‘Next stop is Vietnam’ By FAYE WHITBECK, Staff Writer

Fleeing in terror, the peasant girl tore off her own clothes after a napalm air attack.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning photo says more about the tragedy of war than mere words can express.

Almost 35 years later, the bombing which devastated a tiny country and its people has ended. But long after the controversial war that took the lives of 58,170 American soldiers, Vietnam remains under Communist rule.

However, photographs of today’s Vietnam portray the small country whose shore lines the South China Sea, very differently. Picture-book scenes are in stark contrast to the terrifying images reflected on American TVs in the 1960s and 70s.

About the size of Germany and the 13th most-populous country in the world, Vietnam now invests capital to recruit tourism — which has increased steadily over the past decade. One of the world’s 25 highest in biodiversity, its agricultural and industrial economy is growing exponentially.

Vietnam’s culture, once dominated by China, the Soviet Union and Cuba, now reflects more exposure to European and American influences and, since the 1990s, brings vacationers from around the world.

In this edition of The Daily Journal come photos from seven local women who recently visited Vietnam, each with reasons of her own. Their pictures convey a breathtakingly beautiful country whose people, regardless of government, are busy with life.

At the heart of the women’s trip is the captivating story of an International Falls woman, Hoa Sobczynski, a native Viet who left her homeland at the age of 17. Born in 1964, Hoa was a child during the hellish apex of the Vietnam War, and her family endured all that came with living in South Vietnam during those times.

The trip was also an introduction for Hoa’s teenage daughter, Helen Sobczynski. These Borderland women undauntedly experienced a journey which shall remain in their memories forever.

Born and raised in the Falls, 18-year-old Helen had only heard stories of an intriguing childhood in her mother’s broken English. For the first time recently, the young woman met her elderly great-grandfather who still lives on the delta fields where her mother, as a child, squatted in the rice paddies. Merging the narrations of this old man with that of her maternal grandmother who lives in California, Helen recently matched the pieces of her mother’s history.

The local women who traveled the entire country of Vietnam over a three-week period (with a tour guide) are: Sue Nordquist, Cindy Peterson, Kathy Ruelle (who wrote a commemorative poem found on page 8A), Shar Schaak and Darlene Tomzcak. Also accompanying the women were Helen’s two Vietnamese aunts from California, Thuy Nguyen and Truc Nguyen. (Nguyen is Hoa’s family name. It was also the name of Vietnam’s last ruling family: the Nguyen Dynasty 1802-1945.)

Hoa and her twin sister were born in the coastal town My Tho to a Vietnamese couple who were yet unmarried. Each came from a different social class, but, like everyone else they were Buddhists.

Helen refers to her maternal grandmother by a literal translation, “Ba Ngoai,” and her late maternal grandfather as “Ong Ngoai.” They shall be referred to in this story as “Ba” and “Ong.”

A middle-class girl whose father worked in a factory, Ba became pregnant at age 23 by Ong (Liem Nguyen), the oldest son in a rich, upper-middle class and very respected family. He was also attractive, popular and “most wanted,” Ba recently told her granddaughter.

Ong was the principal at an elementary school and Ba’s pregnancy was considered shameful. Hoa’s mother married the father of her 1-year-old twins in 1965.

As did all dutiful daughters-in-law, Ba honored the Vietnamese custom of living with the husband’s extended family and doing all the work. This meant caring for his young siblings and the eventual raising of her own five children. Add to that — the complete cleaning duties, cooking, and care of farm animals necessary for food. All this was done in a big house with no running water or electrical power.

Food was cooked over burning rice husks. The Viets slept inside mosquito nets on wooden pallets, which were in turn used daily as countertops or homework tables. The same clothes were worn to bed as were worn around the house. A new set of clothing and one good pair of sandals were received annually during the Chinese New Year. Ba had to ask her in-law’s permission to visit her own parents just 12 kilometers away.

In 1971, during the Nixon Doctrine’s “Vietnamization” of South Vietnam, Hoa’s father enlisted to be an American officer pilot. This was a period when U.S. military effort was to gradually strengthen the South Vietnamese armed forces (VNAF). Ong was trained in Louisiana for 18 months.

Moving to a U.S. Air Force base in Vietnam brought astronomical change for Hoa’s family. The new, magical living quarters had running water, electricity, telephone, TV, appliances and more. It was overwhelming. Ba told Helen that when her youngest sister came to visit the base and took a shower, she ran to inspect the building’s walls to see how they could hold so much water.

By 1975 amidst mass chaos, the Communists were taking hold in South Vietnam culminating with the fall of Saigon. And one day, Hoa’s father just didn’t come home. She was 6 years old.

Four weeks later, the family heard rumors that Ong had left the country. But for 10 months, they received no word and didn’t know if he was dead or alive.

Then it was finally verified that Ong, whose destiny would have been a concentration camp, had taken off in his plane one day and just kept going.

Meanwhile, Ba and her children were forced back to a make-shift bamboo shanty deep in the rice fields, where they endured routine interrogation about Ong’s whereabouts by the Communists. They were also considered traitors through the eyes of the villagers.

Ba told Helen that this was the hardest life she had known — to go from the nice American military base to this devastating and uncertain existence: sick children, flooded fields, starvation, constant threats, back-breaking work, penniless and no husband.

Six years went by.

Inexplicably in 1977, Ba suddenly began receiving letters from a sister who had left Vietnam, and lived in New York City. But it soon became apparent that the coded messages, which took six to nine months to arrive, were really from Ong who had escaped Vietnam along with thousands of other refugees, and was now in California.

Forbidden to have any contact with her husband and not able to tell anyone about the letters, they were Ba’s secret joy. Boxes of clothes began to arrive from America.

In 1978 when Vietnam began to calm, the American government under agreement with Vietnam, allowed veterans to sponsor Vietnamese relatives into the USA. Ong started the paperwork for his family’s immigration and sent them a quilt with money sewed inside.

“Ba Ngoai started to dream of the land of milk and honey and a reunited happy family,” her granddaughter wrote in her research notes.

With her only son already reunited with his father, the remaining Nguyen family left Vietnam and arrived in Los Angeles in December 1981. The reality of America was beyond what they could have imagined.

Hoa was 17 years old and spoke not one word of English. She began high school in Santa Anna, Calif. She went on to learn English at a community college where she also met her future husband, Kurt Sobczynski. Together, they would move to International Falls in 1990, where Kurt began work at the paper mill during its expansion. Both of their children, Helen and John, would be born in the Falls.

But happiness was short-lived for Hoa’s 40-year-old mother. Six months after arriving, the woman who had endured so much, discovered that her long-missed husband had a second wife in California. He also had a daughter.

“Imagine how alone Ba Ngoai felt — new country, new language and culture, no job ...” wrote Helen in her notes. Her grandmother remembers that “this was a harder time than four years in the rice fields because then she had a dream to support her. Now the dream came crumbling down.”

Ong moved out and filed for divorce soon after. Ironically, when Ong’s second wife found out he already had a wife and five children, she left him.

When Ong died in 1989 from complications of excessive drinking and smoking, Ba was devastated because she still really loved him, Helen said. But oddly, she moved into his family’s (who had later arrived from Vietnam) California home, by invitation, and still lives there today. Every year, she visits her elderly parents in Vietnam.

A vacation in Vietnam

Her third reunion in Vietnam, Hoa Sobczynski finds it hard to recognize the area in which she lived. Where there had been dirt roads, paved streets and other infrastructure now exist.

“I saw where my mom’s plot (rice paddy) was,” Helen said.

The Borderland women shared several observations about Vietnam.

The weather was stifling hot and humid and they understand how sleeping on pallets would have provided coolness. Toilet seats are positioned directly on the floors, for which Ruelle and Schaak humorously realized they each had their own positioning techniques. Most cooking is done outdoors on small stoves in hot pots, even in hotels, and soup is a routine cuisine even for breakfast.

Helen, who likely bears a Caucasian stature because of her mixed heritage, said she felt tall in the country, and everything seemed “so small — the chairs, even the dishes.”

Travel by bicycle and motor scooter remains the most popular mode of travel in Vietnam, and the women were spellbound by the congested, undulating throngs that moved through the streets beneath massive knots of wiring that are part of Vietnam’s modernization. They also spoke of how everything is “built upward” in the tiny country. “Every speck of land is utilized,” said Ruelle, noting the tiered rice plateaus and multiple-storied homes.

The travelers admitted they couldn’t have appreciated the mesmerizing beauty of the country without witnessing it — lush hillsides, misty seas, colossal flowers and gregarious people. “They have a melodious way of speaking,” said Schaak, “and they’re always smiling.”

For Ruelle, an extremely emotional leg of the journey was visiting China Beach, where thousands of recovering GIs were offered a rare respite from battle. For two years, as a teenager, Ruelle had written to American soldiers there. The Vietcong used the place as a terrorist base. Later, it launched the tragic “boat people.”

Ruelle noted that none of the women ever got sick through the entire trip, nor did she ever feel unsafe.

“It’s odd,” she puzzled, “but I never really felt like I was that far from home.”

A trip such as the one these women experienced is full of ironies, retrospection and discovery. It was an opportunity for a new view of the distant past which changed America forever.

Time passes. Things change. The 9-year-old girl of the Pulitzer photo is now a woman living in Canada. She has become the life-long friend of the man who took her picture.