This is the first of two-part series by Graham commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. He spent part of his childhood in Saigon and, at 18, was the first political prisoner held in Vietnam since the end of the war. Graham, a Belmont resident, is also the Outdoor writer for The Times.

Printed in The Times of San Mateo County April, 1995.

I WAS 7 YEARS OLD when I learned about St. Nick, and 18 when I learned about prison. Some memories, more than two decades old, are like photos in an album, loosened and scattered by decay and time.

The family pictures from when I was a child are in an old album, hidden in the darkest corner of one of my parents’ closet. I’ve asked them in the last few years to bring them out, but they still seem to be doing their best to forget that time.

My father, Fred Graham Sr., had brought us to Saigon when I was 4, just after the February offensive of 1968, called Tet. He thought it would be safe. He says he didn’t know what would—Little Tet—also called the May Offensive.

As I remember one of the pictures, Dad is on the roof of our condominium that looked out over the Saigon River. The day is cold. I know it’s cold because I’m dressed from head to toe in warm woolens and have a wool cap on my head. I seem to be having a ball riding my little hobbyhorse.

Dad, a big, robust man who refused to believe it got cold in Vietnam, wears a V-neck T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and sits on a chair, a wide grin under his black horn-rimmed glasses, a bottle of beer in his hand. My mother is to the side with my brother, doting on him the way mothers do their youngest.

What you don’t get from the picture is that across the river in which I would soon learn how to water-ski, a Navy Skyraider is swooping down in an air strike o a hot a Vietcong hamlet.

As the prop plane lifts away and turns, a loud rumbling comes over the city and a large, black clod erupts and rises above the palms on the island, the machine gunfire from the Vietcong suddenly silenced.

"Oooh, daddy,” I said. I thought it simply a great show of fireworks.

We moved from that condominium with the intentions of getting a larger place. My parents found a three-story house left by the French. I remember it as a mansion. There are a lot of places and situations in my memory that seem larger than they really were. And others that were much larger than I realized they were.

My mother, a woman of Ecuadorian descent, looks 10 years younger than she is. She attributes her young and beautiful skin to having lived in a tropical climate. A beautiful woman, she has always tried to surround herself with beauty.

It still amazes me how her interests were so contrary to what she was given in terms of her experiences and the experiences of our family. Too bad beautiful things are like lights that draw bugs.

Thugs had begun targeting our house, always striking while we were away. One night after we returned from a watching a movie at the Tan Son Nhut Airbase, our Vietnamese amah (maid), met us at the door and bared her forearms. Scratch marks covered them. She said that three men had just stolen Dad’s collection of Beatles reel-to-reels. In a huff, Dad made a resolution to stay up for the next three nights and wait for them.

His frustration stemmed no only from the many thefts, but also from the uselessness of the “White Mice.” White Mice is what we called the police, because all they did was wear white uniforms and give out tickets to Americans in hopes of landing a bribe. Whenever shooting started, they’d scatter like their namesake.

Dad stayed true to his promise by sitting up all three nights, his eyes watching the entrance, but to his dismay, they never showed. A week after my father’s last night of guard duty, while he was taking a shower he noticed a shadow moving across the bamboo curtain that separated the bathroom from the second-story balcony.

With a war whoop he leaned in the Marine Corps during Korea, Dad tore open the blinds. Stumbling over himself, as Dad tried in vain to get a good hold on him, the thief pulled himself up higher and away to the third floor. Dad thought this was the end of him. He didn’t know how right he was.

The next morning as mother was preparing breakfast, the amah came running into the kitchen and rushed my mother out back to the carport. Blood, blackened by time, had pooled at the bottom of the drainpipe leading up to the roof.

On the roof, we had an old brick chimney, barely supported by wires. While Mom and the amah sopped up the blood with a mop, Dad pieced together what had happened. He told the White Mice that the thief had probably run across the roof and, in the dark and confusion, had tripped on the wires and brought the chimney down on his skull.

My parents tried to shield us from that event by keeping my brother and me in our rooms until the bloodstains were bleached. Thought the physical evidence was gone, they were not able to keep us from knowing. They just kept us from knowing why.

Many of my memories of being with my father during my youth are tainted by pain. That was because he was gone most of the time.

In Saigon, he worked for Philco Ford and then the American Trading Company, one of the many companies that folded after the war. International trade in electronics was his business. Part of his job for Philco Ford was to instruct Army communications specialists and go out with them when they set up these large radios in the jungle. The job took him away from the family quite a bit. So when it came to communications at home, the lines seemed cut down.

Dad always had gifts for my brother and me when he returned. He made good money when we lived in Southeast Asia, and the U.S. dollar went far back then. I remember him surrounded by gifts, whether it was my birthday, Mom’s birthday, my brother’s birthday, or any excuse for a gift, any type of celebration.

When I remember the war in Vietnam, I remember the white and red of hospitals. I was 7 when my parents took me to Tan Son Nhut U.S. Army hospital. My tonsils had to be removed.

&You’ll have all the ice cream you want,” my father said as he left me and my comic books alone in the hospital room. Thought scared, it being my first night away from them, I smiled naively as they left.

In the morning, a blond nurse, dressed in olive, like the female characters in the sitcom M*A*S*H, rushed in and asked me to roll over and bare my bottom. I cried in shock at learning that a woman as pretty as she could inflict so much pain with a needle prick as she said, “It doesn’t hurt.”

Drowsy soon after, I felt myself lifted onto gurney and was wheeled out of my room down a long hall, that except for a roof and columns, was open to the air. I was maneuvered around the gurney of another. I looked into the face of Black soldier, who even in his own sedateness looked at me as though I were in his hallucination. As he passed me, just before my eyes closed, I saw his bandaged stump, stained by his own blood.

After the operation, as I came to, my throat hurt and I heard Vietnamese being spoken. Visions of blood, amputations, mothers holding their wounded babies filled my eyes. Ignoring the pain in my throat, I screamed, “NO!” and pleaded for a nurse to take me away from this communal recovery room.

That was the last time I thought the view from the top of our condominium had been simply a great fireworks display.

READ part II