Tong Nguyen, oral history by Mariana Olga Cisneros, Garden Grove, California, April 25, 2015. Digital Recording. 

Tong Nguyen grew up in Saigon, Vietnam while war was occurring around him. He readily identified who the opposition was in the war, noting that “The communist [were] anywhere. They try to make a war.” Mr. Nguyen attended primary and secondary school in Saigon. He went on to enter college pursuing a degree in the sciences, but he knew that he would probably have to leave college to join the military. All men in a specific age range were required to join the military or police force. Mr. Nguyen decided to join the police force because it seemed the better option of the two. However, as it turned out, being in the police was not much different from being in the military. The police received the same training as the military in addition to regular police training on the law. They required two types of training because the police had two roles, “the police office protect the citizen and fighting communist”.

 
While these roles were distinct, the South Vietnamese police force carried them out simultaneously. As Mr. Nguyen explained, in contrast to the American police system, he did not have any say in where he was stationed, “they want to send [me] to go, I have to go. It’s different over here.” Mr. Nguyen was not surprised by the militarization of the police force because he felt the urgency of the situation, explaining that, “The communists kill people everyday. […] Because they attack at night. They terrible. They can kill anytime, every day.” Because there was no specific battlefront, it makes sense that typically civilian jobs, such as the police, became directly involved in the war. When discussing the whereabouts of the Northern Vietnamese soldiers, Mr. Nguyen said, “We don’t know exactly. They hide.” This added to the fear because the police force constantly had to be ready for an attack.

During Mr. Nguyen’s time in the police force, he was not able to see his wife and parents daily, but he did visit them frequently. He remembers that “Every family scared.” His parents seemed particularly scared, but that was not unique to his family,

Because over there any family, the parents really scared for son, because you know, that’s a terrible war. And every family. Not only my family.

Mr. Nguyen also interacted with Americans regularly during the war. Immediately following his training, his unit was assigned an American adviser who “can help and we work together like this.” Mr. Nguyen had overwhelmingly positive feelings for the adviser explaining,

I like him because in South Vietnam we need American adviser and military. Because we have to fight against communism. And we need, you know, they come and help the South Vietnamese. And everybody know about it.

He described his relationship with his adviser “Like two friends. We work together and we talk together.” The adviser supported his unit in many ways, and the adviser once told the unit, “ ‘I can help you, you can ask me. If I can, I can talk to my, you know, boss or something.’” Mr. Nguyen emphasized that “if we need help, they ready to help.” That being said, the adviser was not always accessible to the unit. For example, Mr. Nguyen pointed out that he could not request a meeting with the adviser; he did not even know the whereabouts of the adviser other than when the adviser visited his unit. Mr. Nguyen remembered, “I can’t meet him. Only he can come.” The American adviser never said anything about leaving Vietnam, but one day in 1965 he stopped visiting the unit.

At that point, Mr. Nguyen knew that he should leave Vietnam, given that “any minute I stay, the communist can kill me.”  All of his friends on the police force were thrown into jail when Saigon fell in April of 1965, but before Mr. Nguyen was thrown in jail he fled Vietnam on a stranger’s boat. After spending time in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, he was relocated to another refugee camp in Pennsylvania. He was picked up by a sponsor from the camp and moved to Chicago, where he worked as a janitor at a bank. From there, he moved around the US from job to job until he ended up in Southern California.

Mr. Nguyen frequently described the effects of the war on his life, saying, “the Vietnam war is terrible. And I don’t want to remember because they killed a lot of people.” Even though he viewed the US positively, he also wondered, “ How long American government can help it to come back and no more communists in Vietnam?”