Commentary on BBC Vietnamese
- Bui Van Phu
- Nov 6, 2015
- 3 min read
Webmaster's note: This is excerpted from a commentary written by freelance journalist Bui Van Phu. It was published on BBC Vietnamese.
The Case of Duong Trong Lam
In doing this report, A.C. Thompson wants the U.S. to re-open these cases. However, the authorities show no interest because these cases have been closed and archived for over 20 years.
When the investigative report “Terror in Little Saigon” was released, I had a conversation with Giao Chi Vu Van Loc, a writer who has lived and been active in the Vietnamese community in San Jose and San Francisco for the last 40 years.
We talked about the death of Duong Trong Lam in July 1981 and remembered what a shock it was to the community.
At that time, I was involved with student activism at the University of Berkeley, organizing rallies and meetings about human rights violations in Vietnam. Because of this, I was advised by elders in San Jose to take precaution, not to travel by myself because I could be harmed by Communists.
Mr. Vu Van Loc, a former Colonel in the South Vietnamese Army, explained that Duong Trong Lam’s father was Lieutenant Colonel Duong Van Lang and was in Mr. Loc’s military unit that he led. According to Mr Loc, Lam was stubborn and had very different political views from his father’s.
Lam graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. At one point, Lam had worked at the Center for Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement (CSEARR) in San Francisco. CSEARR was lead by Michael Huynh, who just passed away recently in Saigon.
After working at CSEARR, Lam founded the Vietnamese Youth Development Center (VYDC). In the summer of 1980, through the VYDC, Lam launched the newspaper Cai Dinh Lang with the mission of “using ideas as a weapon against all forms of oppression.”
At that time, international Vietnamese students with a pro-Hanoi stance were often active in the San Francisco area. They regularly delivered the Thai Binh newspaper, from the Association of Patriotic Overseas Vietnamese in America, and Cai Dinh Lang paper to my dorm’s mailbox. These periodicals were also sent to many other Vietnamese families.
After Duong Trong Lam’s shooting, an organization with the name Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation (A.C. Thompson found this through FBI documents with the abbreviation VOECRN) mailed a letter from Las Vegas to the Associated Press office in New York to claim responsibility for the killing on July 21, 1981.
At the time of Lam’s death, the Front didn’t exist yet. In 1982 a broadcast on CBS called “HCM Trail” talked about the Front that Admiral Hoang Co Minh had founded that year. The title of this news story was a play on words on Ho Chi Minh’s Trail during the war. In 1983 a series of “Just Cause Conferences” were organized to welcome Admiral Minh returning home from the resistance base.
Detectives Hendrix and Sanders of the San Francisco Police Department could not find any clues in Lam’s death and concluded that the killing was related to money issues, not politically motivated.
In fact, at the time there were a lot of rivalry between different Vietnamese overseas groups in America and Canada for financial gains from remittances and goods shipped to Vietnam. Lam could have been a victim in this conflict.
Former Colonel Vu Van Loc disclosed that Duong Trong Lam was buried in the Los Gatos cemetery near San Jose. When the Vietnamese elders in the community found out, they protested so Lam’s family exhumed and reburied him at a different location.
To this day, there is no concrete evidence to prosecute any suspect for the murders of Vietnamese-American journalists.
However, the investigative report “Terror in Little Saigon,” attempts to firmly conclude that K-9, an arm of the Front had killed Duong Trong Lam and Nguyen Dam Phong.
If the Front views this is as libel accusing them of committing terrorist acts, Mr. Vu Van Loc said that the Front can sue reporter A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and PBS in court.
Looking back at the Vietnam War, if the war had truly continued on American soil as some journalists have asserted when writing about political activities in the Vietnamese community, then it will probably take a long time to determine the culprits behind these murders.
And it could be possible that answers will never be found because the Vietnam War is a war with many mysterious deaths.
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