A harrowing escape from a war-torn country places a group of refugees in an impossible situation: Out of water, out of time, and with hundreds of miles to go.

...we are the foam

floating in the vast ocean

we are the dust

wandering in endless space…

—Anonymous

“Whoever is listening, be my witness.” —Thich Nhat Hahn

South China Sea, April 27, 1981

Dzung Nguyen piloted the fishing boat with the lights out, a dark splotch on the inky sea. Evading detection was imperative. Water caught flecks of the waning half egg of the moon and glistened like a tossed blanket of unreachable stars. The boat’s six-horsepower motor thrummed quietly. Three hundred miles to the southeast lay the Indonesian island of Natuna, a name Dzung had only recently learned, one that meant salvation.

He remained anxious this close to Vietnam’s coast. He hadn’t wanted Thomas, seven years his junior, to join this group of conspirators plotting escape, but their mother had insisted. Thomas, too, could reclaim his future if they made it out. Dzung feared they wouldn’t. If patrol boats caught them now, they’d all be tossed into the prison labor camps, and Thomas’s fate would be Dzung’s burden.

At 28, Dzung knew the dreadful prisons, euphemistically called “reeducation” camps, better than any of them. Life there was a misery of hard labor and scant nourishment, and many died inside them. Dzung had nearly starved to death during his own five-and-a-half-year internment. He’d worried about Thomas and the rest of his family throughout, and now Thomas was likely closer to danger than he’d ever been on Saigon’s streets. Communist soldiers prowled Vietnam’s southern shores searching for those attempting to flee. Con Son Island, the erstwhile site of a brutal French-run penal colony for communist revolutionaries, loomed due south and harbored a force, Dzung had heard, of the People’s Army of Vietnam. They would have to skirt its soldiers.

The plan felt dangerously simple: Motor 120 degrees from north for 50 miles, then turn 180 degrees south, hold the line, and pray they’d eventually spot Natuna, a tiny Indonesian island that took in any Vietnamese refugees who could find it. It was a long shot, but it was their best hope. The slightest deviation could mean they’d miss the isle altogether and drift for weeks in one of the region’s notorious swirling currents. That would mean a slow death for him and the boat’s 26 other passengers.

Dzung dropped a piece of fabric from the bow and clocked the time it took to reach the stern. He calculated their speed as seven kilometers per hour, but the boat’s owner, a fisherman named Duc, assured him it could travel only six. Dzung studied his hand drawn map and used the lower number to mark the spot where they’d make their turn. The journey should take four days.

So far they’d spotted no patrols. In the spring of 1981, the Vietnam War, known locally as the American War, had been over for six years, and communist-run Vietnam was two years into a decade-long war with Cambodia. Soldiers posted to the southern strands kept a lookout for escapees and Army deserters. Both typically hailed from the former American-supported Republic of the south, which by now had shed hundreds of thousands of refugees amid harsh conditions.

Vietnam’s diminishing shores remained dark at dawn’s slow approach, the last quarter moon hung overhead, and the water was calm. The 30-foot boat contained a small fish hold below, where the passengers—many of them strangers—huddled with supplies for the journey, and a five-by-six-foot cabin on top with hardly any deck to speak of. When sunlight broke over the flat horizon, Thomas and a few others emerged from the hold to watch a pod of dolphins racing alongside their vessel, arcing in and out of the shimmering waves as the two young children aboard pointed and laughed.

Dzung eyed his younger brother. Thomas had only been a high school kid of 15 when Saigon fell in April of ’75. Old enough for one to know where he stood, too young to fathom all he’d lost. For Thomas, the violent thrust into the role of the household’s eldest son must have been disorienting when the communist victors had carted Dzung and their father into the jungle to be reeducated. He probably felt cocooned in loneliness. Thomas was a bespectacled young man of 21 now, tall, competent, a little shy. Dzung would do all he could to give his brother a new life. Their country had failed him. Dzung vowed that he would not.

A commotion now rose above the old diesel engine’s grumble. Something was wrong. The 55-gallon oil barrel they’d filled with fresh water had rusted and leaked, someone shouted. Now it was completely empty, every drop lost. They had four days to go if all went well, considerably longer if they lost their course. Dzung fixed his gaze on the dark waters ahead. His brother Thomas’s fate, and the lives of the 25 other passengers, weighed on his shoulders.

Now the journey was a race against time and thirst, and whatever else the sea might toss at them.

Saigon, 1975-1978

Thomas idled the Vespa while his brother swung off the back of its saddle. Dzung threw his bag, packed with 10 days’ food and clothing, over one shoulder and waved goodbye without ceremony. Then he disappeared into Don Bosco Catholic High School to report for reeducation. Like the convulsive split of Vietnam into North and South in 1954, like the war’s escalation a decade later when the U.S. stepped in, and like its dramatic conclusion just weeks before when Dzung outran Northern troops who swept into the city, it happened fast, like it meant nothing. By silent accord they kept all the new era’s probabilities secret even from themselves. It was best not to think of it. Most in the city were afraid, but it didn’t show in the way they went about their daily tasks, mundane or momentous. Before Dzung was out of sight, Thomas revved the Vespa back into traffic and returned home to his mother, two older sisters and kid brother.

His father, a retired colonel who until recently worked as the director of personnel for a government telecommunications branch, had reported for a monthlong stint of reeducation two weeks prior. Dzung, as a 22-year-old second lieutenant in the now disbanded Republic of Vietnam Air Force, received a lighter sentence. Thomas told himself they’d both be home in a fortnight even if he didn’t believe it. Saigon had fallen little more than a month before and already the city where he’d lived his entire life had retreated behind veils of rumor, chaos and mistrust. An uncle from Hanoi who fought in the communist army had shown up in a tattered uniform of the North and told Thomas to trust no one, even his own family. The best thing to do, he’d said, is say nothing.

The northern communists, victorious but now vastly outnumbered by their new subjects, turned neighbor against neighbor. Military cadres strolled through Saigon’s districts to interview its citizens and encouraged each household to report on the others. Thomas’s family lived in the third district on Phan Thanh Gian Street, one of the city’s busiest, replete with shops and noodle stands. He attended mandatory weekly meetings held on each block where the cadres touted the merits of communism, explained how things would unfold, shared news and issued instructions. Thomas scoffed at the pretty picture they painted of the new regime. He’d grown up in pre-communist Saigon and knew the products, social and material, of the capitalist West.

Dzung and his father remained imprisoned months later when Thomas returned for his sophomore year of high school. He presented an easy target. The Nguyens had worked against the Revolution for three generations, and the underlings of the new government watched his family with heightened vigilance. Thomas only grew more resistant.

His new teachers parroted lessons from the communists. Thomas couldn’t stomach them. He’d read Marx and other manifestos well before Saigon fell and found them lacking. The changes he observed, mostly for the worse, spoke for themselves. In school, as in the city, the new order noosed all forms of speech. For weeks, every student was forced daily to chronicle the entire history of their families. Thomas complained about the repetition, but he was told to be silent and keep writing, that maybe he’d forgotten something. Students whose families had worked and fought for the old regime were segregated into separate classes where they could be watched and educated more severely. City folk began to disappear. Some fled, others taken forcibly. One thing became clear. In life under the communists, leaving the house each morning did not guarantee your return the same day.

Time paraded on, each day rife with uncertainty. The only word the family heard from the captive Nguyen men came with the occasional scrap-paper letter. His father would ask at length in minuscule writing for sundry supplies when he could, but Dzung hardly said a thing. He merely scrawled on one side of a page every time that he was fine and to send him nothing. Thomas could only stare at the empty words and guess what lived in the spaces between them. He worried about his brother but tried not to think about it.

A compulsory field trip in his senior year took Thomas to Củ Chi, a rural area northwest of Saigon known for its intricate tunnel systems dug during the American War where countless men had been lost and entombed. He hopped into the back of a Molotova, a two-ton, armored Soviet truck, packed with his classmates. Ahead of them in the convoy rolled several more trucks crammed forty or so each with prisoners of the state. These were men who had committed petty crimes, thieves and drug addicts.

Guards unloaded the prisoners near Củ Chi and surrounded them with a circle of barbed wire. Military cadres gave them machetes, shovels and other basic tools to clear the area for farming. Other prisoners chopped trees and in a few days built their jailers small bunk houses while they themselves slept in the open. Thomas realized he was witnessing the birth of a new reeducation camp. These were the strong men, the guards said, come to prepare the way. More and more would follow. He and his classmates camped in the fields and watched the prisoners work for two weeks. Even as a comparatively free observer, Thomas found it exhausting. He couldn’t help imagining that one of those men was Dzung, one his father.

It was only natural for Thomas to rebel. At 17, he lived a double life that required him to show in the classroom a mask of acquiescence that ate into the skin. He befriended a young woman in class named Loan. She was pretty, kind, open. Their cohort came to include three other castoffs whose families had worked for the old regime and a newer student named Luy whose family hailed from the central highlands. The sextet of high school seniors formed a sort of anti-communist club that met in secret to gather information that might become useful to a shadowy resistance that some said was gathering strength in the city’s underbelly. They’d create maps highlighting their district’s best routes for covert movement, trusted neighbors and any other pertinent intel they could gather.

Luy seemed more insistent than the others. He encouraged the gang to escalate and hinted at more destructive acts of subversion. Thomas was careful not to talk openly about such things at their meetings. He suspected Luy himself might be a communist sympathizer egging them on to instigate trouble, and he wouldn’t allow Luy to implicate him or Loan. Thomas was growing ever fonder of her and felt protective. Most rats just wanted some crumb to bring to authorities, he thought, to prove their obedience and win favors. Luy was likely of that ilk. In communist Saigon, the tongue proved the best shovel for digging one’s own grave.

With Loan, however, he felt a much stronger connection. She spoke more openly with him than most girls Thomas knew, sat tantalizingly close, shared her family’s struggles. Loan was among the oldest of her six siblings. Her father had died when she was young, and she bore the responsibility of helping her strained mother take care of the other kids. The communist order believed a citizen should worship only its country and persecuted religious practitioners, particularly Catholics like Loan’s family. Secretly, Thomas and Loan each wondered why the other said nothing of their intensifying feelings.

But there was little room for thought beyond the day’s obstacles and the hunt for sufficient food. If they wanted a future, they had to do something to regain agency in their lives. The time had come to raise the stakes. Their anti-commie crew formed a plan, and Thomas noted the glint in Luy’s eye. The gesture would be harmless, but even their brand of light rebellion was dangerous. A stack of flyers in hand, the six friends traipsed through Bến Thành Market, Saigon’s crowded central exchange. Thomas climbed with Loan to the rooftop of a building overlooking the street and waited, fingering the pages.

At noon, market bustling, they let their message fly. Paper fluttered like doves’ wings to the pavement below. Curious market folk rushed to grab them and for a brief, still moment they read the printed words. “Keep hope! Don’t give up! Things will change for the better.” Armed police grabbed people and commanded all to drop the flyers and stay put. Thomas and Loan watched from above. The guards were young and inexperienced. A scrum of the bold who’d nabbed some of the sheets ran off with them. Assuming they had found the culprits, the police gave chase and fired warning shots into the air.

On the rooftop, Thomas put a hand to the dark splotch on his hip. He stared at the blood. In a grim twist of irony, one of the warning shots had hit him. Loan grabbed his hand and tugged him down from the roof. Luy and the rest of their gang had run off and they were alone in the throng.

Thomas felt lucky. His blue shirt, the color manufacturing workers wore, muted the crimson of his blood, mistakable for sweat. If the suspicious guards found him shot and bloody in the aftermath of the flyer incident, they might detain him and send him off to the labor camps on a whim. Loan, Thomas’s hand still in hers, shielded his bloody hip from view with her own body. Together they walked as calmly as they could and disappeared into Saigon’s back alleys.

South China Sea, April 28, 1981

The wind spoke in gusty whispers, waves susurrant on the hull, engine whirring. Otherwise the boat was quiet. Its passengers languished in the shadowy fish hold like human cargo. Without water their food was indigestible. They would have been hungry if their pestering thirst hadn’t hijacked every thought. No one said a word, tongues papery and swollen. An infectious malaise swept over them.

Thomas could think only of water. The sea was so calm and he prayed for rain. His mind drifted as a leaf on a breeze, a rickety boat on the impassive sea. He felt neither afraid nor brave. His years under the communist regime had numbed him, and whatever came, so be it.

Next to him, a man he didn’t know slumped into his shoulder. Thomas righted him again and again, thinking him seasick. When someone opened the lid to the hold, the sun blazed in and he saw the color drained from the unconscious man’s face. He called to Dzung but another man named Tu, who had been Dzung’s commanding officer in the Air Force, appeared and helped Thomas pull him from the compartment. They placed a yellow vitamin C tablet in the man’s mouth and dabbed his lips with saltwater. He didn’t look good.

A ship crested the horizon. Tu grabbed the flare gun and fired a round into the sky. Its glowing ember hung in the air and arced into the ocean. Only a few rounds remained. The ship kept going and disappeared.

His brother, installed at the helm, immersed himself in his navigational tasks. Dzung’s focus never wavered. Thomas saw in him a small but powerful man who had a job to do and performed it without rest or complaint. In a way, he hardly knew him. Seven years separated them, and another nearly six had parted the brothers in the war’s aftermath. Thomas had often wondered what horrors he suffered. He had some notion. He knew, for example, that one of his own uncles, interned at a camp near the Cambodian border, had contradicted his guards and earned a spot in solitary confinement. A friend of Dzung’s told Thomas that he had personally delivered his food rations daily until eventually the uncle had bashed his own head against his cell wall and died.

Thomas watched his brother at the helm, comforted that Dzung was tasked with leading them. On and on, the fishing boat puttered over the interminable sea. Clouds gathered on the horizon and performed a tantalizing dance that evening. A moment’s sprinkle came, nothing more.

Reeducation, 1975-1981

Uncle Ho is on the march with us! The captive men of the South, looking to win favor, belted the revolutionary marching tune under the gaze of their jailers with as much enthusiasm as they could muster. Let’s go to liberate the South. The songs were obligatory features of their daily routine. Dzung moved his lips but refused to utter a sound. There is no greater hardship than the sky-high hatred. My South, raise the scarlet flag high.

Day after day, Dzung and the other men toiled barefoot, clearing forest for farming, building, repairing, digging latrines and wells and transforming old tar landing pads into vegetable gardens. They collected their own feces for fertilizer, and maggots crawled up their legs planting rice in the monsoons. This first camp was called Trang Lon, an abandoned U.S. military base that lay crumbling in the tropical light, now ringed with coil upon coil of barbed wire. Division 25 of the Republic of Vietnam’s now defunct Air Force had been stationed here. The red soil was riddled with pebbles and worthless. The barracks were ruined and pocked with holes in the roof and walls through which rain splattered, two naked 40-watt bulbs spraying their yellow light. They slept like sardines on the cold cement, Dzung atop a wood scrap he covered with denim.

The soldiers of the North forced their prisoners to criticize one another each evening and report the day’s offenses. At first the prisoners made stuff up, little things, but they grew to resent one another. Moles and snitches amassed, friendships became suspect. Trust eroded and the men generally quieted. After a while, Dzung hardly spoke.

Some attempted escape, most of them caught in the maze of barbed wire. The majority were either shot or tossed into a dark Conex box cargo container to roast in its sunned heat for months. Once, at a notoriously horrid camp called simply A-30, Dzung watched from a neighboring field as a group of seven prisoners fled into the forest. An ex-Marine Dzung recognized had cracked a guard over the head with the blunt end of a hatchet and ran off with his AK-47, firing at pursuing policemen. A week later, interned carpenters were forced to fashion seven coffins for the failed escapees.

The camps held other dangers. One day working in the fields of Trang Lon, a man digging near Dzung stepped on a landmine. His leg spun through the air in the blast cloud as Dzung watched. The surrounding area was littered with mines the Americans had left behind. No one had a map. Refusing to work, a prisoner in the labor camps would be shot. Working, he might trigger his own demise. Dzung preferred not to think about it and trusted his luck. He harnessed this nonattachment into a personal code: Remain true to himself and obey his wardens as infrequently as possible.

He often ditched work in the fields and snuck back through the gates each morning—no one questioned a prisoner entering his prison—until one of the prominent bodoi, as soldiers from the North were called, confronted him. Dzung answered that the thatch was itchy, and he’d come back into camp to clean up. The bodoi objected to Dzung’s casual demeanor and spat a command to stand straight when talking to him.

“You’re not my commanding officer,” Dzung replied. “I do that only for my superiors.”

The bodoi, red-faced and speechless, sent Dzung back to his barracks and turned on his heels. Dzung sagged with relief. He’d thought for certain the bodoi would shoot him on the spot.

Three days later, the cold muzzle of an AK-47 poked into his back as a pair of bodoi escorted him to a hut. It was after 6 p.m., the equatorial night descending on the camp. A bodoi shoved Dzung into a chair at a small table among the shadows. Guards stationed themselves on either side of the door. No one spoke a word for a long time. Soon a silhouette materialized in the open doorway in a cloud of smoke, a cigarette’s glowing cherry pulsing in the dark. Brother Hai Duong’s stern face glimmered behind the ember. “Guards!” he shouted. “Light!” The bodoi scrambled to kindle two kerosene lanterns and set them on the table in front of Dzung.

Brother Hai was a leader of the camp’s security force and its political propaganda officer. He controlled a room with commanding presence. For the next several hours he interrogated Dzung about his identity and his family—his rank, where he trained, the deeds of his military service, what his father did and his grandfather before him, all he knew of his aunts and uncles and mother. Everything. Brother Hai was a competent and demanding, if not unkind, interrogator. Dzung complied.

The officer released him on the condition that he inform on his fellow inmates. For the next two weeks, Brother Hai came down for the evening muster. He made a point of letting Dzung see him and then walked to the far corner to await his report. Dzung ignored him and returned to camp with the others.

Then, one October night, a group of bodoi barged into his barracks with a list and barked 30 names, Dzung’s among them. Grab your belongings and get on the truck! A dark, curly-haired prisoner named Khang, who had taken a liking to Dzung and slept two spaces away, ran out after him. Dzung had trusted no one and had never said much to this young man, but kindness spoke for itself. Khang held out a precious can of condensed milk he’d gotten from his family and told Dzung to take it. Dzung thanked him, piled with the other selected prisoners into the canvased Molotova idling beyond the rings of barbed wire, and rumbled off into the night. He would never see Khang again, but he never forgot his face.

Hunger became a constant. Two slices of rotten potatoes and two teaspoons of rancid rice comprised his meal twice a day. For Tết, the Lunar New Year, the communists roasted a pig for themselves and left the scraps to all the inmates. Dzung managed to score a flap of skin and fat the size of his thumbnail. Some of the men caught mice and snakes and ate them raw. Others quietly shared extra portions their families had sent them and spoke of light matters that couldn’t harm them to be overheard. But all turned thinner. 

Once, his mother came to see him at a camp called Suoi Mau, meaning “Bloody Creek.” Month after month, he had scrawled the same brief message to her: “I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. Is everyone at home okay?” They hugged and sat at opposite ends of a table. Armed bodoi surrounding them watched and listened. They could say little for fear of punishment. Dzung felt humiliated. His mother saw how skinny he’d become and cried for most of the visit. They had 10 minutes. At the end of it, Dzung told his mother never to visit him again.

He remained an uncooperative prisoner—leaning against his hoe in the fields and dreaming of escape, ignoring the communist guards, refusing to snitch on fellow inmates—for five and a half years. By January 1981, he weighed 90 pounds in wet clothes, the same he’d worn for years. He was starving and close to death. He could hardly walk, and his vision dimmed whenever he stood. Near the end of the month, the wardens called his section into the hall where the commissars taught political lessons and excoriated the prisoners for their recalcitrant minds. Dzung’s name was called along with five others. They were told to grab their belongings and were taken to a different facility a few miles away, where for several days they were fattened on extra portions of quality rice, whole sweet potatoes, and dried fish. Then they received paperwork telling them they could go free.

He had 50 đồng in his pocket to pay his way home. When the train came, the attendant recognized the men as ex-prisoners of the labor camps and told them they rode free anywhere they wanted.

As he traipsed Saigon’s streets in the twilight, Dzung felt that he had been released into a bigger prison. This was a depressed, broken version of the vibrant city he’d known. He ached to see his family but felt little joy. Now they would be miserable together rather than apart. A young man on a bicycle pedaled by him in the deepening darkness near the old house that he hadn’t seen in nearly six years. The street, like Saigon itself, had a new name.

The young man called his name. Dzung hadn’t recognized him at first. Thomas had transmogrified from the child who had motored him to Don Bosco to report for 10 days of reeducation into an imposing man of 5’10”, as tall as their still imprisoned father. Thomas seemed to barely know his shrunken, emaciated brother. He’d been off to spend the night at the air conditioning factory where he worked. Instead he told Dzung to climb aboard the bicycle and rode him home to their mother, arriving together in the same manner they’d last departed.

Saigon, 1981

Dzung slurped his pho at a local cafe amid the surreptitious throb of The Eagles’ “Hotel California.” The new regime had banned Western music, but Saigon’s residents were growing bolder. Thomas treated him to his first meal back home as a free man, though Dzung didn’t feel free. He craved revenge. Murmurs had reached him even in the camps of a burgeoning resistance biding its time. Thomas had heard them, too, but he’d kept his head down working as an engineer and living day to day. Though he was still weak from malnutrition, Dzung made up his mind that he would find the resistance and join their forces. He parted ways with Thomas and set out to walk the streets.

He’d been instructed to report to his local ward upon arrival, but he ignored the order. Agents came to his house more than once to make him comply. Dzung was rarely at home. He’d passed them once, unrecognized, on his way out. Most days he spent pacing the streets, haphazardly hunting for signs of the resistance or paying visits to old friends.

He found one named Hung, an officer he’d known at Pleiku Air Base where he was stationed near the war’s end. Hung told him that Dzung’s former commanding officer, Tu Huynh, often came to Saigon these days. He could arrange for them to meet. Tu had run the air terminal at Pleiku, and he had a wild streak. They’d been close drinking buddies who frequented a restaurant in town called Can Tho, named for the city from which Tu hailed. The owner’s daughter had caught Tu’s eye.

The last time Dzung had seen him had been the final moments of Pleiku’s chaotic evacuation, which Dzung had helped him direct, just before the North Vietnamese Army stormed through in the spring of ’75. Dzung had raced to jump aboard the last plane departing the base, a Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar that had just careened down from the skies. Tu had been beside him, but when Dzung hopped into the rear hatch, the C-119 still rolling, Tu stopped on the tarmac. Dzung yelled for him to jump on. Tu shook his head and shouted that he’d get a ride with a helicopter pilot who was due to return. Dzung figured he knew what he was doing. Apparently he still had something to take care of. He waved to Tu’s diminishing figure as the crowded C-119, having never come to a stop, lifted off again.

The old friends met in secret the next time Tu was in Saigon. It turned out that the helicopter pilot had bailed, and Tu had joined a convoy that was ambushed on its way south. He’d become a prisoner of war, many of whom had been stripped naked and forced to march barefoot dozens of miles to labor camps. Dzung himself had only barely made it back to Saigon. He’d outrun the Northern army by a single day, hopping from base to base before each was captured in turn.

Tu still had the same unruly spirit Dzung remembered. He’d been released from the camps early when his father, who emerged as a communist sleeper agent, had pulled strings. Soon after, Tu had married the Can Tho restaurant owner’s daughter, with whom he now had three young children. Tu asked if Dzung wanted to escape Vietnam with him. He had a fishing boat, he said. Though curious, Dzung wouldn’t commit. His strength was only just returning enough that he could run again.

He wanted to trust Tu despite his father’s treachery, but he wasn’t sure he should believe him. People everywhere were attempting escape. It was a dangerous enterprise riddled with swindlers and traitors. His mother had tried to pay for his passage on his return, but when he, Thomas, and their sisters arrived at the scheduled meeting spot, the organizers called it off with the excuse that communists were lurking. The scam left them in the lurch. Besides, part of him still wanted to stay and fight for a better Vietnam.

Tu translated Dzung’s lack of enthusiasm as disbelief and invited him to his home in Can Tho, where he lived in a shack behind his father’s house with his wife, Bay, and their children. His father had been a governor of the region, but his Northern comrades had ousted all of their Southern agents and replaced them. Though still prominent and influential, he now looked the other way when escapees came through.

The fishing boat bobbed near Can Tho on the lazy Sông Hâu, a muddy green distributary of the Mekong overhung with the nipas, palms and cajuputs of its mangrove banks. Tu explained that he’d attempted to flee with this boat more than a dozen times. One recent capture left him beaten and imprisoned with two of his teeth knocked out. His father’s provincial clout was losing its power to save him. Duc, the fisherman who owned the boat, motored them back and forth on the river while Tu narrated their failures. Dzung was worried someone might be watching them.

When they reached the Hâu’s banks again, Tu turned to Dzung. “Now do you believe me?”

Dzung answered with a smile. “I believe that you have the boat,” he said, “but I still have no idea how we’ll get it to Indonesia.”

Tu said he had lost his navigator, the same helicopter pilot who hadn’t shown at Pleiku. But he still had the map that marked the island of Natuna, a supposedly safe haven for Vietnamese refugees. He was hoping Dzung, the man who had gotten himself and hundreds of others out of Pleiku, would take the helm. He’d never let him down before. And he thought Thomas, whom he’d learned was a mechanic, would be handy on a boat with a dubious engine. These brothers were the sort of men he could count on. “Can you do it?” Tu asked.

Dzung knew how worried his mother was. She wanted her children out of Vietnam, and he felt he owed it to her to try. He’d been through officer candidate school and knew how to use a map and compass. But nautical navigation was different. He’d never even been on open water.

Dzung looked at Tu and nodded. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I can try.”

South China Sea, April 29, 1981

If something goes wrong with this engine, Thomas thought, God help us all. The clanking motor sounded as though it was on its last leg. He could tear apart and rebuild cooling systems, but he was no diesel mechanic. It was their third day at sea, and at this point, he could barely summon the energy to stand.

No one spoke any longer, and nearly all movement in the boat had ceased. Their thirst had grown almost unbearable, a cruel irony surrounded by this endless maw of undrinkable water. In their stupor, Tu had given each passenger a slender slice of lime to suck and a yellow globe of vitamin C. No one had urinated in two days.

Dzung had not moved from his station. The seas were stormless, yet navigation proved taxing work that required absolute concentration. Checking their bearing, tracking the time and consulting the hand drawn map consumed every moment. With no instruments aside from the compass Tu had bought him, all of it was guesswork. He had to trust his calculation, but he knew that only the most direct route would save them from a parched death at sea.

Ban, a young ex-officer of the Armed Forces who was dating Tu’s sister, came up periodically to assist him at the helm. Duc and his fishermen filled the diesel tank at intervals, but they were out of their depth on the open sea. All their lives they see things, Dzung ruminated, watching his sapped passengers who had come from the towns and cities. Now they see nothing but water.

Most still lay sprawled in the hold. Tu’s children, a three-year-old girl, a boy of two and a baby girl only a few months old, squatted in the tiny cabin near the helm with their mother, Bay. Dzung had never heard a sound from any of them. He caught a glimpse of Thomas lying motionless down belowdecks. He thought the worst for a moment but banished the thought. Eventually Thomas stirred.

Around 4 p.m., a French ship crossed their trajectory just shy of the horizon. They’d seen half a dozen others, mostly freighters on the trade line between Singapore and Hong Kong. All had ignored them. This vessel, though massive, didn’t seem to be carrying shipping containers. Dzung called to Tu, who stood observing the ship from the narrow deck. He opened the box of flares. Only one remained. If this one failed to win them aid, they could not count on rescue. Tu angled the gun to the sky and fired. Dzung watched its slow arc, and they waited. The ship continued on its way, and Dzung pushed south. He’d gotten used to it. They’d always been on their own.

But half an hour later he heard the ship’s horn and looked over his shoulder. The French vessel had turned around and was making straight for them. As it neared, its waves rocked their little fishing boat up and down. Thomas and Ban appeared from below. The ship towered over them even at a slight distance. Thomas thought it must be 20 stories high. Ban glassed the Frenchmen, their onetime colonizers, through the binoculars. He could see them on the deck looking back and studying them. Someone rushed to grab something to write on. Thomas, who knew enough French and English from high school, scrawled a message in both languages—“We need water”—and held it aloft.

By now, other passengers had dragged themselves out of the hold and, energized by the thought of rescue, jumped and waved to the foreign vessel. For a moment, they believed they were saved. Then, without warning, the ship turned from them and hauled off the way it had been going. As it did so, it released a load into the sea. Thinking it was a gift of water and perhaps other supplies, Dzung veered after them to retrieve it. As he pulled up to the bobbing load, he and Thomas saw with disgust what it was. The French had dumped a mess of garbage at them and ditched.

At nightfall, an insurmountable exhaustion overcame him. Dzung had been awake in a near trance of hyper-focused navigation for three days. He asked Ban to take over the helm and keep them pointed south while he rested. Descending into the dark hold, he heard Bay’s little boy ask his father why his drink was so bitter. Tu had managed to save some of his own urine for his children and had given them a desperate sip.

The whole crew was in bad shape. Their bodies had suffered and now their spirits ached. According to Dzung’s calculations, Natuna was still a long way off. He felt abandoned, helpless, numb. If they had to make it one more day, he thought they would all surely die.

Saigon, before

Thomas sipped his coffee and regarded the man across from him with suspicion. Viet had asked Thomas to join him for a drink. The two had become friendly, about as close as a citizen of fallen Saigon could get to his communist political instructor.

For the last couple of years, Thomas had worked at an air conditioning factory for an engineer named Minh. Technical skills were in high demand, and Minh’s production of quick-freezing systems, essential for Vietnam’s seafood transport, was among the very few things booming. He’d brought Thomas in as his personal protégé. At night, Thomas sat in the owner’s office and studied the pages Minh had given him to master the ins and outs of air conditioning engineering. He’d stopped biking home each afternoon for a paltry lunch whose sustenance he would burn right through on the ride back to work, and lately he’d taken to sleeping at the factory.

Thomas had proved a quick study, and his success had given the communists the opportunity to use him as an example. Even a son of criminals, a brother of terrorists, can work hard enough to make himself a good citizen. He was sent to political school to be further indoctrinated in the eminence of communism.

Viet now sat across from Thomas and studied his student. His family was well connected in the north, and he had been educated for a time in the Soviet Union. The two had talked often, and by now Thomas had mastered the art of evasive conversation.

His instructor leaned in. “What do you think of the material you’ve received in the classroom?”

“Whatever you say,” Thomas responded, “I try to take it in and understand it.”

Viet looked at him before going on. “Can I trust you?” Thomas’s heart drummed a few beats. “What I’m about to say to you should never reach another person’s ear.” Thomas assured him that he was not the sort of guy to blabber. Viet held his tongue for a moment and looked around him before leaning closer. “You know that everything I’ve taught you is bullshit, right? It’s all lies.”

Communism was too good to be true, he confessed. One might think it possible to build a society that’s one for all and all for one, but it doesn’t happen that way. Greed is too entrenched in the human spirit.

When he was in the Soviet Union, Viet explained, he heard about stockpiles of all the books that had been eradicated from society and left to rot. He never saw them with his own eyes, but the rumor had opened them. “What books?” Thomas wondered. When the communists took over, they’d closed all of Saigon’s bookstores. You couldn’t find anything printed before 1975. Exactly, his indoctrinator rejoined. No one was even attempting to liberate the proletariat. The regime’s aim was to mold a single, mindless class subject to its masters’ appetites.

Thomas had already intuited that Saigon held no future for him. But if even this man, his political instructor, did not believe his own words, then Thomas would have to take matters more firmly into his own hands. One spring day, Dzung pulled Thomas aside, told him about a boat, and whispered the name of an island.

Natuna Sea, April 30, 1981

Ban’s shout woke Dzung a few hours after he’d gone to sleep in the fish hold. “Land! Land! I see land!” Dzung was confused. It was 2 a.m. They shouldn’t reach Natuna before the end of the day before them.

Faint black shadows wrinkled the otherwise smooth horizon to the west. If it was anything, it had to be a coral island Dzung had noticed marked on the map. A few of the other men insisted on turning west and exploring whatever was there. Heading off course would gamble their lives, and time was short. Dzung knew the map and helm best. They looked to him to decide, but he felt himself faltering.

He remembered an officer who had interrogated him on his family history at one of the camps. “You’re just like your father and your grandfather,” the officer had accused afterwards. “A heavy sinner.”

“The egg of a worm will become a worm,” Dzung had rejoined, “and the egg of a dragon will become a dragon.”

Dzung knew his passengers were desperate now and thought of his imprisoned father, who was no worm. He steeled himself and steered toward the western shadow.

The island’s black silhouette loomed a few hours later. Coral glittered beneath them in the plunging sliver of moonlight. Dzung killed the engine. The craggy strand looked neither inhabited nor inviting. Tilted in the distance against the rocks near shore lay a massive, half sunken rusted ship, likely an abandoned wreck from WWII. Dzung thought rainwater might have puddled there, enough to collect and refresh them. He recruited Tu, Duc and Ban, and they dove into the shimmering water with a few jugs strapped to them on leashes. The water they found in the ship’s crevices was green and clouded with slimy moss, but they could boil it. They filled their jugs and swam back to the boat. Day was drawing close. The horizon subtly lightened.

Duc started the engine, and Dzung began to reverse them out of the shoals, worried he’d clip the propeller on a hunk of coral. The island’s shadow receded a hair on the verge of dawn.

Then a dog barked. Dzung eyed the still-dark rock jutting from calm water. A rooster crowed. He and Tu regarded one another. There must be people living on this island, whatever it was.

Thomas crawled from the hold, and the sight of a cliff wall barely fifty yards off startled him. He thought they were going to ram it.

Dzung steered them around to the far side of the island after the sun rose. Coconut trees hung in the windless morning, and a fishing village eventually materialized on the shore. Ban looked through the binoculars. He was alarmed to scope a drooping bloodred flag. “Oh god, they’re communists!” For a moment, they panicked. Then it fluttered and opened to reveal Indonesia’s red and white standard.

Dzung was amazed. He had been right about the fishing boat’s speed. Traveling faster than he’d allowed for in his calculations, they’d overshot their turn south, which had put them east of their mark. They’d nearly scudded past their destination in the almost moonless dark.

A fisherman pointed to them from his sampan floating in the bay and shouted. “Saigon! Saigon! Saigon!” Dzung jumped overboard, swam over to him and pointed to his sandpapery mouth. The man offered him a scoop of freshwater in half a coconut husk. Dzung had never tasted water so sweet. He felt it seep into his body’s every cell and replenish him.

The crew cheered when a large boat full of locals who worked with the United Nations sped over and lashed their fishing boat to its gunwale to ferry them to shore. They had reached Natuna island. Dzung hadn’t lost a single person. The date was April 30, six years to the day after Saigon fell and they’d lost the war.

Thomas climbed numbly out of the boat and onto the sandy beach. Neither he nor Dzung knew what to feel. They’d been disappointed and on guard for so many years. It was hard to trust a promise, and though each felt a deep kinship with the other, they were out of practice exercising their emotions.

But they knew this: Together they had made the unlikeliest of journeys. Together they had found refuge. If they faced a daunting prospect as castaways spat from the sea and with no home to return to, they faced that together, too.

In that, there was hope.

NICK DAVIDSON is a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based storyteller, musician, yogi, and martial artist.

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