The Butcher! The Killer! The Playboy Assassin! Leaping from the cockpit of his fighter jet in a heroic black jump suit, his lithe body strung like a bow, his lavender silk scarf trailing war mythology like a Sam Peckinpah dream… the day he nearly got it leading the bombing raid but the guy next to him took the bullet, spilling his guts like Beefaroni… the time he buried his comrades with his own hands and then, drunk on good French wine, sat all night in a Saigon disco staring at the wall with beautiful Miss Mai on his arm.…. Lord, the tales the man has lived, and oh, the troubles he has seen. The Viet Cong, who had this thing about firebombing his house (they tried seven times and made it twice, but he was out rocking and rolling); the Buddhists, who pretended to be a bunch of bald sweeties, interested only in the White Light (never political, those Buddhists), but who wanted to take away his power as surely as Ellsworth Bunker or President Thieu did; the American press and students, those misled Com symps, who pictured him as the Butcher, the Killer, the Man Who Invented the Tiger Cages, the Adolph Hitler groupie in the first place.…
Nguyen (pronounced “win”) Cao (pronounced “cow”) Ky is the former air marshal, former vice president, former strongman of Vietnam, hated equally by liberals, radicals, right-wingers and good folks everywhere. He was prime minister of Vietnam at thirty-five, a job that lasted for two of the bloodiest years of the war, 1965–1967, back when we still thought we could win, but he was ousted by Nguyen Van Thieu; Ky then served the last seven years of the war as VP… and when he finally did leave (on the next to last day of fighting, April 29, 1975), he was purported to have made off with a huge amount of cash. According to the popular tales, Ky has (a) salted away his bucks in Swiss/Caribbean banks, (b) laundered them, (c) invested, through his wife, Miss Mai, in Hawaiian land deals. But the fact of the matter is that Marshal Ky has settled, amid a huge colony of poorer Vietnamese ex-patriate, in Huntington Beach, California, the surfing capital of America, just south of Los Angeles, and is about to open a liquor store. Reluctantly, he is trying to adjust.….
Marshal Ky cruises the living room of his new $107,000 stone home. His living room is tastefully furnished. A glass-top coffee table with chrome legs, a classy-looking abstract painting, a huge white sofa. Chic, monochromatic, in the manner of the waiting room at the William Morris Agency. The only contrast is Marshal Ky himself. It’s been ten years since his jump suit days, but he still cuts a dashing figure. He has on a black leather jacket, a blue turtleneck, handsome cotton and silk pants tapering down nicely to hundred-and-fifty-dollar Spanish boots.…. But Ky looks troubled. His movements have a predatory quality. Strange depressions come to him. Sometimes he will walk back and forth across his rug thirty or forty times… walk down past the kitchen and the TV room where his daughters or son are watching The Munsters or Gilligan’s Island… and he will open the sliding door, and go out back and stare at his roses… the sight of them makes him feel an insufferable joy. For though he has grown them himself, in the warm California sun, the truth is he cannot look at them without thinking of the flowers of Vietnam… and then he knows such longing, such loss, that he must go back inside and call Tony Lam, his PR man, or Big Jack Hanshaw, the liquor king of Huntington Beach and his financial adviser and best American buddy, and ask them if they still plan on playing tennis that afternoon… though he already knows they do.
Today, his depression has been particularly rough. He is not only nostalgic, but worried about the future. Miss Mai is over at Hanshaw’s Liquors working eight hours with Big Jack so she will know the business when they start running their own liquor store. Marshal Ky isn’t sure Miss Mai can handle the chores and still be a mother to his children. He wonders if they shouldn’t have taken the car wash business after all. At least the hours are regular. Deep gloom: “How can I end up in Orange County, selling liquor to Americans?”
Two years ago Marshal Ky lived in the vice presidential palace in Vietnam. He had ten servants, four drivers, five official cars, a private tailor for himself and Miss Mai, a private chef… the list goes on. Now he is about to run a liquor store. But he is not without a sense of humor. What would make the bastards laugh? Air Marshal Ky’s Cut Rate Liquors? Plastique Liquors? Oh, the haplessness of it. Still it’s better than hustling burgers.
Talk about your mid-life crisis. Marshal Ky is a forty-six-year-old deposed dictator with a Negro growing in his living room. Each night now, Ky watches his son Dat, twenty-one, change from a nice, polite, traditionally minded ruling-class Vietnamese lad into a crazy-quilt kid, neither Vietnamese nor American. Ky is not rigid. He expected his children to become somewhat Americanized. He even told Tony Lam: “We must blend in here, or we will be crushed.” To that end, he changed his daughters’ names. Van, eleven, is now Jennifer; Tuan, fourteen, is now Jackie. But this other stuff! Marshal Ky didn’t know how frightening the process would be. He didn’t know Dat was going to be talking trash like some badassed muther from down de block. Ky didn’t think the day would come when he would say: “Dat, my son, what are you doing tonight?” and Dat would answer: “Hey, I’m going up de club wif my man Jack, you dig, Marshal Ky, baby?” My God! All of Ky’s liberal social attitudes, the ones he’s tried so hard to cultivate, get swept aside when he hears such talk. And it’s how Dat is picking up this stuff. It’s not as if the boy knows any blacks. Huntington Beach isn’t exactly integrated. Dat is talking black because he watches Good Times on TV, and has subconsciously picked up Jimmie Walker’s jive.…. Marshal Ky’s big fear, the one he doesn’t even like to think about, is that TV is wiping out hundreds of years of tradition easier and more absolutely than a million Viet Cong ever could. And not only is Dat talking like J. J. Walker, but his way of carrying himself, his slinky bopping and prancing through the house suggests… the Unthinkable… the kid isn’t even turning into a real black man, but into a television ghost of a ghost… and that way lies true madness.….
Marshal Ky is in the car with his family. They are driving into the Huntington Beach hinterlands, like any red-blooded American family. They are going to the Sizzler Steak House for dinner. Marshal Ky likes the Sizzler. You get a nice meal, and it’s quick and efficient. Sitting on the benches with his family around him, Ky feels the blues shaking away. Except to get to the Sizzler you have to fight the Battle of the CB. Once on the Freeway, Dat likes to get on the citizens’ band and make all kinds of bizarre noises. And the girls go crazy, too. Seeing all his kids hanging on that damned toy, talking to the rednecks, really gets Ky:
“This here is Red Dragon old buddy.…. Yeah, Red Dragon on the horn. There’s a beaver where?… Down at the corner of Golden State standing outside of Oscar Wilde’s? Check, old buddy, Breaker Five.”
When Marshal Ky hears this stuff he begins to feel a freezing sensation… the Red Dragon! That might have been the name of a fighter jet. Now it’s the name of his family car. When your car becomes the Red Dragon, what can that mean? Dat defends the CB on the grounds that it puts him in touch with “what’s happening” in town, what “excitements” are going down.…. Ky doesn’t even know how to reply. The incredible ease with which Americans can be introduced to strangers, to aimless, promiscuous Fun, goes against everything Vietnamese. One huge gulp by the red, white, and blue dragon of goofiness and Dat is gone. One day a Negro, next day a redneck. Ky’s face grows as grim as a bomber pilot’s.
At the Sizzler, Marshal Ky tries to relax. He goes through the line, gets his steak, his baked potato, and sits down, preparing to Eat American. But just as he is about to pop that first juicy bite of steaming Sizzler into his mouth, he looks up and there is a little girl next to him. She is standing there looking as cute as an advertisement. She is smiling shyly. Marshal Ky puts down his fork. Behind the little girl are two middle-aged Californians wearing identical pale green leisure suits.
“Go ahead, Julie,” the man says, his glasses reflecting blue Sizzler lights in weird angles, strange patterns.
“Gosh,” says Julie. “My granddaddy says you are President Ky. I would like to have your autograph.”
Marshal Ky smiles and looks around at Dat and Jennifer and Jackie. They are all beaming at him.
He signs a wet napkin and the little girl smiles and rushes back to her grandparents. They smile, wave and the man says:
“Welcome to California, President Ky.”
“Why, thank you,” says Marshal Ky, suddenly looking young and dashing.
The two people and their granddaughter leave. Ky feels a lump in his throat. He looks at his son, who is smiling and acting neither like a redneck nor a Negro.
Ky takes a mouthful of Sizzler. It is moments like these that rekindle his belief in America.
Tony Lam has come to visit Marshal Ky. Lam is a short, bouncy man who has worked for many Vietnamese-American groups. He has worked for AID, for Rand, and has helped relocate thousands of Vietnamese on Formosa. Lam is always ready with a joke, and when he laughs he squeals like a child. He is a successful insurance man and Ky’s main liaison with the eleven thousand Vietnamese who live around Huntington Beach.
Today Ky is especially glad to see Lam. The morning was bad. Miss Mai was out working with Hanshaw, “learning” the cash register. Ky had no luncheon engagements, so he thought he’d work on the lawn. Except the lawn was dead. The entire thing looked like Khe Sanh after the Tet offensive. Months of careful seeding and fertilizing had yielded overcooked bacon. The stubble Ky assumed was “natural,” which the guy in the store swore was only a phase, was clearly permanent. The “fertilizer,” Ky realized, was some kind of poison. Or else he’d used too much. Or else… anyway, the grass was lost. Ky had gotten very upset. He’d even begun to see the lawn “symbolically.” Then Tony Lam showed up:
“You think you have problems, Marshal Ky? Listen to this.…. There were a couple of Vietnamese fishermen—this happened just last week—who had eaten dinner and decided to go for a walk, as they used to do in Vietnam. Well, they walked and they walked and pretty soon they came to a huge path, a huge white stone path. They had never seen anything like it before… So they decided to walk up the huge white path, and pretty soon it seemed to flow into an even wider path, which had these strange white walls in the middle of it.”
“Oh, no,” says Marshal Ky, slapping his leg.
“Yessssss,” says Tony Lam, starting to squeal a bit. “Yes Yesss. They were on the freeway.…. the San Diego Freeway, and they ended up screaming, stuck on the traffic island out there with huge trucks and cars zooming by at a hundred miles an hour. Have you ever heard of anything like that? God, it was awful.…. The po-leese had to come to get them off.…. Ohhhh.…”
Lam is squealing hysterically. Marshal Ky knows Tony is not laughing because he thinks what happened to the two fishermen is funny. Tony is laughing because he is afraid. He is afraid for his friends and for his family, and even for Marshal Ky. Tony Lam is a good friend, and makes Marshal Ky feel better. But there is a sadness to him. His stories are always entertaining, but after he leaves Ky often finds himself depressed.
“Can you play tennis today?” Marshal Ky asks.
“I will try,” says Tony Lam. “But you will butcher me as usual.”
Ky tries to smile.
When his Buddhist fatalism fails him, Ky thinks of his Yale lecture. Here was a moment as good as the best moments of his life as flyer or air marshal or vice president of South Vietnam. Last year Ky went to Yale University, promoting his book, Twenty Years and Twenty Days (Stein & Day, 1976), knowing full well he’d be meeting a liberal audience with no love for him. Before he could begin, a bunch of kids held up signs that said: “Send Ky to North Vietnam,” “Yale Doesn’t Need a Murderer,” etc., etc. But during his talk he managed to retain his cool and his dignity. Ky explained to the students that he was not a butcher at all, that during his regime he had let most unduly charged political prisoners out of jail. He had attempted to get rid of corruption. Indeed, even liberal journalists like Ward Just and Frances Fitzgerald had publicly acknowledged his honesty—it was legendary. He had a military man’s pride in a clean-running machine, he said, even if the machine was a government. He went on at great length, then stopped and asked for questions.
Question: “Sir, you misled the Americans. Weren’t you responsible for the United States staying on after the war was lost?”
Ky: “Do you really think I could have misled all the American generals? I told Johnson at the beginning: ‘This is Asia. Asians fight forever. We believe in destiny… we accept life fatalistically. We will fight for twenty years if necessary. If you come at all, you must prepare yourself for that kind of battle.’ Johnson, of course, didn’t listen. You are an impatient people. You think you can simply overwhelm a country with money and men.”
Question, from a long-haired student who strikes a defiant pose: “What about corruption? The Communists weren’t corrupt like you were.”
Ky: “We were in total chaos. There had been ten coups since 1963, when Diem fell. I took over amidst much corruption, I only had two years in power and during that time I made many mistakes. I was never primarily a politician. My programs, the Strategic Hamlet Program and the Land Reform Program, were revolutionary, but were opposed by both the Americans and the corrupt government bureaucracy, so they failed.…. As for the Communists, your left-wing press and your movie stars romanticized them. People like Jane Fonda knew about the corruption on our side, which I do not deny, and they assumed it simply had to be better on the other side. In a way I don’t blame them. It’s a human mistake. But let me tell you a story:
“Rice prices were spiraling out of control. Rice, as you know, is essential to everything in Vietnam… without it, there would be starvation, total economic collapse.…. Well, I investigated and found that eight men really controlled the rice market. One especially, a Chinese, ran things. So I had him arrested and tried and he was found guilty, which he was, and he was sentenced to die. That was the law I instituted. If you were guilty of treasonous crimes, you were shot. Well, his parents came to me, Chinese ambassadors came to me, and they offered me many million millions to save him. But he was shot as scheduled. Still, rice prices did not fall. They were dumping rice into the rivers to keep prices high. So I called the other seven men into my office. I remember the day so well. I stood behind my desk and I told them, ‘Price of rice must come down. I know what you are doing. You are bad citizens. You have seen one of your members shot, and still you persist. So now we will play a game.’ Then I took off my hat… my military hat… and I tore up strips of paper, and I said, ‘Now each of you will write your name on this piece of paper and you will put it in the hat, and next week we will have a meeting, and at that time I will draw the first name out of the hat, and whoever is chosen, I will shoot personally, right here! This will happen, I assure you, unless price of rice goes down below the minimum I have set.…. It is up to you.’”
The student body had grown quiet. Ky was smiling and shaking his head.
“Within twenty-four hours,” Ky said, timing it, “price of rice dropped dramatically.”
When the laugh came, Ky rode it out. Then he continued: “Your movie stars and press knew little of Vietnam. And they knew nothing of Communism. They didn’t know how the Communists enlist children to spy on their parents. I come from the North, and I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen a child turn in his father for the ‘crime’ of being a landlord. The man was shot the next day. I have seen thousands of people put into ‘reeducation’ camps. These camps are concentration camps. What do you know of such things? Would any of you here at Yale like to live under such a system?
“You must understand my position. I had to fight the Americans as well as the Vietnamese who wanted to kill me.…. I am speaking of ambitious people in my own government. Not to mention VC. All this, and I was only thirty-five years old, inexperienced as a politician. Perhaps some of you are over thirty. Could you rule a country?”
In the end Ky got a standing ovation. When the student body president drove him to the airport he said, “We thought you were so evil, but we are just beginning to understand how complex the situation was.”
Later, Ky received a lifetime membership in the Yale Student Union.
Talking to Americans is a little bit like war, and war, as Marshal Ky frequently points out, is all he’s known since he was nine years old. It’s built into his nervous system. But war gets tiring.
This afternoon, Marshal Ky is going to the Circle View School for a parent-teacher conference. He will discuss how Jennifer, who is in the fifth grade, and Jackie, who is in the ninth, are adjusting.
Despite her age, Jennifer’s personality is more highly developed, and Marshal Ky assumes she is doing very well. Still, her outgoing, friendly demeanor worries Ky a bit. He wonders if she is perhaps not too forward. He recalls his own school days in Vietnam at the lycée. One did not fraternize, one did not presume with one’s teachers, as he sees Jennifer doing.
The three teachers who meet with Ky are in their early twenties. There is Mr. Painter, who teaches science, Mrs. Mosher who teaches Jackie, and Mr. Oberle, who teaches Jennifer history.
Mr. Painter looks like someone who stepped out of an orange juice commercial. His hair is golden and combed surfer style over his forehead. His skin is ruddy and smooth. He smiles a lot when he talks: “You don’t have to worry about Jennifer, Mr. Ky. She’s good people. Yessir.”
Ky reacts to this by nodding his head slowly. He does not smile at all, so Mr. Painter smiles a little for him.
Mr. Oberle, a big, healthy-looking man, says: “I’m very impressed with the way the girls handle themselves. Really. They don’t rip books or write on desks. They have such a manner with them. All the Vietnamese children who come to our school do. It must be the Vietnamese education system.”
Marshal Ky nods his head again and stares at the three teachers as if he has seen a pale horse.
“No,” he says. “Is not the schools. It is tradition. And culture. I am very concerned with the way my Jennifer acts.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about Jennifer,” beams Mr. Oberle reassuringly. “But Jackie is a little shy. When she wants to know something she should just see me. Rather than go through Mrs. Mosher.”
Marshal Ky nods his head very slowly. “No, that has to do with culture. In ancient times we had girls taught only by women. So we kept girls and boys apart. This tradition has been handed down… thus women are shy. Jennifer is the one who worries me.”
Mr. Oberle laughs and shakes his head: “Really, I don’t think she’s got a problem.”
Then Oberle stops. Ky looks pained. “Well,” he says, trying to lighten the mood, “I’m glad it’s not me that’s making Jackie shy.”
Everyone laughs politely. Even Ky. Then he clears his throat. “There is one problem,” he says. “Next year Jackie is leaving your school to go to junior high. We wonder if Jennifer could go with her.”
That would mean Jennifer skipping two grades. The teachers speak up, hesitatingly, but in accord. Bad idea. The junior high is too big. The kids are so much older, more socially sophisticated. That would mean adjustment problems for Jenny.
“I was just thinking,” says Ky, “that, as it is now, the girls can come to school together… they are safe. But if Jennifer is alone… well, it’s just that we have heard so much about kidnapping.”
Mr. Painter has stopped smiling. Mr. Oberle is nodding seriously, and Mrs. Mosher is talking: “We said right in the beginning of the year, Mr. Ky, that we must always keep an eye on your children. They should never be left alone on the playground. They should never be allowed to run off on their own at lunch hour. We can promise you they will always be watched every minute they are here. But, of course, there is still the problem of them coming here.”
The two male teachers agree. One would not like to see the children of Marshal Ky kidnapped by a madman. Perhaps Ky will come in again next week and see the principal? Ky nods, shakes hands.
“It is very frightening,” Ky says, driving home. “I have no money. I took nothing.…. But people all assume I have many million millions. If one of the people who think I have such money were to find out about my children… there are so many nuts in California!”
The next afternoon I arrive early at Marshal Ky’s house to talk with Miss Mai. She is just back from a morning at Hanshaw’s. It’s hard not to remember her as the Asian beauty with the model’s body who appeared regularly in Paris Match, who learned to cook at the Cordon Bleu, who roared through Saigon in sleek black limos. Now she dresses in a yellow pantsuit.
“We are poor,” she says, “but please don’t write it. We never knew what poverty meant before we came here.”
“You live in a hundred thousand dollar house,” I say. “That is not exactly poor.”
“No. Not by poor people’s standards. But compared to what we had in Vietnam, the huge house, the drivers, the cars… we are very poor indeed. There are seven of us in this house, including my mother and my aunt. It is crowded. Everyone thinks we have so much money, and in truth I wish we did. I wish Ky had stolen money so we could live like our rich friends. I used to believe it was wrong, but in America no one cares how you get your money, only that you have it. I am constantly embarrassed socially by our lack of money.”
Miss Mai joins her mother and her aunt (who speak no English) in the kitchen and begins dinner. She says she enjoys cooking, but that she is very tired from the liquor store.
“Nothing is as easy or as much fun as it was,” she says. “Today, for example, I would like to fix you a really good Vietnamese lunch, but I must prepare Chao Tom for the tennis party at the Hanshaws tonight. So we are just having some raw fish. You will probably not like it. Americans always like things with rich sauces.
“I cook Chao Tom for the Hanshaws for a change. I mean I like steak and baked potato as much as anyone else. I really do. But after you’ve had it night after night… at every house you go to… well, you long for something with a little different taste.”
Miss Mai smiles sweetly, but her voice is brittle. Efficiently, she strips away the outside of a sugarcane stalk, cuts it up, dips it in a light sauce made from various oils and spices. Next she wraps a jumbo shrimp around the stalk and fries two at a time in a small pan.
“This is a delicacy,” she says. “I want you to try it. I only wish I could fix another for your lunch.
“It will be better after we get the store started, and hire some people.…. I love family life. That is what I’m used to. Of course I miss Vietnam terribly, and worry about my friends there.…. I send money to one friend every month… whatever I can afford.”
She reaches into her purse, as if she has to prove this to me, and pulls out a check made out to a Vietnamese woman. The check is for fifty dollars.
“Don’t print her name, please,” Miss Mai says. “She would get in trouble with the Communists.…. They are terrible.”
“Are you glad to be here?”
“Slowly I am getting used to it,” Miss Mai says. “Now that Ky is better.”
“Better?”
“Last year, he was very very depressed. He would sit up late at night all alone, and grow quite sad. It was awful.…. He worried constantly about money, also. But now things are a little better. Oh, the shrimps are done.”
A little later Ky and I are having lunch. We are eating raw fish and noodles.
“What she told you is true,” swears Ky. “We have little money. I know no one will believe me. You probably doubt me.”
“I must confess I do.”
“I don’t blame you,” Ky says. “Everyone thinks I steal. They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But on the contrary, it did not corrupt me. You see, I had absolute power, and I could have made many million millions. But I am honest, which is why I was never a good politician. I should have been more like your American politicians. Like Nixon, or the others.”
“What of Carter?” I say.
“He is just the same as the others. Jimmy Carter the president is very different from Jimmy Carter the candidate. He said he was going to change the government, but look at the men he chose. Many of them are very familiar names to me… I remember them too well from Kennedy’s administration.”
Ky smiles and shakes his head: “If you must know, I view my life as a tragedy. The Americans called me a butcher, said I didn’t care about ‘democratic ideals.’ But there was no time for democratic change then. We were in war, in crisis, and strong decisions had to be made.….”
I ask about Ky’s famous Hitler quote—“Did you say ‘What Vietnam needs are two Hitlers, not one’?”
Ky laughs, but the sound is brittle, like Miss Mai’s.
“Do you know how that quote came about? We were sitting around the barracks one day. A group of flyers and myself. There was one reporter there. We were talking about how the nation desperately needed a strong leader. We were all noting that whenever countries got into trouble, a good strong leader made them tougher. We all mentioned names. Hitler was one, true. But so was Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and John Kennedy. We weren’t talking about whether the man was good or bad, merely if he was forceful, not afraid to make decisions. Because up to that time in Vietnam we had had nothing but weak leaders who couldn’t withstand the coups. Anyway, what happened was the reporter quoted me as saying, ‘What we need is Adolph Hitler.’… They tried to make me seem like a devil. I think it was because I was never pro-American… and because of my style.”
“Perhaps that’s true,” I say. “I remember the pictures of you in your jump suit and your lavender scarf. People got the impression you didn’t really care about anything but yourself.”
Ky looks incredulous. He waves his hands as he speaks: “But all the officers wore jump suits. As for the scarf, I liked it… and I like pretty women. What man doesn’t? The question should be why did they pick on me for these things? In America good clothes and the company of beautiful women are considered marks of distinction.….”
“You’re saying the rap against you was because you were Vietnamese?”
Ky nods enthusiastically: “That is exactly right… as were the attacks on me for being a ‘butcher.’ I did what had to be done in war. I do not believe laws are made for criminals. I believe laws are made for good citizens. I do not believe in coddling criminals.”
“Actually, a lot of people I know in New York, who claim to be liberals, privately would like to see muggers drawn and quartered.”
“And they are exactly right,” Marshal Ky says. He eats his soup and nods his head. “You know, I look at Westerns on TV, and I feel like the hero.…. I feel like the Lonely Ranger.…. I feel very much like the Lonely Ranger.”
He stops, grows silent, and his mouth curls up in an odd way.
Later we drive to the home of a Mr. Von Thon in Villa Park, where Ky is to meet with twenty Vietnamese ex-soldiers, currently eking out livings as fishermen. Father Ha, a radical priest and leftist journalist, is scheduled to show up, too, to “debate” Ky on how the large community of Vietnamese ex-patriates can best adjust to Americanization. On the way, Ky explains that he is not against the meeting, but is afraid for the Vietnamese. “Our position here is fragile,” Ky says. “‘We cannot afford to offend people. It would take only a couple left-wingers
or hippies to come and start a fight, and what would the papers say: ‘Vietnamese start trouble,’ and other bad things. Father Ha is just a crazy priest. I have always had trouble with priests.”
The twenty ex-soldiers are waiting, standing in a semi-circle, drinking cheap red wine. Several still have their army jackets. All are smiling broadly. Meeting Ky in this way is a rare pleasure, equivalent to Jimmy Carter just dropping in before dinner. Ky shakes each man’s hand and begins talking rapidly. The men talk of war, telling Ky he is a hero, how people thought he would “save the country.” One man says: “Even now people say that you will come back to South Vietnam and save us all.”
Ky responds emotionally: “There is nothing I wanted more,” he says. “You do not know. I could do nothing, though. Mr. Thieu took my power. He had my hands tied. I stayed until April 29, the next to last day of the war. I offered to lead a bombing mission even then. But Thieu would do nothing. He is brilliant, but only thinks of himself.”
The fishermen nod their heads. Another man speaks, a Mr. Tinh: “I do not wish to brown-nose you sir,” he says, “but I must tell you, you are a brave man. I respect you. I do not respect many of the other leaders.…. Now I hear that the Communists are eliminating people who originally came from the North and fought against them in the war. All are being sent to camps. It is very bad.”
“That is why we must speak out,” says another man.
Ky stares at a poster on the wall: HUMAN RIGHTS FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS IN VIETNAM. “That should read just ‘Human Rights,’” he tells the fishermen. “Then it will fall under President Carter’s human rights campaign.” There is a pause, but no one asks Ky to elaborate.
“I am trying to do things even though you do not see me,” he says. “Last night I had dinner with Mr. Antoni, the supervisor of Orange County. I asked him to work out a plan to help Senior Citizens Training, to start a Vietnamese Service Center. I want to help you in any way possible. If you have problems, come to me and tell me.”
The men look delighted. Ky goes on: “I understand you have had trouble here.”
Several men tell a tale of community tensions. Over one hundred and fifty Americans who live in the Villa Park area signed a petition saying that the Vietnamese were “filthy, living fifteen in an apartment, unsanitary.” The landlords of one apartment complex, where many poor Vietnamese live, publicly denied the allegations, however, saying, “We had more trouble with the whites who lived here before. The fact is, for a poor people, the Vietnamese are incredibly neat.”
Marshal Ky nods. “I told Mr. Antoni we are a people willing to work and to learn. Many of you have never seen an inside toilet before you came here. We must be given a chance to learn.”
The men nod and drink and tell more stories about Vietnam. Ky suddenly looks very tired. “Father Ha did not come,” he says. There is some relief and some regret in his voice.
Marshal Ky sprawls on a huge couch at Jack Hanshaw’s mansion. The couch makes him look very small. His thinning hair is matted, his mouth is curved down, and he is sweating. Tony Lam offers to get him some juice. Miss Mai, still in her tennis skirt, proffers a tray of shrimps. Next to her is Jack Hanshaw. Hanshaw is a well-conditioned forty-five, tall, tanned, with light blue eyes and a big toothy smile.
“Boy, you took some time,” Hanshaw says. “We’ve been waiting for you for some time.”
“Well,” Ky says, sighing deeply, “they don’t like to let you go. I expected to stay no longer than an hour. If they had their way I would have been there all night.”
“Well,” says Hanshaw, smiling at Miss Mai, “I’ll tell you what. We all need to play some tennis and relax.”
Ky nods and disappears into the bedroom. I go with Hanshaw and sit by a huge pond stocked with giant gold fish.
“Very nice place,” I say.
Hanshaw is still smiling. He even manages to smile while he talks, like Ed McMahon.
“We’ve got quite a nice place here,” he says. “Very few places like it in this area. Our pool is terrific. You saw our pool, didn’t you?”
“Sure,” I say. “Nice pool.”
“Well, that’s a sixty-five-foot pool,” Hanshaw says.
As he talks he watches Miss Mai and Tony Lam playing tennis.
“How are people responding to the Kys?” I ask.
“She came in at six A.M today,” Hanshaw says. “Worked all day. I’ll tell you, business is up twenty percent in the two weeks Mai has been in my store. If they are accepted that well in all phases of their life, I’d say they are going to be a big success out here. Actually, I’m putting Ky in a good spot [Hanshaw is selling Ky one of his fifty-six liquor stores]. It should easily bring him sixty thousand dollars a year. That’s good money. Mai says they want a string of liquor stores… get a house like mine.”
“Very nice place you’ve got,” I say.
“Seventy thousand square feet,” Hanshaw says. “Did you see my rabbits?”
On cue, some rabbits come bounding out from beyond the palm trees, and right behind them is Marshal Ky. He is dressed in a spiffy red tennis suit.
“Yippee!” says Marshal Ky. “I’m ready now!”
He opens the gate to Hanshaw’s tennis court, and begins hitting the ball to Tony Lam. His strokes are smooth, and he has a strong forehand.
“He learned to play with Ellsworth Bunker,” Hanshaw says. “Quite a good player. Ky was kind enough to bring the champion of South Vietnam by last week.…. We played for hours.…. Ky beat her in two sets. He’s really athletic. Would you like a drink?”
“No thanks,” I say. “I guess I’ll be going.”
“Take a beer for the road,” Hanshaw says. “Have a Coke or something. You ever see fish like these?”
Nguyen Cao Ky is really into his game now, smashing backhands at giggling, diving Tony Lam. He is sweating and grinning, truly at ease.
“I’ll go get the Coke,” Hanshaw says. “Take a look at those fish. You won’t see fish like those everywhere.”
This interview came as a total surprise to me and is one of my favorites. I walked into Ky’s place with all the usual left-wing assumptions. I’d done quite a bit of research to get ready for the interview and thought I already knew many of the answers to the questions I posed to him.
I knew nothing. Ky struck me as an amazing person. He was strong, brilliant, fearless in battle, yet sensitive and kind. Yes, he could have been putting on a show for me, but every person I talked to—many more than I was able to get into this piece—said the same things about him. He was universally respected.
I didn’t get it in the piece but at one time he began to cry and said, “You people talk of war. All I know of life is war. I’ve been in war all of my life, even as a kid.”
Perhaps I am still naive but when he died a few months ago I felt a deep sorrow. He was one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met.