Hell in An Loc Read online

  Lt. Gen. Nguyen Vinh Nghi, former 21st Division commander during the An Loc rescuing operation, was detained for thirteen years: as commander of a task force defending the strategic city of Phan Rang, south of Nha Trang, he was captured by the NVA when his headquarters at Phan Rang air base was overrun on April 16, 1975. General Nghi was the highest-ranking prisoner of war in the Indochina Wars. Brig. Gen. Pham Ngoc Sang, commander of the 6th Air Division—which was relocated to Phan Rang after the evacuation of Pleiku—was also captured with General Nghi. (General Sang refused to be airlifted out of Phan Rang after the fall of that city; he volunteered instead to stay with General Nghi’s headquarters to provide air support to the retreating units. Sang also spent thirteen years in a re-education camp; he died in California shortly after emigrating to the United States.)

  Brig. Gen. Ho Trung Hau—who succeeded Gen. Nguyen Vinh Nghi as 21st Division commander—also spent thirteen years in a Communist concentration camp. He died in Saigon shortly after his release.

  Brig. Gen. Tran Van Nhut was more lucky: In September 1972, Nhut was appointed commander of the 2nd Division in Quang Ngai in MRI. After the fall of MRI, the remnants of his division were put under General Nghi’s operational control. While Nghi and his staff were captured by the NVA, Nhut was rescued by a naval ship off the coast of Phan Rang, after he jumped into the sea from his C&C helicopter. (His controversial escape in face of the enemy had, to a certain extent, tarnished his reputation as a good soldier and competent province chief during the siege of An Loc.) Generals Dao, Nghi, and Nhut now live in the United States.

  Lt. Gen. Nguyen Van Minh, III Corps commander during the siege of An Loc, was later reassigned as commander of the Capital Special District. He safely emigrated to the United States in 1975 and died in California in 2006.

  Brig. Gen. Le Quang Luong, former 1st Airborne Brigade commander, assumed the command of the Airborne Division after An Loc and successfully participated in the counter-offensive to recapture Quang Tri. In April 1975, when this author visited him at his headquarters in Saigon, Luong was very frustrated that President Thieu had committed all his brigades “piece-meal” by attaching them to II and III Corps, while he just sat at his headquarters and could do nothing to save them from annihilation. Luong emigrated to the United States in 1975 after the fall of Saigon; he died in 2007 in California.

  ARVN senior officers were typically incarcerated for thirteen years in the average. Some were detained twice in Communist camps. Col. Nguyen Cong Vinh, former 9th Regiment commander at Loc Ninh, belonged to the last category. After the fall of Loc Ninh, Vinh was incarcerated in a Communist concentration camp in Cambodia. Released after the Paris Agreement, he was sent back to a re-education camp in North Viet Nam in 1975. Colonel Vinh now lives in California.

  Colonels Pham Van Huan, former 81st Airborne Commando Group commander, and Nguyen Van Biet, 3rd Ranger Group commander, and Lt. Col. Le Van Ngon, the hero of Tong Le Chan, also spent time in a North Vietnamese re-education camp after the war. Colonel Huan now resides in California, Ngon died in a concentration camp, and Biet died in Saigon after his release. Col. Bui Duc Diem, former Assistant for Operations to the 5th Division commander, reported that, after his release from a re-education camp in North Viet Nam, the Communist government denied his request for an exit visa, but thanks to the intervention of the U.S Embassy in Thailand—to which he had sent copies of his two Silver Star awards earned in An Loc—he was able to come to the United States. Diem now lives in Oregon.

  Col. Ho Ngoc Can, whose task force T-15 was the first, along with the 6th Airborne Battalion, to effectuate the link-up with the besieged garrison of An Loc, had a dramatic and heroic ending. After An Loc, Can was appointed province chief of Chuong Thien, a VC-infested province in MRIV. One of the most decorated officers in the South Vietnamese army whose courage was legendary in the Mekong Delta, Can fought to the very end in 1975 in defiance of Gen. Duong Van Minh’s order of surrender. He was taken prisoner by the VC after his RF and PF units ran out of ammunition. The Communists took him to Can Tho, the seat of IV Corps, and executed him at the city’s soccer field on August 14, 1975. According to the people who witnessed his execution, Colonel Can shouted “Long Live the Republic of Viet Nam!” before he was felled by the bullets of the VC firing squad.

  Pham Phong Dinh, a military historian, disclosed that Can had thought about committing suicide to comply with the traditional view of a “Quan Tu” (virtuous leader)—who rather dies than surrenders to the enemy—but his Christian faith had prevented him from doing so. Brig. Gen. Le Van Hung, the former 5th Division commander and the hero of An Loc, and his former deputy, Col. Le Nguyen Vy (later general), were not restricted by these religious considerations.

  In April 1975, General Hung was deputy IV Corps commander in the Mekong Delta. On the morning of April 30, Gen. Duong Van Minh, the new President of the Republic, ordered all ARVN units still fighting in the capital city and in MRIV to lay down their weapons and to await the arrival of Communist military authorities to hand over their military bases. In the evening, General Hung bade farewell to his wife. He then went to his room and shot himself in the heart with his pistol. According to Pham Phong Dinh, the historian, General Hung died at 8:45 P.M. on April 30, 1975. At around 11:00 P.M., Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khoa Nam, IV Corps commander, called to offer his condolences to Mrs. Hung; afterward, Nam went to his office and shot himself in the head with his Browning pistol.

  Generals Nam and Hung could have fled the country on a navy ship or flown in their personal helicopters to the U.S. 7th Fleet off the coast of the Mekong Delta, but they had decided to stay and die because time-honored Confucian tradition requires that “if a citadel is lost, the general must die with the citadel.”

  Col. Le Nguyen Vy, former 5th Division deputy commander in An Loc, was elevated to brigadier general and assumed the command of that division after the siege. On April 30, after hearing on the radio Gen. Duong Van Minh’s order of surrender, General Vy bade farewell to his officers, then he went to his trailer that served as his office, put a Beretta 6.35 pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger. (The same day, Gen. Phan Van Phu, former II Corps commander and General Tran Van Hai, 7th Division commander, also committed suicide.)

  “Sinh vi tuong, tu vi than” (General in lifetime, saint in death) goes a Vietnamese saying. By fighting their whole life for their country and at the end, by choosing to die instead of surrendering to the enemy, the above generals are worshiped as “than-tuong” (general-saints) by the adoring Vietnamese people, and every thirtieth of April—dubbed “black April”—the members of the overseas Vietnamese communities gather at pagodas or other worship places to pay respects and to commemorate the memories of these fallen heroes.

  Not content with executing, incarcerating, and torturing their living enemies, the Communists, in their relentless pursuit of a policy of hatred and retribution, also went after the dead. “The new rulers failed to bring anything resembling true reconciliation with those who had been on the losing side,” wrote Arnold Isaacs. “In an act of ugly vengeance, the victors bulldozed dozens of military cemeteries and obliterated their dead enemies’ graves—in Vietnamese culture, a devastating loss for the families of the dead.”20 The 81st Airborne Commando Group’s cemetery in An Loc didn’t escape the Communist wrath. Following is the story of a former resident of An Loc who had returned to her native city after the war:

  As for me, at the one time I had come back to visit my country, I had returned to An Loc to look for the echoes of those unforgettable troubled times, and most of all, to kneel before the cemetery of those 68 heroes of the Airborne Commandos, who had given their life for the nation, to pay tribute and burn incense in their memories. I couldn’t hold my tears when I saw that the old scenery had changed. The old cemetery, that served as the symbol of loyalty and heroism, had become an urban center. Those vengeful “atheists” had dug out the remains of our brothers and dumped them outside Xa Cam Gate. With a heavy heart, I found my way to
Xa Cam Gate, but in front of me, there were only a sad and quiet rubber tree forest, and the dusty red soil routes on which I used to play with my friends, kicking up the red dust, those same roads on which the frightened residents of An Loc had fled away, those roads that were soaked up with the blood of my brothers and of the enemy; I whispered a prayer for your spirits—our national heroes—for the spirits of all Vietnamese who had died during this atrocious war, for the early liberation of the Fatherland from this incarcerated life. 21

  Since the implementation of the cultural liberation period known as Doi Moi (Renovation) in the late 1980s, the Vietnamese Communist regime has invited the members of overseas Vietnamese communities to come back and to use their financial resources and technological know-how to help rebuild the country. But political reconciliation would require overcoming the simmering ill will and animosity and, as Isaacs Arnold has appropriately put it, “bridging a gulf of hate and suspicion that was as wide as a million graves.”

  Nature has an admirable way of regenerating itself—even after a destructive war; and if there were ever a positive note concerning the old battlefields and sanctuaries, it probably would be the restoration of the wildlife in a 1,160-square-mile area just across from Binh Long province. In an article titled, “Endangered species thrive along Ho Chi Minh Trail” (San Jose Mercury News, March 4, 2007), Jerry Harmer, an Associated Press reporter, said that, according to New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, at least forty-two threatened species and an estimated half of the world’s population of a rare species of primate now live in this area—which used to be the safe haven for NVA units involved in the 1972 Binh Long campaign.

  “Four decades after the U.S. warplanes plastered it with bombs,” wrote Harmer, “a remote corner of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia is making a comeback as treasure trove of endangered wildlife . . . Today, the sounds of war have given way to the mesmerizing pulse of soft tropical sounds: the calls of yellow-cheeked crested gibbons fill the cold dawn air, and birds such as blue-eared barbets and white-rumped shamas sing through the day.”

  It is no small consolation to know that the U.S. airplanes that devastated the Cambodian forests along the Ho Chi Minh trail forty years ago had, in their own way, contributed to the comeback of the wildlife in these areas: today, elephants are seen shepherding their young to drink at the multiple jungle water holes created by old B-52 bomb craters.

  Epilogue

  After the fall of South Viet Nam in 1975, politicians and military analysts predicted that Viet Nam’s pro-Western neighbors would fall like dominoes in the face of seemingly unstoppable North Vietnamese divisions equipped with the latest Soviet and Chinese weaponry. Thirty-three years later, no dominoes have fallen. Instead, the Soviet Union has collapsed along with the international Communist system.

  Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army and the editor of Nhan Dan, the VCP’s mouthpiece, believed that the Vietnamese Communist regime will also die because heaven is no longer on their side. He wrote: “I believe that although heaven was on the side of the North Vietnamese during the war, the Communist utopia will not last long. Heaven is just. When living kindly, one will reap goodness. When sowing wind, one will reap tempest. Communism has reached its glorious goal, but in the process, it has bankrupted itself, both in theory and in deed. Its goal to build a society without exploitation is contradicted by its cruel and inhumane practices, its violence against its opponents, and its embrace of class struggle and war.”1

  I agree that the Vietnamese Communist regime will not last, but for more earthly reasons. It very existence in fact, is being threatened, not only by insurmountable geopolitical and economic dilemmas, but also by the tremendous advances in information technology.

  Although it doesn’t publicly proclaim it, China—as in the case of Taiwan—historically has considered Viet Nam a renegade southern province. They named it An Nam, or “the Pacified South.” China’s occasional killings of Vietnamese fishermen in Viet Nam’s Vinh Bac Bo (Gulf of Tonkin), in fact, has added to a consistent pattern of Chinese southern expansionism: conquest of the Paracel Islands in 1974; invasion of the northern provinces of Viet Nam in 1979 and subsequent annexation of 6,000 square kilometers of borderland; occupation of the Spratley archipelagoes the same year and acquisition of 12,000 square kilometers of territorial waters in the Vinh Bac Bo conceded by Hanoi under the 2000 Vinh Bac Bo Pact.

  Concerns about Beijing’s new aggressiveness have sparked new military re-alignments in the strategic Asia-Pacific region. Despite the Free World’s professed commitment to “constructive engagement” with China, the post-World War II policy of “containment” remains a popular ploy in today’s global, political chess game. Viet Nam has thus regained its strategic value in U.S. eyes as a missing link in the containment scheme and a counterbalance to the even graver threat of Chinese expansionism.

  But effective and lasting strategic cooperation, such as in NATO or the U.S.-Japan alliance, requires that the partners share the same moral values and political ideology. In other words, only a free and democratic Viet Nam, enjoying popular support and the support of the community of free nations, can stand up to the aggression of its former allied and historical enemy and effectively contribute to regional security.

  Viet Nam is also facing daunting odds on the economic front. To foster economic growth necessary to generate jobs for a population that is expected to increase to 100 million by 2010, Viet Nam needs to export its products and attract foreign investments. In other words, in order to survive, Viet Nam needs to participate in the global economy. The country’s recent admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a good start in that direction, but participating members, on the other hand, are required to provide an environment of fair competition and safe investment or, in other words, the institution of the rule of law, the eradication of corruption and bureaucracy, and most of all, the dissolution of government-subsidized state enterprises.

  In an age where innovation and pluralism have become interdependent, to succeed, economic reform must be implemented concurrently with political reform. But for authoritarian regimes, political reform means the erosion of the government’s grip on power, and its ultimate demise. “The fatal dilemma of the communist system,” correctly predicted Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1989), “is that economic success can only be purchased at the cost of political stability, while political stability can only be sustained at the cost of economic failure” (102).

  Moreover, in the view of political scientists, the Communist regime can hang on to power only if it can control three things: food, movement, and ideas. In today’s Viet Nam, food tickets and travel permits are no longer required. In the meantime, the Viet Nam Communist leadership is desperately struggling to control the free flow of information; but the last bulwark of the regime is being threatened by the explosion of information technology. For younger generations of Vietnamese—80% of the Vietnamese population were born after the war—Marxist ideology is a thing of the past and gone are the endless political indoctrination sessions in which they were required to recite Ho Chi Minh’s slogans like parrots. For them now, money is their goal in life and Bill Gates has dethroned Ho Chi Minh to become their new hero.

  One of the ironies of the Viet Nam War is that the losing side—those who fled the country after the fall of Saigon, and their descendants—are doing quite well in their adopted countries. Based on statistics published by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development for 2005, it is estimated that the total purchasing power parity (PPP)—a measure often used to compare the standards of living between countries—of three million Vietnamese overseas is about two times the total PPP for the 84 million Vietnamese at home (which, at 620 U.S. dollars per capita, ranked 145th in the world). The Vietnamese communities overseas also have gained considerable political clout in their new countries. The second generation of Viet
namese immigrants has, in recent years, actively participated in the political process of their countries of adoption. In the United States, quite a few have been elected to local offices, two have been elected to state legislatures, and recently, for the first time, a young Vietnamese-American attorney in Louisiana won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  In the last few years, several U.S. cities and states have adopted resolutions recognizing the former South Viet Nam flag—three horizontal red stripes on a yellow background—as the official flag of the Vietnamese American communities. The resolutions also permit the flag to be ceremoniously displayed on public properties.

  These remarkable political and psychological achievements culminated in the unveiling of a Joint Viet Nam War Memorial, the first of its kind in the world, in April 2003 in Westminster City, California. An eleven-foot-high bronze monument portrays a soldier from the former Republic of Viet Nam and an American GI standing side by side with their countries’ flags behind them. The dedication ceremony was attended by an estimated 10,000 people, most of them Vietnamese Americans—many of them coming from other parts of the world.