Note: This article originally appeared on Sunday, July 5, 1992, in the Washington Post Magazine.
It's a long way from Saigon to West Point; from the United States
Military Academy to the re-education camps of Vietnam; and from the
camps to D.C.'s Cardozo High School. But geography is only the
beginning of this survivor's story
As usual, bribes loosened the guards' tongues. Another transfer was
coming. But this time, after four years in jungle camps guarded by the
North Vietnamese army, the inmates were going to a prison run by the
Cong An, the security police. When he heard the rumor, Tam Minh Pham
knew what to do. For years, he'd heard the stories about the cruel men
in yellow uniforms who took people away in the dead of night, about the
torture, the killings. He waited for the camp to quiet down and the
night air to fill with the scent of cooking fires, and then he crept
out of his bamboo hut to the garden.
Each barracks was permitted a tiny plot -- sweet potatoes, lettuce
and herbs -- to supplement the meager rations of sand-tainted rice and
the snakes and rats the prisoners could catch. Glancing over his
shoulder, Pham dug in the dirt until his fingers touched metal.
The rusting box once held 200 rounds of ammunition for an American
M-60 machine gun. Now it contained 10 notebooks, the kind he used to
fill as a schoolboy. For months, he'd been scribbling his life story.
He wrote in English for protection, but it also was the appropriate
language for a young man's odyssey from Saigon to the United States
Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1974, the
first South Vietnamese ever to wear the gold academy ring. Faithful to
the West Point credo of duty, honor and country, Pham returned home to
rejoin the Army of the Republic of Vietnam -- just in time to
experience its final, humiliating defeat. Then, like hundreds of
thousands of others abandoned by the Americans when they withdrew in
April 1975, he disappeared into the gulag of reeducation camps
scattered in the jungles.
He fantasized sometimes that his West Point classmates would rescue
him. Knee-deep in a rice paddy, laboring at gunpoint for the new
socialist regime, he imagined a spaceship swooping out of the clouds
and cadets in dress gray carrying him and his friends to freedom.
Crouching now in the dirt, he took the tattered notebooks out of the
ammo box and leafed through the pages. It was all there, good and bad:
the Tet Offensive, his turning point; his four years at West Point with
McBrayer, Hogan, Ciupak and his other buddies in Company I-2; the
chaotic April day he lost his class ring and his country. But it was
more than words on a page: Writing had kept him going. He thought of
the memoir as his breath, his heartbeat, the child of his soul.
How he wished that spaceship would come now; he'd even stay behind
if they could just take his memoir back, so cadets could learn what he
had learned about survival. He didn't dare risk trying to smuggle it
into the police camp; a written tribute to democracy and friendship
with Americans might as well be a death warrant. He opened his Zippo,
struck the flint and began feeding the notebooks to the flame, a few
pages at a time, afraid that a larger fire might attract the guards.
In all the months of starvation and sickness, brutality and despair,
Pham had never broken down. Not when he left his parents and family
behind in Saigon, nor when he dug a grave for a friend who had slit his
wrists and dived into a river to find the only escape possible. Not
even in the darkest moments, when he contemplated suicide himself.
The air was alive with cricket song, the distant calls of ducks, the
hissing of campfires. But he had never felt so alone or forgotten. He
looked up at the sky, shot with stars. How vast the universe, he
thought, and yet there was no room in this world for these pages. Tears
rolled down his cheeks as the wind took the ashes of his life story and
carried them, dancing like fireflies, into the jungle beyond.
* * *
In an attic on a wooded street in Arlington, Tam Minh Pham sits in
front of a computer screen, typing. Nights and weekends he is in this
chair, trying to resurrect the words that went up in flames 13 years
ago, he says, "to share my experience so people can benefit without
having to go through the ordeal."
He is 43 now, a gaunt man with straight black hair, wearing jeans
that he buys in the boy's department. After arriving in the United
States in May 1991, he Americanized the order of his Vietnamese name --
Pham Minh Tam -- putting his given name, Tam, first. It sounds like
"Tom."
The liberation of Tam Minh Pham, for that is what finally happened,
the happy conclusion of a journey that began with so much hope and then
detoured into tragedy, is one man's story and two nations'. It is yet
another way that Vietnam stays with us, nearly two decades after the
last helicopters of Operation Frequent Wind lifted off the roof of the
U.S. Embassy in Saigon, taking the last lucky few. Its elements of
heroism and loyalty and betrayal echo the ordeal of countless
Vietnamese who ended up on the wrong side of the only war the United
States has ever lost. And so while it's a story about friendship,
family ties and a brotherhood, it's also about turning your back on
someone who once mattered. And ultimately, because of a determined few
unwilling to forget, it became the story of a rescue.
The author must work from memory, but there's an outline for his book in his résumé:
1970-1974: Student -- United States Military Academy at West Point
1974-1975: Tactical Officer -- Vietnamese National Military Academy
1975-1981: Prisoner of War -- Vietnam
1981-1991: Professor of English -- Teachers Training College, Saigon, Vietnam
1991-present: Teacher's Aide -- Cardozo High School, Washington, D.C.
* * *
At Vo Truong Toan High School in Saigon, Pham wanted to be an
electrical engineer; maybe even study in the United States like his
father, who attended Michigan State in the 1950s and later became a
high-ranking aide to the prime minister. But all that changed after the
Tet Offensive.
When the crack of AK-47s filled the air on January 31, 1968, Pham,
and most everyone else in the South Vietnamese capital, assumed they
were fireworks heralding the lunar new year, not part of a surprise
North Vietnamese attack. After the shooting stopped, he got on his
bicycle to see what had happened. Riding along streets decorated for
the holiday with the yellow blooms of the mai apricot, he spied the
corpse of a dead Viet Cong. It was a boy, maybe 17, lying face down
outside a neighbor's house. He was dressed all in black, thin cotton
shorts and shirt. "There was blood all over his body. And that was a
shocking sight," Pham recalls, the image still vivid. "We hadn't had
any chance to see a real Viet Cong. We just read about them in the
newspapers . . . The way he was dressed I thought he must have been so
cold." But even though the dead boy was about his own age, he felt no
pity, only rage at an invader.
In the United States, the sight on the evening news of other dead
guerrillas, sprawled on the manicured lawns of the American Embassy,
triggered a different reaction that marked the first step of our
retreat from Vietnam: If Gen. William Westmoreland says the Viet Cong
are so close to defeat, then what the heck are they doing in downtown
Saigon?
But while Tet spurred our eventual disengagement from the Vietnam
War, for Pham it was only the beginning. That summer, as American kids
took to the streets in Chicago, he applied to the Vietnamese National
Military Academy in Dalat, a beautiful mountain resort and
honeymooner's favorite known as the "City of Love." Founded by the
French, the academy "was like a college, so one could be a scholar and
a soldier at the same time," he says. Still, its military training was
so fierce his parents had to sign a waiver absolving the school of
liability if their son were killed. He did so well that in 1970, during
his second year, he was picked to compete for a unique opportunity: a
West Point education.
That spring, West Point got a new superintendent, Gen. William A.
Knowlton, a veteran of the Vietnam War who was determined to add a
South Vietnamese to the ranks of incoming cadets. Although the academy
had graduated more than 100 foreign cadets since Antonio Barrios of
Guatemala received his diploma in 1889, most came from Latin America
and the Philippines. With the Vietnam War on, Congress created four new
all-expenses-paid slots for our Southeast Asian allies. South Koreans
and a Thai took the first three. "Everybody kind of forgot about the
Vietnamese," says Knowlton. The academic board had settled on two
finalists for the remaining spot: a Malaysian with excellent English
and a not-as-fluent South Vietnamese candidate. The Malaysian had the
edge, until Knowlton spotted a note from an instructor in the
Vietnamese candidate's file: Cadet Tam Minh Pham thinks in English.
By the time Pham arrived at West Point in July 1970, Henry Kissinger
had already begun his secret peace talks in Paris with the North
Vietnamese. Of course, the class of '74 didn't know that.
"We all assumed we were going," says Patrick A. McBrayer, who roomed
with Pham at West Point. Back then, he was an idealistic, sandy-haired
kid from Forest City, N.C., who decided on West Point in sixth grade,
inspired by "The Long Gray Line," director John Ford's sentimental 1955
ode to the academy. He and Pham were assigned to the same company, I-2.
Together they ate, studied, marched, looked out for each other.
"Cooperate to graduate" was the rallying cry. Pham coached McBrayer in
math. McBrayer's lessons helped Pham graduate from the "Rock Squad" of
non-swimmers. The day Pham plunged into the swimming pool from an
Olympic platform in fatigues, combat boots and a rucksack weighted with
a brick, McBrayer was there praying, "Come up, come up," and cheering
when he surfaced, "looking like a wet rat."
Pham assimilated. He dated a general's daughter. He got drunk on
blackberry brandy before an economics test. Dwarfed in a land of
Brobdingnagians, he mastered karate. Required to attend church (West
Point featured no Buddhist pagodas), he dutifully attended Protestant
services. His company mates gave him a nickname: Gooky.
The war hovered like a storm cloud. Walking into class one day,
McBrayer watched a maintenance man add a plaque to the wall with the
name of yet another West Point casualty. In the era of Kent State and
My Lai, cadets were reluctant to wear their uniforms in public, knowing
they risked taunts of "baby killer." As a constant reminder of an
unpopular war, Pham knew, without a word spoken, that some cadets
resented him. Reading the New York Times left at his door every
morning, he could see his country falling apart.
Gradually, it became clear that only one member of the class of '74
would be going to Vietnam after graduation. In January 1973, when the
news of a peace agreement was broadcast, Pham was watching. He
remembers his feelings this way: "In my heart, signing a peace treaty
is like signing a surrender. But I knew the American people were
impatient because lots of their folks died in Vietnam, which is a long
way away from home, for a cause that is so distant and so abstract . .
. So I didn't feel angry at all. Just depressed."
On graduation day, Pham and McBrayer, dressed in gray swallow-tailed
uniforms, tossed their caps into the air. Outside the stadium, they
embraced and pledged to stay in touch.
"West Point's loss is Viet-Nam's gain," reads Pham's entry in the
1974 Howitzer, his class yearbook. "No doubt, stars in his eyes will
soon be on his shoulders."
"I'm sometimes asked by people, 'Didn't you counsel him to stay
here?' " says former superintendent Knowlton, now retired. "And I say
no, because this is not his country. There was no doubt in his mind
either; that's where he should go."
Pham agrees: "At West Point, I believed what we were taught about duty, honor, country. That was what drew me back."
The new lieutenant strode off the plane at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut
airport in August 1974, resplendent in dress whites. A saber with a
gold hilt gleamed at his side. The sight dazzled his younger sister
Thanh-Dung, who was preparing to leave Vietnam to study in America. She
would carry that fairy-tale vision of her brother for years.
* * *
April 30, 1975. Second Lt. Pham and 60 Vietnamese military cadets
were holed up at Thu Duc, an infantry school just outside Saigon.
They'd been in retreat for a month, trying to stay ahead of the North
Vietnamese. Pham had just lost his West Point ring, inscribed with the
class motto: "Pride of the Corps '74."
A month earlier, the black sapphire stone had dropped out somewhere.
A bad sign, he'd thought. The North Vietnamese had already captured the
province of Tay Ninh. Then the town of Ban Me Thuot, perilously close
to Dalat, fell in a single day. The military academy was evacuated,
officers leading the cadets toward Saigon. For safekeeping, Pham put
the ring with its empty socket in the shirt pocket of his fatigues. And
now it too was gone.
There are West Pointers who never take off their ring from the
moment during Ring Weekend when their girlfriends slip it onto their
finger. Plebes learn to define it -- "the crass mass of brass and
glass, sir!" -- while envious Army colleagues demean its wearers as
"ring-knockers" purportedly equipped with a golden phone to the
Pentagon. In a culture steeped in symbolism, the class ring is the most
potent icon, a sign that "I made it" through one of the toughest
schools in the world. "Nothing is more demanding, nothing more
commanding or consuming than a West Point experience -- unless you were
a tortured POW for years," says novelist Gus Lee, whose forthcoming
book explores his experiences as a Chinese-American cadet at West Point
in the 1960s. "The ring says you went through a very intense experience
with lifetime comrades. You have all these brothers who wear the ring,
and it bonds you."
Heartsick, Pham searched the barracks, but had to give up the hunt
when two North Vietnamese tanks, hulking Soviet-made T-54s, rumbled
through the camp gates. The retreat from Dalat, where Pham had taught
cadets the tactics, leadership and other skills he acquired at West
Point, had come without a shot fired. But his men were equipped with
antitank guns. Now Pham positioned a fire team in a barracks window.
"San sang," he ordered. "Nham." They took aim. "Ban!"
One of the enemy tanks rocked to a halt, billowing smoke and fire.
The other fled. The cadets cheered, but victory was brief. "We were
only single swallows which could not make a whole spring," Pham says.
Under smoky skies, Pham and his men joined the surreal exodus along
Highway 1. The road was jammed with wild-eyed men on motorbikes,
terrified women balancing their entire households on pedicabs and --
the only happy faces -- jubilant prison inmates in tiger-striped
uniforms, freed when their jailers took off. Taking a jungle path, Pham
could hear the enemy tanks clattering beside them on the macadam,
victors and vanquished both aiming for the capital. Shortly after noon,
a North Vietnamese tank burst through the gates of the presidential
palace in Saigon.
The war was over. But at first, nothing happened. Pham shed his
uniform. He and a buddy supported themselves as sidewalk bicycle
repairmen. Eventually, the North Vietnamese began summoning the nguy,
the "puppet" soldiers and administrators of South Vietnam, for
"reeducation." For junior officers like Pham, the sentence was supposed
to be 10 days.
* * *
Nguyen Van Nhan, a former South Vietnamese infantry officer, entered
a bamboo hut at the reeducation camp somewhere in the province of Phuoc
Long. The new inmate saw he was not alone. Another prisoner was lying
on a bamboo bed, shivering under a blanket. He was moaning and
scratching himself. His skin was dark, and every inch of it, except for
his palms and face, was covered with scabies that left bloody welts.
There was a bowl of rice on his bed; a chicken was pecking away, eating
the prisoner's rations. Nhan, who had been trained at Fort Benning,
Ga., soon learned he had something in common with his new hut mate,
late of West Point and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Because
they were trained in the United States, they were treated like dirt,
says Nhan, who now inspects shoes at a factory in Texas.
By then, June 1976, Pham had been a prisoner of war for nearly a
year in a camp so deep in the jungle bordering Cambodia that there was
no need for a fence. Every couple of weeks, the cadre who ran the camp
would call the prisoners in for a marathon haranguing session, but Pham
recalls no education; just the painful lessons of revenge, hard labor
and deprivation. At night, the prisoners scribbled the next day's jobs
on slips of paper -- chop wood, harvest rice, clear minefields -- and
drew lots. Pham had the good fortune to never draw the minefields.
Sometimes, busy at another task, he would hear in the distance the
muffled bang of an exploding mine.
Before the collapse of South Vietnam, U.S. officials warned of an
inevitable bloodbath if the Americans pulled out. "One of the great
false alarms of all time," George McGovern told the Senate in 1976. Not
so, according to a 1985 study published in the Washington Quarterly by
Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, two Vietnam experts then at
the University of California, Berkeley. Based on an international
survey of 800 Vietnamese refugees, they asserted that between 1975 and
1982, "at least 65,000" people were executed in Vietnam.
The researchers said they did not count those consigned to what
refugees called the "slow death" in the reeduca- tion camps and
prisons, "those who died by accident (such as cleaning minefields),
those who died from malnutrition, disease, or exhaustion, those who
committed suicide, or those who simply disappeared." So that figure
doesn't include Pham's hut mate who walked outside one night and
dropped stone dead. Or the son of a wealthy Danang family who killed
himself after the new regime took over his family's gas station. "You
today," Pham whispered to his friend lying in the grave he dug for him.
"Me tomorrow."
If the prisoners were lucky, they got a bowl of filthy rice a day,
or an undigestible sorghum cereal usually fed to horses, called bobo.
Pham says he learned to make something he called "rats seven dishes,"
to make a meal of snakes, a snack of ants and worms. Allowed to visit,
his mother brought him a copy of Gone With the Wind. Pham convinced the
guards that Margaret Mitchell was a Russian writer. But they always had
the upper hand. Guards surprised him and his friends one night as they
discussed the inevitable collapse of communism, and threatened for
hours to shoot them. Moments like that, he says, taught him more than
four years at West Point. They are the reason he has titled his
book-in-progress Rendezvous With Yourself.
"Despite all this, and this is what I want to remember -- there is a
positive side to what we underwent," Pham writes. "It is that, the more
you suffer, the more you come to know yourself. In prison I realized
there is a price to be paid for everything. The price of self-knowledge
and calm is hardship and suffering. This produces the kind of freedom
that money cannot buy, power cannot touch and fame has nothing to do
with."
In February 1981, after Pham had spent five years and eight months
in captivity, the police unexpectedly set him free -- by an
administrative mistake, he thinks. His detention camp release permit
branded him a "member of previous military body and organizations
involved and responsible for anti-communist activities." He returned
home to Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City. With its informers,
disease and poverty, it sometimes seemed like just a larger prison.
Pham eked out a living teaching English to Vietnamese like himself:
"socially dangerous persons" tarred by their links to the United States
whose only chance for a better future was getting out.
For support, he and his family depended on his sister, who was
stranded in America after Saigon fell and her scholarship to Duke
University evaporated in an administrative foul-up. Living in
Washington, Thanh-Dung worked three jobs to send money, medicines and
consumer goods her family could use, barter or bribe with. She sent a
stream of letters to West Point, the State Department and Capitol Hill
in a fruitless quest to win their release. "I keep the fire burning,
but it's just not enough to make any miracle happen," she recalls.
Pham's class president, Robert Mixon, wrote Secretary of State
Alexander Haig, a West Point grad. He never heard back.
In 1984, Pham tried to get a boat out, but the police showed up just
before the sampan pushed off; he had to give them all his money to
escape arrest. Write your friends at West Point, his mother said. When
I get a chance, he said.
By then, he had received just two pieces of mail from the States, a
form letter soliciting donations to the West Point Fund and an
invitation to his 10th reunion.
During his State of the Union message in 1985, President Reagan
introduced Jean Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee due to graduate from West
Point in the spring. Newspaper stories erroneously described her and
another cadet as the academy's first Vietnamese graduates; there was no
mention of Tam Minh Pham, class of '74.
He couldn't tell his mother the real reason why he didn't write. "I
was miserable . . . It had been a long time and nobody paid attention,
so I thought I was forgotten."
That same year, a friend of Pham's mother introduced him to her
niece, Kim Chi Trang, a soft-spoken 23-year-old who lived at home
caring for her handicapped mother. They dated, meeting in cafes after
his classes and talking for hours about many things -- except his
imprisonment. They married three years later. The newlyweds, like many
Vietnamese, honeymooned in Dalat, the "City of Love." Pham wanted to
show his bride the national military academy where he had gone to
school and later taught, but it was now off-limits and heavily guarded.
The closest they could get was a hilltop a few miles away.
When the Vietnamese government, desperate for economic aid, began to
open its borders in the late 1980s, a West Pointer named Thomas Marks,
class of '72, was among the first visitors. Marks, who had become a
schoolteacher in Hawaii and "chief foreign correspondent" for Soldier
of Fortune magazine, attached himself to an American business group
scouting for opportunities and looked up his old friend. He and Pham
met in 1988 at the Caravelle Hotel, where American reporters had once
watched the war from the rooftop. "He was not in the greatest shape,
psychologically or otherwise," says Marks.
Back home, Marks wrote a bitter article about the trip, disguising
Pham's identity but using his story "to explain what happened to these
people when we just pulled the plug, because there are so many like him
that had their lives turned into pieces of garbage. We left an entire
army we created, all of our intelligence people. There are some guys
who are still hiding to this day." Soldier of Fortune headlined the
piece, "Ho Chi Minh City's Living Dead. Abandoned ARVN Vets: Outcasts
in a Troubled Land."
Meanwhile, Pham himself finally wrote to his classmates. "Hi, I am
really at a loss of what to say after 15 years not having been able to
see you guys!" the letter began. "I surmise, however, that you must be
in pretty much better shape than I am." The letter was carried to the
United States in 1989 by one of the American businessmen he had met
through Marks. It eventually made its way into the July issue of the
Assembly, West Point's alumni magazine.
In the letter, Pham mentioned McBrayer and other friends, but only
touched on his ordeal. "I was sent to camp right after April '75 and,
thank God, got out of it in 1981." He said he had eventually tried
contacting the Association of Graduates, West Point's alumni group, and
officials at the American Embassy in Bangkok for help. "But there has
been no real response yet."
The letter was signed, "P.M. Tam USMA '74."
* * *
"Daddy, why don't you help him?"
Carson McBrayer, 6, asked her father that question soon after the
Assembly with Pham's letter arrived at their house in Yardley, Pa. They
were standing in the upstairs hallway, a gallery of his family's
military history: a portrait of his great-grandfather who lost an arm
at Petersburg fighting for the Confederacy; a photo of McBrayer
receiving his diploma; his West Point company posing stiffly at Trophy
Point their plebe year.
Carson and her 4-year-old brother loved the stories behind the
pictures. McBrayer pointed out the short Asian cadet squinting in the
sun in the first row. He told his kids how his friend had gone back to
defend his country, how the enemy threw him in jail, how no one knew
for years if he was dead or alive. And now he wanted to come to
America, but no one seemed able to help him.
His daughter's question, so obvious and innocent, pierced McBrayer.
He'd wondered what happened to Pham. He had made occasional calls to
the Association of Graduates, checked with the State Department, even
tried to send money through a relief agency. Of McBrayer, the Howitzer
yearbook noted, "We will remember him as one who valued ideals and
friendship as his most cherished possessions." But he knew his attempts
had been halfhearted.
After five years as an infantry officer, McBrayer had gone to work
for Johnson & Johnson, shifting from command of a company of
soldiers to leading a production team that made OB tampons. In 1987,
venture capitalists had asked him to help start a new company,
Osteotech, an orthopedic specialty firm.
Now he made a vow to his wife, Leslie. "I'm going to do something. I
made things happen in the military. I made things happen in business. I
can make things happen here." But when he tracked down Pham's sister in
Gaithersburg, Thanh-Dung was skeptical. Now an American citizen married
to Henry Cohn, a Department of Veterans Affairs lawyer, she had a
folder bulging with platitudes and buck-passing, the legacy of her
losing battles with bureaucracy.
But McBrayer persisted. His weapons were the phone, the fax machine
and West Point connections. He organized a "Free Tam Committee" and
persuaded the accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand to set it up and
a New Jersey bank to run it, free. His company paid for a direct-mail
campaign that sold T-shirts and netted $15,000 from classmates and
other West Pointers.
By Christmas 1989, he had a man on the ground in Thailand, an Asian
businessman with high-level contacts, who was cutting through the red
tape that snarled the Orderly Departure Program. ODP is the
well-meaning but tortuous obstacle course set up by the United Nations
in 1979 after the international outcry over the plight of Vietnamese
refugees forced to run the gantlet of South China Sea pirates. Through
his sister's efforts, Pham's name had been on the list of refugees
acceptable to U.S. officials since 1984 -- a roll that five years later
still had 600,000 names. The catch: The Vietnamese had to agree.
Behind the scenes, high-powered ring-knockers had also been busy.
Former superintendent Knowlton, who had written Pham several letters he
never got, pleaded Pham's case to Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., the former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who is the presi- dential
emissary to Hanoi for POW-MIA affairs. Tipped off by Marks, a Thai West
Pointer also got word to Vessey. During a negotiating session, Vessey
handed the foreign minister of Vietnam an envelope. Inside was a pitch
for Pham's release. A COMMUNICATION FROM THE FREE Tam Committee:
"To: The Pride of the Corps '74
"At 22:45 hours on May 31, 1991, Pham Minh Tam returned to the
United States, seventeen years after our graduation. He was accompanied
by his wife Kim Chi. After many years of waiting and hoping, this
mission has been accomplished."
* * *
"I don't think we'll ever know exactly what triggered the Vietnamese
to let him go," says Vessey. In the end, it may have been simply the
growing chorus of voices calling for Pham's release. McBrayer insists
he was a "small player" and is quick to credit Knowlton, his classmates
and, most of all, the tireless efforts of Pham's sister, who never gave
up, even when it seemed everyone else had written her brother off. She
and Pham, however, have no doubt about their greatest benefactor, who
waited nervously with the Cohns at National Airport a year ago for a
plane from Bangkok. Lewis Sorley, a West Pointer who has befriended
Pham, says it best: "The day West Point assigned Pat McBrayer as Tam's
roommate was the luckiest day of his life."
The night Pham arrived in America, he and McBrayer were sitting
around the Cohns' kitchen table in Gaithersburg. Thanh-Dung excused
herself and went upstairs. She's now a successful benefits consultant
for the Wyatt Co. But in 1976, when she didn't know if she would ever
see her brother again and she was a cashier at Blackie's House of Beef
and working two other jobs that netted her only $300 a month, she had
wanted to buy something by which her parents could remember their
eldest son. From the upstairs linen closet, she brought down a copy of
the Howitzer, his class yearbook. The other gift she had needed a
general's permission to buy.
"Does this look familiar?" she asked her brother, placing on the
table a glistening saber of German steel, a scarlet tassle hanging from
its gold hilt, just like the one he had carried so proudly the day he
came home from West Point.
* * *
Through the years Pham was held without trial, surviving death
threats and scabies, living on vermin, his classmates were rising
through the ranks, going to graduate school, falling in love, getting
married, having children, getting out of the service and discovering
that a West Point ring could be the key to the executive suite.
Now in their early forties, the men of West Point, class of 1974
(female cadets wouldn't arrive for another two years), are hitting
their stride. The 400 or so still in uniform are majors and lieutenant
colonels; 70 to 80 will soon command battalions. Many of those who left
the Army have found success in business and the professions.
For his first six months in America, Pham couldn't even get a job
washing floors or dishing out ice cream. Last fall, he finally found
work as a teacher's aide at Cardozo High School, a massive complex of
brick in a struggling Northwest section. He still hasn't left Vietnam
behind: His days are spent helping Vietnamese immigrant children, many
of them Amerasians, the abandoned offspring of GIs. His one-year
contract, which pays $15,900 a year, runs out in September. His wife
works as a home attendant caring for their wheelchair-bound landlady.
The couple shares a tiny room with slanted walls, twin beds,
cast-off furniture. Between them they were only allowed to bring 40
pounds of belongings into this country -- among them clothes, Pham's
West Point diploma and dog-eared books and tapes with the favorite
sermons of his Zen Buddhist masters, who taught him that the only
prison is the mind and passed on their preternatural capacity for calm
acceptance. "You could put a bomb under him," his sister jokes, "and he
wouldn't jump."
Pham seems free of any bitterness about the years that went by
without a word from his American friends. "That's understandable," he
says. "It's like a wound. No one wants to open it up. Why should we?"
The soldier who endured six years of prison emerged a serene
philosopher. "I don't blame anyone . . . If I had stayed back here
after graduation I would be so rich now, but I wouldn't have the mental
attitude I have."
Enlightenment hasn't immunized him completely from worldly delights.
With gifts from friends and their own earnings, he and his wife have
acquired the American passion for consumption. They have a new Toshiba
color television and a VCR. Their favorite tape displays the date
"Sep.28.91," and features the Corps of Cadets marching under a crisp
blue sky, commands echoing across the parade ground at West Point.
Guests of honor that day, they sat in the superintendent's box for
the Army-Harvard football game. When the announcer introduced Pham at
half time, the Corps of Cadets rose in a standing ovation. The
superintendent gave him a brass medal with the words "Welcome home"
inscribed on the back.
"It may not be the nicest thing to say, but this guy got lost in the
shuffle," Pat McBrayer says, trying to explain why it took 17 years for
Pham to be returned to the fold.
Oh, there are lots of good explanations. The communists stonewalled.
"We weren't getting anyone out," argues Vessey. "The fact is we did not
have much influence." People tried, although none with a sister's
tenacious devotion; there were, after all, lives to live, careers to
forge, families to raise, other battles to fight.
But there may be another, more fundamental reason, one that perhaps
only someone like McBrayer, 13 years out of uniform and no longer
dependent on the goodwill of superior officers, is able to talk about.
America's focus, understandably, was on its own POWs and MIAs,
McBrayer says. "As a country we were concerned about other things. We
had El Salvador and Panama; and Vietnam was something everybody wanted
to forget. And Pham was part of Vietnam. And he was forgotten."
* * *
In a science laboratory at Cardozo High School, the steps of cell
division are outlined on posters written in English, Spanish, Chinese,
Arabic and Vietnamese.
Tam Minh Pham's days are spent circulating from class to class in
the school's English as a Second Language program, juggling roles --
translator, instructor, booster, social worker. Hispanics dominate the
ESL program, and the dozen or so Vietnamese children often ended up
getting ignored, teachers confess. When Pham first arrived at Cardozo,
some of his students were skipping out after lunch.
Whatever their nationality, his students "are faced with lots of
problems, both domestic and academic," says Pham. "They look at each
other through a mist of prejudices, and they don't always get along. I
serve as kind of a bridge to help them come closer together, to help
them know each other."
But the day he arrived at Cardozo was almost his last. He found
himself at his first pep rally, a raucous display of American school
spirit that deafened and terrified him. Cardozo was nothing like his
school in Vietnam, where students quietly walked the halls and people
rarely revealed their feelings. Pham went home and was sick for the
next week. "I said to myself I wouldn't come back for anything." Then
he realized what he had was a dose of culture shock. "People just
behave in their own way," he told himself, "so why should you feel
scared? Just get back and understand them." It's what he tries to get
across to the kids who are struggling to fit in, just as he is. "The
key is mutual understanding and respect. As long as you have that, you
have no problem dealing with each other, no matter what skin color you
have, what culture you were raised in."
Before and after classes, he waits in his office, a large room on
the third floor with three desks and a copier. "They just pour in," he
says, "with questions, looking for advice, for anything they have in
mind." Chau wants help finding his American father. An wants a pass. A
teacher wants to know how a new student who speaks little English is
managing. There are always cultural gaps, little ones like when a boy
uses a comma for a decimal point, Vietnamese style, instead of a
period. And there are deeper fissures. One day recently, Pham had to
break up a beef between Chau and a Hispanic classmate who had greeted
him with a noisy, "Hey, how ya' doing, man" and a slap on the shoulder.
"Chau mistook that for an act of aggression, so he fought back," Pham
says.
Today's science lesson is based on the periodic table. At a lab
counter, a Salvadoran teenager named Juan hunches over his notebook.
His black pants are emblazoned with silver stars and the legend "Never
legal." Pham peeks over his shoulder.
"Is it iron?" Juan nods. "How do you know?" Pham demands. Juan
pauses. Then, firmly, "Because it's in the table." Pham gives his
shoulder a friendly cuff. "Good man." "I never consider myself a
Vietnamese who should take sides with the Viet- namese kids," Pham says
later. "I just want to make different groups of students mix better. I
look at the kids as my own brothers."
* * *
West Point rings gleam on the hands of most of the men sitting in
Salon B of the Corcoran Ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel. It's
Valentine's Day, and Thanh-Dung Cohn and her husband, Henry, have
joined about 25 West Pointers for a tribute organized by McBrayer. The
night before, Pham's former company mates, the men of I-2, drank beers
and swapped tales in McBrayer's suite. Summer Field Training Exercises,
1973: Cadet Pham's job is to fire a flare at the approach of
helicopters. But his flare hits a chopper, forcing it down. The pilot
emerges, unscathed but ripping mad. "I can't believe it!" he says after
the frightened cadets explain what happened. "Two tours in Vietnam, and
I get shot down by a Vietnamese in Fort Hood, Texas!"
Beside each china dinner plate is a program for the evening's
tribute. On the cover is Pham's graduation picture, the one that
appeared in the Howitzer. Below it is a verse from the "The Corps," a
West Point hymn:
"The long gray line of us stretches
Through the years of a century told,
And the last man feels to his marrow
The grip of your far off hold."
Pham and Kim Chi are beaming
at the center table. It's been quite an evening already. Vincent
Stafford, a producer for NBC, has showed a tape of "Portraits of
Freedom," an upcoming documentary that features Pham's story. The hotel
has presented them with an all-expenses-paid weekend. McBrayer's
company has given the budding author a personal computer and printer.
There is even a 1986 Oldsmobile represented by a photo. Pham seems in
shock, dazzled at the riches.
The friends of Pham have another mission now. They're working with
Rep. Jack Reed (D-R.I. and West Point '71) to get a private bill
through Congress to win Pham speedy citizenship, which would help his
permanent job prospects.
There is one more item of unfinished business, a final act of
healing. Classmate James Hogan, now a corporate vice president in
California, takes the podium. "Kim Chi, could you come up here,
please?" From the pocket of his pin-stripe suit, Hogan removes a thick
14-karat-gold ring emblazoned with the class crest and its motto,
"Pride of the Corps '74."
"Oh. Oh," Pham says, shaking his head when he realizes what it is. He whispers, "I'm so honored."
Hogan helps Kim Chi slip the ring on her husband's finger. The room
erupts in applause. Pham looks as boyish as a cadet at the Ring Hop 20
years ago. He lifts his hand in a gesture that somehow seems caught
between a salute and a blessing. Light from a chandelier catches the
gold as Tam Minh Pham turns from side to side on the platform, bowing
to his friends, his class ring held high, flashing.
Christopher Scanlan is a national correspondent in the Washington bureau of Knight-Ridder newspapers.
