Journey to 'Freedom Land'

The first refugees to reach the U.S. came largely from Viet Nam's professional classes--doctors, dentists, lawyers, office workers, military officers, and their families. Said one U.S. Army doctor at the refugee center on Guam: "They were the VIPS, the cream of the crop, all first-class passengers. Some of the women even wore jewels to the physicals." But last week the rest of Viet Nam's uprooted were making their way to a new life in the U.S. They presented a much different sight.

Down the gangplanks of the first rescue ships to reach Guam filed thousands of refugees who had fled the Vietnamese coast in small boats--barefoot, poor and bandy-legged, bringing little more with them than the soiled, flimsy clothing they wore, carrying infants and small bundles of belongings. They were not the endangered elite of a fallen nation, but instead plain soldiers, fishermen and gnarled farmers. One wealthy Vietnamese immigrant who watched them said superciliously: "You can tell by their accents that they are only peasants. They are the wrong people. They should never have come. They will only make it more difficult for the rest of the Vietnamese." A U.S. immigration official remarked with considerably more sympathy: "All they have is wrapped up in a piece of clothing. God help them."

The new refugees on Guam were more representative of South Viet Nam as a whole. According to TIME Correspondent William McWhirter, who interviewed scores of the refugees last week, most were originally Northerners, predominantly Roman Catholics, who fled not out of last-minute panic but for reasons that they had long pondered. They often refer to the U.S. as "Freedom Land."

The first stop for America's new refugees is a 500-acre wasteland on Guam's Orote Point, the site of an abandoned Japanese airbase from World War II. The mammoth refugee complex bulged with 40,000 people. The air is constantly filled with red dust kicked up by the bulldozers grinding away at the remaining tree stumps and brambles. At night, strands of arc lights create hard patches of brightness among the heavy-canvas tents.

The refugees leave urgent personal messages about themselves in graffiti all around the camp--on the fences leading into the huts and immigration tents, on the sides of the shower stalls, even in spray paint across their tent flaps. Said one sign: "Tran Thi Hong da di California" (Tran Thi Hong gone to California).

Without Maps. That the refugees have survived at all seems to many a personal miracle. For example, while Saigon was being shelled, one Vietnamese army colonel picked up his wife and daughter, pirated a small speedboat still in the racks at the city's Club Nautique, took them down the Mekong River and out to sea, where they were rescued. His daughter's husband, Pham Van Tinh, a Vietnamese air force pilot, escaped separately from Tan Son Nhut airbase. Under heavy fire, he made a dash for a twin-engine cargo plane, shot the lock off the door with his pistol and flew into Thailand without maps or direction, following the shoreline. Tinh did not know his wife got out until he spotted her in a Guam mess hall last week.

In another case, three bachelor civil servants got into the prized sanctuary of the U.S. embassy compound through another man's ruse. A U.S. embassy guard, they say, began offering places inside for $5,000. A woman next to them produced her diamond bracelet and rings. The offer was accepted, and when the gates were opened, the three also sprinted in. Meanwhile, a Vietnamese police officer, who was equally unauthorized, showed up at the embassy and had his own driver help lift his wife, nine children and then himself over the wall.

After their ordeal, in the heat and uncertainty of life at Guam's Tent City, most of the refugees were only exhausted and played out. Like refugees anywhere, they spent their time sleeping, lying on their bunks, wandering aimlessly around the deserted airstrip that is now the main street of Tent City, always waiting. On their release for the States, a process that takes at least four or five days, the Vietnamese are left on the roadside to wait for buses to their flights, families sharing lines of cots stacked like beach chairs, sitting for hours under the scorching sun or waiting through the long, chill nights to be picked up for their next destination.

The next stop is one of three military bases in the U.S., where they wait for sponsorship in America. At one of those bases, Southern California's sprawling Camp Pendleton, Marines have thrown up a vast tent city amid the tough green scrub and yellow-mustard weeds. The Marines, who displayed superb organization in setting up the camp, rounded up three blankets for every refugee and issued each a hooded field jacket. The refugees organized a committee responsible for small personal needs, medical services and English-language courses. There was something hauntingly familiar about a Marine captain's remark: "The Vietnamese run my camp. My Marines are there purely in an advisory capacity."

For the moment, the Pendleton refugees were those drawn from the social and intellectual elite. In one of the eight refugee compounds, there were no fewer than 50 medical doctors among the 900 inhabitants. Some had worked for U.S. firms that arranged their evacuation. Others, like Teacher Van Ming Minh, escaped with the help of women who were either married to or going steady with American officials.

The camp had one incongruous celebrity: former Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, who was billeted in a tent with 15 other refugees. Still sporting his familiar lavender ascot and displaying a forlorn jauntiness, Ky stood in long chow lines with the others, complained about the cold nights, and asked visiting reporters for warm underwear. He spoke vaguely of seeking an American sponsor to set him up as a farmer "in Arkansas or San Antonio," or of finding a new life as a cab driver. "For us," he said, "the only hope is that we shall return. When Hitler occupied Europe, people like President de Gaulle hoped that he could come back--and he was back." Ky seemed to be offering himself as a rallying point for his countrymen, but said that he had no definite plans for forming a government in exile.

Minor Crisis. Halfway across the nation, at Fort Chaffee, Ark., another 13,500 refugees set up housekeeping in rows and rows of white-framed Army barracks hastily partitioned off to accommodate individual families. A local radio station started broadcasting ten minutes of news each day in Vietnamese. The Army had been supplying soggily cooked rice, but finally asked for help in its kitchens. Said a mess sergeant: "Come and show us how to cook it properly." A score of Vietnamese women volunteered. A minor crisis arose when the camp ran out of soy sauce.

Severe trouble almost erupted when Lieut. General Dang Van Quang, who headed secret-police operations under President Nguyen Van Thieu, was spotted leaving the base snack bar. A group of young captains and majors surrounded Quang, whom many of his countrymen regarded as one of Viet Nam's most corrupt generals, but they eventually dispersed.

At Florida's Eglin Air Force Base, some 2,400 refugees housed in a tent city began their new lives with heavy doses of American culture. They watched such movies as the James Bond thriller Live and Let Die and The Way We Were. Children wandered the camp munching dry cornflakes from boxes or worked at the aerodynamic mysteries of the Frisbee. But there were touches of home. A Vietnamese priest, Joseph Hoc, came from Boston to hold daily Mass for the Catholics. A Ceylonese monk, Henepola Gunaratana, set up a vihara (shrine) for the Buddhists. Seeing the monk was an emotional experience for the refugees. "They burst into tears," he said. "I might have reminded them of their native land, and they might have felt homesick."

At week's end the Immigration and Naturalization Service, responding to congressional pressures, injected a new bureaucratic note into the already complicated business of trying to find new homes for the Vietnamese. All the newcomers, said INS, will now have to undergo time-consuming security checks before they are allowed to leave the camps. It is standard immigration procedure, but since the refugees left their pasts and their records in a country now occupied by the Communists, the check may simply slow down the flow of refugees all along the line, from Guam to the U.S., and force them to spend weeks in the camps.

Once they get out, the newcomers get much help from Americans, who are doing what they can. The town council of Beckley, W. Va. (pop. 24,700), voted to support two families. A firm in El Dorado, Kans., planned to train some refugees as construction workers.

In New Hartford, Conn., Carol Karvazy, wife of a refugee from Hungary's 1956 uprising, organized the town to sponsor two Vietnamese brothers, their wives and eight children, who were warmly welcomed there last week. In Faribault, Minn., John and Margaret Kennedy had eleven new Vietnamese faces--two adults and nine children --around the kitchen table in their small, two-bedroom house. In Tulsa, Okla., a gas-station owner, E.A. Stehle, set off with his wife in their Cadillac Eldorado for Fort Chaffee, determined to do what he could to help a Vietnamese family. Before the day was out, they returned with Colonel Nguyen Bang and eight members of his family wedged in the car. "We have to do what we think is right," said Stehle, who undertook to get the Bang family settled in Tulsa. Colonel Bang will work in the filling station and hopes to become a mechanic.

Culture Shock. Miami's Cuban community took in four families--31 refugees--who were housed in a nondescript motel in the city's Little Havana section. "It's only natural," says Sylvia Goudie, who fled Cuba in 1960. "If we, the Cubans, don't help them, who is going to do it?" In Loma Linda, Calif., the Seventh-day Adventist community sponsored en masse the 388 doctors, nurses and medical technicians from Saigon's Adventist Hospital.

Apart from all their other problems --finding work, worrying about family left behind--most of the Vietnamese newcomers were somewhat dazedly trying to master their culture shock. As one refugee at Fort Chaffee said: "Conditions are so strange here." Cao Huynh, a 23-year-old student, has just settled in lower Manhattan with six younger brothers and sisters. He is happy at the welcome he received. But he says wistfully: "Viet Nam is still Viet Nam. I still love that country, and I have to go back --if the Communists flee away."

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