U.S.-Hanoi Talks Stir Hope for Those in Vietnam Prisons : Ex-Saigon Official Details His Five-Year ‘Reeducation’

Tran Son Ha, imprisoned for five years after the 1975 Communist victory in Vietnam, says he often thinks of friends still confined in “reeducation camps” in his homeland.

“Some I knew before 1975, and also some of them I knew in the camp,” Ha, secretary general of the Orange County-based Ad Hoc Committee for Vietnamese Political Prisoners, said in a recent interview at the Westminster law office he manages. “We would share a piece of sugar together, a cup of tea--even a piece of potato.

“I was lucky enough to escape to this country. Since the day of our arrival, we always think of our friends suffering in the camps, and how we can help them get out, to have freedom again.”

Ha’s story of imprisonment, release and escape from Vietnam began a decade ago and ended in 1980. In its broad outline, the same story, different only in details, has been told to Western reporters by many former prisoners.

Ha said that in April, 1975, he had expected to escape the impending Communist takeover of Vietnam through the help of the departing Americans.

“I was on the list, but because of the last-minute bombing of the airport, and so on, my wife and I were left behind,” he said.

On May 1, 1975, the day after Communist troops took control of Saigon, “the new government asked all the former government officials and officers in the military to register at their former stations,” said Ha, who had been executive assistant secretary of labor in the South Vietnamese government. “So I registered at the Department of Labor. They ordered me to go to the office every day.”

The next month, Ha, who also was a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese navy, was ordered with other military officers to report to a former French Catholic school in Saigon for a 10-day “reeducation” program, he said.

The first day, Ha recalled, the authorities called in a catered lunch from a nearby restaurant.

“We thought, ‘Oh, they are treating us very nicely,’ ” Ha said. “But after one day, very late at night, they transferred us on military trucks, with very secure military measures, to the border between Vietnam and Cambodia.”

Ha said his group was taken to a former South Vietnamese military base in Tay Ninh Province.

“It was deserted at that time,” he said. “We had to clean it up, and take barbed wire and encircle ourselves.”

Ha spent two years in this camp, he said.

“We went to the jungle to cut wood to bring back to them for some construction,” he recalled. “We had to raise vegetables, and we had to clear the mine fields. We had to cut some kind of plants to make roofs, but there were a lot of mines in those fields. Some of our people were wounded. Some of them died. Some, their legs were cut. From time to time, they don’t ask us to labor, but they have some lecture.

“They provided some rice . . . supplied by China. They kept it underground for years. If you pressed a grain of rice, it became flour. It had no nutritional value at all. If you eat this a lot, you are subject to beriberi . . . We got just two small bowls of rice a day.”

Ha said his wife had set his portrait on a Buddhist altar in their Saigon home and was offering the traditional prayers for departed souls when finally, about a year after he was taken away, he was allowed to write her.

In subsequent years, he was transferred to various camps, “and every time, the situation was getting worse,” he said. He caught malaria, medicine was unavailable and he was on the edge of death when his brother in Australia sent medication that helped him recover, he said.

Meanwhile, his wife, through black market sales of goods sent by relatives overseas, saved enough money to bribe Communist officials to free him, Ha said.

“She got in touch with the right person and gave him two taels of gold--about $1,000,” he said. “In February, 1980, I was released. At that time, she had already contacted fishing-boat organizers. I used false identity and everything. I managed to escape on the fishing boat in June, 1980, with her.

“We were on the way to Singapore. We were on the high seas for four days and three nights, then ran out of gas. We thought of death at that time--many ships passing by didn’t bother to rescue us. Then, a British ship called a U.S. tanker, and we were picked up by an American tanker.”