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By Cork Graham
This is the second article of a two-part series commemorating the fall of Saigon. Graham spent part of his childhood in Saigon and was the first American political prisoner of the Vietnamese government after the war ended. In the first article, Graham described how, at 7, he was awakened to the bloody reality of war during a stay at Tan Son Nhut U.S. Army Hospital. Graham, now a Belmont resident, is an Outdoors writer for The Times.
Tan Son Nhut was also where Americans gathered to celebrate Christmas. I wasn’t too keen on returning to the base that year. Christmas was held in an Air Force hangar.
Presents and food covered a long table that stretched the length of the hangar. Mom, dressed in an elegant ao-dai, her long brown hair up in a beehive, cradled my brother in her arm and led me by her free hand.
She chatted with friends from the Club Nautique, a water-ski club left by the French, and then after leaving my brother with her friend, led me to Santa Claus. For a moment, I wondered where Dad was—he had driven us to the base. But then I remembered he was hardly ever there.
“What do you want for Christmas?” Santa Claus asked me, as my mother lifted me onto my lap. As I told him, I suddenly realized that Santa Claus had the same kind of horn-rimmed glasses my father did. Stunned by the realization that Santa Claus was really just my father in a red suit and fake beard, I sat quietly and confused.
Two years later, after my father’s business moved us to Singapore, I had a friend who still believed in Santa Claus. The idea surprised me, and then I became jealous. I, too, still desperately wanted to believe in Santa Claus.
Eleven years later, in 1983, I was again in Saigon. I was 18 and I had returned to Vietnam as a photojournalist covering an Indiana Jones-style archaeological raid. The result of that failed treasure hunt was my imprisonment on trumped-up charges of espionage.
During the first two weeks of my imprisonment, the Vietnamese wrongly accused me of being a member of the CIA, and said if I didn’t admit to being a spy, I would be taken out and shot.
As the end of those two weeks, they blindfolded me, and put me up against a wall. I should have realized immediately why the interrogator gave the command to first in English, but all my attention was on freeing myself form the tight bindings around my elbows.
Shaken by the command and the firing pin of the executioner’s weapon striking an empty chamber, I crumbled to the ground. The next day I was taken to Saigon and spent 11 months being bounced around from one prison to another, punctuated by a mock trial held in a theater whose poster advertised melodramatic Soviet movies.
My release took 11 months to occur because United States had no embassy in Vietnam, and Vietnam tried t use my capture as a tool to open better communications. Previously, according to a contact at the Pentagon’s POW/MIA Division, who remains nameless because of sensitivity of the situation and his position, Vietnam used the bones of dead American servicemen to influence American policy by releasing them at opportune moments.
And, even though President Clinton lifted the trade embargo, the United States has yet to have an embassy in Vietnam. So, according to the State Department’s Consular Information Sheet, dated March 21, 1994, “the United States government is unable to provide normal consular protective services to U.S. citizens.”
It’s said that a person’s life flashes before his eyes when he’s about to die. While I waited for the snail’s pace interaction between my country and Vietnam that culminated in a ransom of $10,000, which my father raised to pay the Vietnamese, I spent seven of those months in isolation looking at my life flash by after I crumpled to the ground during the mock execution.
The psychologist who debriefed me up my return to California said that it was the first experience in Vietnam that was most traumatic, and that my imprisonment was the best experience I could have had.
I had again spent Christmas in Vietnam and remembered Santa Claus and how Dad, because he was big and round, had played Santa Claus all four years we lived there. I never realized he was Santa Claus until the end.