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AUCKLAND — Twenty-three years ago the life of Vietnamese Community chaplain, Fr Andrew Nguyen, was transformed.
On June 6, 1990, Fr Nguyen arrived in New Zealand to a life of peace and freedom, after a life of war, repression, imprisonment and torture.
Speaking of that day in 1990, he told NZ Catholic: “I was very happy, very happy, because I came to a free country.”
Fr Nguyen was born in South Vietnam in 1943, when the country was under French colonial rule.
The leader of the communists, Ho Chi Minh, presented himself as a patriot against South Vietnam’s French rulers, Fr Nguyen said.
“But after the French left our country, Ho Chi Minh brought the communists to Vietnam,” he said. “He’s worse than the French colonial thugs. He’s a very cunning man.”
In Fr Nguyen’s first year at the seminary, in 1963, a coup d’etat killed the president of South Vietnam. South Vietnam sided with the Americans and North Vietnam with Russia and China.
“Two years later the Americans started to pour troops into Vietnam,” Fr Nguyen said. At the height of the Vietnam War, the United States had half a million troops in the country.
Millions of civilians died, as well as 54,000 American troops and about 35 or so New Zealanders soldiers.
The communists destroyed Buddhist temples and Catholic churches, said Fr Nguyen. But he was lucky, because when he was young, most education was in the Church.
“My family was Catholic and [I] got a very good education from the Church . . . and secondary school was a Church school.”
He was ordained in 1970. War was raging everywhere. “All my life that was war . . . all the time. I witnessed all sorts of crime through war — killings, beheadings.
“And war continued until 1973 — and at that time the Americans, they shook hands with China already and they sacrificed South Vietnam, because it means nothing to the Americans. Continue reading
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