The Boat People – from ‘Lost in the Reptile House’
Our boat proved a creaking museum piece with a six-man crew in floral skirts headed by a wizened skipper sitting on top of the wheelhouse with his bare feet stuck through a hole in the cabin roof to steer the wheel – for six hundred dollars a day you expected your life in his hands and not his feet.
For three hours we alerted the skipper to little specks on the horizon but he would poo-poo them as local fishing boats with such haste we grew convinced he was determined not to find Vietnamese boats, thus avoiding the wrath of the authorities, and by late afternoon we’d left the vigil to the crew and were dozing on deck when we were woken by the skipper.
“Vietnamese,” he shouted, but when I followed his pointing arm it was just another dot, about three miles to the south, and only visible for a split second as it topped each swell. Yet our translator said the skipper was adamant – not only did their bow wave show they were coming towards us, but he could see a white sheet draped over their superstructure with a message on it.
At that distance it seemed impossible, but the ‘VT 666′ slowly grew bigger until you could read on the white sheet, ‘Help us, Help us. Help Communist refugees from Vietnam. We have risked our lives for freedom, please help us,’ and, in larger letters written on rush matting over the wheelhouse, ‘Don’t disappoint us.’
The refugees lined the rails in ragged vests and shorts, a few thin smiles and cheers amongst them, but most staring mistrustfully as they rode the swell. It took pressure to persuade our skipper to draw alongside which he finally did on the blind side to the coast. As I jumped aboard, I was grabbed by a young man and pinned to the rails.
“I am Bachelor of Arts in Saigon University,” he shouted, his voice breaking. “We try to go into harbour to the south and they stoned us. This is Malaysia and they stoned us… Don’t they have a Government here?”
I tried to take pictures but he grabbed my arm like a vice and stared into my face.
“I tell you, it made me cry when they stoned us… it made me cry,” and then his grip relaxed as he began to weep.
An old man, tears rolling down his stubbled cheeks, pulled me round and held up a little photograph of a smiling young man on graduation day.
“You take me to my son,” he said, and he pointed over his shoulder. “My son in America… you take me to America. Please.. please,” and he was led away weeping by younger men.
Their leader Ly Tich Tuong, who’d built the sixty-foot boat himself from scrap timber, said they’d been at sea for three days with two hundred and ten on board.
“Two hundred and ten?”
He gave a bitter smile at my doubting face and led me to a raised forward hatch where you were hit by the hot stench of shit and vomit and a carpet of white sick faces, some squinting up at the light, others keeping their heads buried between their knees in silent resignation.
They tried to lower a crude ladder for me but the bodies were so tightly packed they couldn’t squeeze the legs between them, so they led me through the bodies of the sick lying on deck to a rear hatch, to the same stench and shock – women and children this time, red-eyed from sickness and crying. On three sides of this hold they’d built crude shelving to take more bodies, and young faces began to slide out and stare vacantly like images from Buchenwald.
