May 8, 2018 Living in Vietnam Today (part XVI in a series)

The Liberty Gazette

May 8, 2018

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

We’ll be wrapping up our Southeast Asia series soon, but first we have an exclusive; a powerful story from a young Vietnamese willing to share their reality with you. Here are his words:

We went through a lot of things after the Vietnam war. My dad worked at the Da Nang airport as a helicopter mechanic. He was trained in the U.S. When the war was over we did not have many options. We followed the new government’s direction to move to an area in the central highlands. We did not know we were actually being moved to an undeveloped piece of jungle.

My parents had two small children and no idea about the term, “new economic zone,” that the communist government used for moving city people who did not support the Viet Cong or who had been involved in the war.

Most southern army officers went to jail, or as the commie people call it, “re-education camp.” It’s nothing different than hard-labor prison for former soldiers. They brainwash those soldiers and make them fear to death so they won’t be a threat against the new government when they get released. My uncle who was a navy officer spent almost three years in a re-education camp.

My dad did not go to jail because he worked in an office. We just lost our house as did many city people after that fateful day in 1975. We were moved to the new economic zone in 1976. I was born there two years later.

When people arrived there they did not want to get off the bus because there was nothing there. They cried a lot and asked drivers to take them back to their city, but it was too late. Little did they know they were on the one-way ticket bus and the government had tricked them. Government people showed photos of the “imagined” new economic zone with farms, farming tools, and houses. But when they arrived at the economic zone there was nothing.

We struggled there for more than three years. My dad helped the government officers with their documentation and paperwork because a lot of them actually came out of where they wanted to send us and did not have proper education.

That was a real problem with Vietnam back then, when the well-educated people were shipped to the government’s farm and work was “ruled” by the poorly educated commies.

My dad found that since moving there we had lost thirty percent of our people to diseases like malaria and jungle yellow fever. Sometimes just a regular infection was deadly because there was no health care available.

So he decided to bribe the government officers he knew to get a ticket for the whole family to leave. There were checkpoints everywhere and it was almost impossible to buy a bus ticket if you didn't have connections.

We still don’t have freedom of speech here, and we don’t really know if we disclose too much information about their dictatorship regime.


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