“My eight seasons in Hell”

In April of 2000, Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) Mental Health Department (MHD) invited Julien Nguyen, aka NLGO (The Elderly Soldier of Oregon), a former captain of the Republic of Vietnam to speak about his miserable experience as a detainee in multiple labor camps after the fall of Saigon and how he has survived his eight years in Communist Hell. Below is his integral speech, “My eight seasons in Hell” with the contents suggested by MHD, “Understanding adult survivor of concentration camps”.

MY EIGHT SEASONS IN HELLjulien nguyen      Ladies and gentlemen,      I would like to thank my friend Khom One for having kindly invited me here to speak, and you all for having gladly come in this room to hear, about the incredible experience that I had faced during eight years in the Vietnamese Communist (Vietcong, VC) concentration camps. Or, if you like, my eight seasons in Hell, and not just one brief season in French poet Rimbaud’s well-known poem, Une saison en Enfer (A season in Hell) –having a different context, of course.      My life after the collapse of our Republic of (South) Vietnam was, indeed, extra-ordinary and nightmarish. Like in Dante’s La divina Commedia,  it was a true journey, composed of three episodes, namely:     (1) Hell: eight years in the concentration camps as an officer, plus one year in jail as a “boat people” being captured during a failed escape attempt, and afterward, seven days and nights on the stormy sea on board of a small fisher-boat to the Philippines,        (2) Purgatory: eighteen months in the Philippine refugee camps,       (3) Paradise: since my arrival to America in 1985.      

 I. LIVING CONDITIONS IN THE VC RE-EDUCATION CAMPS      But let me just talk, first, about the VC Hell, the worst of all hells combined. After the fall of Saigon, on April 30, 1975, exactly 28 years from today, all South Vietnamese officers, including myself, then a 28 year-old Army captain fighting to the last minute, were ordered to report to the new authorities. We were rounded up by the thousands and packed like cattle in groups of 40 to 50 into camouflaged Soviet-made Molotova trucks to be driven out under the night cover toward the so-called re-education camps in the hinterlands or deep in the jungles. Soon later, most of us were transferred, at the holds of ships, to around sixty labor camps, in North Vietnamese mountainous areas –close to Chinese or Laotian borders.1) There, we were stripped of our basic human rights, subjected to apprehension (i.e. fear of being executed at any time), humiliation (e.g. “you can be shot to death at our will”, they threatened), insult (e.g. “vile valets of Americans”, “bloodthristy mercenaries”), inclement weather (coldness but no warm clothes available, plus mosquitoes having the size of flies), and the worst living conditions (sheds with thatched roofs, bamboo walls, and rough wooden shelves to use in lieu of beds). We were detained as prisoners of war, war criminals, or “enemies of the people” for an indefinite time (8 to 14 years in average) without formal sentences or judicial proceedings of any kind. What was propagandized worldwide as “re-education” by the Communist regime turned out to be, in reality, an elaborate system of political brainwashing and indoctrination, forced labor, moral torture, physical beating, and clandestine execution. Re-education, thus, was conceived as a form of vengeance, a method of punishment reserved for military personnel and government officials of the fallen regime.

2) Added to that misery were other mental torments:      – Frustration and anger at being abandoned or deserted by our superiors, friends, colleagues who had left in the mass exodus on the eve of the collapse of Saigon, and betrayed by the USA, our close, longstanding ally.       – Despair over being separated from families and beloved ones, and in many cases, abandoned by spouses or fiancees.                                     – Depression caused by the nostalgia of a “glorious” past and the vision of a sinister and unknown future.       – Those mental and physical torments compelled several prisoners to resort to suicide as the unique, efficacious relief.3) Hunger, supreme punishment and its consequences:       However, none of the above miseries could be compared to hunger, an abominable punishment which I may call the “supreme refinement of cruelty” and where the Vietcongs demonstrated an outstanding expertise, even superior to that of their Soviet models and bosses as mentioned in The Archipelago of Gulag of Solzhenitsyn. Indeed, the Vietcongs knew how to kill in a “scientific”, subtle manner, progressively, by exposing prisoners to a permanent hunger on which I need to focus in order that you would see what exact level of atrocity they have reached and how our endurance has been during so many years. To better subdue them, and transform the heroic warriors, that we were, into trapped animals, they exploited successfully the lowest, the most degrading human basic instinct: urgent need to tuck in. Personally I would have preferred a “bloodbath” as frequently mentioned and rumored by the Western media, or a pointblank shot at the full chest, because thus, like during the wartime, death would have come fast, and pain would have been terminated once and forever. On the contrary, there, every day, we were starving slowly, and practically living an ignoble death, with powerless rage and irreparable shame to be constrained to think constantly of the empty stomach and the way to fill it up.

       Here, in America, people, even prisoners and homeless persons could never realize how starvation, or to the least hunger, is, and they are lucky. In Communist paradises, prisoners’ ration for two daily meals was limited to a small bowl, and just a bowl, of sliced manioc (other terms: manioca, cassava, or casava), kind of plant having a large, starchy root used in civilized societies to feed porks. No breakfast. No sugar, or milk, or meat, or chicken, or oil, or rice, or fruit. Nothing but dry manioc. In the evenings, we were given a sort of soup made mostly with water, salt, and some stems of “rau muong”, a local vegetable which we were ordered to grow, using human urine and feces, and animal dung as fertilizer. The manioc, given to us, had been sun-dried, and so, had a blackish color, a bitter taste, a fetid odor. Still, it was distributed in small quantity, just to keep us alive, every day.                      

And now, you can imagine what disastrous consequences such a malnutrition, combined with mandatory labor and continuous depression, might have inflicted on our body and spirit. Unlike generals, colonels, and government ministers, we were then young, healthy officers, age 30 and 135 pounds on the average. After some months, the strongest guy became pale, haggard, wild-looking, gaunt-faced. After a year, we became mobile skeletons. Detainees’ brain becoming dull, pasty, they could no more think, or react, or resist, or protest, or revolt –which was exactly what the Vietcongs wanted and the very goal they aimed at: keeping prisoners’ mouth shut. Their body was sluggish and their brain, center of will and action, dead. For good. Their stomach, instead of being fully satisfied, was repeatedly irritated, filled with acid, corroded by the toxic effect of manioc. Gastrointestinal troubles became inevitable. Muscles, for lack of proteine, lipid, glucose, contracted, deflated, and little by little lost their function. Hunger forced prisoners to look for and swallow almost anything: unknown leaves and dangerous fruits, reptiles of all families, randomly found in labor fields –which caused, on the spot, sickness, even death, to some of them.
      I

Illnesses of all sorts came quickly, especially typhoid, bronchitis, pneumonia, TB, scurvy (extreme weakness for lack of Vitamin C), beriberi (partial paralysis of the extremities), rash on the face and over the body, scabies. The most common cause of death was diarrhea and its inevitable terrible sister, dysentery, etc. (I will come back to this problem later). Every morning, at least one sick guy was quietly sent to the Communist paradise. In my camp, out of 2,000 prisoners, about 600 have died from diseases of all names, including mental degeneration, just for the first year in North Vietnam.      Deaths went on with the same rhythm until six years later, when the Soviet advisers, who supervised the Vietcong government, warned them of the dangerous situation and ordered them to allow visits and food and medicine supply by prisoners’ own families. Thus, I was visited two times, once a year for my last two years in the camps by my mother and young sister whose each round trip from South to North took a month due to ill-maintained roads and archaic transportation system.        Meanwhile, our bodies were so ill-nourished and weak that several guys easily fell at a single gust of wind, or after stumbling over a stone, and died. Some others stepped on rusty nails and passed away shortly after from tetanus for lack of antibiotics. An infection on legs or arms could result in an amputation, since our immune system had been completely annulled. 
         

No Western medicines. Only some kinds of suspicious traditional herbs used to treat all diseases. Aspirin, for example, a popular and very cheap medicine in South Vietnam, was a luxury under the Communist regime, never given to prisoners. No physicians. No dentists. Only one or two so-called Vietcong military medics, or nurses, who had not finished the 5th grade. Leg or arm amputation was performed, without anesthesia nor antiseptic nor antibiotics, and none of the victims has survived. In that way, some ulcerous stomachs have been removed, too. A sore tooth was extracted by hand, with or without the consent of victims. But prisoners had no choice. 
4) Daily labor            

We were ordered to do numerous nameless things six days a week, and to attend political re-education classes on Sundays. Some examples: planting vegetables, cabbage, rice –which we were not allowed to eat. Going to the forests or mountains to cut trees, bamboos. Building or fixing houses, roads, bridges. Plowing rice fields in place of buffaloes, guarding cows and pigs… The Vietcongs did not seriously expect good results from our labor, because they knew well that we had not been familiar with doing those kinds of jobs, and that, above all, we were too hungry. Their labor strategy aimed to punish us and keep us busy. Period. Still they encouraged us to do more, better, on a daily basis, with mandatory performance evaluations by peers, and with their hollow promises, such as: any one who is willing to work hard will be soon released. Those who believed them usually died out of excessive effort and exhaustion, combined with hunger. On the other hand, going outside, in the open air, daily, instead of being confined between walls, was, in my opinion, the only positive aspect, in term of health, of the Vietcong labor

II. HOW COULD I HAVE SURVIVED HARDSHIPS      Until now I still consider myself simply as a “lucky” guy. I did not try to do anything extraordinary, exceptional for my survival. Now, looking back at that period of life, I think I owed it to an amalgam of the following factors:1) Self-pride:      I inherited self-pride –a sense of self-respect, from my parents, and some form of arrogance and fear of ridicule from my French teachers since childhood. I had been taught not to complain, to justify, to implore before human beings. I always like the philosophy of Vigny, a French poet, contained in these words by a dying archi-proud wolf wounded by hunters: “Lamenting, crying, begging mercy, is equally coward”. Also, I admire Guillaumet, a hero in Saint-Exupery’s novel Terre des hommes(Land of men), a pilot surviving a crash in the African desert, who refused to sit there, on the sand, and die like a dog, and who, though wounded, exhausted, stood up and continued to walk days and nights before being rescued.. .         That way, in the concentration camps, I did exactly by, for instance, hiding my tears at my father’s death as well as that of his young sister, my aunt, who, as a boat-people, was lost somewhere at the bottom of the ocean when her boat sinked, and by swallowing my pain at the sad news of my sweetheart’s betrayal. No one, even friends, knew then how desperate I was. I did not need others’ pity. Friendship, yes, but pity, no thanks. Realizing that the enemy was using hunger as the utmost punishment (many did not see the same way), I refused to be overcome by that lowest instinct and depression, though very hungry and depressed like anyone else, because I was too proud to let the enemies or friends see me in such lamentable situation for fear of being despised or laughed at. While others were whining, I kept my head up. Those who complained much were first to die, out of mental weakness. I refused to go that low by eating leaves and reptiles, like many others, and thus, I did not have diarrhea or gastrointestinal problems which led automatically, sooner or later, to dysentry and finally to death. To deceive my empty stomach, I drank lots of water, chewed the fetid manioc as slowly as possible, and with time, my stomach reduced in size and in need, and so, got familiar with hunger and the quotidian tiny ration. Meanwhile, while many believed in Vietcongs’ promises, I made no effort in labor performance, in order to preserve my energy. I tried to avoid accidents. Thus, I had survived my six years in hell, until my mother’s first visit. The only thing out of my control was rash, which disappeared miraculously when the body was fed sufficiently and the spirit free of worries.2) Evasion from reality      I am a romantic by nature and education. In the concentration camps, I tried to escape the ugly reality: hunger, death, depression, the sad and desperate look of some of my fellow prisoners, the hateful and cruel face of all guardians. By dreaming of another better world filled with “perfumes, sounds and colours answering each to each” like in a poem of Baudelaire, my favorite poet, and by living the world of literature, poetry, love, and fictional women. Then, I started re-reading mentally, in the fields, or in bed, the novels of Stendhal –that writer whom I have been idolizing since high school. Thus, I assimilated with Stendhalian male characters, who loved passionately their beautiful, irresistible sweethearts, and forgot momentarily the reality, my prison and my pain.3) Hatred
      I do not intend to preach hatred  –which is in any case not healthy at all. However, in the camps and nowadays, I always regarded the Vietcongs as the avowed and mortal enemies of the Vietnamese people. No compromise with them. No reconciliation. No forgiveness. I wanted to live as long as possible and see their totalitarian regime be destroyed some day. Hatred, even passive, gave me strength, wisdom, vigilance, and paradoxically, calm.4) Stoicism      I believe in Destiny, fate or, in Catholic term, Providence. I believe you can never change your destiny. An example: you can fall in love with or marry someone, but having happiness with her or him lies with Destiny, for happiness is not a product of human beings. The best way to cope with a hard situation is to accept it, more or less. In the VC camps, I expected the worst, I mean death, so that if it actually came, I would be ready, and not be caught by surprise, and therefore, I would not lament, panic, or beg mercy. During the war, before going to each mission, I used to tell myself that I would not return, and then I felt perfectly serene. During my escape, when our boat, full of women and children, ran out of gasoline and drinking water on the high sea, I had no choice but struggling to keep it floating at the mercy of the wind and the waves, for three nights and three days, while waiting, calmly, for the worst. Until we were rescued by a Greek ship. 

5) Faith      That is the most important and decisive factor. In other terms, I owed my life, my survival, my resurrection to God. I was born Catholic, but à la française, i.e. not a good Catholic. Only when I was drafted and sent to numerous battlefields did I change my behavior. I prayed God to protect me and to give me enough strength to overcome all hardships which my life was loaded with. I continued to pray in concentration camps and jails, in my horrible escape from Vietnam, in the refugee camps, and here, in America where I tried hard to rebuild my broken life.

III. BY WAY OF CONCLUSION   
       In Vietnam, there was no counselor, psychotherapist, mental treatment, extensive care, or MHD in any hospital, school, as we can see, on the contrary, plentifully, here, in USA. There, people suffered from war, separation, detention, death, prison, danger, depression, despair, etc. for so many years, but they were mercilessly condemned to live their brutal reality, and to survive each on his / her own, by his / her own method. Just because they had no other choice. But that does not mean they were free of mental problems. Each Vietnamese refugee and immigrant of the war generation may be, more or less, a good case for mental workers. Including myself. After my personal story, you may think I am, apparently, a strong guy. However, in reality, if one day you awake my subconscious, or unconscious, and make me talk, like today, you will find so many lingering wounds that need to heal through your assistance. But, at first, try to subdue the self-pride hidden in my heart.      American people are lucky to have plenty of mental health agencies nationwide and superb workers like you. Doctors cure with knowledge and technique. You cure with knowledge and technique, too. But unlike medical doctors, to perform splendidly your job, you need to have a true heart –an authentic treasure which is not always easy to find.      Thank you and congratulations.      God bless you all.