'Be Patient, All Will Be Well': Nguyen Van The, the Saigon Branch President Who Survived War, Prison, and the Sea to Reunite His Family (1975–1978)

In April 1975, as North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon, Nguyen Van The (pronounced "Tay") served as president of the Saigon Branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On a Sunday that spring he entered the meetinghouse as artillery rumbled in the distance, surrounded by members crying out, "President The! What news do you have?" He promised to tell them everything after sacrament meeting — and learned that the United States embassy was willing to evacuate Church members. The branch insisted that President The's own family evacuate first so he could devote himself to getting every member out. His wife, Le My Lien, their three children, and her mother and sisters flew out of Saigon hours later. The next day, as President The and fellow Saint Tran Van Nghia rode a motorbike to seek help from the International Red Cross, a tank with a large gun bore down on them; Nghia swerved off the road and the two men hid in a ditch as the tank rumbled by. Saigon had fallen.

Lien reached a refugee camp near San Diego, California, with no money and little English. Sleeping upright against a tentpole with one cot for her children, she was soon diagnosed with tuberculosis. She prayed continually — "Please, let me get through just this day" — believing that if she could survive, her husband could survive his ordeal.

President The was imprisoned in 1976 in the Thanh Ong Nam "reeducation" camp: rat-infested barracks, steel-slab beds, spoiled food, dysentery and beriberi, brutal labor, and beatings for rule-breakers. He survived by lying low and clinging to his faith. At one point he contemplated escaping the camp — but he felt the Lord restrain him. "Be patient," the Spirit whispered. "All will be well in the due time of the Lord." Later he said, "I was able to survive the 'reeducation' camp because ... I had faith in Jesus Christ."

When his sister Ba was permitted to visit the camp, President The hid a letter to his family inside the cloth band of his hat, with a notebook and pen placed on top to distract the searching guards. The ruse worked — the guards examined the notebook and let him pass — and the letter reached Lien. Six months later Ba returned with a photograph of his wife and children, and he knew he had to reach them.

Released at last, he left Vietnam on an old fishing boat and made it to a refugee camp in Malaysia. LDS Social Services meanwhile had arranged for Church members in the United States to care for about 550 Vietnamese refugees, most not members of the Church; Lien and her children were sponsored by BYU professor Philip Flammer and his wife, Mildred, and relocated to Provo, Utah. Lien worked picking cherries, sewing, baking wedding cakes, and typing reports to save money to bring her husband over. In January 1978 — nearly three years after they had parted — she waited at Salt Lake City International Airport and saw her pale, worn husband descending the escalator. "Thank God in heaven," she whispered as she embraced him, "you are home at last!"

The account, preserved in the Church's official global history and in R. Lanier Britsch's From the East (which documents the fall of the Saigon Branch), stands as a striking testimony of divine preservation through war, prison, and exile: a branch president's prompting that his family flee in time, the Spirit restraining him from a fatal escape attempt, a letter smuggled past guards by quiet inspiration, and a family sealed back together through years of prayer.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in Escape from Viet Nam: An Interview with Nguyen Van The - Dialogue Journal):

In a speech at Brigham Young University, in February 1980, he describes the state of the branch just before the fall of Saigon: A few days after that, on April 18, 1975, President (Jerry D.) Wheat and Elder (Richard T.) Bowman came back to Vietnam to get an official list of branch members from the American embassy, having had the names approved for evacuation. President Wheat, Elder Bowman and I went to the Embassy. Brother Cao Minh was afraid not to report, but I told him that my former testimony had said that he was a draft dodger and if he reported to the authorities, we would have a problem. I said, “Do not list any relatives, (although he had several sisters living in Saigon)."