A Vietnamese Boat People Story

By Louisa Gerber and Trung Trinh, St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church

The events that brought Trung Trinh and his wife to the United States were quite long ago, but I think they still resonate. Below is his story of escape as part of a group of boat people fleeing Vietnam in 1981. 

The addendum to the story is that he and his wife ended up as our church custodians for over a decade, until they both retired. They were very dedicated and were loved and respected by our church community. His wife even hand painted the stripes marking the parking spaces in our church lot. 

When we began looking at reopening our ESOL program in January 2022, after the COVID shutdown, Trung volunteered to help me restart the program and to teach ESOL at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church. The ESOL resource room had been used for storage for several years and was in total disarray. He had been helping with English classes in a local Vietnamese charitable support organization. He said he wanted to give back to his adopted country, and to help new immigrants trying to learn English in their new, adopted country. He helped us for two years until family health concerns caused him to retire from teaching in our program. He is certainly an inspiration to me.

On Sunday, October 4, 1981 at around 11 a.m., the US Destroyer FF-1053 Roark was on the way from Subic Bay to the Indian Ocean when it rescued a group of 60 Vietnamese refugees from a small boat in the middle of the South China Sea. That day is still vividly in my memory since my wife, my youngest brother, and I were among those 60 fortunate people.

I always consider that day as my second birthday and the FF-1053 Roark is like my second mother. Without it, I really do not know how my life would have ended up.

The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975 with the fall of Saigon under the invasion of the North Vietnamese Army. Even though there was a great effort from the US government to evacuate the Vietnamese people closely associated with the United States or the South Vietnamese government, there were still a lot of people who were left behind and had to suffer under the new regime. The most common punishment applied to those who were working for the previous South Vietnamese government was to be kept in the so-called re-education camps which in reality were hard labor camps.

After graduating from the National Institute of Administration in January 1973, I was appointed by the South Vietnamese government to work as a Director of Social Services in a province in the Mekong Delta. My job was mainly to coordinate various programs to provide financial, food, and building material assistance to the war victims, the orphans, and the elderly within the province. And because of that position, I was kept in the “re-education camp” as punishment from April 1975 to August 1980.

Upon my release from camp, I returned to my family in Saigon, which was now re-named Ho Chi Minh City, and I was placed under close surveillance by the local government. Every week, I had to report my daily activities to the local government officials.

Realizing that I would never become free under the new regime, I decided to look for ways to escape from Vietnam either by boat or by land via Cambodia and then Thailand.

After three failed attempts, on September 30, 1981, my wife, my brother, and I went down south from Saigon to join a group of people waiting for the right time under a dark night to navigate down the Mekong River to get out to the South China Sea. The trip was organized by a group of my friends’ former students. Since they were locals, we did not encounter any major problem avoiding local authorities while on the river.

Initially equipped with only a compass – which was removed from a US Army UH 1B helicopter – we planned to head south to either Malaysia or Indonesia. On the way out to the high seas, we had seen a number of commercial ships passing by, but none of them stopped to rescue us, either because they did not see us or because they did not want to bear any responsibilities incurred by picking us up from the international waters.

Then on the fourth day of our journey, on Sunday, October 4 at around 11 a.m., the first sign that we saw was the appearance of a helicopter flying over us. It brought us a lot of hope since we thought there must be a ship-base for such a helicopter. We decided to turn off the engine to wait and see if our hope would become a reality. Then after a few hours, we saw a ship silhouette on the horizon coming slowly towards our boat. However, we were not sure if that ship would rescue us, since there were many incidents in which refugee boats were picked up by Russian Navy ships only for those refugees to be jailed in Vietnam.

Finally, as the ship approached, we were definitely excited to see the American flag and also the ship’s motto, “Victory through Service,” inscribed on its smokestack.

Then the rescue operation began. A small canoe led by a Japanese-American officer approached our small boat to check our conditions. Then it pulled our boat alongside the ship. One by one, children and ladies first, we climbed a ladder to board the ship.

Once we were on board, after being searched for weapons, everyone took a bath and was provided with clothing and with our first American meal.

To be rescued by the US Navy ship, the Navy had to be responsible for coordinating with US government agencies to provide us with a resettlement plan. After the US Embassy in Malaysia obtained an agreement with the Malaysian government, we were allowed to land in Penang with the condition that our group had to be processed and out of Malaysia as soon as possible.

That was why we stayed in Malaysia for only a week before being transferred to the Philippine Refugees Processing Camp (PRPC) located near Subic Bay. While in the camp, we participated in a cultural orientation and English as a Second Language (ESL) that was designed to assist us in learning as much as possible for our new life in America.

After four months in the PRPC, my family, under a sponsorship of the US Catholic Conference, came to Virginia and joined my sister who had been in the US since 1975.

Even though there were a lot of ups and downs in our new life in the US, I am always grateful for being able to live in a democratic and free society in which people are respected as human beings regardless of their backgrounds and origins.

There is a saying in our culture: “Whenever we eat a fruit, we have to remember the growers.” By the same token, we have been enjoying the fruit of FREEDOM; we have to remember and to appreciate its growers. That was why in 1986, I formed a “Refugees Save Miss Liberty” campaign to raise funds among the refugee communities in the Washington metropolitan area to contribute to the restoration of the Statue of Liberty.

Even though our financial contribution was small, the campaign was organized to cherish our FREEDOM and to remind us of the reasons we had to leave our country to come to America as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”