The Van Nguyen's StoryThe Van Nguyen
(Pronounced “Tay Van Win”) My name is The Van Nguyen. I was born in Vietnam. When I was two years old my mother died of a disease, leaving my older sister, Ba, and me without our mother. Five years later, when my sister and I were waiting for my dad to come home from work, we heard gun shots outside our house. We hid under the bed out of fear. We didn’t find out until the next morning that it was our father who had been shot and killed by the police for coming home from work after curfew. We lived with our uncle until he also died four years later. After our uncle died, my sister and I had to make our way on our own. We started working, as young as we were, in order to survive. I eventually became an officer serving in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. After serving as a lieutenant in combat, I was assigned to the army's linguistics team because I had learned to speak English. During the Vietnam War, I met a young American serviceman who introduced me to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I joined the Mormon church and helped to translate Church documents, including The Book of Mormon, into Vietnamese. In 1973, I was called to serve as the president of the Saigon Branch of the LDS church. The communist government of North Vietnam had broken their peace treaty and were once again invading South Vietnam. As the communist armies marched closer and closer to Saigon, I finalized evacuation plans for the members of my LDS branch. All branch members were approved for evacuation and were on the list of Vietnamese people to be flown out as refugees with the remaining Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. On Sunday, April 27, 1975 I met with about 200 members of the Saigon LDS branch for what we referred to as our “funeral” testimony meeting -- the last we expected to hold in our Saigon meeting house. I prepared my little flock to follow our evacuation plan as soon as the embassy gave word it was time for us to leave. On April 30, however, the Vietnamese People’s Army surrounded Saigon. The scene at the embassy was chaotic. Families from my branch were part of a crowd of frightened people trying desperately to obtain some of the few available seats on the planes leaving Saigon. My wife and children were able to leave safely, but I insisted on being the last to leave so I could help others obtain safe passage. Soon after sending my family off, the crowd was told that no more flights would be leaving because enemy fire had destroyed the runway. The airport was closed. American helicopters became the last chance for anyone to leave the city. In the chaos, families were divided as people were shoved into the few remaining seats on the helicopters and everyone else was left behind as our promise of protection flew away. I remember seeing the embassy building burn and hiding from enemy tanks as they rolled into the heart of Saigon. I gathered with the remaining LDS saints at our meeting house. We prayed for help, knowing that because many of us were military officers and all of us were associated with an “American church,” things did not look good for us. Some of the remaining members of my branch were able to escape, some walked miles to the Mekong Delta to try to find food and shelter, and others were fated to live their lives in poverty and sickness under the new communist rule. I was detained for more than two years at a “reeducation” camp. There I was forced to confess to the crimes of teaching English, the American language, to students who then “learned how to fly, drop bombs, and retard the reunification of the people.” In reality, I was a prisoner. I spent my days being taught political propaganda, then working hard labor. I remember the conditions of the camp being unbearable. Prisoners were fed a bowl of rice twice a day, only occasionally with vegetables or a little chicken. The food was often rotten, and the camp was filled with maggots, filth, sickness, and stench. When I was finally released from the camp, I was allowed to join a group of people who were attempting to escape the country. I had no money, but I convinced them to let me come with them because I could speak English. We escaped on a boat disguised as fishermen, evading government patrol boats in the darkness of night. Miraculously, we made it out of Vietnamese waters and landed in Malaysia after a few days at sea. When the “boat people” and I were turned away and not allowed to land, we spent two more days sick and exhausted at sea until we finally arrived at Kuala Lumpur and were allowed to land and join a refugee camp. After three months in the refugee camp, and over three years of being separated from my family, I was finally reunited with my family who had relocated to Provo, Utah. I worked various jobs in Utah as my family and I tried to make a new start. I ended up working as a government translator and relocated to South Salt Lake where I have served in many callings in the LDS church and raised my family. Because of my experiences, I will never take my freedom or my faith for granted. One thing I learned from going through those hard times is that most of us here in this country take things for granted, especially freedom. Here we have freedom, so we never think about it, but in Vietnam we didn’t have freedom. It is the most precious thing you have, and you don’t always appreciate it. You are born here, and you breathe the free air, and because things are easy here you don’t think about it. You have all the necessary things in your life, but in Vietnam we didn’t even have simple items like sugar, salt, and food. I hope that everyone here, especially the young men and young women, will appreciate what they have. People ask me how I was able to get through the difficult trials I have had. I was able to survive the “reeducation” camp because I was in the camp with faith. I had faith in Jesus Christ. Without faith I would have died. In the camp nobody knew when they would be released, so we had to have hope. Many of my friends in the camp were hopeless, and they couldn’t survive, but I had faith and knew that someday I would be out and would be reunited with my family 20,000 miles away. I never doubted that I would be reunited with them. Through faith and hope I was able to survive. |
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