There is a lot of talk about the subject of foreigners coming to the USA by one means or another. My view of such people changed in 1978, when I actually met a bunch of such people. Let me quote from a letter I wrote to my father in 1978.
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[Additional comments added October 1997. Comments near the end were added January 2007.]
[Thursday,] 10 August 1978
Dear Dad,
Well, the USS Francis Hammond made pg. 1 of The New York Times—or at least pg. 10. We rescued, not one but two boatloads of Vietnamese refugees, and now have 77 “guests” aboard…
Seas were still rough when we got underway [from Subic Bay Naval Base, Philippines, headed for Pattaya Beach, Thailand] Monday morning, but got better by Wednesday…
Not much to write about Monday and Tuesday. We had a General Quarters drill Tuesday which came out pretty bad—we took too long getting the ship in battle readiness. That was just because it was a drill: twice this week the General Quarters alarm has been hit by accident, and everybody moved like greased lightning. (Especially the accidental alarm that came just a few hours after we’d rescued the first boatload—we were sure that Vietnam had found out about it and had come to engage us in battle!)
Anyway, the big event of the week was rescuing the refugees. Both times I was on watch (darn it!) [in the electrical switchboard room inside the ship] so I couldn’t see them [the refugees] when they were spotted, or when the captain [Commander James E. Auer] first talked to them. I did get to see the first boat with the people in it, before we brought them aboard. It was several hours between the time we confirmed they were Vietnamese refugees (the first boat, I mean) and when we finally took them on board. The captain was sensitive to the political, diplomatic, and military implications here, so he did nothing until he’d shot off some detailed radio messages and had gotten some replies back. Finally he got the word, and they were brought aboard.
[Writing here, I was misinformed or incorrectly assuming. Some time later at a Captain’s Call, I asked the captain what his orders had been, regarding the boat people. He said that he’d sent messages to the State Department, and had sent messages up the chain of command as far as Hawaii. The captain told me he’d gotten the same reply from everyone: “You’re at the scene, I’m not. Rescue them or don’t, at your discretion.”]
They were a pitiful sight to see, that first boatload. Thirty-seven people on a boat built for half that many, if that much. [The boat looked like a big canoe driven by an oatboard motor, with a very long shaft between the motor and the propeller.] They’d been out at sea for eight days, without food or water for the past 2-1/2. [They’d all been seasick for a long while. Up until that day I’d always thought of seasickness as a joke ailment, but these people were clearly weak.] They had no oars, and the motor on the boat had gotten a triple whammy from a storm at sea. They were scared s—less—scared of being discovered by the Vietnamese Navy (and consequently blown out of the water) and scared of dying at sea. And whatever horrors in Vietnam that had prompted them to take this near-suicidal risk, were there to be seen in their eyes. That haunted look of theirs, as much as their physical state, prompted me to think they looked more like zombies than like living people.
I’d read of another USN captain who’d found a refugee boat, had given the people there medical attention, food, and water—and then sent them on their way. Only thing was, that boat was seaworthy. (However, I think that captain was a coward and a disgrace.) Perhaps if this boat had been seaworthy, our captain would’ve done likewise. With the motor gone, it wasn’t, so as a “mission of mercy,” we took them on.
I’m told that one young woman [who was close to giving birth] collapsed on the deck as soon as she’d gotten up the ladder—she was too weak to walk! They [our people] kept them [the Vietnamese] on the fantail until they could get a place set up for them to stay—under guard. This was to keep us sailors from bothering them, but it was also in case one or two were Communist saboteur “plants.” But none of them tried anything—since they were out of danger, and now had at least a glimmer of hope for the future, they were content to sit quietly. Besides, in the condition they were in, if all 37 had attacked a single, unarmed sailor, the sailor would’ve won nonetheless!
It was decided that they would sleep where the helicopter detachment personnel were sleeping [in the compartment just below the fantail, which also contained the First Class Petty Officers’ lounge, the electrical safety shop, the electrical storage room where we kept the crew’s movies, and the rudder control room]…A portion of the ship was sealed off for their use, guards were placed there, and no one (at first) was allowed in at all except a few previously designated personnel. I was not one of them [even though I ran the electrical safety shop]. The area consisted of their sleeping quarters, a shower room, a bathroom, a battle dressing station (for emergency medical care)—and incidentally, the safety shop. So I couldn’t get to my tools, or the shop, so I couldn’t work much that day—didn’t bother me a bit.
(By Thursday, things were a little more lax—anyone having a “legitimate reason” to go back there, could—and since the safety shop is in the refugee zone, they saw quite a bit of me.)
Anyway, we got clean clothes for them. People donated them, and they also got clothes from the “Lucky Bag” (which contains articles of clothing confiscated by the Master At Arms from anyone unlucky enough to leave them improperly stowed.) One of the other two ships with us has a Commodore, and so rates a doctor and a chaplain, and these latter two officers were flown over to our ship. Our three corpsmen, plus that doctor, spent a good portion of the day examining the refugees. We fed them what the doctor advised they could stomach. They got a chance to shower. When they first came aboard they looked like death warmed over, but a few hours later they’d blossomed like roses. We found out that some of the children were cute as a bug’s ear!
Meanwhile, there was the junk [the broken boat]. [The Vietnamese] weren’t going to use it again, and it couldn’t be left there (it was a hazard to navigation.) So we had to sink it. Only trouble was, it wouldn’t sink. They [some crewmembers] poured diesel fuel from the junk’s fuel compartment all over the wood and set it afire. But then the waves washed over the side and put out the fire. Then they tried to restart the fire by firing a flare into it. The flare gun wouldn’t fire. When it finally did, the flare went everywhere but into the boat. Then they machine-gunned it. I don’t know what that was supposed to accomplish, but it didn’t sink the boat or get it on fire. Finally, somehow they got it burning. It burned and burned and burned, but it didn’t burn fast enough, and it was still floating. Finally, we decided to use our big gun on it. We got about a quarter-mile away from it. They fired ten shots at it without hitting it, although one got close. The eleventh was a clean hit, right in the middle. When the smoke had cleared, we went to take a look. There was nothing left but part of the keel, a small oil slick, and LOTS of sawdust!
(Thus that day we found out our captain had a great heart, and a lousy group of Gunner’s Mates.)
[In belated fairness to the GMs, I must mention that the boat had no metal except the outboard motor to reflect radar, and being partly flooded, the boat was so close to the waterline that it was hard to locate from a quarter-mile away.]
The ship was rife with rumors about our passengers. Some had us taking them to Thailand, as we were originally scheduled to go, but other rumors had us going to Guam, the Philippines, back to Japan, or Malaysia. The official word as of Wednesday night, (and unchanged as of Thursday night) was that they were going to the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. No one knows (or at least, is telling) their fate from there.
They went to bed early, Wednesday night, being very exhausted by their eight-day ordeal.
I took the 8 p.m.-midnight [electrical switchboard] watch. At 10 p.m., we had “Taps.” After “Taps,” words are never passed over the P.A. system [until 6 a.m. Reveille] unless they have to be. At 10:17, the word was passed(!) “X.O. [Executive Officer, second in command], please contact the bridge.” A little later, the word was passed again(!) for another officer to contact the bridge. Eventually the incredible news came down: we’d found a second boat, with forty refugees, mostly women and children. I don’t know if they waved a white flag as we approached, as I’m told the first boat did. There was no real problem with the second boat. By about 1 or 2 a.m., they were found, brought aboard, given a place to sleep and clean clothes, and their boat sunk.
In contrast to Wednesday, when I only was allowed back in the safety shop once, on Thursday I was in and out, in and out of there all day (I managed to find plenty of excuses for “legitimate reasons” to go.) A few [Vietnamese] were still sick, but the rest were quite energetic, and happy as clams. If somewhat crowded, they had hope for the future, and were out of danger, they had clothing, food and shelter provided for them, free medical attention, and even free entertainment (even if the movies were in a foreign language). Thursday morning the XO even passed out some pens, envelopes, writing tablets, and USS Francis Hammond postcards, and told the refugees to write all they wanted, and the ship would assume the postage costs. I had known that one woman had an American husband in New York (and the papers to prove it) and that a man had a relative in Paris. Apparently, judging from the addresses I saw, a lot of Vietnamese in America (evacuators from S. Vietnam’s fall, and prior refugees) have managed to get their addresses in the U.S. communicated to their relatives in Communist-dominated Vietnam. [But some of the addresses that I saw were woefully incomplete: “Duc Tran, San Francisco.”]
They were given a little accord on Thursday. When they first came on, we had guys with flak jackets guarding all the entrances/exits of their place, in case either they or they crew had a disease the other group was not immune to, and in case one or two were N. Vietnamese infiltrators with hidden guns. The doctor and our corpsmen pretty much ruled out the first possibility, and as for the second, they were docile as lambs. (Only thing is, do they have lambs in Vietnam?) The guard force was downgraded to an informal patrol of E-6s and E-7s asking crew found within the VN area, what they’re doing there.
TUESDAY, 15 AUGUST [1978]—Lots happened [in] the last five days, if I can remember half of it. I’ve got a good feeling this’ll be more than a one-stamp letter.
First of all, the “Hammond 77,” as they came to be called, left the ship, while we were in Pattaya Beach, [Thailand,] yesterday at 1400. They’ll go (or have gone) to Bangkok to the U.S. Embassy. They’ll go to a nearby U.N. refugee camp temporarily, while the paperwork on them is done. When it is done, about six plus/minus two weeks from now, they’ll go to the USA.
Okay, let’s backtrack. Before we pulled into Thailand, rumors were going around that the refugees would be palmed off to Thailand or a U.N. refugee camp there. (Only thing is, Thailand has many more [refugees] than it can handle. As for the U.N. camp, it’s supposedly very poorly administered and very overcrowded.)…
When we came in Friday, a Lieutenant Colonel, USMC from the U.S. Embassy [in Bangkok] came aboard. He and the captain talked for a while, then they went to the back to brief the VNs on their fate. I was fooling around with the safety shop, and so happened to be there when the announcement was made. A small group gathered around, those who were fluent in English. The captain told them that they were going to the U.S. They cheered and applauded. The captain then gave more details, but meanwhile the core was telling those around them the good news. Soon there came a second round of applause from the rest of the VNs. There were a lot of moist eyes in that room. Two of them were mine.
Later that day, on the beach, I got a chance to talk to the Lt. Col. I asked him what kind of press coverage we had gotten. (I had assumed that when the Pentagon had found out what we’d done, a spokesman there had made a press statement.) I was surprised to hear that there had been no news, and no press agencies knew what we’d done. He said that to go from the ship to the U.S. Embassy, the refugees have to get the Thai government’s permission to “enter” the country. If the Thai government took a long time on this, and if we had made public the refugees’ presence on our ship, and hence the number of days the government here made them “cool their heels,” it would greatly embarrass the Thai government. According to the Lt. Col., the U.S. is engaged in “delicate negotiations” with the Thai government to get them to accept more refugees. Thailand feels it’s already taken more than its fair share and more than it can afford to take, while the USA, responsible for this whole sorry mess, has not done enough. With things like that, we don’t want to antagonize the Thais in any way. So the plan was not to publicize the thing until the [Thai] government had given its okay. That, as I said, happened Monday (yesterday). However, the press services (AP, UPI, Time) managed to snoop it out last Saturday.
So the refugees stayed on board, while we [of the Hammond crew] hit the beach. They [refugees] were given more freedom. They were allowed on the [helicopter] flight deck, to get fresh air and look at the beach, anytime they wished. We still ate in the mess hall at different times (creating twice as much work for the mess cooks) but by Friday they were allowed to watch the movie with the crew. Indeed the rule against fraternization was, if not formally dropped, informally unenforced. That’s because there were no problems with them. They not only cleaned up after themselves, they even did their own laundry on a modest scale (even though we were willing and able to do it for them). I thought they were cool people. (One time, it was while we were still out at sea, [and it was late enough at night that the rest of the Vietnamese were asleep,] when nobody was looking, I slipped a five-dollar bill under the pillow of a seventy-year-old lady. I couldn’t speak Vietnamese, and she couldn’t speak English [so neither of us spoke], but I could tell [from her eyes that] she was moved. I did it because nobody [at that time] knew what would happen next, but anyone that old who took such risks for freedom deserved something.) [And also I gave her the five dollars because, though she was Asian, I saw a resemblance to my grandmother Mary Sadler. The moment in which I gave her the money was intense—her eyes were watching me closely as I turned to her, took out my wallet and removed the bill, and slid it under her pillow; and my eyes never looked at my hand, once I had selected the five-dollar note, but looked only at her face. The moment was quiet, the only sounds being the breathing and snoring of sleeping Vietnamese, plus the sounds that the ship itself made; and it was dark, with the only light coming from the electrical-parts storage/16mm movie storage room behind me.]
[Next morning, when I went back to the safety shop and the Vietnamese sleeping area, the English-speaking Vietnamese made a fuss over me and my “generous” act. Apparently I had given my gift to one person, but all 77 felt validated by my deed. While I always like to be liked, when I gave the old woman that money, it had never occurred to me that she would tell anyone else about it.]
[Correction May 2006—According to an e-mail I received from James Auer, the old woman to whom I gave the five dollars was not seventy years old, but 97; she lived to be 105.]
[Additional comments below, added January 2007: The expression “You go, girl!” was not coined until decades after this 1978 incident. But it was how I felt toward the old woman. Spoken communication between us being impossible, I came up with a nonverbal way of communicating that I was impressed with her bravery.
I didn’t, and don’t, know anything about Vietnamese culture. But it’s a safe bet that trying to gift money to a young Vietnamese woman stranger, especially when done by a young American man in the 1960s or 1970s, would have been a vile insult. But this woman was old enough that I was sure that no insult would be taken.
And everywhere in the world, nothing says “I like what you did” like handing over unexpected cash.]
[Continuing my 1978 letter:] I was on the beach Sunday and Monday, so I don’t know much except what I was told afterward. At 1400 on Monday they [the Vietnamese] left the ship for the US of A, via the refugee camp in Bangkok. Before they left, there was a small ceremony in which each refugee was given an ID card making them an honorary crew member of Francis Hammond. In return, the spokesman for the group, the owner of the first boat and a Lt. Commander in the old regime’s navy, gave a short speech. He thanked the crew for their many acts of kindness and said that for the refugees, their “lives began again on August ninth.”
After we left Pattaya this morning, the captain said he was very proud of our conduct. Interesting, because we might do it again: “It is entirely possible,” he said, “we might encounter refugees on our way to Taiwan.” So, we shall see. Already, the commendations from the big brass are coming in (which always makes our captain look good). One commented that in terms of age range, and sheer numbers, this has been the largest refugee rescue by any USN ship in many months.
[We didn’t encounter any more boat people during that trip. A month or so after that, the ship went into overhaul. In December 1978 I left the Hammond for Christmas leave followed by an assignment in San Diego.]
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I think it is hypocritical that the husband of a Slovenian immigrant, and the grandson of a German immigrant, rants and raves about how bad the foreigners are who want to come to our country. Donald Trump’s rantings on this subject, and his many racist dog-whistles, offend me.
On the other hand, never have I been more proud of my country, my Navy, and my ship and its captain (Cmr. James E. Auer) than during the incident I’ve described.
Tom H. Richardson Talks To The World 