The Agony of Arrival

Day after day, as artillery fire thundered a somber greeting from a nearby range, the buses disgorged their weary passengers. Vietnamese refugees were arriving at their first destination in America: Camp Pendleton in Southern California. Small-businessmen and Saigon bureaucrats, their faces etched with fatigue and suffering, their tight-lipped wives stifling tears, their children staring blankly in the bright sunlight, filed into the camp. There they were issued mattresses, bedclothes and kits containing toilet articles, sandals and one candy bar each. Inside the tents and Quonset huts hastily erected for the emergency, the refugees finally gave way to emotions stored up over weeks of anxiety. In their first communal act in America, they embraced and wept.

That scene will be repeated many times, not only at Pendleton but at Fort Chaffee, Ark., and Florida's Eglin Air Force Base until the thousands of refugees are processed by the U.S. Government and ushered into American life. Like last week's first arrivals, many of the refugees will undoubtedly be bewildered by the impersonal routine of the camps. They will be given a medical exam, fingerprinted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, issued a Social Security card, tested for their job skills and command of English, and interviewed about a U.S. sponsor. Without one, no Vietnamese can leave the base.

The sponsor assumes a moral responsibility to help refugees find lodging and a job. No fewer than seven volunteer service agencies* are now searching for potential sponsors around the U.S. It is a familiar task for the agencies, which have assisted many past immigrant groups, but the Vietnamese effort is more difficult because they are arriving in such a rush. While they are awaiting processing and a sponsor, the refugees must adjust to crude living conditions in huts and tents that are baked under the Southern sun.

Because of the rapid exodus, U.S. Government officials were caught unprepared, and have fallen behind in the processing. "Organization!" scoffed Stuart Callison, an Agency for International Development official assigned to Pendleton. "We beat the first load of refugees here by an hour and a half. That's how organized we are. I haven't the vaguest idea what's going on. I get all my news out of the Los Angeles Times." William Wild, another AID official who is in charge of the Pendleton operation, considered himself in business once he was able to lease a small data-processing machine for 90 days. "I'm operating on $40 million left over from the Cambodian foreign assistance funds," he groaned. "We could be in trouble if Congress doesn't quickly approve the appropriation for the refugees."

Like most immigrants before them, the Vietnamese are sad about the life they have left behind and apprehensive about what lies ahead in America. "We are getting bona fide refugees without anything or anybody," says INS Official Don Day at Pendleton. "I never know what will happen to me, only what has happened to me," mourned Hoan Lac, 39, a psychotherapist, who cried softly as she rocked her two-year-old child. "I have many friends in this country, but I have lost their addresses. I had to leave Viet Nam in 50 minutes." Pham An Thanh, 40, once a prosperous marketing manager for a paper and sugar distributing company in Viet Nam, fought back the tears as he noted that his current net worth is $4. "You know," he said in broken English as he fingered his worn trousers, "when I go, I forgot to put on my good clothes." Then he mused: "I believe I have a good future here. I think the Americans in the end are good people. I think. I hope."

Despite the screening in Guam, some obviously unqualified refugees reached the U.S. Parts of Pendleton resembled Saturday night in Saigon, as bar girls clad in tight-fitting slacks flirted with Marines. An Air Force officer admitted that the eight women accompanying him were not, strictly speaking, dependents. "I'm not married to any of them, and I'm not related to any of them either," he said. "I met them when I was stationed in Nam, and I felt I had to get them out. The authorities must have known I was lying, but they realized it was the only way to save their lives."

For all the trauma of their arrival, the Vietnamese will probably fare as well in America as past immigrants. They will not have the impact of the 650,000 Cubans who fled from Castro and settled largely--and for the most part successfully--in Miami. They are more likely to scatter throughout the country in the manner of the 38,000 Hungarians who escaped to America after the 1956 revolution was crushed by the Soviets. Like the Cubans and the Hungarians, the Vietnamese are mostly middle-class people who should be able to overcome social obstacles and make a decent living. Says INS Commissioner Leonard Chapman: "The Vietnamese are hardworking, honorable, highly religious, artistic, and they have a great sense of family." Their staying power, moreover, has already been cruelly tested. Notes Harvard Sociologist Tom Pettigrew: "In such a murderous war, most people would not have shown themselves to be tough and so persistent. I think these qualities will show up in the refugees."

* The seven: International Rescue Committee. Inc., Church World Services, Lutheran World Council, U.S. Catholic Conference, Tolstoy Foundation, United HIAS Service, American Fund for Czech Relief.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.