SPEAK OUT!

BY An Ngo Lang

When my family fled our home as Saigon was falling to the North Vietnamese, fifty Marines on the U.S. Navy cargo ship, the Sergeant Andrew Miller, with unwavering dedication, rescued and cared for us along with more than 6,000 other evacuees. Their heroic actions became my family’s refugee symbol of despair-turned-to-hope.

Thousands of other refugees, Marines, and service members were involved in the life-changing Operation Frequent Wind in late April and early May 1975. What follows is my tale, a fragment of that much wider international saga.

Marine PFC Conrad Ochoa, aboard a Mike boat on April 22, 1975, as it lurched over the choppy waves in the South China Sea, battled the nausea rising in his throat. Around him, the other Marines of Sierra Detachment sat in tense silence, jaws clenched with each crash of the boat over the punishing waves.

Thinking about what lay ahead only made the knots in Ochoa’s stomach worse. Instead, he practiced the list of Vietnamese phrases the men learned during their training sessions: Không nói (Don’t speak), Ðung lên (Stand up), Ngoi xuong (Sit down), Bình tinh (Stay calm).

The men boarded the Miller that night and Ochoa’s thoughts strayed to home and family. Overhead, stars glimmered, and PFC Ochoa traced the pinpoints of starlight as if they were a roadmap to his grandmother’s home in Phoenix, a place filled with the abiding love of family. Framed photographs of his relatives—stoic Marines in dress blues—lined the archway in his grandmother’s living room, and one day, his image would be up there too.

A week later, PFC Ochoa stood beside his fire team leader, Cpl. Jeffrey Trnavsky. They watched as the sea teemed with evacuees. Like human flotsam, countless bodies were packed into junks, fishing boats, sampans, barges—anything that could float. Ochoa choked down his nerves and gripped his rifle. The Marines had been trained for combat, but no one told them they would be participating in a humanitarian mission.

Trnavsky and Ochoa climbed down the boat’s portable ladder to the permanent barge attached to the Miller. The back of that floating platform was open, allowing the transfer of refugees from an arriving barge to the permanent one. Both barges heaved with the waves. Their ropes pulled taut as they drifted apart before slamming back together. Moving between them was perilous.

There was little time to think, and Ochoa’s instincts took over. For hours, he gathered children and the elderly in his arms, leaping across the shifting divide, ensuring the safe passage of refugees across the treacherous gap. At times, he couldn’t move fast enough or stop the surge of frantic refugees who, in a panic, scrambled to get onto the portable ladder at the side of the Miller.

Some didn’t make it. They tumbled into the water, their arms outstretched, begging for rescue. Often, Ochoa only had seconds to pluck them out before they vanished beneath the surface, or the barges crashed together. The terror in their eyes burned into his memory with an intensity that would haunt him for decades.

The late morning sun sent ripples of heat off the barge’s deck when PFC Ochoa saw a little girl of about six years old standing alone, her blonde hair like a halo in the sunlight. But that was the only thing that was bright about her. Her knee-length white dress, dingy and tattered, clung to her tiny frame. Tears slid down her dirt-smudged face; her body trembled.

PFC Ochoa scooped her into his arms. “Where are your parents?” She shook her head and responded in French, then tried Vietnamese. But none of her words matched the phrases he’d memorized.

He carried her up the Miller’s ladder and into the superstructure that housed the bridge and the ship’s supplies. Gently setting the girl down, he motioned with his hand for her to stay put, and said, “I’ll find your Mama.” She recognized the word for mother. Her eyes brightened, and she nodded. She reminded him of his youngest sister, and for an instant, everything inside him ached.

He stepped outside and scanned the hundreds of faces on the deck. His stomach dropped. In the surrounding water and far out into the horizon, hundreds of vessels dotted the sea. Conrad Ochoa didn’t know if he could keep his promise to the little girl. But he had to try.

Desmond Andrews/DVIDS

It had to be him. Big white cowboy hat. The tee shirt and blue jeans. And an expectant look on his face. People streamed in front of me across the gleaming floor of the Phoenix airport. Stretching my five-foot-four frame to its greatest height, I waved like a tourist flagging a New York City taxicab.

Our eyes met, and I called out, “Conrad!” His wide smile reached his eyes, making them dance and crinkle at the corners. I was finally meeting my third Marine (see editor’s note), PFC Conrad Ochoa.

We talked nonstop for the next two-and-a-half days while I visited him and his wife, Shannon, at their home outside Phoenix. He told me about his time on the Miller and the ensuing years. After the war, he became a Marine guard at the White House. Following a second re-enlistment, he left the Marines as a platoon sergeant. Since then, he had been a horse gatekeeper, landscaper, electrician, and cybersecurity specialist. But it was his love for his family and strong moral compass that left the deepest impression on me.

Conrad Ochoa’s mother raised him—the oldest of eleven children—with a profound sense of duty and compassion. Food was often scarce, and sacrifices had to be made. “Mom told me, ‘You have to go without today so the younger ones can eat.’ That’s how I was brought up. The same principles applied on the ship.”

Ochoa and the other Marines went without food for days, often distributing their rations to children and nursing mothers. “Everything we could find or had, we gave it to everybody,” he said.

During our visit he shared some of his most vivid memories, including caring for children like me. His voice was steady but heavy with the weight of the past. “We knew that things were bad on the ship. There was nothing we could do. People were hurt. People were shot. Some had missing limbs.”

We sat in silence for a moment, transported back to the sweltering, overcrowded deck—the air thick with the stench of oil and human bodies pressed together under the blistering sun. “There were people who came and offered us gold, jewelry, and gems in exchange for special favors,” he said. “But none of us took it. We told them, ‘You’ll be treated like everyone else.’”

I asked him what happened to the French/Vietnamese girl in the white dress. She and I had been a lot alike. French and Vietnamese were my first languages, too. Rather than a white dress, I wore red silk pajamas on the Miller—the same ones I had on when we fled.

On that morning, there was no time to change or think when rockets whistled overhead, their explosions shaking the walls of our home. I slid into them every night before bed because they made me feel like a princess. But no such fairytale happened on the ship.

Those pajamas only reminded me that they couldn’t shield me from the scorching sun by day and the typhoon rains that soaked me to the bone at night. But I was lucky. I had my family with me.

Ochoa told me that all the Marines took care of that little girl. “We brought her food and water. In return, she taught us how to sing Frère Jacques.”

I asked if they ever found her mother. In a soft voice, he replied, “No. When we got to Subic Bay, I carried her off the ship and placed her in the arms of a Navy doctor. I’ve spent decades wondering, hoping she made it home. If only I knew, I’d be at peace.”

As a four-year-old, I used to think monsters were the ones who rained rockets into Saigon. That had to be the reason for the terror on my parents’ faces and why we had to flee our beloved homeland, the place of my earliest cherished memories.

But I learned during our escape that it wasn’t monsters. It was war.

Half a century later, Marines and other service members who took part in Operation Frequent Wind still carry the weight of those memories. On the cusp of adulthood, those young men left home and safety to do more than they ever imagined.

They gave more than 100,000 strangers—grandmothers, grandchildren, newlyweds, orphans, schoolteachers, farmers, South Vietnamese troops, and my family—a future. They served, protected, and sacrificed not only because it was their duty but, perhaps more importantly, because they possessed a deep sense of humanity and a commitment to doing what was right.

On the 50th anniversary of Operation Frequent Wind, I remember the Marines of the U.S.N.S. Sergeant Andrew Miller and all of those who chased the monsters away. Because of them, refugees like me hear freedom ring.

Editor’s Note: In An Ngo Lang’s January/February 2024 “Speak Out!” she told the story of her family’s escape from Saigon and how she reconnected with two of the two Marines who served on the Miller.

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