Friday, May 12, 1972
The River Of Refugees Keeps Running
by Hugh Mulligan
DA NANG, Vietnam (AP) --Vietnam's great river of sorrow is at flood tide again as hundreds of thousands of refugees stream out of their homes and villages, away from the enemy, away from the bombings and the artillery barrages.By boat and army truck, they come in an endless flow of misery, on foot, on motorbikes, on incredibly overloaded buses from places that are no more. Dong Ha. Quang Tri. Cam Lo.Da Nang is the mouth of the great river; more than 300,000 homeless have poured into the lovely old French port at the bottom of the 3,000-foot-high Hai Van Pass, the Pass of the Clouds.Some never get there at all.The carcasses of two Army trucks and a bus that once ran from Dong Ha to Hue to Da Nang lie in deep ravines among a rubble of shattered crates and suitcases, mute testimony to the treacherous curves on the winding, climbing road through the pass.A few days ago a wooden and straw junk, loaded with 110 refugees, capsized and sank in a storm along the coast.American civilians working with Vietnamese welfare officials estimate 250,000 persons are trapped in the northern villages between the new front line, above Hue, and the Demilitarized Zone.Camp Books, which the U.S. 1st Marine Div. vacated two years ago, is a ghost town come back to life. Families from Dong Ha and Cam Lo, which the Marines once secured and pacified, hang their washing and cook their noonday rice in the screened-in barracks still bearing the signs: "Gunnery Sergeant's Hooch," "Exchange Laundry Shop," "Personnel Decon Station," "A Co. Mess Hall."For some, from the country, the living is easier than they have ever known: electricity, fresh water, plumbing, housing with tin roofs, wooden floors and screens. Vietnamese public health officers visit the eight military camps reclaimed from the past, lecturing the people on how to use the toilets.The best-organized refugee canter is Camp Land, a former U.S. prison stockade still with watchtowers and 12-foot-high concertinas of triple mesh barbed wire. The camp's Self-Government Committee, meeting in what once was the warden's office, has organized bus service into town, schooling for the children and a project of straw hat-making to raise some community funds.The biggest problem is trying to persuade refugees to move out of the Catholic schoolyards and Buddhist pagodas downtown and into the camps, for the people are reluctant to leave their priests or monks.On the road into Da Nang, by the old French port at the top of the Pass of the Clouds, little girls in colonial hats sell slices of watermelon and loaves of French bread to the homeless hordes.The few personal possessions that the refugees carry on their backs or sling across the radiators show a bizarre and pathetic range of priorities: a large fishing net. An electric fan. Two sewing machines. A barber chair. A large wooden bed, almost hiding the jeep beneath it. Two love birds in a cage. A favorite cooking pot. And lashed to the tops and the tailboards of almost every truck winding up through the pass, a tangle of motorbikes and bicycles.Everywhere, children of all sizes, the big ones carrying the little ones, mothers breast-feeding the infants on the back-boards of two-and-a-half-ton trucks.Da Nang, its population almost doubled by the influx of refugees, has become a vast open central market, where food is plentiful and, for the moment, money, too. Fresh spring vegetables reached the city just in time to miss being swallowed up by the Communists' offensive. There is plenty of rice, thanks to stockpiling after last year's typhoon and floods. All nine bakeries have gone on overtime shifts to supply bread to the refugees under an emergency government program.The lull in the fighting has resulted in a small reverse flow of refugees, back over the pass toward Hue and the villages in between."The same thing happened just before Quang Tri fell," said Tom Estrada, senior U.S. civilian working with refugees in Da Nang. "The government so far hasn't discouraged them from going back, but the military knows the battle of Hue had yet to be fought, and the city is now nearly empty of civilian traffic to provide freedom of movement for military vehicles. They'd be better off waiting."On a temporary basis, Da Nang and its huge bases left by the Americans can house another 100,000 refugees, but the city has nothing to offer in the way of work. The American troop withdrawal already has caused an economic recession, and there are no industries of any kind."The big job will be finding something for the people to do," said a U.S. social worker. "When the money they brought with them runs out, the curbside markets will vanish and everyone will be dependent on government handouts of rice and cooking oil.""The River of Refugees Keeps Running", by Hugh Mulligan, published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes on Friday, May 12, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.