I often tell people that I grew up in Vietnam. That's true in more ways than one. I was still very
young and inexperienced when I joined the Army. Somehow, 18 months in Germany didn't cure that.
It was the war in Vietnam that forced me to grow up.
I was stationed in a former Catholic Seminary just outside of the village of My Tho in the Mekong Delta. We provided support to the Seventh ARVN Infantry Division. I think it's lucky that I wasn't stationed in some big American base camp somewhere isolated from the Vietnamese people. For, more than anything else, Vietnam taught me empathy. It's a lesson I couldn't have learned if I had been surrounded by American troops all the time. The attitude I heard coming from them, unfortunately, was that killing a Gook wasn't the same thing as killing a human (Yes, I actually heard that). I think some of the fundamantal psychological weapons of warfare are racism and the de-humanization of your adversaries. But if you had any meaningful contact with Vietnamese people you held a different perspective.
I started carrying pockets full of candy and chewing gum for the kids. Even though my Vietnamese wasn't good, I learned that the respectful way to greet an older woman was "Chau Ba" and you showed respect to an old man by greeting him with "Chau Anh". I learned that if you treated people with respect, they appreciated that and treated you the same way. But mostly I learned that I was not the most unfortunate person in the world. Regardless of how wrapped up I had been in my plight, these people in this distant war torn land had it worse than I or most Americans could even begin to understand. In short, Vietnam forced me to stop feeling sorry for myself and to grow up.
Vietnam instilled in me a commitment to service. The Nobel Prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore expressed it very clearly when he stated: "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy." So I came back from Vietnam with the idea that the best way to heal myself was to help others less fortunate than me.
Thus began my hippie years. When I came back from the war I dedicated myself to the anti-war movement.
I lived in a political collective that organized around the anti-war issue. When I wasn't making
posters for anti-war protests or posting fliers announcing the next demonstration I volunteered to
read to blind students. In those days most of the college textbooks weren't available in braille, and
the cassette recorder hadn't been invented yet. So the only way for blind students to go to college
was to pay readers to read their textbooks to them. Of course, most of them couldn't afford that.
So I volunteered. I spent many years doing that, and in the process got to round out my own
self-education a bit.
But there was more. I was always volunteering. I worked with the Omega Boys Club of the East Bay, an adjunct of the well known Omega Boys Club of San Francisco. What we did was target African American kids locked up in Juvenile Hall (mostly for drug or gang related offences). We tried to let them know that it was never too late to start over. I conducted the Omega meetings at Los Cerros Camp in San Leandro, one of the Juvenile detention facilities that served the Oakland California area. When kids did well in the program we tried to get them involved in the weekly Omega meetings when they were released as well as in the evening academic classes we taught. The ultimate prize was an Omega Scholarship to a Historically Black College or University. I ran the Omega meetings at Los Cerros camp for 7 years. During my tenure with the club, Omega sponsored over 100 kids in 4 year colleges through the Omega Scholarship Program. Most of these were recruited out of the juvenile justice system. The Omega Boys Club has now graduated over 250 kids from 4 year universities.
Finally in 1991 I had an opportunity to go back to Vietnam. This time the trip would be with a group of
doctors from World Health Organization and Médecins sans Frontières who were dealing with an
epidemic of Rheumatic Fever in Vietnam. It was killing kids by the thousands. They needed a computer
geek to go with them, and well, they just don't come any geekier than me! Vietnam was a mess, it was
worse than during the war. They were just pulling out of a famine in the Mekong Delta, and I saw kids in
the hospitals that looked just like those photos of the famine victims in Ethiopia - totally skeletal
with distended bellies and vacant looks in their eyes. Then there was the epidemic on top of that.
Imagine rooms the size of basketball courts with rows and columns of "beds" (wooden platforms really)
closely packed with three kids head to foot on each bed. All dying from Rheumatic Fever induced heart
failure.
It was on this trip that I first met Pham Van Hung, an 11 year old homeless orphan boy living on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Because he wasn't used to eating well, he was very small for his age. He had never been to school. But he was quick, and there was something about him that I just knew, for certain, was special. He had a quickness, an inquisitiveness that just made him stand out from the other street kids. So I found a family in the Mekong Delta that had other kids his age and told the parents I'd send Western Union Moneygrams for his support directly to them if they would take care of him. To make a long story short, they did, and I did. We both held up our ends of that contract for the next 13 years.
Hung was a stellar student and eventually went to college at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology. In four years he earned two degrees, one in Computer Science and one in English. And he graduated at the top of his class. He went on to work with a firm asssociated with the WiMAX Consortium. WiMAX will be called the 4G cellular network here in the US. It should be deployed in the largest 80 American cities by the end of 2010 and will bring DSL speeds to your cellular devices. Hung helped write the specifications for the WiMAX standard. Currently he is working in Melbourne Australia where he writes the embedded software for Nokia cell phones.
Hung calls me Ba (which means father). I call him Con Trai Một (which means Number One Son).
