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Subject: Vietnam: Hazy Images And Searing Memories; The Two Wars of Duong Nguyen<By
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 92 04:42:03 EST
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Vietnam: Hazy Images And Searing Memories; The Two Wars of Duong
Nguyen<By Phil McCombs=Washington Post Staff Writer=

 That soup, you never forget it.  His wife, Huong, brings us
bowls of it, pho, steaming and aromatic with herbs, rice noodles
and thin slices of beef browning in broth, its rising warmth
redolent of the feverish heat of Vietnam, scorched dust, monsoon
rains pounding on thatch.

 But this is a quiet Sunday afternoon in Northern Virginia, and
Col. Duong Nguyen is relaxing at home. There's a bowl of persim-
mons on the table. He's wearing a white turtleneck and loafers.
Usually he's impressively crisp in his U.S. Army uniform, but to-
day he seems smaller, more simply human - just as I remember him,
17 years ago, running like hell across the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut
in Saigon.

 Now he's been through two wars, two armies, two medical train-
ings, two countries, two lives.

 A double vet.

 When he went down to the Wall last month, he says, "I went there
as a veteran, to think, to share the feelings of these veterans.
And these GIs looked at me with what felt like antagonism. I
looked at their faces, and they were not welcoming, they were not
opening their arms to their comrade. But I am a veteran also."

 Painful as it was, he understood.

 "Looking at me," he says, "they see a Vietnamese face and get a
vivid feeling of their own suffering. I don't take it personal-
ly... . I feel sorry for them, because the war didn't have a good
outcome, and they suffered when they returned - not at all like
the gulf war returnees. My hospital commander in Germany, he was
in Vietnam. He said they spit on him and called him 'baby killer'
when he returned."

 He shakes his head. His smile fades.

 It's hard for Duong to cry, he says, because Vietnamese men are
raised to be stoic, to hide their emotions. So instead, he tends
to laugh and smile, even at the worst things.  At first it's un-
nerving, the laughs and smiles, but when I learn to read them as
tears, it all makes sense.

 "We lost," he remembers, "because of the culture of corruption
in Vietnam - President Thieu and his generals. The American sol-
diers were fighting a deadly battle, but they looked at Saigon
not far away where the Vietnamese people were enjoying their
lives with all that good food and good music."

 He laughs.

 "I experienced something of that same thing in the gulf war, and
I suffered too. I left for the gulf from Germany, and there was
no send-off. It was the holiday season, all these lights and
Christmas trees and decorations and music in the air - 'Silent
Night' - and here you are, going off into the unknown. And the
Germans were going around with signs, 'No Blood for Oil.' It was
a lonely feeling." Duong's younger daughter, Diem, who doesn't
have any problem expressing emotion, went berserk when her dad
was sent to the Persian Gulf.

 "She'd call home screaming and crying," remembers her mother,
Huong. "I was really upset," says Diem, now in premed at the
University of Virginia. "There was this big hype about the Iraqi
army, so I freaked out big time. After a while my dad started
calling me, so I felt a lot better about it."

 She's gorgeous now - like her older sister, Hong, who's at
Harvard's dental school - with that special combination of physi-
cal delicacy and inner steel that Vietnamese women seem to hold
the patent on. Their brother, Phi, between college and law
school, is a lanky young man who wears his baseball cap backward.

 When I first saw those kids, at Tan Son Nhut that day, Diem was
only 3, and her father clutched her in his arms as he sprinted
across the airfield, pressing his face against her tiny body so
the Vietnamese MPs wouldn't recognize him - a South Vietnamese
air force officer. His wife's sister happened to be a secretary
for The Washington Post in Saigon, where I was a correspondent,
and in those days when you helped one person get out, you tried
to help the whole family (in this case numbering 23 souls; all I
had to do was put them on the American Embassy's airlift list).
That morning I drove Huong out from downtown, past the jittery
gate guards with their M-16 rifles. She'd followed her husband at
a more dignified pace, with little Hong, 7, and Phi, 6. They all
made it to the plane, and America. Three days later - on April
30, 1975 - the North Vietnamese army took Saigon.

"I remember walking to the plane," Hong says now, "and my dad be-
ing very tense about it. Then I remember realizing it was a
dangerous thing. I realized that if they caught my father, it
would be all over. That was the scariest walk." Now that she's
studied the Vietnam War at the University of Maryland, and
currently with James Webb at the Kennedy School at Harvard, Hong
says she knows that if her dad hadn't made it past the MPs that
day, he would have ended up in a communist "reeducation" camp.

 One of Duong's brothers, in fact, was five years in a camp.
"He's got no job," marvels Phi, who visited him in California,
"he's in a different country, he can't speak the language, and
he's the happiest person in the world! In American terms, he
doesn't have anything, but in his own mind he has everything he
needs - three meals a day, and he's not afraid to go outside the
door."

 The old war blends into the new as Hong continues: "I remember
getting on the plane with tons of people, there were no seats,
people were just packed inside. It was like a game almost. I
didn't understand that we were never coming home again. Then I
remember during the gulf war I had a dream: I was little, it was
sunrise and I woke up, roosters were crowing. I went out on the
balcony and my grandfather was standing there, smoking. We just
stood there and watched the sunrise, and we could hear the gun-
fire, and the roosters crowing."

 Her grandfather - Pham Xuan Nguyen - died of a stroke a few
years after arriving in the United States. He'd been a colonel in
the South Vietnamese army, and had served the French during the
First Indochina War. I used to drop by and interview him, espe-
cially toward the end.  "SAIGON, March 21 - There is despair,
fear and outrage here," went one dispatch. "... 'When my dad
heard about the abandonment of the highlands, he broke down weep-
ing,' said a secretary. 'He told me the last time he wept was
when the country was partitioned in 1954.' "

 That secretary was Pham Le Thuy - Duong's sister-in-law - who
now runs her own mortgage company in Northern Virginia. She and
her family had been first on the list, and they got out first.

 Less than a week later, Duong, his wife and kids were airlifted
first to Guam, then to a refugee camp in Arkansas. They had only
their clothes, a few hundred dollars and one another.

Duong was born in Hanoi in 1943, the ninth of 13 children of a
civil servant in the French administration. In 1954, before the
partition of the country under the Geneva accords, his father
took him to Saigon. The rest of the family came later, along with
nearly a million refugees fleeing the communists in the north. He
was educated in a French-style lyce'e and at the medical school
of the University of Saigon. In 1969, he was assigned to the ARVN
9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta. When the allies -
America and South Vietnam - invaded Cambodia in the spring of
1970, he was manning a front line aid station - "sometimes terri-
ble, sometimes scary." I happened that I was in the same inva-
sion, courtesy of my sergeancy in the U.S. Army.

 Duong had met Pham Bach Huong at a dance in the early '60s, and
they married in '68. Lucky for him. She became a hostess for Air
Vietnam, and was able to get past the gate guard at Tan Son Nhut
that last day because of her airline identity card.  "Duong told
me to leave before him with the kids, and not to worry," she re-
calls, "because there'd be a period of neutrality before the
whole country collapsed. But I didn't see it that way. I'd been
up to Danang, and saw the whole thing collapse up there with my
own eyes." She was right, and with the full ferocity of the Pham
women, insisted her husband's name go on the list.  Duong was in
the Vietnamese air force by then. At one point he'd been assigned
to study psychology for a year, and thus became the chief of
psychiatric medicine for the air force - indeed, its only shrink.
"Even the generals had to be cleared by me to carry a weapon," he
recalls. "I had to manage drug addicts. People would try to bribe
me to say they were crazy so they could escape military service.
I said, 'No way!' " It was "Catch-22" all over again.  Much
later, when he was in the U.S. Army and aboard a big military
transport flying toward Saudi, Duong "felt safe, but one soldier
was complaining of a headache and wanted to be treated, even
though all I had was my stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. I
saw people very withdrawn, not talking. Others laughed inap-
propriately. Some were so afraid, when they got off the plane
they claimed different diseases. But I knew these things would
happen. Even on the ground, that soldier with a headache still
tried to get out of duty - complained and complained."

 His first memory of the Persian Gulf: the haunting call to
prayer from the minarets.

 Duong inadvertently missed the ground invasion when the 1st Ar-
mored Division, "Old Ironsides," thundered to the attack earlier
than planned. He'd choppered to the rear to pick up a batch of
laser-protective goggles, then on the way to the front, one of
the choppers broke down and Duong spent a day standing around the
desert with a couple other guys waiting for a repair crew and
hoping the enemy wouldn't show up first. Sounds easy, but you can
still get killed that way.

 "He was a superb soldier," says Lt. Gen. Ronald Griffith, who
commanded the 1st in Germany when Duong was named division sur-
geon in 1989 and who later took his 23,000 troops to the gulf, "a
skilled physician, and a caring leader - the qualities you would
want in the very best surgeon. ... When we deployed to Southwest
Asia, he was responsible for coordinating all the medical support
to include the evacuation of wounded and dead from the battle-
field, which we thought would be considerable." Duong had
prepared for casualties of 5 to 7 percent - up to 1,600 - but as
it happened, the division suffered four killed and 57 wounded.  A
few weeks ago, in a small auditorium at the DeWitt Army Community
Hospital at Fort Belvoir, Duong was promoted to colonel. A full
bird. In his current assignment, he's in charge of preventive
medicine for much of the Military District of Washington.

 Huong was there with the girls, though Phi was at work and
couldn't make it. It was a real nice ceremony. There were a lot
of Duong's friends and associates, a huge roast beef and a chef
to carve it.  Griffith spoke first, remembering how it was in
Vietnam - the "bitter conflict" and "the bittersweet experience"
and "the great yearning that seems to be with all of us who ex-
perienced that part of the world to return there someday."

 A colonel read the promotion order - "patriotism ... valor ..."
Griffith and Huong pinned the silver eagles on Duong's shoulders.

 Duong kissed his wife.

 He spoke last, thanking his comrades-in-arms, Huong, "who en-
dured a lot of stress during our many moves, and especially dur-
ing the gulf war ... and my beloved parents, who passed away dur-
ing the difficult period of the fall of Saigon.

 "Thanks, Mom and Dad. I wish you were here."

They lived in Oklahoma, Maryland, Washington state, Germany - 16
years of peripatetic Army life. The kids didn't want to move
overseas at first, but of course ended up loving it. Duong had
just checked into a Holiday Inn in Dayton, Ohio, for a medical
seminar when he learned via TV that his division was being de-
ployed to the gulf. Huong was alone in Germany, the kids scat-
tered at different colleges.

 "I received the order from CNN," he quips.

 As a draftee myself, I have a small, nagging question. Having
survived the Indochina wars and the fall of his country, and hav-
ing arrived safely on these shores, Why did he join the Army?
He's a doctor, this is America, he could make millions!

 At first, he says his wife wanted to be near her family in Wash-
ington, and the Army offered Aberdeen. Then he says he wanted to
"see the world."

 Then it comes out: Making millions doesn't matter to him. He's
Buddhist, believes fate rules, you try to live right, that's all.
"I wanted to maintain my integrity," he says quietly. "In the
Army I'm treating patients, and I don't have to worry about how
much they can pay. ... I like the discipline of it too."

 It's been a hard discipline at times. In the Saudi desert, when
ordinarily he'd have been celebrating Tet, the lunar new year,
with his family, "I drove my Humvee to a lonely hill and stared
at the sky.  Vietnamese friends in the States said I was stupid
to join the Army. They're drinking and dancing, and here I am
lost in the desert, suffering a harsh environment - no altar, no
incense, no special feast."

  In our reminiscing, it transpires that Duong has a small, nag-
ging question for me too.

 "By the way," he says, "I've been meaning to ask you all these
years - what did you do with my car? Remember? I gave you the
keys at Tan Son Nhut."

 Man, I don't remember. There was a lot going on.

02:28 11-11C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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