Business for a cause

US President Barack Obama (L) and David Duong (R), whom Obama appointed to the Vietnamese Education Fund last February

Business for a cause
Vietnamese-American David Duong has spun gold from American trash.
The slight, mustachioed entrepreneur made his fortune managing a recycling firm in California. Now, he’s hoping to afford opportunities in education to eager students in Vietnam who may lack the means to make it to American universities.
Last February, President Barack Obama appointed David Duong to serve on the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF)—a scholarship organization run through the US State Department.
In a way, the move signifies the final achievement of a lifetime of educational philanthropy.
David Duong made his fortune as CEO of California Waste Solutions, a top US recycling firm. He returned to Vietnam to create Vietnam Waste Solutions, which collects and processes solid waste in Ho Chi Minh City.
“I am not interested in business only,” David Duong said. “I also care about education. That I invest in Vietnam, care about the country and the Vietnamese community is no secret. That’s why US Congresswoman Barbara Lee and others nominated me for the position [at VEF].”
American dreamer
David Duong was born in 1958 in Saigon. He and his family emigrated to America in 1976. When he landed in America, the young man worked as a waste collector and went on to establish Cogido Recycling Company in 1979 with the help of every member in his family.
Following his rise to prominence, David Duong opened Vietnamese summer classes for young people, raised funds for American schools and created scholarships and awards for the best Vietnamese students in California.
In Vietnam, David Duong’s company has furnished schools with computers and established scholarship funds for promising, underprivileged students. He has also created entities to help families overcome poverty which is often cited as one of the main reasons that young students cease attending school.
“I don’t want to just hand out fish,” said the businessman. “We’re teaching people to fish here.”
According to David Duong, VEF spends US$4-6 million annually to fund higher-level education for Vietnamese students who wish to study in America. Under the VEF scholarship program, after finishing their two- to four-year course, the students return to Vietnam to serve their homeland.
David Duong said that interested applicants can request recommendations from their schools, or contact VEF’s office in Hanoi to apply for the scholarships. They must pass interviews with professors from the US in order to obtain the honorarium.
This month, the panel of professors will come to Vietnam to select 40 students from more than 80 candidates for the 2010-2011 school year.
“Starting in 2011, we plan to increase the number of scholarships for locals to study in the US. We will also increase the budget for these grants. At the moment, we can only afford to accept about a third to one half of the increasing number of candidates we get every year. To execute this plan, we will seek donations from big companies who have set aside money for education,” David Duong said.
Bringing it all back home

THE VEF EXPLAINED

Founded in 2007 through an initiative by former President Bill Clinton, VEF is an independent organization, funded by the US government. VEF aims to promote a closer relationship between the US and Vietnam and also improve the quality of education in Vietnam. VEF is governed by a board of directors which includes three US senators and several individuals appointed by the President. VEF grants scholarships to young Vietnamese scientists and students to study in the US.

At the moment, David Duong’s latest project aims to bring American University campuses to Vietnam.
He said that instead of sending the students to America, the idea of bringing US universities to Vietnam could help more students enjoy high quality education at a more affordable cost.
Currently, David Duong and his co-workers are putting together a committee to the idea to VEF. David Duong says the notion will prove “beneficial for both Vietnam and America,” he said. David Duong added that students from all over the world can come to study abroad at such campuses.
“All of the things I do for the benefit of the two countries, I think, will surely bear fruit,” David Duong said. “I believe I will have the full support of the Vietnamese government since both the Minister of Education and Training and the Prime Minister are determined to improve the quality of local education,” David Duong said.

HIV-positive kids run into negative adults

 

Prejudiced parents teach disadvantaged children a bitter lesson in bigotry

HIV-positive children sit on a bed at the paediatric hospital in Hanoi in July. The government estimates that of 254,000 people living with HIV in 2010, 5,100 are children.
The children at the Mai Hoa orphanage do not bother to ask the dreaded question anymore.
And Sister Nguyen Thi Bao does not know whether to be happy or sad about their silence.
The HIV-positive orphans have all but abandoned hopes they will one day laugh, play and study with “normal” children.
When classes opened across Vietnam on August 16 this year, the kids knew that their new school-year would begin inside the orphanage, an AIDS hospice in Ho Chi Minh City’s Cu Chi District.
Last year, they were allowed to attend the An Nhon Dong Primary School.
But a backlash from parents who refused to allow their children to attend classes with HIV infected children, forced the Mai Hoa orphans out.
Thanh Nien Weekly reported the story last September.
Amid almost empty classes and pressure from school officials, Sister Nguyen Thi Bao, who manages the Mai Hoa center, thought it best to take the children back to the orphanage, just a short walk down a country road, with a promise that they would be able to come back school this year.
But since then she has not heard anything from local authorities about enrolling the children in the new school-year.
“I was told that [parent] awareness is still low. So the kids should continue to study inside the orphanage until ‘the right time,’” Sister Bao said.
“I don’t think this is the right time. I’m not sure when it will be,” said Nguyen Van Chan, the principal of the An Nhon Dong Primary School.
“Some parents have kept asking us that if we let the infected orphans in, who would give a complete guarantee for their kids? I myself cannot do so,” Chan said.
“The parents would allow the orphans to join their kids in flag-saluting ceremonies every Monday or occasional sightseeing tours. But that’s the limit of their tolerance.”
Chan said the only thing that local authorities and the school can do at this moment is to carry out both public and door-to-door education campaigns in the community so the stigma attached to the children can be removed.
In their ignorance and fear of HIV/AIDS, many parents believe their children could contract the virus by brushing shoulders, or if their kids were scratched or bitten by infected orphans.
There is no truth to these fears, said Dr. Chu Quoc An, deputy director of the HIV-AIDS Prevention and Controls Department at the Health Ministry.
“There is no scientific evidence that kids can contract the HIV virus by such actions,” An said.
But parents have remained adamant.
Le Thi Nga, the mother of a fifth-grader and a third-grader at the An Nhon Dong school, said no matter how well-educated she is, she would never let her kids study with the Mai Hoa children.
“I know that there is little likelihood that my kids would get infected. But who knows?” Nga said.
“My kids are not equipped to protect themselves, and I cannot be with them all the time they are at school [if the infected orphans study there]. I also don’t have time to take them for blood tests every three months.”
Most of the parents in Cu Chi District’s An Nhon Tay Commune, where the An Nhon Dong School is based, are farmers with little education. But the fear and stigma relating to HIV/AIDS is far more widespread.
Nguyen Thi Quy Hien, a 31- year-old teacher at an inner-city district in HCMC, said she would also pull her daughter, who is attending the first-grade next year, out of any school which accommodates HIV-infected children.
“No one wants to sacrifice their kids for the sake of integrating HIV-infected orphans. I don’t think I say this just for myself.”
The Health Ministry estimates that there are around 254,000 people living with HIV in 2010, including 5,100 children.
Silence is prudent
A 14-year-old girl at another HIV/AIDS orphanage in HCMC said she felt sorry for her peers at Mai Hoa.
The girl, whose name the center’s management insisted on keeping anonymous, said she has been able to attend a public school and interact with her friends quite happily.
“Because my friends have hidden my [HIV] status from their parents,” she said.
A representative from the center, who also declined to be named, said her center had learned a lesson from Mai Hoa’s case.
“The more the public knows about the status of the infected kids, the more difficult it will be for them to integrate into the community,” she said.
The representative insisted that even the name of the district where her center is based is not made public.
“You will never be able to imagine the public pressure if they are informed [of our kids attending public schools].”
‘Give them a break’
Around 50 kilometers away from downtown HCMC, the Mai Hoa AIDS Center features a green, quiet campus. Founded in 2003 as a hospice for patients, the facility also houses an orphanage to care for children of people who died there.
The children, who receive antiretroviral medication, are taught with textbooks and teachers provided by the An Nhon Dong Primary School.
Under Vietnam’s HIV/AIDS laws, children cannot be denied access to school if they or any members of their family are living with HIV/AIDS. The law also bars employers from firing employees, or doctors from refusing to treat anyone, because of their HIV status.
“Children with HIV should go to school to be able to have a chance to develop like any other children. It is their right to go to school,” said Jean Dupraz, deputy country representative of UNICEF Vietnam.
Eamonn Murphy, Vietnam Country Director of UNAIDS – the UN’s AIDS-fighting body, said that regarding the Mai Hoa case, local authorities should have done more over the last twelve months to educate the community.
“If the knowledge is low, we have to educate the parents. If they are fully informed and understand the situation and still choose to be ignorant, that’s their responsibility,” Murphy said on the sidelines of a conference held to promote a booklet disseminating HIV/AIDS facts and information in HCMC this week.
“The children should not suffer for the rest of their lives because of a lack of education. They will live full lives and they will be adults some day."
Sister Bao said among 16 students denied access to the An Nhon Dong School last year, four have been sponsored to further their studies at a secondary school in HCMC.
“I just hope they will not be ostracized as they were here,” she said.
The Catholic nun was also firm that the rest of the students at the orphanage cannot be approached for interviews.
“Give them a break. They have endured enough hurt.”

Expats play dumb

Foreigners in HCMC say they exploit the limits of police language skills to make quick getaways. Police say they’re not buying it.
RJ. an American teacher living Ho Chi Minh City, used to be pulled over by traffic police almost every weekend for driving in the wrong lane.
While fighting District 7 traffic on his way to work, RJ cut corners. When he saw the flash of the policeman’s baton, he would ride his bike onto the sidewalk and wait. The minute the cops recognized he was a foreigner, however, the cops always just waved him on without a word.
This charade played out the same way, again and again until RJ finally met the wrong cop.
On the day in question, RJ didn’t even bother pulling his bike up onto the sidewalk, instead, he waited to be dismissed by the side of the road.
A young policeman angrily signaled for RJ to drive up onto the sidewalk for an interrogation.
“Then they proceeded to make me wait at least ten minutes before even approaching me on my bike,” he said. “The boss came over and tested my knowledge of Vietnamese. Failing to successfully communicate with me, he turned his back and walked away.”
“Then his subordinate approached me, brought me to the side of the road and pointed to the cars-only lane and said ‘oto, oto’ (car),” RJ said. “Then he pointed to the motorbike lane and said ‘xe, xe’ (motorbike). Then he looked up at me, smiled and asked ‘ok?’”
RJ’s experience is reflective of a larger game of cat-and-mouse. Thanh Nien Weekly spoke to a dozen foreigners who extolled the virtues of remaining incommunicado in the realm of Vietnamese traffic law. The language barrier, they said, often prevents traffic police from stopping and fining foreigners.
One American driver told a Thanh Nien Weekly reporter that he had been returning from a movie with his girlfriend on the back of his motorbike, when the police attempted to flag him down.
He just kept driving. “Always keep going,” he advised foreign riders.
The errant American was somewhat alarmed, he said, when a motorbike patrolman gave chase and began tapping his girlfriend on the back.
“Honey,” she pleaded nervously.
But he just kept driving. Eventually, the frustrated officer gave up.
Senior Lieutenant-Colonel Vo Van Van, vice head of the HCMC Traffic Police Division, said police have fined a total of about 600 foreigners for violating traffic law since 2008 in HCMC.
“A large number of foreigners visit, live and work here. We have set up a taskforce that is able to speak foreign languages to handle violations of traffic law by foreigners,” he said.
A police source told Thanh Nien Weekly that this taskforce consists of two police officers.
Lt. Col. Van said the most common violations among foreigners include driving in the wrong lane, no helmet and no driver’s license.
“In some cases, violators failed to present the motorbike’s registration and even abandoned their bikes fearing trouble,” Lt. Col. Van said. “But traffic police are not allowed to keep a driver’s passport. They can confiscate other papers issued by Vietnamese agencies like visas, residence registrations or the motorbike of the violator to ensure that the fines are enforced.”
Lt. Col. Van said that police handle traffic violations committed by foreigners and locals in the exact same way.
“But language is a problem,” Lt. Col. Van said. “Some abuse the situation and pretend not to be able to speak English in the hope of being ignored.”
Paul Finnis, director of the Saigon Children’s Charity in HCMC, rejected the notion that many urban expats disregard the traffic laws because of a lack of English language skills among traffic policemen.
“I don’t think this is the case and I don’t see a lot of evidence of expat people disregarding the law either,” Finnis said. “The only example might be those expats who don’t have a Vietnamese driver’s license, for instance, or who don’t register their motorbike.
“This might be because it is difficult for them to understand how to go about doing so. I know that I was lucky enough to get a lot of help from a Vietnamese friend with this,” he said.

To obtain a Vietnamese driver’s license: • Applicants must be at least 18 years of age • Vietnamese visa valid for at least three months • Documentation: application form stamped at one of these offices: embassy, consulate, government office, private company and representative office • A photocopy of passport • A photocopy of valid visa or permanent residence card • 8 photos (3 centimeters x 4 centimeters) • A valid medical certificate • Fees: VND170,000 Certified documents will be submitted at the Department of Transport Further information available (in English) at http://sgtvt.hochiminhcity.gov.vn/web/tintuc/default.aspx?cat_id=592#content

Vietnam’s thirst for beer hard to quench

Vietnam’s thirst for beer is hard to quench, and a new production line with a capacity for 50,000 bottles an hour is the latest industry attempt to target one of the region’s key markets.
VBL Danang Ltd opened the line producing Larue beer at its factory in central Vietnam on Friday.
The brew with a tiger on its label is a down-to-earth favorite in the seaside city of Da Nang.
“Vietnam... is one of the largest beer markets in Asia Pacific and of the highest growth potential,” Christopher Kidd, regional director of Singapore-listed Asia Pacific Breweries Ltd (APB), said in remarks prepared for the opening ceremony.
APB and Vietnamese state-owned SATRA Group comprise the VBL joint venture.
VBL said the expansion, “to meet robust and surging beer demand”, will double bottling capacity and is the latest upgrade since it bought the brewery from Australia’s Foster’s three years ago.
At the ceremony, Singapore’s Minister for Trade and Industry, Lim Hng Kiang, said Larue is now available in most of Vietnam’s provinces and showed healthy volume growth of 25 percent last year and 50 percent this year.
Along with the Da Nang brewery, VBL manages and operates three others in central and southern Vietnam. A wholly-owned unit supplies Tiger beer, Heineken and other brands in the country’s north.
“Over the next 18 months, APB through its joint ventures and subsidiary, plans to invest close to 100 million dollars in capacity expansion in our various breweries in Vietnam,” Kidd said.
He said APB was one of the first foreign-invested firms to enter Vietnam after the communist country began to adopt a policy of economic openness 24 years ago.
Other beer firms have kept coming.
In Da Nang, stubby bottles of the Philippines-based beer San Miguel sat on wooden tables at a roadside restaurant, hoping to tempt drinkers away from Larue or other labels.
The US brand Budweiser, among others, has moved into Vietnam, and Japanese brewer Sapporo Holdings said in December that it will enter the country from early 2012 in a joint venture with Vietnam National Tobacco Corp.
Sapporo said it will be the first Japanese brewery to build a production and marketing base in the “promising Vietnamese market which has been growing at an annual rate of more than 10 percent”.
In a report last year, Spiros Malandrakis, an analyst with global market research firm Euromonitor International, said Vietnam’s integration into the World Trade Organization opened up more opportunities for investment and imports from foreign companies, particularly with the government’s commitment to slash tax on imported beer.
However, Malandrakis said Vietnam’s domestic “economy lager” generated the strongest yearly sales increase, 10 percent in 2008.
The brewers are trying to capitalize on a beer market which Euromonitor International forecasts will continue to be one of the region’s largest and fastest-growing.
Total beer sales volume at Vietnamese cafes, restaurants and other outlets grew 56 percent between 2004 and 2009 to 1.6 billion liters, the second-fastest growth rate in Southeast Asia after Cambodia.
Euromonitor International sees continued expansion of the Vietnam beer market, at 8.9 percent for 2009-10 and 5.6 percent growth by 2013-14, slightly behind Laos and Cambodia.
Vietnam’s leading brewer is Saigon Beer, Alcohol and Beverage Corp (SABECO), which had up to 35 percent of national beer sales and was increasing its production, the official Vietnam News Agency reported last year.
It said Hanoi Beer, Alcohol and Beverage Corp (HABECO) had a 15 percent market share.
Earlier this month HABECO inaugurated its new Hanoi-Me Linh brewery built with an investment of more than 100 million dollars, Vietnam News Agency said.
HABECO bottles Hanoi Beer and is a major producer of the draft brew known as “bia hoi”. The draft is dropped off every day at Hanoi’s ubiquitous sidewalk bars which are little more than plastic chairs and a metal tank of the beer.
“In my opinion, bia hoi is the best drink,” said Nguyen Duc Trung, 42, citing its relatively low alcohol content and thirst-quenching abilities in Hanoi’s heat.
“I drink bia hoi every day and that’s become my habit.”

Source: AFP 

No money to support human trafficking victims

Vietnam’s first effort to provide comprehensive assistance to human trafficking victims has run headlong into rough weather with critics slamming it as impractical and over the top.
The Ministry of Justice on Monday (August 23) submitted a draft bill to the National Assembly (NA), Vietnam’s parliament, on supporting human trafficking victims in the country.
The draft law on fighting and preventing human trafficking stresses the need to help victims with daily necessities, healthcare, counseling and education, including vocational training. It also mentions the provision of emergency aid to new returnees, including loans and legal protection.
But legislators at the NA Standing Committee meeting on Monday said the lack of money to fund its activities will make the law impractical.
Phung Quoc Hien, chairman of the NA’s Finance and Budget Committee, said the range of victims that the bill deals with was “too broad” and that no state budget would be able to handle it.
“There are still many other disadvantaged people who haven’t received such support. I agree that there should be support but it should have some limit and be suitable to our budget,” Hien said at the meeting.
Many Vietnamese girls and women have been trafficked to China, Taiwan and Cambodia and forced into prostitution or marriages. Studies have also found that some went voluntarily as an escape from abject poverty. There were others considered “ugly” or too “old” [in their late twenties or early thirties] to find a husband in Vietnam who were lured by the prospect of marriage, children and a better life. Most of the trafficked were cheated into leaving the country for better prospects, studies have found.
Tran The Vuong, Chairman of the Committee for People’s Aspiration [a parliamentary agency tasked with collecting people’s opinions for follow-up action by the lawmakers and the government] said any support mentioned in the bill needs money and would thus be difficult to implement.
In fact, Vuong went further and said not all victims should be beneficiaries of the bill because some were rich.
He said the bill should lay out more eligibility requirements for assistance.
“I have the feeling that human trafficking victims are being favored and supported like those who have contributed to the country.”
As the bill sets out different responsibilities, including financial ones, for commune level administrations, Vuong said the requirement was “far from reality” and “I don’t know where people were sitting to write down these things.”
He said communes do not have money for such support. The bill asks communes to receive returnees and pay the train and bus fares for them to get home, while commune officials themselves pay their own fares when travelling on a mission, he added.
“Almost all communes have nothing in their budget.”
Justice Minister Ha Hung Cuong dismissed notions that the bill was overly supportive of the victims, saying the ministry did not see them as contributors to the country.
The support policies were suggested by the Prime Minister in 2007, and the ministry was just narrowing down the range of victims to benefit from the bill, he said.
Cuong also said that if anyone was found to have wrongfully benefited from assistance, they would be punished and would have to return the money given to them.
Many officials at the meeting said the bill should clarify which type of buying and selling of human beings should be held criminally liable.
Some parents have had to sell their children out of sheer poverty, and there were wealthy childless couples wanting to buy children, they said, suggesting that in such cases, only administrative penalties be imposed.
The bill will be amended further and submitted to the National Assembly for passage in October.
Tough reintegration
Since the early 1990s Vietnam has been a source, transit and destination country for trafficked persons, according to a 2007 study titled “Transnational Migration, Marriage and Trafficking at the China-Vietnam border” by Le Bach Duong, Khuat Thu Hong and Danièle Bélanger.
Thousands of girls and women have been trafficked to Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and other places in Australia, Europe and North America, the study found. The researchers focused on 213 women from the northern province of Quang Ninh who were trafficked or migrated to China and had returned to Vietnam. Quang Ninh shares a border with China.
The returnees have not received any formal government support, the study found.
Though more returnees reported no change in attitude towards them after their return, there were those who were ostracized and/or looked down upon.
“Here we have many returnees. We know that they returned from China so we do not want to meet or associate with them. Some even disdain them... They are often asked ‘You’ve returned from China, haven’t you?’... Generally speaking, they must feel shamed to death,” the study quoted from group discussions held in Hai Dong Commune, Quang Ninh.
One major difficulty faced by many returnees to Quang Ninh is to get their civil and household registration back as local authorities removed them from the list when they left for China.
This made it impossible for returnees looking to rent land for cultivation, and without household registration, their children could not enroll in schools, the study found.
One victim who lived with her family could not get a birth certificate for a son she had with a man in China. “For ten years he went to school only with his hospital birth certificate.”
Then some members from Vietnam Women’s Union told her to report that she had the child with a Vietnamese man without a marriage certificate, and finally she was able to get an official birth certificate. “But it was not easy,” she said.
“Without instructions from the higher level, local police simply refuse to register the returnees and their children as local residents,” the report said.
The relative of another returnee said the woman had to ask to stay in an unused kindergarten. “It took a very long time to get the approval, but she cannot stay there for free. She pays VND150,000 (US$7.70) a month,” the relative said.
For many reasons, 84.6 percent of the returnees in the study said they have considered migrating again.
Bélanger, one of the authors of the study who teaches at the University of Western Ontario, told Thanh Nien Weekly in an email this week that “we need to change the attitude and mentality about trafficking and victims of trafficking.”
The Canadian academic said people often believe all women victims of trafficking were sex workers, or that it is their fault that they were trafficked.
She said the law should recognize trafficking victims as “people in need of support and help from the government, their family and community.”

Source: Thanh Nien

Australian vets create virtual map of Vietnam’s ‘wandering souls’

A group of Australian military researchers have taken another step in assisting the Vietnamese government in recovering their missing war dead.
Dr. Bob Hall and colleagues have compiled available data on the burial locations of Vietnamese soldiers killed in battles with Australian and New Zealand forces during the war. They have also launched a web page dedicated to urging Vietnam War vets from Australia and New Zealand to return personal effects taken from felled Vietnamese soldiers.
Statistics have estimated that around 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers are still listed as missing in action.
During the war, Australian army forces buried the bodies of Vietnamese soldiers killed in battle and logged the burial sites in their daily unit war diaries. These logs are considered the best available information for recovering Vietnamese remains - they provide both dates and locations of battles in which one or more Vietnamese soldiers was killed. While many of these burial sites are already known to Vietnamese authorities, others may not be.
In March, Hall travelled to Vietnam with Derrill de Heer. Both men had served in the war and now work as military researchers at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy.
During their spring visit, de Heer and Hall presented Vietnamese military officials with the suspected burial sites of around 3,700 soldiers killed in two provinces occupied by Australian troops from 1966 to 1972.
Vietnamese officials responded by giving the pair some names of Vietnamese MIAs as well as the dates they went missing to cross reference with the Australian burial logs.
At the end of July, Hall and de Heer returned to Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province - one of the two areas occupied by Aussie troops – to reveal their findings.
“In a number of cases, we were able to describe the people who were buried at the sites by name,” Hall told Thanh Nien Weekly.
Hall heads Operation Wandering Souls, a project funded by the Australian Research Council, which seeks to create a virtual map of Vietnamese soldiers buried on battlefield sites. So far, the research team has successfully converted military reference points to latitude and longitude and plotted them on maps generated by Google Earth.
Just the beginnin

This photograph was found on the body of a Vietnamese soldier killed in action in 1968 during fighting in northwest Ba Ria -Vung Tau Province. Australian military researchers say they are hoping to return it to his family.

The Australian academics say the burial sites they have identified constitute the earliest stages of their pilot project – none of which have yet been exhumed.
“If we had the names of all the soldiers who died in battle we should be able, with a good degree of probability, to identify soldiers in specific locations,” de Heer said. “[But] this part cannot move forward until the Vietnamese officials provide this data.”
Phan Chien, chairman of the Ba Ria-Vung Tau Veterans’ Association, confirmed his organization and other local agencies would assist the group with their work.
“Vietnamese families would be very grateful to learn the fate of their loved ones killed or missing in action thanks to the project,” Chien said.
Last week, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga told Thanh Nien Weekly that Vietnam has been working to verify all the information provided by the Australian researchers.
“Vietnam welcomes any kind of cooperation in the search for Vietnamese soldiers missing in action during the war,” Nga said.
Mementos come home
Hall and de Heer launched a campaign to urge Australian and New Zealand war veterans to hand over any personal effects captured in the field (e.g. photographs, diaries, or letters). The pair have encouraged such veterans to contact the group through the website www.vvaansw.org.
“There is interest from retired Australian and New Zealand soldiers in returning items they have held since the war,” de Heer said - though he declined to elaborate on the number of objects recovered because the website had been up for only three weeks. So far, he added, no Vietnamese families have contacted the research group.
“Maybe we’ll come back and give an exhibition [of the photographs, diaries, and letters],” Dr. Hall said. “That would be something we would like to do in the future.”
Hall added that this part of the project was in its early stages and that the success of it would depend upon the response of the Australian and New Zealand veterans.
Colonel Stuart Dodds, defense attaché of the Australian Embassy in Hanoi, expressed enthusiasm for the effort in a recent interview. “I’m very encouraged,” Dodds said. “Australia looks forward to working with Vietnam in the future to resolve the missing in action issues as a humanitarian effort.”
Making amends
Hall said this project, named Operation Wandering Souls, aims to reciprocate Vietnam’s efforts to repatriate the remains of six Australian MIAs.
The project took its name from the Vietnamese belief that if a person dies in a place where he is not known or dies in a violent death, his spirit will wander.
As a veteran, Hall felt the need to do something for Vietnamese soldiers.
“I think this is a thing that other soldiers would recognize, as a thing that should be done. It is lucky that we [are] in a position that we can do it.”
De Heer says that his motives go all the way back to 1970.
During the war, he recalled, a Vietnamese man asked him to help him find his son who had been killed in contact with Australian soldiers a week earlier and buried near a local beach.
De Heer and his men dug the man’s son up out of the sand and wrapped it up in a poncho.
“It was a clean wound, thank goodness,” de Heer said. “But I’ve never seen so much grief in my life.”