Tag: Nguyen Cao Ky

Choppers that chop the seas

The news of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky passed away brought back a long time passing.

In my youth, the sound of hovering helicopters was as common as street vendors’ chants.

On the war’s last day, ambassador, flag, ground-keepers, pilots and anything that moved, tried to get out to International Waters . Buses, barges and yes, choppers.

Lone pilots angled and abandoned choppers, then swam for aircraft carriers.

Their last sortie. (Years later, I met a man in New Orleans who found work as a commercial pilot for an oil company, transferable skill set I would say).

But on that fateful day, the choppers chopped the seas. One helicopter force-landed and hit our barge’s sandbagged wall. The loosed blades then flew wildly toward our ship, the USS Blue Ridge. I lied head down but eyes glued to the scene of action. That same barge had been our home for the previous 24 hours. Floating barge and flying blades was my brush with war and death.

Words circulated that many, VP Cao Ky included, went to Guam, where they had erected tents for refugees. For us, who ended up in Wake Island, we spent a purgatorial summer (“Do you know, where you’re going to” theme from the Mahogany). One of our folk singers sang for free to keep up our morale. She just came up short of singing “by the  river of Babylon…there we sat down and wept”.

I overheard “Band on The Run” by McCartney  from the barrack next door.

Not sure that was fitting or insulting. After all, I have spent the last three decades and a half trying to live down deserter’s guilt.

On a recent trip to Vietnam, a drunk at the table even screamed in my face that I was no longer a Vietnamese.

The burden must have been heavier for those who had invested more in the conflict (Cold War, but hot spots) e.g. the likes of Premier Cao Ky.

Occasionally, the two sides – reconciliators and extremists – were still at it.

We should put on the Holllies’ He Ain’t Heavy.

That’s how it will end. And how everything eventually ends, with time. My narrative just happened to be accompanied by the sound of choppers normally associated with Vietnam. One thing VP Cao Ky showed us and the world, was that, despite the hefty death toll and billions of dollars spent on bullets and agent Orange (later, he was resettled in Orange County), one still needs to live out one’s life, flamboyant or faced down. Army divisions used to distinguish themselves by various colors of their scarfs (red for paratroopers, green for Green Berets, so it’s not unusual for pilots and stewardess to pick their colors as well).

When you are near death on a daily basis, the least you can do for yourself is to look in the mirror, and say “not today”.

That today finally came for him, at age 80, and as fate would have it, resting in peace near South China Sea. But for many of us, “band on the run”, we live on to be memory keepers, story tellers and hopefully history-makers. It’s interesting to note that the younger generation tends to be more careful and conservative (model minorities) while their predecessors lived their lives in flying colors (go on YouTube, and click on any bands of the 60-70, like Chicago), least of which, a purple scarf, from a former Vietnamese pilot. Band on the run. Leader of the band dies today. The music, however, plays on. War and Peace. Dogmatism and pragmatism. Man and machine, romantic and robotic, pilot and chopper, laid to rest at Vietnam War epilogue. For me, not today. Not yet.

Someday, they will excavate in the South China Seas, and find hundreds of choppers, one of which without blades. Further excavation on the outer ring will find millions of skulls (boat people). They are all there, hidden underneath, but, still served as reminders of the long Cold War that took its heavy toll both in men and materials (choppers).

torn between two places

Yahoo News had a piece about Diaspora, the return.

It features Mrs Nguyen Cao Ky, who is now a proud owner of a Pho restaurant in former Saigon.  She said to have spent a few months in the US, and the rest in Vietnam.

Other Viet Kieu expressed similar sentiment: “when I am here, I miss the States, and vice versa” said wife of a former Vegas casino host.

The attachment to places.

We are creatures of habits.

I found myself gravitated toward District 3 where I grew up.

I turned my head every time I passed by L’Ecole Aurore.

To lend some credibility, the article quoted Professor Hung, of the U of VA, who said what everyone had already known: the less attractive the US economy the stronger the pull of  Vietnam .

So, we have Vietnamese moving out of Hotel California. The choices are Houston or HCMC. Sociologists couldn’t have foreseen this 38 years ago.

I didn’t. We were in a state of shock!

Those of us who weren’t religious person then, became one.

Churches and synagogues welcomed the displaced.

So, my sweet guitar gently weeps.

I admitted to eating a bunch of church pot-luck dinners to get through college.

Then, upon graduation, I paid it all back by offering my ration packs to Boat People in Asia.  Whatsoever you sow, you shall reap.

I saw what people went through at seas to get to shores, to Hotel California.

Now, I met people like Mrs Ky who discussed opening up shops in VN, organizing a conference there, and perhaps buying a piece of land.

I do miss the comfort in the States e.g. clean beaches, ample parking and ubiquitous police. Over-protected in one place and under-served in the other.

Torn between two  places, feelin’ like a fool. Blame it on war, blame it on peace. But mostly, blame it on greed which brought down house of cards. As of this edit, I have read excerpt of Andrew Lam‘s latest Birds of Paradise Lost which is an expose on the theme of Diaspora of millions Viet Kieu, suffering the fate of “neither here nor there”.

The strangest moment came when songs of the 70’s got played at coffee shops in Saigon. It only accentuates a known fact: the place seems to have freezed up in time. Those music got me nostalgic for Vietnam when hearing them in the States, but then, to hear them play here in VN makes me nostalgic for time past, not the place itself. We all swim against the tide of time.  Boys-men-boys, in my case, a boy from BAN CO. Even grown men need to have some fun. It’s either biking or swimming now.  For that, you can do it anywhere.  But who you would ride with, that depends on the place. Those who went through the piercing experience of separation and exile are rarely heard nor noticed. Most force themselves to forget and move on. Others leverage new skill and contact to return, a phenomenon known as “brain re-gain”. More are coming back. Yet remain forever “outsiders”, torn between two places.

the Nguyen

In college, I could just tell when teachers got to my name: they couldn’t pronounce it. To save time, I just said “here”.

This was Penn State, late 70’s, when a name like Carter from Georgia could barely register in Washington Belt Way.

Now a random walk on the web tells me the Nguyen have finally gained some noteriety (not as popular as the Smith or Cosby but familiarity bred comfort).

If you were to google “Nguyen”, you would get Dat Nguyen (used to play the NFL for the Cowboys), Tila (Nguyen) Tequila (every other pictures) and Betty Nguyen (weekend anchor of CNN).  But you will also get Scotty Nguyen (poker face) and one-eye Nguyen (Agent Orange piece disguised under Nguyen),

Lee Nguyen (guitar player) and Colonel Loan’s war-cruelty photo.

The Nguyen dynasty has scattered to the four corners of the earth, evolving and adapting to opportunities and obstacles, not unlike Venture Capitalists, whose few bets made it while many didn’t.

Being in communication, I try to  ” see ourselves as others see us” .  And the best place to start is to Google for this sort of thing. Let’s take Tila to start our “beer summit”.

She was getting into fights while in school. Got put in “Buddhist shut-in” and from there (Texas) went to Hollywood (hopefully not on a Greyhound bus) to realize her American dream.  MTV gave her a contract, and the rest was history. She was quoted at one point saying she would want to be the US ambassador to Vietnam.

Vietnam watch out! Tila is coming (if history repeats itself, this is not the first time a well-known Hollywood actress wanted to grace Hanoi playground. Jane Fonda beat her to the punch). Or in Second Life, Tila will actually become the virtual ambassador if e-citizens elected her using their tokens.

VP Nguyen Cao Ky once said that he wanted to keep his last name so he could come back to Vietnam without sounding like a foreigner. Well, he did.

His daughter took that to the next level: keeping her father’s name in its entirety, while adding and ending it with her  first name (Nguyen Cao Ky + Duyen). She made it as a co-host of Paris By Night video series (celeb life style: got to change who you hang out with, and while at it, reinvent yourself). If history repeats itself, Brad and Angelina beat her to the punch as well (they rode in a scooter before the helmet law came into effect a while back).

So back to our Google search for the Nguyen. Back then, our ancestors weren’t originally Nguyen. The sad truth was, we adapted to the King’s demand and command (conformity and allegiance).  Nguyen has morphed into a generic code,

with mixed connotations: part Chinese, part French, part US, and now the Seven Seas.

The Nguyen are now inter-marrying (as in my families), and the third generation of Nguyen might still bear the name, but the gene mutation has morphed beyond recognition (unless kids wear “ao dai”  during Tet). My nephew and niece inter-married

and produced offerings of mixed heritage. Our Thanksgiving at times, looks like a UN Security Council, deciding on the fate

of Syrian Chemical Weapon Disposal.

Maybe someday, they will put a Nguyen in the White House. One term would be fine. Let’s see if he/she can do better than his/her predecessors.

Or the system (which according to the latest CNN poll, 86% said the government is broken) itself not only helps this future Nguyen look Presidential, but also renders him/her ineffectual. I broke my arm on my first month learning Kung-Fu. It hurt like hell. Took a long time to heal. Perhaps something broken can be healed. First: recognition of the pain. Second: be patient. Third: put on a cast to speed up recovery. In my case, it was a long summer staying indoors.

We won’t hear much about  US might or Exceptionalism in near term.

Friedman (of the Flat World) beat me to it in his op-ed “fat years, lean years”. Or like Chairman of HSBC is coming out with “Good values”, a call for reflections. It would be interesting to see the turn-out in Las Vegas Caesars (Coliseum  built for Celine Dion, whose Roman original motif was blood sports) to hear Former President Bill Clinton (who charged for a talk about “global interdependence” themes).

That broken arm the summer of my Junior High (while “tous les garcons et les filles de mon age, …se promene dans la rue) set me on a different course ever since: pause to think and be reflective . The US and the Nguyen got something in common: we both had been very ambitious to the point of having an illusion of grandeur until the crash. I and many other Nguyen knew it well: even in and through a worst-case scenario, we have managed to get PhD’s, started companies, invented products and run for office.

I still know when that slight pause came during roll call. But these days, it just my first name that they had trouble pronouncing. If only they knew that it meant “win”, as in win-win solution. At least, we got pass the Nguyen part. Just Google them, and find out for yourselves. It’s the same story you would find in NYT today about a Hasidic matriarch who came and had 2000 descendants. It’s the story that repeats itself time and time again here in America. It’s your story. It’s our story.