What Makes America Different? Kahn's Story

Stories That Shouldn't Die With Me

My wife and I spent a winter in our motor home five years ago in Missoula, Montana. We parked it in my youngest daughter’s driveway. We watched her newborn, a real preemie, while she worked and her husband finished grad school. Montana is cold in the winter. I told my wife I’d just put some hay bales around the bottom to keep the cold out from under the bus, as we called it.

My family has always rallied to help, so my daughter came up from Utah one weekend in November to help put the bales in place. After two bales, my daughter came over, put her arm around me, and said, “Dad, you haven’t done anything this tacky in your life. Don’t be a cheapskate. Go get a skirt made for the bus.” She was right, and that led to my meeting Khan.

On Monday, I found a tent-making business that said it could make a skirt that snapped on the motorhome. A tentmaker? I was skeptical. When I arrived, some workers showed me around the shop and told me I had to wait for the owner. In walks a small, smiling Vietnamese man named Khan.

Khan was meticulous. He measured and drew every wheel well and exhaust pipe and turned around the entire perimeter of the coach. All the while, he was happy and assuring me that he could make it perfect. And two weeks later, when I picked it up, it was terrific. It fit exactly right, the color matched the coach, and honestly, I couldn’t believe it. It was superb work.

For those two weeks, I stopped in to check on things and talked with Khan. I told him I was a Marine in Nam and asked when he came to America. First, he thanked me for fighting for his country, and then he told me his family’s incredible, joyous, and heartbreaking story.

He grew up in Saigon. His father was a merchant with several shops, and he said they lived well by Vietnamese standards. He had a sister and a twin brother. He and his brother wanted to enter the Vietnamese Navy, and his father tried to send them to France for college. While contentious at times, the boys went to school in Saigon and joined the Navy.

On the day of the infamous picture of the helicopter evacuating people from the embassy roof in 1975, he and his brother were on board two different ships. When they received word of the fall of Saigon, his boat turned and headed away from Vietnam. He recounted his feelings of trepidation because they did not know where they were going, just that they weren’t returning. His brothers’ ship decided to head to the port in Saigon and take their chances.

They intersected with a US Navy ship on the third day of heading to sea. The US ship took them all on board, and they sank their Vietnamese vessel. Khan and his crew were taken to the Philippines and placed in refugee status, where they remained for over two years. He eventually came to California, where he stayed for a few years before moving with his wife to Missoula.

I asked if he’d stayed in touch and returned to visit his family. He had, but not until the 2000s. When the communists took over, they took all of his father’s businesses and the family home and seized all his money. He was placed in a ‘reeducation camp’ where he remained for thirty years. Khan’s mother and sister were banished to the streets. They eventually swapped roles as his sister married, and she and her husband cared for their Mom.

His brother and shipmates were rewarded for returning with a 10-year sentence of hard labor. Their crime was being in the South Vietnamese military. He survived but was forbidden to work for the rest of his life. Working requires a government permit, and he can never have one. His sister and her husband take care of his brother. Khan said he always dreamed of bringing them all to America.

On his return visit, he had the government assign an official to accompany him. With tears in his eyes and his voice quivering, Kahn said, “My brother and father are broken men.” He said his reunion was bittersweet. His father said it was too late for him in America. Neither his father nor brother would have been permitted to leave, and his sister wouldn’t leave them. So Khan came home alone.

Khan was an engineer by education when he arrived here. He didn’t speak English well enough to work as an engineer, so he said, “I did what I had to do to survive. I have always found a way to work for myself.” His tent business was impressive, just as he was. He married and raised two kids.

As we parted, he said something I’ll never forget. “Mr. Kugler, we just have to all make the best of what life brings our way.”