Telling It Like It Is [p.3]

Some fatal miscommunications added to the dire frustration of this two-hour ordeal. The USS Dubuque thought the refugees would use the map to get to their destination. The captain assumed that the boat had used a sail to get to the middle of the ocean from Viet Nam and that they would be able to use the sail to get to the Philippines. However, the “sail” was merely a piece of fabric that had been used to block sunlight.

On the other side of the spectrum, the refugees thought that the food and water were to be consumed and that another ship was on the way to rescue them. With the level of their starvation and the false sense of security, they quickly finished the supply within a week.

Nguyen expresses that this part of the story haunted him. From his research, a navy publication reported that there was another navy ship nearby and its captain was willing to escort the refugee boat to the Philippines.

“But the captain of the USS Dubuque refused to give the order and thus there were questions about his intentions,” he explains.

Passengers started dying at the horrifying rate of two-a-day, until there was no other choice but to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. After another 37 days at sea, they were rescued by Filipino fishermen and brought to the town of Bolinao. Out of the original 110 people who left Viet Nam, only 52 people stepped foot on that island in the Philippines.

“The Filipino press reported the story and the American press picked it up shortly after; this was how it came to be known as Bolinao 52,” recounts Nguyen.

Although Nguyen realized that the media covered the ordeal of Bolinao 52 extensively once this story broke, he observed that it has not yet been told from the survivors’ perspectives.

“It would have been a disservice to the story if no one told it from the survivors’ perspectives,” Nguyen firmly states.

However, many of the survivors began to seek anonymity soon after their arrival in America. When he first began the project, Nguyen did almost all of the research for Bolinao 52 on the Internet and could find no information on the survivors.

“It was extremely difficult and I knew that the only way would be through the Vietnamese community,” says Nguyen.

After a radio interview on VNCR with Ysa Le, Nguyen was able to get in touch with a woman who was one of the survivors’ sister.

“Luckily, it turned out that the woman was the sister of the man who climbed onto the USS Dubuque,” says Nguyen.

Although Nguyen was able to have a brief meeting with this survivor, who he immediately recognized from the 60 Minutes segment, he was not able to get in-depth details because the man expressed much anguish and discomfort with recounting his experience.

After the meeting, Nguyen was disappointed to go home with almost nothing. Fortunately, the man had given information about Nguyen’s project to another sister of his, who was also a Bolinao 52 survivor. Tung Trinh called Nguyen a month later and expressed her interest in participating in Nguyen’s project.