Where the Wind Leads

by Dr. Vinh Chung

  The pirates waved their weapons and shouted demands, but no one on our boat spoke Thai or could understand a word they were saying. But the pirates didn’t wait for someone to translate; they just charged around the top deck, jerking the jewelry from women’s necks and ears and demanding rings and watches from the men. One of the pirates ducked under the covered section, where my family was huddled together. When my mother saw him coming, she quickly pulled off her earrings and dropped them into her bra, but it was too late—the pirate saw what she had done and grabbed at her shirt to get the earrings back. But retrieving my mother’s earrings was apparently more trouble than they were worth, and when the pirate noticed that Yen, sitting beside her, was wearing earrings, too, he shoved my mother aside and pointed a knife at Yen’s throat instead. When my aunt saw what was about to happen, she pulled one of the earrings from Yen’s ear and handed it to the pirate, who then ripped off the other earring himself.

  The pirates worked quickly, almost frantically, screaming and shouting as they rushed around the deck, grabbing any shiny thing that caught their eye. They searched my father and ripped his pants in the process, but for the most part the pirates took only what was easily accessible. When they found books or paper, they ripped them apart and threw them on the deck, acting as if they planned to start a fire and torch our boat before they left. That was the most terrifying thought of all because our boat was more than a means of transportation for us—it was life itself. While we were at sea, our boat was our country and our home. If it stayed afloat, we lived, and if not, we died. The thought of being trapped in a flaming tomb started a panic, and the women began to beg for mercy and plead with the pirates to take whatever they wanted and go.

  Grandmother Chung shouted at the men to leave everyone alone, but they ignored her. She was clutching a framed image of Quan m, a Chinese goddess of compassion, mercy, and kindness. When the pirates snatched it out of her hands and threw it on the deck, it broke apart, revealing jewels my grandmother had hidden inside.

  Oddly enough, the pirates never bothered to go below deck, though half of our passengers were down there, and the pirates could have doubled their take by doing so. But that was more than a simple oversight on their part. There was a reason they worked so quickly: they were afraid too.

  These pirates were young. Most of them looked to be in their twenties, and some were even teenagers. They were doing their best to puff themselves up to look and sound as terrifying as possible, but they were too young and too skinny to be physically intimidating. Some of them carried knives, but they were small boning knives that fishermen used, not the infamous long knives that Thai pirates used to mutilate their victims. Some of the pirates weren’t wielding knives at all—they were carrying screwdrivers. These pirates were not only young and skinny but underequipped, and with limitations like that, the only way they could terrify and intimidate was to bluster and bluff.

  My father noticed that one of the pirates looked different from the others and seemed to be their leader. The man did not look Thai; he looked Chinese, and he was the only one who had not painted his face. When the man noticed my father staring at him, he turned and said under his breath, “Don’t be afraid. It’ll be okay.” My father began to realize we were being threatened with only hand tools and the pirates who wielded them were almost as frightened as we were.

  There were only 15 of them and more than 290 of us, and our party included some strong young men. My father and uncle and the other men began to whisper back and forth about the possibility of fighting back and throwing the pirates off our boat. Looking back, my father thinks they could have done it; they could have overwhelmed the pirates with numbers, disarmed them, recovered all the stolen jewelry and gold, and probably could have stolen their ship.

  But no one did a thing because it was not the pirates they feared—it was the stories.

  They had heard so many stories about confrontations between pirates and refugees that ended in horrifying ways—with men forced to watch while their wives and daughters were abused and mothers forced to watch while their babies were cast into the sea. It didn’t matter if the stories were true—they were true to us. The only source of information about pirate atrocities came from interviews with survivors who made it to refugee camps and recounted their ordeals. Their stories were terrible, but there was no way to know if they were typical. Did all pirates commit violent atrocities? Our timid pirates didn’t seem to want to harm anyone; were they the exception or the rule? Were all pirates monsters, or did they turn into monsters only when they were resisted? Some said that half of all refugee boats never made it to land—what happened to them? Did vicious pirates ram and sink them all, or were some of them lost in storms? Did some of them have second thoughts, turn around, and return to Vietnam, leaving those waiting for them to imagine the worst? Or did some of the leaky old boats that desperate refugees were forced to take to sea just gradually take on water until they disappeared beneath the waves? So little was really known, and the less that was known, the more there was to fear.

  The men on our boat did nothing because they didn’t dare. It wasn’t what did happen that paralyzed them with fear; it was the thought of what could happen. That fear is something all refugees experience because refugees are forced to sail across pirate waters all their lives. So many things can go wrong for a refugee, but it’s the fear of what could go wrong that haunts us.

  Fifteen minutes after the attack began, the pirates scrambled back onto their trawler, carrying handfuls of stolen booty, and the ship roared its engines and sailed away. Everyone wondered if the pirates were really leaving, and we waited to see if the trawler would come back and ram us again and again until our hull cracked open and we sank into the sea. But they just continued on until they were once again a speck on the horizon.

  When the attack was finally over, no one said a word. It was as though a bomb had gone off and sent a shock wave through the ship that left everyone stunned and mute. Those on the top deck were the ones who had been robbed and threatened, but the experience had been almost as terrifying for those below. All they could do was stare up helplessly at the open hatch, listen to the feet stomping on the planks over their heads and the women pleading for mercy, and imagine what was happening to their fellow passengers—and wonder if they would be next.

  No one knew what to say because no one knew what to think or feel. What had just happened? We had been robbed, but we were alive and unharmed. The women had been traumatized, but no one had been assaulted. Our hull had been cracked, but the leak was repaired quickly. We had been attacked by Thai pirates, but our pirates turned out to be inexperienced amateurs. Should we celebrate or weep? Had we been blessed or cursed? We didn’t even know if our ordeal was over. Were our pirates working alone, or were they part of a ring that would send other ships like a pack of wild dogs closing in on a wounded animal, each one tearing off a piece of our flesh until nothing remained?

  What we did know was that if we had been attacked once, it could happen again—and if it did, there was nothing we could do about it. That was the realization that left us stunned: we were helpless. Even a bunch of skinny teenagers armed with nothing more than screwdrivers could walk onto our boat and take anything they wanted—and we didn’t dare do anything about it.

  My father looked at the horizon. There was no sight of land.

  Sixteen

  ONE MAN’S BURDEN

  STAN MOONEYHAM HAD PROMISED ED HILL THAT HE would look into the problem of the boat people, and to Stan “looking into” something meant studying it inside and out. He read everything he could find on the subject, and before long he had a thorough understanding of the situation.

  Stan learned that when South Vietnam had fallen in April 1975, thousands of Vietnamese immediately left the country by boat, but those first-wave refugees had US Seventh Fleet ships, such as the carriers Hancock, Okinawa, and Midway, waiting to pick them up offshore, and those refugees were quickly resettled in other countries.
Over the next two years the number of refugees declined, which made the refugee problem small enough for most nations to temporarily overlook. But by 1977, the number of refugees fleeing by boat was increasing again. Tens of thousands were fleeing every month, and because of Vietnam’s growing animosity toward its Chinese citizens, 60 percent of all boat people were Chinese.

  But the statistic that Stan found most alarming was that the death rate among boat people was reported to be as high as 50 percent—of every two refugees who left Vietnam, only one survived.

  With those sobering facts in hand, Stan headed for Washington to meet with State Department officials and members of Congress to gather advice on the best way for World Vision to tackle the problem—but to Stan’s dismay he was unanimously cautioned to do nothing. It was an international political minefield, they told him. Surrounding nations had been overrun by refugees and were refusing to accept any more; a foreign mercy ship on the South China Sea would be a slap in the face to those countries and would only create more hostility. It was an impossible situation, they said, and a young organization like World Vision that was still establishing credibility could not afford to have a colossal embarrassment on its hands.

  Stan left Washington, feeling the same way he had felt that Sunday evening in Ed Hill’s study. The congressmen and State Department officials were right; they had good reasons, logical reasons, practical reasons, for avoiding the problem entirely—but it didn’t matter. The image of that refugee woman’s face still haunted Stan, and he was bound and determined to do whatever he could to help.

  Stan knew from his fund-raising experience that facts alone often are not enough to motivate people to take action; sometimes they have to see the problem, they have to feel it. That was not the kind of information Stan could get from books, so he decided to travel to Southeast Asia to witness the problems facing refugees with his own eyes.

  He began by touring the refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and the conditions he found there were even more appalling than he expected. Refugees were packed into overcrowded shantytowns; there was an almost total lack of sanitation; the food was rat-infested; the water was fouled by sewage—they were the same problems World Vision was helping to alleviate all over the world; only here the problems were multiplied because of the sheer number of refugees in each camp.

  In the Philippines Stan toured a cargo ship called the Tung An that was jammed with twenty-two hundred refugees who had been sitting in Manila Harbor for two months. Every inch of space on the ship was occupied, and a thousand of the refugees had been forced to remain in the cargo hold on top of a load of cattle feed that had gotten wet and had become a breeding ground for hundreds of thousands of worms and crawling insects. Stan had witnessed suffering all over the world, but when he emerged from that cargo hold, he could barely stand up.

  After his travels in Southeast Asia, Stan had two kinds of facts at his disposal—the cold statistics that could appeal to the rational mind and the graphic firsthand stories that were able to reach the heart. Doubly armed and confident that he would find a warmer reception this time, he traveled not only to Washington but also to Geneva, Canberra, Ottawa, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore in search of advice and support for his mission.

  He found none.

  Once again he was told to steer clear of the boat people problem. No country would agree to accept more refugees even if Stan found a way to rescue them. Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore were especially hostile to his idea since they had already borne the brunt of the refugee problem. A government official in Canberra told him, “Don’t give them enough gas to get here.”

  Stan returned from his travels discouraged but undeterred. “I came to this conclusion,” he said. “Any idea opposed by seven governments with accompanying threats couldn’t be all bad.”

  But he did have a dilemma: What was the point of rescuing refugees if there would be no place to drop them off?

  The last stop on Stan’s seven-capital tour was Singapore, where he met with the US ambassador, John Holdridge. The ambassador was sympathetic to Stan’s cause, but he saw no way around the problem either. As long as surrounding nations were unwilling to accept refugees, he saw little point in rescuing them.

  Stan rode back to his hotel completely discouraged. He felt a deep burden for the boat people, and he was willing to do anything he could to help them, but so far his efforts had been stymied at every turn. Stan was sharing a taxi with a World Vision colleague named Hal Barber, and Hal suddenly had an idea.

  “Why do we have to rescue them?” Hal asked. “Why not just resupply them? We could load a ship with food, water, clothing—whatever they need to survive at sea. We could even offer to repair their boats or fix their engines if they need it. Then we could just send them on their way.”

  That was the solution Stan had been searching for, and it was so simple he couldn’t believe he had overlooked it. They didn’t have to rescue the refugees; they could just resupply them. And why not? That was exactly what World Vision was doing for the poor and hungry all over the world—they didn’t remove people from their desperate situations; they just provided assistance for them while they were there. Stan knew Hal’s idea did not solve the ultimate problem because as long as the refugees remained at sea, they were in mortal danger. But at least it was something. If they could help the boat people survive long enough to reach land, who knows how many might be saved?

  Stan’s burden was now a project, and he gave the project a name that suited its purpose: Operation Seasweep.

  First they needed a ship, and the decision was made to charter one, rather than buy one, until their concept had proven successful. The ship they chartered was a 327-foot-long World War II relic called the Cal Loader. The Cal Loader was an LST, an awkward military acronym for “Landing Ship, Tank,” which was designed with a flat bottom and a bow that could open like a pair of doors to allow tanks to roll out onto a beach. The ship had been designed to make amphibious beach landings, but it was adequate for World Vision’s purposes since it was relatively inexpensive and had the facilities to house a crew and enough room to hold plenty of cargo.

  Next a crew had to be recruited. A man named John Calder from New Zealand was named project director, and Burt Singleton from the US staff of World Vision became director of operations on the ship. There was an Indian doctor named T. N. Chandler, who had a two-room medical clinic at his disposal, as well as two Chinese nurses, Rosemary Ng and Regina Loh. The captain of the ship was Filipino, and the crew was a mix of different Asian ethnic groups, who were responsible for the daily operation of the ship. The cargo bay of the LST was loaded with food, water, diesel fuel, medical supplies, and even spare parts for the three-cylinder Yangma diesel engines that most of the smaller refugee boats employed.

  It had been only six months since that moment in Ed Hill’s study, when Stan first stared at that photo of a terrified refugee woman and her daughter. Now he had a ship, a crew, and a mission, and as the Cal Loader sailed out of Singapore Harbor he found himself wishing Ed Hill could be standing beside him.

  When the ship left Singapore, it headed due east, and once it passed the hundred-year-old Horsburgh Lighthouse the British East India Company had set in place to mark the entrance to the Straits of Singapore, the Cal Loader was officially in the South China Sea.

  It wasn’t long before they encountered their first refugee vessel, a small boat with just twenty-one passengers aboard. When Stan and his crew saw it was damaged and taking on water, their instinct was to get everyone off the boat right away, but they knew they had to stick to their original strategy of resupply versus rescue. It was possible the boat could be repaired, and they had brought along tools and materials for exactly this kind of situation.

  They towed the boat behind the Cal Loader while the ship’s engineers attempted to make repairs; but the boat was damaged too badly, and by nightfall it was decided to take the fifteen women and children aboard the Cal Loader as a preca
ution. Around midnight the refugee boat suddenly broke apart and sank, and the six men aboard were thrown into the black water with it. The women and children aboard the Cal Loader began to scream and point at the water, where their husbands and sons had been standing moments before, and the ship immediately turned hard to starboard and swung its searchlight around to illuminate the area.

  Five of the six men were located and pulled from the sea before they could drown, but the sixth man was nowhere to be found. He was the son of one of the women aboard, and she was so grief-stricken at the thought of losing her child that she tried to throw herself into the sea to join him in death. But the crew held the weeping woman back and continued to search; and after circling the area several more times, the crew eventually found the young man clinging to a plastic water container the Cal Loader had lowered to the dehydrated refugees when they first found them. It was a strange irony: Stan and his crew were supposed to resupply and not rescue, but by resupplying the boat with water, they had inadvertently rescued that young man from drowning.

  Now there were twenty-one refugees aboard the Cal Loader, and there was no boat to which to return them. Stan knew he had a problem. This was exactly the kind of situation he was supposed to avoid, but he had had no choice. What was he supposed to do, just stand there and watch while twenty-one men, women, and children disappeared beneath the water of the South China Sea? Stan felt confident that he had a perfectly justifiable reason for rescuing these refugees—but that didn’t mean the surrounding nations would agree with him.