Vietnam Highlands. Free Image by ThuyHaBich from Pixabay.

Forty-Three Years

They believed each other to be dead. 43 years later, childhood friends discovered they had survived war.
United States, Northern America

Story by Y-Danair Niehrah. Edited by Melaina Dyck
Published on November 7, 2021. Reading time: 4 minutes

This story is also available in it kr



Listen to this story:


Forty-five years ago, my father Y-Luin left Vietnam nestled in the cargo hold of a C-141B. A few days later, Saigon fell. This is his story…

Y-Luin is Degar-Montagnard from the Rhade tribe, an ethnic minority who called the central highlands of Vietnam their home. His father, Y-Thih, spent years in and out of prison fighting for autonomy and equal rights for the Degar people.

In the early ‘70s, Y-Luin was the only Degar student in his high school in Saigon. His father found work in Saigon with the Vietnamese government while his mother stayed home in Buôn Ma Thuột. At the time, Y-Luin was on top of the world. He was the head of athletics of the high school. He had multiple black belts in different martial art forms. He got his baccalaureate and passed his pre-med exam.[1] Y-Luin had his eyes set on studying medicine in France—Paris maybe.

He spoke about the future a lot with Thế Huỳnh Hữ, his best friend. They’d spend late nights under the jungle moon practicing martial arts together, studying for exams, and dreaming about what their future homes would look like.

On April 25, 1975, Y-Thih told Y-Luin to leave the city, never telling him that the whole time the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had taken Biên Hòa Airbase. Y-Luin believed it was a surprise—maybe his father had pulled some strings; gotten him into a school in France. He boarded that C-141B to Guam as a refugee not knowing his mother had been killed by a boobytrap in Buôn Ma Thuột.

Y-Luin never said goodbye to Thế. It was one of the biggest regrets of his life at the time; things he’d mention when decades later I would sit with him over a bottle of wine to ask about his childhood. My brother and I would routinely scrub the internet looking for Thế on social media, to no avail.  

Thế and Y-Luin believed each other to be dead.

Forty-three years later, my father came across a YouTube video about his high school reunion from the 1970–1975 classes and saw that someone had commented looking for my father and giving his contact information. A couple of emails and a phone call later and they were reunited.

They first saw each other on Christmas Day, 2018. Almost half a century later, they were still cracking jokes about each other, especially since my father lost most of his hair since they last saw each other. The war took home from both men. We learned that after Saigon fell, Thế had spent nine years in a labor camp before managing to escape on a boat out of the country in 1984.

In the wake of the tragedy, they both found success in America: raising families and forging their new homes—with one of the biggest blessings being that the kinship they thought they had lost in 1975 now blooms stronger than ever.

 

[1] A pre-med exam is taken to enter medicine as a field of study.


How does this story make you feel?

Follow-up

Do you have any questions after reading this story? Do you want to follow-up on what you've just read? Get in touch with our team to learn more! Send an email to
[email protected].

Talk about this Story

Please enable cookies to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Share your story

Every story we share is another perspective on a complex topic like migration, gender and sexuality or liberation. We believe that these personal stories are important to better understand what's going on in our globalised society - and to better understand each other. That's because we are convinced that the more we understand about each other, the easier it will be for us to really talk to one another, to get closer - and to maybe find solutions for the issues that affect us all. 

Do you want to share your story? Then have a look here for more info.

Share Your Story

Subscribe to our Monthly Newsletter

Stay up to date with new stories on Correspondents of the World by subscribing to our monthly newsletter:

* indicates required

Follow us on Social Media

Y-Danair Niehrah

Y-Danair Niehrah

Y-Danair Niehrah is a Degar/Montagnard-Vietnamese American living in Charleston, SC. Outside of his editorial work in the publishing industry, Y-Danair loves to write historical and genre fiction and hopes some day to teach craft to other aspiring writers. 

Topic: Migration




Get involved

At Correspondents of the World, we want to contribute to a better understanding of one another in a world that seems to get smaller by the day - but somehow neglects to bring people closer together as well. We think that one of the most frequent reasons for misunderstanding and unnecessarily heated debates is that we don't really understand how each of us is affected differently by global issues.

Our aim is to change that with every personal story we share.

Share Your Story

Community Worldwide

Correspondents of the World is not just this website, but also a great community of people from all over the world. While face-to-face meetings are difficult at the moment, our Facebook Community Group is THE place to be to meet other people invested in Correspondents of the World. We are currently running a series of online-tea talks to get to know each other better.

Join Our Community

EXPLORE TOPIC Migration

Global Issues Through Local Eyes

We are Correspondents of the World, an online platform where people from all over the world share their personal stories in relation to global development. We try to collect stories from people of all ages and genders, people with different social and religious backgrounds and people with all kinds of political opinions in order to get a fuller picture of what is going on behind the big news.

Our Correspondents

At Correspondents of the World we invite everyone to share their own story. This means we don't have professional writers or skilled interviewers. We believe that this approach offers a whole new perspective on topics we normally only read about in the news - if at all. If you would like to share your story, you can find more info here.

Share Your Story

Our Editors

We acknowledge that the stories we collect will necessarily be biased. But so is news. Believing in the power of the narrative, our growing team of awesome editors helps correspondents to make sure that their story is strictly about their personal experience - and let that speak for itself.

Become an Editor

Vision

At Correspondents of the World, we want to contribute to a better understanding of one another in a world that seems to get smaller by the day - but somehow neglects to bring people closer together as well. We think that one of the most frequent reasons for misunderstanding and unnecessarily heated debates is that we don't really understand how each of us is affected differently by global issues.

Our aim is to change that with every personal story we share.

View Our Full Vision & Mission Statement

Topics

We believe in quality over quantity. To give ourselves a focus, we started out to collect personal stories that relate to our correspondents' experiences with six different global topics. However, these topics were selected to increase the likelihood that the stories of different correspondents will cover the same issues and therefore illuminate these issues from different perspectives - and not to exclude any stories. If you have a personal story relating to a global issue that's not covered by our topics, please still reach out to us! We definitely have some blind spots and are happy to revise our focus and introduce new topics at any point in time. 

Environment

Discussions about the environment often center on grim, impersonal figures. Among the numbers and warnings, it is easy to forget that all of these statistics actually also affect us - in very different ways. We believe that in order to understand the immensity of environmental topics and global climate change, we need the personal stories of our correspondents.

Gender and Sexuality

Gender is the assumption of a "normal". Unmet expectations of what is normal are a world-wide cause for violence. We hope that the stories of our correspondents will help us to better understand the effects of global developments related to gender and sexuality, and to reveal outdated concepts that have been reinforced for centuries.

Migration

Our correspondents write about migration because it is a deeply personal topic that is often dehumanized. People quickly become foreigners, refugees - a "they". But: we have always been migrating, and we always will. For millions of different reasons. By sharing personal stories about migration, we hope to re-humanize this global topic.

Liberation

We want to support the demand for justice by spotlighting the personal stories of people who seek liberation in all its different forms. Our correspondents share their individual experiences in creating equality. We hope that for some this will be an encouragement to continue their own struggle against inequality and oppression - and for some an encouragement to get involved.

Education

Education is the newest addition to our themes. We believe that education, not only formal but also informal, is one of the core aspects of just and equal society as well as social change. Our correspondents share their experiences and confrontations about educational inequalities, accessibility issues and influence of societal norms and structures. 

Corona Virus

2020 is a year different from others before - not least because of the Corona pandemic. The worldwide spread of a highly contagious virus is something that affects all of us in very different ways. To get a better picture of how the pandemic's plethora of explicit and implicit consequences influences our everyday life, we share lockdown stories from correspondents all over the world.

Growing Fast

Although we started just over a year ago, Correspondents of the World has a quickly growing community of correspondents - and a dedicated team of editors, translators and country managers.

94

Correspondents

113

Stories

57

Countries

433

Translations

Contact

Correspondents of the World is as much a community as an online platform. Please feel free to contact us for whatever reason!

Message Us

Message on WhatsApp

Call Us

Joost: +31 6 30273938