PEOPLE

into the South China Sea, That night an Italian reporter remarked
at dinner that this panic-stricken flight from their own people was
the rault of years of hexican propaganda.
This was how the fint 130 000 refugees got out of Vietnam.
Two months after Saigon fell, h m Binh began to prepare his
~ p e Food . was hard to get and, when you found it, expensive.
Prices were between ten and thirty times higher than before the communists
took ma. The hospitals were run properly but there was
a shortage of medicines, which were kept for the army and party
members. Ordinary people who went to hospital were told what they
needed but had to ay to buy the medicine themselves. As o result
some people died. The text books being issued to schools all stcmcd
to be written by Ho Chi Minh. More alarmingly, the communists
started taking revenge, Prominent people who had worked for the
Ameriaans were arrested. People la$ well known who had not
helped the Americsns might be left alone, unless they were
denounced by someone to the authorities.
With tht money saved from the family ice works, Lam Binh
bought a boat in July. It cost $10 000 to buy and repair. He registered
it as a fishing boat, Then he studied navigation, Only Nguyen
Van Chen had had any bating cxpetience. The escape had to be
planned in complete secrecy, At that time most people trying to
escape w m being aught, They were either intacepttd by government
patrols or betrayed by relatives or neighhum. There had been
talk of esrsptes being blown out of the water by Vietnamese gunboats,
The family, eight in all, decided to leave together, abandoning the
ice works. The three friends were later inctuded. They smuggled
enough food (mainly dried Ash and prawns) on board KG 4435 to
last two weeks. Then in daylight they left the port of Rach Gia, four
of them hiding on the cabin floor. Rach Gia was a busy port, with
800 large fishing boats like Lam Binh's and probably 3000 small
craft. But it was not as easy as it might seem to get away, as about
one in ten of the fishing boats acted as security vessels.
It was now February, early in the calm season at sea. They knew,
however, that if they headed south there was still a danger of being
caught in turbulence from the South China Sm, m, as Rach Gia is
on the south-west cat of Viemmm, they steered a cwr~
west amss
the Gulf of Wland. Evm in the relatively dosed waters of the gulf,
the weather was roughcr than expected. Lam Binh's family - his
parents, two sisters and two of his brothers - were very seasick and
when the boat arrived in Thailand they could not go on. They suyd
v Lao refugee camp 14/32 in Ubol. Lam Binh did not like the Imk
of the amp. With his brother Lm lkc Tam and the three friends,
none of whom had been seasick, he shoved off in KG 4435 and went
looking for something better.
But it took a long time to find it, They were shunted from one
port to another by authorities, given food and fuel and told to move
on. Ilr Mdaysia, Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah (Bornto) it was the
same story. Thc Malaysian government said they would k given
anything they wanted as long as they mwtd on, so they took fod
and water for three weeks and 4000 lines of fuel and left. The five
mcn spent four weeks in Kuching in Sabah repairing the boat for
the long voyage to Darwin. When they reached Darwin their journey
had taken them 3500 kitometres. The mcmbcrs of KG 4435, the fint
of the bmt people to reach as far as Darwin, settled in Australia.
Had they been refused prmission to stay, they intended to try to
ger to France, By what mans irs not clear. Presumably not in
KG 4435, although a review of the iourncys of the bo~t people
would make anyone waxy of piacing limits upon them.
From an aircraft, the seas and straits of South-East Asia look sluggish.
White caps are unusual, nu angry ~urf pounds the palm-fringed
beaches, and the land masses wd myriads of islands look flat and
at ease with the peaceful pea.
For the kind of small craft of the boat people leaving Vitmam
between 1975 and 1977, however, there were hidden dangtrs, even
if they esaped the coastguards and the pirates who began opcnly
to optrate in the shallower waters, especially off the coast of Thailand.
The waters of the South China Sea and the Java Sea are mly
deeper than forty or fifty metres and shallow seas such as these are
subject to currents manipulattd by winds. The tidts we affected by
the rise and fall of the Pacific and Indim Oceans, which converge