Like Father, Like Son

In 1945 Triet Le's father and brother were kidnapped in a village near Hanoi. Four months passed before Le, then 17, learned that they had been buried alive. The reason for their ghastly deaths: they had opposed Vietnam's incipient communist movement.

The son followed the course his father had set. Le learned French and English, read voraciously in three languages and wrote passionate denunciations of communism. He joined the South Vietnamese army, then worked for the U.S. embassy in Saigon. In the last, worst years of the Vietnam War, he wrote a column for the newspaper Hoa Binh.

Le fled Vietnam on April 30, 1975, the day that Saigon fell. He made his way to Washington's "Little Saigon" and launched a caustic anti-Hanoi column for the Vietnamese-language biweekly Tien Phong. For years, he castigated the Vietnamese government for, as a colleague put it, "betraying the people."

On Sept. 22, Le, 61, and his wife Tuyet Thi Dangtran, 52, were gunned down in the driveway of their house in suburban Bailey's Crossroads, Va. A neighbor said he heard several shots and saw a car speeding away. It was the couple's 10th wedding anniversary.

Le's co-workers at Tien Phong are convinced that the murders were political assassinations carried out, one said, by "communist agents" working for the Hanoi regime. Police said they had no suspects.

Le's murder was only the latest attempt to silence Vietnamese journalists. In 1980 the house of Tien Phong's publisher, Nguyen Tranh Huang, was fire bombed. Last year the magazine's layout artist, Nhan Trong Do, was found dead of gunshot wounds in his car in Virginia. Since 1981, three other journalists who put out Vietnamese publications have been killed, two in California and one in Texas.