River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  I met her in a dead-end refugee camp in Thailand near the Cambodian border. Her desperation and grief were reflected in the candle she was offering up at the camp’s makeshift Catholic church. ‘It is for Kim,’ she said. Kim was her sister. Though barely ten years old, she was raped repeatedly by the pirates and was presumed to have drowned. Then Ly told me what had happened. One night, she said, she had slipped out of the Vietnamese fishing village of An Giang in a twenty-four foot fishing boat. Altogether, there were twenty-two people tucked out of sight below decks, including her aunt and a younger sister. A few hours out to sea, the boat ran into some Vietnamese fishermen, who confiscated their money and gold in return for allowing them to proceed. Thirty-six hours later, they met a Thai fishing boat whose crew gave them canned fish and sweets. A few hours afterwards they were attacked by another Thai fishing boat, this time with a crew of pirates aboard. It rammed their boat twice until it sank. The pirates plucked six girls, including Ly, her aunt and Kim, out of the sea. Everyone else they left to drown, including the men, whom they drove off with knives.

  Then the terror began. The girls became the pirates’ playthings, repeatedly raped and terrorised with fists, hammers and knives. After tiring of them, the pirates threw the three older girls overboard. They clubbed and beat Ly. And Kim, her little sister, was raped by three fishermen in succession. Ly could hear her screams. Her last memory of Kim was of a sobbing, pain-racked little bundle of humanity, begging for life. No trace of Kim was ever found.

  Ly struggled so hard that the pirates threw her, too, into the sea. Naked but for a pirate’s shirt and a shawl, she kept afloat for nine hours until another Thai fishing boat rescued her. The immense generosity of these men matched the immense cruelty of the pirates. They nursed her back to life, and when they landed at the southern Thai port of Nakhon Si Thammarat, they handed Ly over to the police who sent her to the Vietnamese boat people camp at Ban Thad.

  I met her there one sad Sunday morning in a small comfortless room next to the church, through Joakim Dao, president of the camp’s Catholic community, and heard her story. She told me that even now, and throughout her life, she would be looking out of the window for her little sister Kim, though she knew in her heart that Kim would never be coming home. As I left the church, apologising for my unwarranted intrusion, I remember thinking with humility how she reflected the special dignity of Vietnamese women and their instinct of survival.

  But when I looked into her eyes they were expressionless. They were dead. They were the eyes of Vietnam – the eyes of someone who had born the unbearable.

  On another occasion, travelling along the coast of southern Thailand, I came across a group of ten men, women and children, wading ashore on the beach at Ya Ring. Shocked and physically exhausted after repeated pirate attacks, they collapsed in a huddle on the sand, all that remained of a boatload of thirty-seven refugees raided by pirates. They were all wet through and looked like drowned rats. But something about one girl was different and yet disturbingly familiar. With a jolt of recognition and sadness, I realised why she had caught my attention. She had blue eyes and brown hair. She was an Amerasian. Her name was Chung Thi Ai Ngoc. She was thirteen, and she needed urgent medical treatment; the pirates had thought her western features were a prize to be fought over, and she had been repeatedly raped.

  In due course I asked Ngoc about her American father, and how she felt about going to America. She looked down at her bare feet in the sand and said nothing. Then she began to cry. She had never known her father, she said; he had gone away a few months before she was born. At the end of his Vietnam tour, he had gone home leaving her pregnant mother to fend for herself and his baby. Her mother had raised her as best she could and had only one dream, getting to America. So they had escaped by boat. And her mother? Ngoc was sobbing like a baby now, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably and her hands clenched tightly. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ she said. The pirates had put her mother on a different boat. During the night the two boats had become separated at sea; her mother was lost to her.

  In the cruel roulette of life Ngoc seemed to be an especially tragic loser. More than an innocent victim, she was a metaphor for America’s intervention in Vietnam, made for the best of motives but which brought about terrible death and destruction and in the end more tragedy than it can possibly have been worth. The Americans courted the south Vietnamese assiduously; they made them dependent, then abandoned them to their fate. That is precisely what happened to Ngoc’s mother; her GI boyfriend made her pregnant, then one day – like America – he jilted her and went away. When I looked into Ngoc’s tear-filled eyes I saw that they, too, were the eyes of Vietnam.

  I had been hearing sinister stories about the goings on at Koh Kra, an island in the Gulf of Thailand much frequented by Thai fishermen-turned-pirates. On this jagged finger of jungle-capped rock forty miles from the Thai coast and directly on the route from Vietnam to Thailand, the pirates committed their worst atrocities.

  When I got to Koh Kra, it was deserted, having been cleaned up by the United Nations and Thai police raids. I quickly saw though that it stood out as a monument to all the suffering of the boat people. The evidence of the pirates’ occupation remained on its sandy beach; the charred carcasses of two wooden refugee boats, women’s hair, a girl’s shoe, bloodstained clothing and a torn bra. There were charcoal inscriptions in Vietnamese on the walls of the white hut, the only shelter on the island, and more poignant messages in paint on the rocks.

  ‘When your boat reaches the island, immediately send all the women to hide in the bushes and caves. Don’t let the Thai pirates see them. If they do they will rape them,’ said one inscription. ‘They will give you something to eat, but they will take everything you own, even your clothes,’ said another. ‘They will rape you, one boat after another, one hundred boats altogether, taking turns coming to the girls.’

  In the face of such horrors, a singular man set an epic example. Theodore Schweitzer, a Missouri-born American was for a while the UN field officer at Songkhla refugee camp in the south of Thailand – a job which need not have demanded much initiative. But he saw piracy as a curse, its eradication a challenge, and in twenty-seven daring missions to Kra he rescued nearly 1500 stranded Vietnamese refugees at great risk to himself.

  In his first dramatic rescue, Schweitzer swam the best part of a mile from his boat to the island at two in the morning. In the best Hollywood tradition, he rose from the sea and confronted a group of pirates gang-raping refugee women on the beach. He had only a commando knife with which to defend himself against this ruthless bunch. But his unexpected arrival and tough air of authority unnerved the pirates and probably saved his life. That night, he rescued 157 distraught refugees. One was a badly burned woman who had been hiding from the pirates in high grass when they poured petrol on it and set it alight. Another woman was so terrified of being gang-raped again that she stood in sea water up to her knees in a rock cave and stifled her screams of pain as giant crabs bit at her legs. Claude Bordes, a French doctor who treated her, told me she would bear the scars for life.

  One of the most barbaric pirate attacks on Kra happened a few days before I arrived when more than 200 fishermen-turned-pirates attacked and towed Vietnamese refugee boats to the island. The fishermen raped more than fifty women and teenage girls and killed sixteen of them. Such incidents affected the tough American deeply. In a moving interview, he described the death in hospital of a Vietnamese girl in her early teens shortly after he had rescued her from Kra. ‘She died of shock and convulsion,’ he said. ‘Her jaw locked open. She died from fear. She was just totally scared to death. She was a very beautiful little girl and the pirates picked on her every time.’

  Nothing better captures the sorrow in the souls of these victims than the simple message I saw scrawled in charcoal on a hut wall on Kra. It read: ‘Moment of remembering father and mother,’ and was signed Tran Van Sang. Another said: ‘Remembering twenty-one days’ suffering of three s
isters.’

  More than ten years later, to international indifference, Vietnamese in their thousands were still putting to sea in small boats to escape poverty and oppression at home. And so, not very long ago, I spent two unforgettable days with a group of boat people whose thirty-seven-day struggle for survival in a drifting boat was as harrowing as any I have ever encountered, and quite beyond the range of most people’s experiences.

  I met them at Puerto Princesa on the lovely Philippines island of Palawan, where an asylum camp for boat people waiting to be resettled in the West had been established. It was not Vietnam; it might have been. A frenzy of green trees tumbled down to a sandy beach and a turquoise sea. The air was scented with the smell of woodsmoke and cooking. There was a little Catholic church, there were dimly lit noodle shops and masses of ragged children, laughing and tumbling in the mud, for it was the rainy season. There were pretty women, generous with their smiles. There were boy scout groups, lovers sitting on a bench and ageing men with wispy beards and wrinkled faces and sad, watery eyes. It had the chaotic intimacy of a fishing port on the Mekong.

  Early in the morning in a quiet corner of the camp, I sat down with Dinh Thong Hai, a thirty-year-old tailor from Saigon, and Vo Thi Bach Yen, a seamstress from the Mekong Delta. As we drank cà phê sũa, filtered coffee sweetened with condensed milk, out of grimy glasses, I was struck by how sad they were. Both had left Vietnam desperately looking forward to a future in America. It was Hai’s fifteenth escape attempt. He had been jailed several times for trying to flee. Yen’s husband, a former captain in the defeated Saigon army, and her two older children had been in California for more than a year and she had escaped from Vietnam with her four-year-old daughter to join them. Now, in front of me, they blurted out the story of their barbaric voyage in a drifting boat.

  Their forty-five foot long riverboat had left Ben Tre, in the Mekong Delta, in chaos, overloaded with 110 men, women and children crammed on board with only enough food and water for a few days. It was bound for Malaysia, six days away across the ocean. But after barely two days a storm had blown up, the boat sprang a leak, the motor failed. The passengers rigged a makeshift sail and prayed for deliverance. Day after day, they were passed by merchant ships, some within hailing distance. They scrawled an SOS with toothpaste on a piece of wood and held it up; at night they made bonfires of their clothes. One night, a Japanese freighter came within a hundred yards. Several refugees, maddened by hunger and thirst, jumped into the water and swam towards it but the ship sailed on, leaving them to drown.

  Panic set in as they ran out of food. Phung Quang Minh, a former corporal in the Saigon air force, forcibly established his leadership in the drifting boat. He surrounded himself with a group of followers, mostly teenagers, and they armed themselves with sticks and knives and carried out his orders in return for extra food and water seized from the weaker passengers. Even the captain of the fishing boat deferred to Minh’s authority. One dawn, he jumped over the side with his daughter and three relatives and vanished in the ocean swell.

  On the fourteenth day a twenty-two-year-old man died of thirst and his body was committed to the deep. On the fifteenth day, Yen’s daughter died. She was one of seven small children to perish that day and was the focus of Yen’s life. ‘She did not say anything. She just stopped breathing,’ Yen said quietly. ‘The next day I asked two passengers in the boat to help me to put her little body into the sea.’

  During the next days, several people began drinking sea water and their own urine, which hastened their deaths. Others toppled into the sea, jumped overboard and swam away, or clung to pieces of wood or oil drums, convinced by the seagulls circling overhead that land was nearby.

  A few days later, their spirits rose when they were spotted by the USS Dubuque. As the 8800-ton American amphibious landing ship circled, four refugees jumped into the sea and swam towards it. One drowned; the others reached the ship only to be rebuffed by the sailors, who leaned over the side to tell them it was on a secret mission (to the Arabian Gulf) and they could not come aboard. They threw down three life-jackets and told the refugees to swim back to the boat.

  In full view of the American ship, the body of a refugee who had died was thrown overboard. Sailors photographed the corpse floating in the water. One Vietnamese-speaking American told them, ‘We will never let anyone on your boat die again.’ The Americans gave them six cases of tinned meat, boxes of apples, plastic containers of fresh water and a map with directions to the Philippines, 250 miles away. Although the Vietnamese explained to the sailor that the boat had broken down no one offered to repair the engine. Two hours later the Dubuque sailed away, leaving them to their fate.

  The suffering now became unendurable. Minh confiscated the American food. He beat Yen about the head with a shoe to stop her giving water to dying children. Then, twelve days after the encounter with the Dubuque, he and his gang turned on the others and began to murder them, one by one.

  The first victim to be killed and eaten was Dao Cuong, the best friend of Hai and one of the feeblest on the boat. The refugees were dying at the rate of one or two a day; but Minh’s gang preferred to kill rather than feast on the corpses of those who had died. Two children, aged eleven and fourteen, and a twenty-two-year-old woman, were his other victims. One of the children was Hai’s cousin.

  For the first time in almost an hour Hai and Yen were both silent for a moment. I thought they did not want to talk about it any more, because the memories of the cannibalism were too painful to recall, especially to a stranger. But then Yen took a deep breath, sighed and went on: ‘It was horrible, but we did not have the strength to stop him.’

  Another difficult pause, then Hai was saying: ‘Two days before it happened, Cuong was so driven by hunger that he gave Minh a gold ring in exchange for an apple. But Minh’s group came with knives and sticks and said they needed my friend for food to help the others to survive. I said, “No, Cuong is still alive. I cannot let you kill and eat him. You can use him if he dies.” Cuong overheard the conversation. He said he did not agree to be killed. He still believed we would be rescued the next day. But the men had made up their minds. We were too weak to resist. “Kill him, kill him,” one said. “Quickly, quickly, it’s almost night.” And when I saw the two men grab Cuong by the feet and realised they were about to kill him, I asked them to allow us a few minutes in private. Cuong had told me before we had left Vietnam he wanted to be a Catholic. I scooped up some sea water, poured it over his head and read the Bible. Then the men pushed Cuong’s head under the water until he drowned, before eating his body.’

  A silence intervened. Hai’s face was suddenly very pale. But the whole story was not yet out, for he said that an eleven-year-old boy – his cousin – was Minh’s last victim, killed the day before their rescue by Filipino fishermen. The boy still had the strength to move and understood what was happening. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die,’ he screamed and hid in the cabin. Minh dragged him out and handed him over to his men. They held him over the side of the boat while he struggled and screamed and kicked; it took them about three minutes to drown him. Then they took out a knife, cut off the head, dismembered the body, cooked the flesh and distributed it.

  Hai stopped talking. The whole story was out. A terrible sadness filled the air. I saw the shame in their faces and felt guilty that I had made them relive their experience. The significance of what Hai had been saying suddenly dawned on me. Probably they had all become cannibals to survive that terrible voyage; perhaps some of the people on that boat had, in desperation, eaten the flesh of Minh’s victims and not just some part of the naturally dead. There have been reports before of cannibalism at sea; starving boat people who ate the dead. But never before, as far as I know, had there been a case of boat people murdering and eating each other to survive.

  I sought to talk to Minh but UN refugee officials responsible for the camp would not allow it. He and six members of his gang were shut in a locked building guarded by
Filipino soldiers and out of bounds to the rest of the camp’s 4800 inmates, while their future was decided. Some of the best legal brains of the Philippines were arguing whether they should be prosecuted. Clearly it was not a normal case of murder. The desperate circumstances raised complex questions. The refugee status of the Vietnamese and the fact that the deaths had occurred at sea compounded the issue. Minh’s defence was the plea of necessity. He argued that twelve days after the Dubuque had steamed off and left them helplessly adrift in a leaking and disabled boat, the refugees had lost all semblance of sanity and were driven by desperation to killing and cannibalism.

  As I got up to go, I looked into Hai’s eyes. They were black pools of horror. The eyes of the dead. This man too had eyes I cannot forget. The eyes of Vietnam.

  Of the 110 refugees who left Vietnam fifty-eight died en route, most by drowning and starvation. After investigating whether the Dubuque should have given more help to the refugees, the US navy suspended Captain Alexander Balian from his command and later court-martialled him. Hai and Yen have left the Philippines and are learning to live with their memories in their new lives.

  Kidnapped

  I tried to give this day to you . . .

  or at least a part of it.

  From the top bunk I have memorised

  everything you’ve written me . . .

  this must be the hardest time

  because I’m not even sure

  I ever knew you . . .

  through the time zones

  the different days

  are not really ours to give . . .

  so we end up keeping them

  for ourselves

  and we look for other gifts.

  More and more, I was waking up to the fact that without Indo-China, Southeast Asia no longer held the same attractions for me; by staying alone in Bangkok, with Jacqueline in Paris, I had cut my life in two. But a decision was made for me. In May 1976, the Sunday Times offered a temporary solution to my dilemma with a three month assignment in London. Six years after I had first left Paris for Cambodia, I came back to Europe, a stranger.