Anh Nguyen

Anh Nguyen, 63, was born and raised in Hue province in central Vietnam. He was a captain in the army of South Vietnam fighting the Communists, who imprisoned him for seven years after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 2, 2002

Click here to enter gallery Click a name to read each survivor's story: • Germaine Pitchon • Huynh Hai • Ramon Liceas Frias • Muharema Jerkic • Daniel Agau • Anh Nguyen

TEMPLE TERRACE -- In those days, when he was a dashing young captain in the South Vietnamese army -- Anh Nguyen likes to brag -- he lifted 100-pound shells.

When he walked out of a Communist prison years later, he weighed less than one of those shells.

"At least every morning, I'd hear someone dying," Nguyen says of his seven years as a prisoner of war.

Now, to calm his soul, he pens his ordeal in a notebook, which he twists in his hands. Its lined pages show neat handwriting and looped letters in both English and Vietnamese.

"The first few months, I thought about my wife and kids," he says of prison. "Later on, we were so hungry. We did not believe we'd survive through all this hell."

Guards kicked him in the stomach for eating roots and insects. He buried friends who died of sickness and suicide. With a bloated belly and on swollen knees, he hauled wood on his back for 12 hours a day, "as buffalo which plows fields," he wrote in his journal.

When Nguyen arrived as a refugee in Florida in 1996, he was a small switch of a man with a hole in his stomach the size of a dime.

Even after his wife and five children joined him in the United States, the only thing he could do to ease the demons in his mind was stand on his head against the wall and cry. He would wake from nightmares, screaming.

In support groups at Northside Mental Health Center in North Tampa, Nguyen began to open up. He wrote down his nightmares and his life history. He also started playing guitar. His family bought him a karaoke machine.

Sept. 11 brought his nightmares back until he followed a therapist's advice to stop watching the television.

Now Nguyen laughs bashfully at his home as he plays a tune on the guitar, passing the instrument off to one of his sons.

"I try to quiet down my anger. If I speak out, I feel better," he says.

"I do see a bright future. My wife is working, my son is working, the youngest is going to college. They will have more, and that brings consolation."

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