By Tony Wright
Dinh Nguyen remembers with fearful clarity the day that became known as the fall of Saigon, though it was 50 years ago this week.
People rushed in confusion through the streets, crying and shouting; soldiers of the South Vietnamese forces shed their uniforms and, many of them carrying wounded comrades, headed for wherever they might hope to find refuge.
Dinh Nguyen escaped from Vietnam after more than six years in a “re-education camp” after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Credit: Joe Armao
“That day,” says Dinh, “lives like a cancer in our bodies.”
It was April 30, 1975. The Vietnam War was over.
It would infect and burden the passage of Dinh Nguyen’s life with torment unimaginable to most of us.
And yet, sitting in the comfortable two-storey home in the northern Melbourne suburb of Kingsbury that he shares with Bach Yen Truong, the wife he lost for six years when their escape from Vietnam went agonisingly wrong, Dinh Nguyen insists he is blessed.
“People say they want to go to heaven, and I tell them you are already in heaven, right here,” he says.
He, his wife and their daughter, Van Uyen Nguyen, are among an estimated 270,000 Australian residents who were born in Vietnam – making it the sixth most common foreign country of birth in Australia.
Almost all of those Vietnamese came to Australia in the years after the fall of Saigon, many as refugees. At the 2021 census, 334,781 people declared Vietnamese ancestry.
Dinh Nguyen served in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam for five years during the Vietnam War, becoming a second lieutenant. He was still a soldier when Saigon – which he refuses to call by its modern name, Ho Chi Minh City – was captured by the communist forces of North Vietnam exactly 50 years ago.
In less than two months, the authorities announced that all those who had been in the service of the former Republic of Vietnam must gather in designated places to be educated in the policies and rules of the new regime.
Dinh Nguyen with his wife, Bach Yen Truong, and their daughter, Van Uyen Nguyen, soon after they were reunited in Australia in 1989.
Dinh went to a high school, where he was told his study would take 10 days.
Five days later, he and those around him were suddenly loaded onto trucks and transported to a “re-education camp” in the jungle on the border of Vietnam and Cambodia. He refers to such places as concentration camps.
He and his fellow inmates had to build their own shelters – huts each crammed with 40 or 50 people. There was no electricity, and Dinh soon learnt what it was to be hungry.
“There are two forms of hunger,” he says. “There is physical hunger, where your body always craves fats and sugar. The craving. Always. And there is psychological hunger, where you miss your family, and you live in fear and uncertainty.
“A concentration camp is not a prison because in prison, you know how long you will be there. In a concentration camp, you do not know when it will end.”
He remembers a man tortured by the knowledge that he had left his two children to be cared for by neighbours, believing he would return in 10 days. As years passed, he never knew what had happened to them. Dinh lost contact with the man, and does not know the fate of his children.
Four such camps – two of them near the old city of Bien Hoa, just a tantalising 35 kilometres from his home in the former Saigon – engulfed Dinh’s life for the next 6½ years.
Eventually, he was allowed to write to his family, who brought him food from their own increasingly scarce supplies to keep him alive. Aged 31, he was so frail, he hobbled around with a walking stick.
Dinh as a young man.
On December 19, 1981, his camp – this one at Xuyen Moc, in south-east Vietnam – was assembled to hear the names of those who were to be released. Dinh Nguyen’s name was called. Two men stood – both with the same name.
It was hours before the confusion was sorted and Dinh Nguyen, former second lieutenant of a defeated army, was given enough money for a bus ticket to the nearest town. There, he sold his mosquito net and bought a bus ticket to his home city.
He was greeted by cousins and the aunt who had raised him, and later, he tracked down his father and his mother. He was required to report to a police station weekly, and to present his written diary accounting for all his daily activities.
Soon, he met up with the woman who became his wife, Bach Yen.
In 1983, they decided to escape Vietnam. Bach Yen was three months pregnant.
Because of his military skills, Dinh was taken in by a group of eight men who had a large boat, 2.5 metres by 10 metres. Their plan was to sail about two kilometres from the Vung Tao shore, 120 kilometres from Saigon, and wait for 150 others, including Dinh’s wife, to be transferred from a hiding place by small boats.
But in the night, shots were heard. Authorities had found the hiding spot of those trying to escape. A Vietnamese navy ship gave chase, and Dinh had no choice but to stay aboard as his almost empty boat fled at speed.
The boat reached international waters and the navy quit the chase.
Dinh fell into the deepest despair.
“I could do nothing,” he says. “Imagine how I felt, leaving my pregnant wife. I was just lying dead in the boat until the others got me awake to advise on positioning. I had a compass.”
Dinh with his wife, Bach Yen Truong, at home in Melbourne.Credit: Joe Armao
They made it to Singapore, but were refused permission to land. Eventually, their boat was boarded by the Malaysian navy and they were taken to a huge refugee camp on Malaysia’s Bidong Island.
There, Dinh signed up to go to the United States as a refugee. A friend told him he was a fool – the US had no diplomatic relationship with Vietnam, and if he wanted to be reunited with his wife, he should choose Australia.
Dinh begged an official of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to change his destination. Despite being told it was impossible, another officer finally took pity on him. Soon, he was on a plane to Sydney.
There, he got a job in a nut factory. He eventually learnt his wife was alive and had spent only three months in prison because she was pregnant. He cannot speak as he shows me a two-word telegram he received from his father-in-law in November 1983: he had a baby daughter and she was well.
He applied desperately for permission to reunify with his little family, and heard back nothing.
Dinh’s first wage was $178 a week. It was the first time he had held money. He sent monthly the permitted 500-gram parcel – clothes for the baby and Panadol, which could be sold in Vietnam for good money – to ensure his wife and child survived.
Years passed with no word on his application for reunification.
Dinh, determined to move beyond factory work, gained a bachelor of arts degree in interpreting and translation from the University of Western Sydney, and was employed in Hong Kong by the UNHCR.
In 1989, he was required to accompany UNHCR officials to a conference in Hanoi, amid trepidation about returning to the country that had imprisoned him for so long.
And there, waiting to undertake interpreting duties in a high official’s office, he spied on a desk a list of people to be granted permission to leave Vietnam for reunification with their families.
His eyes mist and his voice softens as he recalls the moment. The names of his wife and daughter were on the list.
He could barely believe it, and could not risk saying a word lest his past destroy the sudden dream of a future.
Soon, he was back in Australia, anxiously awaiting developments.
A phone call came from a friend in late 1989. He was to send money for air tickets.
Finally, after six years of separation, the family was together again in Australia. Dinh finally got to hold the daughter he had never met.
These days, Dinh works as a freelance interpreter and translator.
He and Bach Yen are grandparents to the four children of their daughter, Van Uyen, who is a lawyer.
Dinh is a former president of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Veterans Association in Victoria, and a volunteer at the nation’s first Vietnamese Museum, recently established in Sunshine.
He says he is proud the veterans’ association has raised funds to help Australian communities recover from bushfires and floods.
“We want to extend our gratitude to Australia and Australians for their compassion, kindness and generosity in accepting a hundred-thousand Vietnamese refugees and giving us new lives,” he says.
And he is a staunch fan of the Western Bulldogs. He says the footy team gave him the capacity to feel the emotion of excitement after all those deadening, hungry years in the camps and the long dread that followed.
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