The US Navy Saved a Boy Fleeing Vietnam — Now, He’s a Navy Doctor
Mil & Intel
By Joshua Skovlund | May 23, 2021
Artillery impacted around the small fishing boat where a young family — 9-year-old Minh Van Nguyen, his mother, and his eight siblings — huddled for cover. Though 50 people were crammed on the boat as it rocked in the harbor of Vũng Tàu, 50 miles south of Saigon, the craft belonged to Nguyen’s family. It had been Nguyen’s father’s fishing boat, the luckiest boat that caught the biggest hauls in their home village of Phan Thiet. It also was the same boat his father was steering on a pre-dawn morning when he collided with another boat, falling over the side. His father’s death had left 9-year-old Minh — his name would become Peter Minh Van Nguyen when he eventually arrived in the US — with his mother and his eight siblings alone to face the end of the war and the arrival of communist forces.
Nguyen’s mother had lived under communist rule as a child and would not allow such a future for her children. As the North Vietnamese approached, she loaded her children onto her late husband’s boat with several other families.
“If we’re going to die, we die as free people,” Han Thi Nguyen told her children. “We’re not turning back.”
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