Surrounded by the death and chaos of the Vietnam War as children, Alexander and Janette Tam shared their survival stories of near-death attacks from pirates with swords and communist guerilla fighters, to their escape on boats and airplanes through three different countries to arrive in the United States, where the former BYU–Hawaii missionary couple first met.
Sister Janette Tam said during the Vietnam War, she and her family were filled with fear and uncertainty. “I was 16 at the time, and my family was afraid I would be drafted. [The government] didn’t care if you were a woman or a man. As long as you could hold a gun, they would take you. … It was chaos. We were glued to the radio station and the TV to find out what happened. Everyone wanted to escape. You can imagine people running everywhere trying to escape.”
Under communist occupation
Elder Alexander Tam said he was born in 1955 in a remote central Vietnamese village 40 miles south of the border dividing the country. The communists occupied the North, and the republic ruled the South, he explained.
Near the dividing border, Elder Tam said he grew up watching battles fought in his backyard. “We lived in a war. We saw the fighting every day. Sometimes it was even fun for us as children to see the war only a mile away. It was like entertainment.”
In 1967, Elder Tam said the communists from the North occupied his village in the night. “They would come in the middle of the night to draft men who were old enough to carry a gun in their army,” explained Elder Tam, who was 12 years old at the time.
The following year, Elder Tam said he enjoyed a three-day cease-fire to celebrate Tet, Vietnam’s Lunar New Year. Not a minute after the new year, Elder Tam said communist guerrilla fighters banged on his door and forced the young family out into the rice fields in the dead of night.
“It was dark, totally dark, and we walked toward the village’s gate. Behind us were the guerrillas with their guns urging us to march forward.” Elder Tam said he saw streaks of light shooting toward them and heard the sound of machine guns. “We were used as human shields,” he said. Elder Tam said he and his family laid cold and wet in the muddy rice paddy; the threat of leeches in the fields was as imminent as the gunshots fired above their heads. “I don’t recall how long the gunshot exchange lasted, but it seemed like an eternity.”
The following day, after the fighting subsided, he said his family discovered his toddler sister covered in blood. She had been shot in the arm and lost consciousness. “We took her to the clinic nearby, and they bandaged her arm. We were blessed that her injury was not life-threatening.”
For the next four weeks, Elder Tam said the communists bombarded the city two miles away from his village. He said the communists occupying his city were violent. “They killed a lot of people. Four or five hundred people were buried alive because they were part of the Southern government.
“They came and knocked on the door, and if they were part of the Southern military, they’d say, ‘Here’s a shovel, you dig your own grave,’ and they’d bury them alive,” Elder Tam described.
As a teenager, Tam said his everyday life included witnessing convoys of army trucks carrying coffins from the battlefield to the city and nightly shelling bombardments. He said he slept in a bunker every night praying the roof over his head would still be standing the next morning.
Life in the South
Six hundred miles south of Vietnam’s dividing border in Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, Sister Janette Tam said she also faced the effects of living in a war-torn country. Sister Tam said she was 13 years old, the oldest daughter in a family of four, when Northern Vietnam invaded the South in 1975. Over the next three years, she said her family lived under communist rule and in constant fear.
“They killed people. They buried them alive. They saw how rich the people of the South were at the time, and they would frame them so they could imprison them and take their house.” Sister Tam said her family was not wealthy, but her father was a retired policeman, which she said meant trouble.
According to Sister Tam, there was a rumor of more war coming to Vietnam. As a result, the communist government started to draft young people. Fearing the draft, Sister Tam said her family planned to flee the country any way they could.
At the time, thousands of people were equally desperate to leave Vietnam. From this distress, the “Boat People” emerged, Sister Tam explained.
The Boat People
Thousands of Southern Vietnamese people like Sister Tam sold everything they had to pay their fare for a boat ride out of Vietnam, she said. They became refugees, willing to travel on any boat, to any destination, as long as it was not Vietnam.
Elder Tam said refugees traveled to Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, praying they would arrive safely and could immigrate to the United States, Canada, Australia or Europe.
Mason Sansonia, from The Borgen Project, writes, “An estimated 62,000 Vietnamese Boat People sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia by 1978. This number rose to 350,000 by mid-1979, with another 200,000 having moved to permanent residence in other countries.”
These Boat People faced countless dangers on their journeys away from Vietnam, Sister Tam said. “Often, the boats were too small and ill-equipped for a long journey.
“Most of the time [the passengers] got killed or raped by [Thai] fishermen. The pirates saw these vulnerable people and, instead of helping, they would take advantage of them.”
Sister Tam’s family made plans to send her and her father on a Chinese export boat. She said it cost them 20 thin, one-ounce sheets of pure gold to pay their fare, and there was not enough money to bring the whole family.
Sister Tam said she and her father made fake Chinese papers and went by fake Chinese names to get on the boat. Everything had to be secret so the government would not know their escape plans. She said to be safe, they would not “say anything straight out. ... I did not know I would be leaving my family. We had to keep it a secret ... so they did not tell me.”
Sister Tam said she packed a backpack with some clothes and said goodbye to her loved ones, not realizing the permanence of her voyage. “This is like a journey where you step into the unknown. We prepared as much as we could.”
Sister Tam’s escape by boat
The three-tiered boat she escaped on was about 1,500 square feet and housed more than 300 refugees, Sister Tam said. “It was like a slave ship. A lot of people wanted to escape [the country]. We would do anything for the price of freedom.”
The boat traveled south toward Malaysia and, while they were in the South China Sea, Sister Tam said her boat was approached by a ship of Thai pirates. The pirates were armed with swords and weapons, but no guns, she said. On her boat, they had one small pistol. “[We] pointed it out and said, ‘Don’t come close! We have a gun!’ So, they were scared and they left us alone. Otherwise, I would be history.”
After two weeks of sea travel, Sister Tam said she arrived to a small island in Indonesia. Fearing the Indonesians would send them away because so many refugees had come before them, the passengers waited until low tide. She said they dug a hole in the bottom of the boat to ensure they would not be able to leave Indonesia. Then, as they sank, they raised the white flag, putting themselves at the mercy of those on the shore.
Fortunately, the island’s inhabitants welcomed the refugees sympathetically, she said. She and her fellow passengers rejoiced to be on land. “Everyone was yelling in gratitude ‘Oh yeah! We’re alive!’” Sister Tam recalled.
Elder Tam’s escape by plane
Meanwhile, in the North, Elder Tam said he enlisted in the Vietnamese Air Force at 17 years old and worked as an auto mechanic for a few years. When Northern Vietnam invaded the South in 1975, he was ordered to move to Saigon and then to Bien Hoa, 20 miles from Southern Vietnam’s capital.
“On Monday, April 28 of 1975, our base [in Bien Hoa] was bombarded for two days,” he said. He and his comrades decided to leave. They found a runway where Elder Tam took a cargo helicopter 20 miles away to a new base, Sai Gon, where he met his cousin.
The next day, Elder Tam said the Sai Gon base was bombarded, and he and his cousin fled to the city outside of the airbase by running through the runway of the airport. There, they found choas. Fires burned. People ran in panic while cargo planes slowly taxied around. Tam said he and his cousin found a huge C130 cargo plane with the rim of the airplane open. Hundreds of Air Force members and their families, men, women and children, ran and jumped on the airplane. Elder Tam joined them.
“It was open, so we jumped on it. There were more than 200 people on board the plane,” Elder Tam said. “We couldn’t even sit down. It was packed.” They flew three hours to an unknown destination, trusting that wherever they landed would be safer than where they came from.
They arrived at an American Air Force base called U-Tapao in Thailand. Elder Tam said he realized that night he would never see his family again. “I couldn’t sleep. I was too homesick. I was very, very sad. I turned on the radio Wednesday, April 30, 1975 and found out the communists had already taken over the country.”
With the help of the United States, Elder Tam said he left Thailand and found his way to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. There, he said he befriended a captain who was a member of the Church.
The captain found Elder Tam a sponsor family, the Ellis’ from Provo, Utah, who were also members of the Church. Elder Tam studied at Utah Technical College, now Utah Valley University, to become an electrical engineer. He said he took the missionary lessons and was baptized as a member of the Church.
Journey to America
Sister Tam said she and her father stayed in Indonesia for nine months, where they spoke with representatives from the United States. She said they made their way to Santa Clara, Calif., where a friend of her father’s sponsored them.
Sister Tam graduated high school and attended Mission College in Santa Clara. “I had to deal with a new culture, a new language and a new environment. I was really sad. I missed my family. Every night, I dreamt of going back and visiting my family.”
At the time, communist Vietnam had no contact with the United States and letters would take months to arrive. “We had to accept we would probably never meet each other again. That thought was killing,” Sister Tam said.
Lonely, Sister Tam said she turned to prayer for comfort, though she didn’t belong to an organized faith at the time. “I prayed a lot. I was like, ‘Please send me a friend. I’m so lonesome.’”
Elder Tam was studying at Santa Clara University to get his master’s in electrical engineering, and he said he went to Mission College at night to learn how to play piano.
Sister Tam said she started taking a piano class as well. One day before class, she was playing prelude music, and “Elder Tam walked in. All of a sudden, I looked up, and I saw his back. There was a voice telling me clearly in my ear, ‘He’s the one. He will take care of you for the rest of your life.’”
The Tams dated and were married in 1984, they said. Sister Tam explained she took lessons from the missionaries and was baptized while she was pregnant with their first child. After fleeing Vietnam, Sister Tam reunited with her mother and the rest of her family in 1989 and Elder Tam with his two sisters and one brother and their families in 2009. •