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2A FLORIDA TODAY, Monday, May 1, 2000 VIETNAM 25 YEARS LATER Refugees face pressure, discrimination Return to battleground brings closure to vets i 1 1 I Li I 1 A 4 X4 j0- A i In I i 'V I ttfim.r mini -f w- -wr id. i AP an appearance by presidential candidate Sen. John McCain when someone labeled Nguyen a communist, and the crowd turned on him. McCain, whose plane was shot down during a bombing run over Hanoi in 1965, had used an objectionable name in reference to communist prison guards who tortured him. "I wanted people to see the detrimental effect of a racial slur and to know that the word affects all Vietnamese, not just the ones who tortured him," said Bao Nguyen, whose family name is as common as "Smith" is in the United States.

He also felt that the media was covering the Arizona Republican as if it were a foregone conclusion that Little Saigon would support a man tortured by communists. "We have other issues that are important, like civil rights, health care and education," Nguyen said. His sentiments are echoed by others of his generation. "Life here can be very confusing," said Patrick Bui, who came to the United States in the early 1960s as an immigrant and now heads the Vietnamese-American Chamber of Commerce in Little Saigon. "Here, for everything you do, you need to fill out a piece of paper.

In Vietnam, any difficulty can be fixed with a little gift of money." There are other cultural conflicts. Kathy Buchoz, a former mayor of Westminster, recalls police rushing to a restaurant in Little Saigon after reports that cooked dogs were hanging in the window. The barbecued animals turned out to be pigs. "No one around here had ever seen a whole cooked pig," she said. NGHIEM TONG-STEVEN, 3, holds the old flag of South Vietnam at a gathering Saturday in Seattle commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

Members of the Vietnamese community gathered at Asa Mercer Middle School to mark the anniversary. By Julie Schmit Gannett News Service HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam Lying in his own blood, Paul Critchlow knew fear. The U.S. Army private 1st class, 23 and fresh off the University of Nebraska football field, had been blown 10 feet by an anti-tank grenade that exploded in front of him. He couldn't move, not even to see if he still had legs.

For five hours, he slipped in and out of consciousness as the battle raged. He decided death wouldn't be too bad. "What I really feared was having to watch a North Vietnamese finish me off," said Critchlow, who was eventually rescued by helicopter. Last week, Critchlow, head of communications for Merrill Lynch, put the event in its rightful place: behind him. He stood on the ground where he had struggled between life and death 31 years ago during the Vietnam War.

is it," he said, as he stepped onto the spot, surrounded by bomb craters. Then he fell crying into the arms of his weeping Vietnamese guide. The visit healed a wound that, for Critchlow, only a return to Vietnam would heal. "I've been trying to reconstruct it for 30 years," he said. "I don't have to do that anymore." Critchlow was one of 24 U.S.

veterans, organized under the umbrella of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, who returned to Vietnam April 24 as the 25th anniversary of the end of the war neared. They came the first time as young men to fight communism, test themselves and do what their country asked. They came the second time as business executives and scholars seeking to build bridges for their country as the war recedes and the global economy grows. The veterans talked with Vietnamese officials of trade, investment, urban planning and the networked economy. The veterans also came as men who, at some level, sought reconciliation either with themselves, their former enemy or their own country.

As the days passed, feelings and memories surfaced much as shrapnel still bursts from time to time through Critchlow's skin. The men recalled lost friends, children caught in cross fire and the care they took navigating along dykes in rice paddies, where a misstep could trigger a mine. Conversations whipsawed from how developed the country looks to how upsetting it was to discover that a soldier killed in combat was a woman. For a few, talking about anything but Vietnam was preferable: the presidential race, their kids. Either way, it was unlike any other trip they'd made to Vietnam.

The seasoned business travelers peered like first-time fliers from the window of the Vietnam Airlines aircraft as they descended into Hanoi, the former enemy capital. In some ways, Vietnam looked and felt the same. The heat, rice paddies, water buffalo and roadside shacks were familiar. Thunder reminded veterans of shelling. Beautiful young women still caught their eyes.

Many veterans weren't ready to revisit the past. But Critchlow did. Using old Army maps, he found the spot where he was wounded. It had happened during a 10-day battle in which dozens of Americans and hundreds of North Vietnamese died. Critchlow's company had gone in to help other units under heavy fire.

They expected resistance as they walked into the valley, but got none. It was only when they tried to pull back to recover a downed helicopter that they realized the North Vietnamese had let them go in. They were surrounded. Near midnight, Critchlow was lying on his back in the middle of a former plantation building beneath a blown-off roof. He was pointing a flashlight upward to help guide U.S.

airmen in dropping bombs on North Vietnamese positions. But the North Vietnamese also were using his beam as a target. Critchlow saw the soldier with the grenade launcher point at him and fire. Almost 31 years later, Critchlow stops to rest and get permission from local officials to cross the fields and reach the spot. Seated in the yard of a Vietnamese family, he is again surrounded by Vietnamese.

But this time, the children smile. A young man offers him water. An old man shows him the right footpath. At the site of the former plantation building, where he once lay near death, he finds a field sown with manioc, a plant like a sweet potato. The hill that took so much blood now grows food.

"Unbelievable," he said. estimated 1.3 million Vietnamese in the United States live. According to a Census Bureau survey in 1998, more than 900,000 Vietnamese resettled in the United States from 1975 to 1997. During that time, 400,000 were born here. Many of the first-generation refugees considered America transitory because they had planned to return to their native land when communism was defeated.

Until recently, simply advocating trade with the government of unified Vietnam was considered traitorous among them. Earlier this year, Bao Nguyen, 19, was in Little Saigon protesting Offering 'Wtekmd! Heddijt. Ross A. m-n lift ii By Valerie Alvord Gannett News Service WESTMINSTER, Calif. Each day as she left for school, the little girl addressed her parents in their native Vietnamese tongue: "My dear Mom and Dad, I'm going to school now.

I'll see you later." On the day that Thuy Thi Nguyen left her home in Oakland, to enroll at Yale, she said the same words, and they all cried. But her parents, Dien Tai and Tuoi Thi Nguyen, always knew their daughter would continue her education. It was the one demand they made of all seven of their children. "My parents told us it was important that we do well," said Nguyen, (pronounced Win) now a UCLA Law School student. Twenty-five years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnamese who came to the United States as refugees can claim increasingly strong roots in America.

Many who came here penniless and uneducated have learned English, become American citizens and purchased their own homes. On average, their children do better in school than the children of native-born Americans and better than the children of past waves of immigrants, said Carl Bankston III, a sociologist at Tulane University in New Orleans who has studied the refugees for 15 years. In the past waves, he said, immigrants were able to move into the middle class through blue-collar factory jobs. Today, those opportunities have dried up. The Vietnamese adjusted, the sociologist said, by congregating in ethnic enclaves where they create their own jobs and encourage their children to move up through education.

In Orange County's Westminster, home of Little Saigon, there are more Vietnamese than anywhere outside Vietnam. Other places where large communities thrive include San Diego; San Jose; New Orleans; Chicago; Seattle; Portland, Houston; and Falls Church, Va. A Web site, www.vietnewhori-zon.org, compiled by Thuy Nguyen and her friends, profiles achievements and milestones the first Vietnamese elected official, the first Vietnamese professional football player and the first Vietnamese Miss America. The Web site also lists less happy milestones, such as a hate crime. That's the flip side to the Vietnamese-American recipe for success.

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"I'm an American," said Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam on April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell. "At the same time, Vietnam is my country, but I have no memory of it. It makes me feel guilty because my parents have tried so hard to instill in me that I'm Vietnamese." Nguyen can't remember her parents' harrowing escape in 1978 on a leaky, overcrowded boat, their rescue at sea by the Japanese navy or their arrival in New Orleans, where her father found work as a machinist. Later, the family would migrate to California, where about 40 percent of the Corrections, clarifications, amplifications It is Florida Today's policy to promptly correct errors of fact that appear in our news reports. Corrections will be published on this page as soon as possible after an error is called to our attention.

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Merritt Island www.nhcplacc.com ty8975jj Assisted Living Facil limmx1 TIME, From 1A Senate President Toni Jennings pointed out Friday that her chamber has tackled several of its top priorities, including a transportation spending package, ethics reform, new school safety measures and an expansion of the state program that pays for children's health insurance. But the House hasn't passed any of those. "The ball is in their court," said Jennings, R-Orlando. The only thing lawmakers have to do this year is pass a budget. That remains undone as well, with budget writers in both chambers meeting over the weekend still trying to hammer out differences.

The biggest of those differences is over what to do with a nearly $13 billion surplus in the state's pension fund. The budget leaders in each chamber Sen. Locke Burt, R-Or-mond Beach, and Rep. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie met Sunday and said they are close to agreement on most of the budget.

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