Helping Old Friends After Half a Century
In 2008, Billy Terrell put the power of the internet to work to solve some long-lingering questions left over from his days as a 21-year-old Army specialist in Vietnam.
During his Vietnam tour, one of his friends, Lt. John Scheer, had befriended two nuns operating an orphanage called Mang Lang. The women had originally approached Scheer begging for contaminated food that the Army was discarding. Scheer began collecting money from the soldiers at the Tuy Hoa base, and passing it along to the orphans. Eventually, enough was raised to build a new shelter for them.
Terrell had been one of the enthusiastic donors to the fund. He helped feed young children and taught some older boys to play baseball. But when he returned to the States in June 1967, he locked old memories away. “The need to put all this behind me was so intense that even the fond recollections of the orphanage lay dormant,” he says.
After the fall of South Vietnam, the communist government shut the orphanage, burning the books and forcing all boys 12 and over to work in the rice paddies. The nuns were left alone. Years passed, and eventually the orphanage was allowed to reopen.
In 2008, Terrell’s curiosity led him online, and to his astonishment, he found the orphanage’s site. In November 2013, he returned, and was able to reunite with a nun he remembered as a young woman in 1967. He has raised money to help the children.
“One of the things I’d like to accomplish is to show that there were American troops who were compassionate human beings in spite of being in a war zone,” he says. “When it came to children, we were regular guys who sincerely cared. We still do.”
Max Lund today, and Max Lund Army officer, Vietnam.
Courtesy of Max Lund
Helping build Southeast Asia’s future
At age 75, Max Lund is still applying lessons in Southeast Asia he first learned as an Army officer in Vietnam half a century ago.
Lund is now president of Cambodia Corps, a program originally set up by retired Green Beret Tommy Daniels to help educate and train people in the country’s northeast provinces. The men saw the program as a “force multiplier,” a Special Forces idea that a small group could have an impact out of proportion to its size. “If we can educate a teacher or a nurse, their impact multiplies,” he says.
Many of the people Lund works with are Montagnards, an ethnically distinct minority he first encountered in Vietnam in the country’s Central Highlands, where he was assigned as part of the Phoenix Program to blunt the incursion of the Viet Cong.
Lund was 25 when he first met the Montagnards. “One of the things that struck us was how easygoing and happy the Montagnards were, even though they had to deal with all kinds of hardship,” he says. “I was impressed by the sophistication of these supposedly primitive people.”
For more than a decade, Daniels has been licensed by the Cambodian government to provide education to Montagnard young people and other disadvantaged youth in the nation’s northeast provinces, where many had fled to escape repression in Vietnam. What had begun in 2003 as a project to help minority students attend high school has evolved into a scholarship program to send high school students to college.
In one province, recent graduates include teachers, a nurse and a midwife who cooperates with Khmer medical staffers. Others work as a veterinary technician and a business graduate with a company specializing in microloans to subsistence farmers. Others who served in Vietnam have joined the program. “We’re a conduit for veterans trying to do something,” Lund says.
Dr. Le Ngoc Dung and Lyle Wacaser Vietnam 1967, and Dr. Dung and Lyle Wacaser today.
Courtesy of Lyle Wacaser
A Brotherhood of Healing Survives the War
As his 84th birthday neared, neurosurgeon Lyle Wacaser knew how he wanted to celebrate: “For my birthday present, I wanted to go see Dr. Dung,” he says. That would be Le Ngoc Dung, whom he first met in Vietnam during his tour of duty there in 1967 to 1968.
Dung was then a general surgeon working with the South Vietnamese army and Wacaser a newly minted major serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
The two formed a permanent friendship, and during the ferocious battles of Tet, they treated American and Vietnamese casualties, racing back and forth between their two hospitals.
After the fall of South Vietnam, Dung was put in a professional backwater, forced to work in a nonmedical capacity. But eventually the Vietnamese government felt his skills as a doctor were too valuable to waste. He was given a top job at the Da Nang General Hospital. Americans have helped him raise millions of dollars to upgrade the hospital.
Wacaser has returned to Vietnam five times since he served there to help Dung. The first time was in 1973, during a visit to Tokyo for a medical conference. He boarded a plane to Saigon and carried 50 pounds of needed medical instruments to Dung. His next visit was in the late 1990s. He brought more surgical tools and books on neurosurgery. The visits continued, and the friendship grew. “It was just two men bonding in wartime and maintaining a lifelong friendship, which both have fostered until the present,” says Constance Kayser, Wacaser’s wife of 29 years.
The Wacasers also sponsored Dung’s brother after he fled Vietnam and wound up in a refugee camp in Arkansas. He later opened two stores in California.
As for his humanitarian efforts in a land where he once was a soldier, Wacaser sees nothing unusual about it. “There are a lot of veterans out there who cared about the outcome of what they did,” he says.
Andrew Carroll is the director of the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University. Mike Tharp is a freelance writer in Texas and a Vietnam War veteran.
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