Keo
Journeys—we are all on one. Some of us have just begun our journey in life, while others of us are farther on down the road. Some of us have been on a fairly predictable path, while others of us have encountered unexpected twists and turns. Such has been Keo Eban’s journey as God led him from the jungles of Vietnam to our fellowship here at Westside Chapel. Here is his story.
(Keo Eban’s Story as told to Virginia Hinson)
I was born under a longhouse in the Raday tribal village of Buon Dha Prong, Daklak Province in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. I was named Y Det Eban, but later I earned the nickname Keo, which means “candy.” I’ll tell you more about that later! I’m not sure of the date of my birth—no one issued birth certificates in our village, certainly not the midwife who delivered me. Later on I would choose the date of September 20 for my birthday, and when my uncle signed me up for school, he recalled the year of my birth as 1958 so that date was put on my school enrollment certificate. Many years later, when I applied for refugee status, my birthday was listed as September 20, 1960. To be honest, I don’t really know how old I am!
I am the youngest of four children. My parents, my two sisters, my brother, and I lived with 5 other related families in our longhouse. A longhouse is just that—a long, narrow, thatched roof house for several families. Traditionally when a girl married, she and her husband stayed in the family longhouse. When a boy married, usually to a girl from another village, he moved into her family’s longhouse. Our village at that time had around 25 longhouses, each made with bamboo walls, bamboo floors, and a roof made of long grass woven around a bamboo frame. I loved walking on the bamboo floor, which would spring up and down with each step I took. Since the houses were built up on stilts, notched logs served as our stairs up to the front and back doors. Of course we had no electricity in our village—electricity would not come to that part of Vietnam for another forty years! Our water supply was a nearby stream. This is where we got our drinking water, washed our clothes, and took our baths. Some of the villagers had even rigged up a bamboo water pipe from the stream to make a shower. Though the stream was neither wide nor deep, amazingly it never ran dry.
My earliest childhood memory is going to work in the fields with my mother. She began taking me to the fields as soon as I could walk. Our family, like many other Raday families, grew rice, cucumbers, corn, pumpkins, and bananas. I guess we had about 200 banana trees with five different varieties of bananas, even purple ones. The bananas were our cash crop, and twice a year a truck would come to collect our banana harvest. Unfortunately the small amount of money we got for our bananas never went very far. Our other crops were for our own use or to sell in the market at a city three miles away from our village. We would get up at 5 A.M. once a week or so to gather our fresh produce and carry it into the city. There we would set up our produce on a mat by the side of a road and wait for customers to come by. My family also raised cows, but not for the milk. Our cows were raised for meat and for sacrifices to the many gods our village worshiped. You see, if our village needed rain for the crops we would plant in May, we would sacrifice a cow to the god of rain at the end of March. If we were going to fish in a nearby river, we would need to make a sacrifice to the river god before we went to the river. There were also gods of the jungle and gods of the fields, not to mention evil spirits that could make us sick. All these needed to be appeased with a sacrifice of a cow, buffalo, pig, or even a chicken. Sacrifices also were made by family members whenever a loved one died.
Since I was the youngest of the family, I stayed working in the fields with my mother long after the other boys had gone to school. Girls from my village did not attend school. My brother, who was enrolled at the school, came home with some frightening stories. He told me that the teacher would hit the students’ fingertips with a ruler as punishment or make a child kneel on the concrete floor for ten or more minutes in front of the class for getting an answer wrong on the blackboard. On top of that, the students had to shave their heads once a week! After hearing my brother’s reports, I decided I was not going to go to school—ever. I hated school even though I had never been.
One thing I did love was candy. Just about every day a peddler selling a white taffy candy would come to our village. I loved that taffy! As soon as the peddler showed up, I would start crying for candy. We did not have any money to spare, but my mother would barter with the man, giving him an orange or some bananas for a piece of candy for me. Soon everyone started calling me Keo, which is our word for candy, and the nickname stuck. When I did finally go to school around age nine, I was teased a lot by the other children. “Keo, would you like some keo?”
It was my uncle who decided that it was time for me to go to school. Our village didn’t have a school so we had to walk three or four miles down a jungle path to another village to attend the school there. That path was scary! None of us would ever walk it alone because we would see monkeys and an occasional tiger in the dense jungle. The school was a little three-room cement building with a tin roof and wooden benches instead of desks. We started off with about 20 students per class, but dwindled down to about 9-10 as the weeks went by. Our lessons were in Vietnamese, a language which I didn’t understand at all as my family spoke Raday, but I soon picked it up. I decided school wasn’t so bad after all. I was still in first grade when the war came to our village. It was 1968, and the Tet Offensive had begun, so the school had to close. Later on I attended 2nd through 5th grades in the city of Buon Me Thuot.
I have many memories of the war. Our village was in South Vietnam, and there was an American base
just about a mile and a half from us. Often the American soldiers
would come to the village for the jar alcohol (rice wine) some of the villagers made and to eat some of our food. Sometimes they would stay all day, and my grandmother and the ladies of the village would cook for them. The Americans liked Montagnard food. I remember one time when a tank came through our village. The big army trucks had churned up the path into a mud pit. A G.I. riding on the back of the tank slipped and fell off into the mud. He started hollering for the tank to stop, but the men inside the tank could not hear him yelling. He then started shooting his rifle, but still the tank did not stop. My uncle and I saw all this happen, and when the G.I. gave up and started walking back to his base, we walked with him—not beside him, of course, in case he was mad at us for some reason, but a little way behind him to make sure he got back safely.
Another memory is not so good. An American helicopter had developed engine trouble as it flew near our village and had to make an emergency landing in our field. One of the men of the village had been shooting at a bird, and when the Americans heard the gunfire, they assumed that they were under attack. They must have radioed for backup because the next thing we knew there were six or eight helicopter gunships shooting up our village! We all ran for shelter, and it is a miracle that none of us were killed. For the most part, though, we liked the Americans, and they liked us. They often would throw food to us from the trucks and helicopters. I remember that everything was green, army green, and that one time I got a can of chicken. Around this time my brother and my brother-in-law joined the American army, as did my uncle. They would serve as scouts for the Americans, a decision that would have huge repercussions for us Raday.
In 1973 the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, but the war did not end for us. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to the communists, and those of us who had supported the Americans were now the hunted people as the Viet Cong (they called themselves the Bo Doi, the North Vietnamese Armed Forces) sought revenge. One night around 4:00 A.M our village was invaded and five of us were captured. I and the other four were tied into a long line and taken into the city for questioning. Since I was only around 15 years old, I was released the next morning, but the others stayed in custody for six months. I knew it was just a matter of time until I had to endure that again so I started making plans to leave the village. First I needed some equipment. When the South Vietnamese Army surrendered, they had thrown away their rifles, packs, uniforms, grenades, and anything else that might identify them as combatants. I found a gun and a uniform, and late on the night of October 25th, 1976, when I was around sixteen, my cousin, three friends, and I left the village to join the Resistance Army in the jungle.
Our base camp was very rough, just a clearing seven miles deep into the jungle. We slept in hammocks and lived off any food we could scrounge from the jungle or steal from nearby fields. There were times when we averaged one meal very three days or so. When we couldn’t find food, we would eat a jungle root called ening. This root is poisonous unless prepared very carefully. First we would peel it, slice it very thin, boil it, and put it in a basket in water in a stream with running water, stirring it frequently. The water would flush out the poison. This became our miracle food, the manna which kept us alive when we had nothing else to eat. The Viet Cong suspected that we must be getting food from the villages so they set up ambushes in the fields at night. We would hide in the jungle and listen to the soldiers talking. We could tell by their dialect if they were enemies. We would simply wait until they went away before we raided the corn, beans, bananas, or manioc. Often the villagers would send us messages to tell us where the VC were.
Very early one morning close to harvest time, when the rice was tall, my cousin and I sneaked into the fields near our home village so that we could visit our parents. My mother was so excited to see me! She went back home and fixed a meal of rice and vegetables and brought it to us in the fields. We couldn’t stay long because my father was very worried that we would be caught and the whole village punished. This was the last time I ever saw my mother and father.
I spent eight years in what I call the killing fields because we were fighting every day. There were only 17 in my group and only a total of 45 in the Resistance, but we would split up in our maneuvers with two or three of us going in one direction and two or three in another so the VC thought we had many more men than we actually had. We used weapons and ammunition discarded by the South Vietnamese Army and the Americans. We also mounted ambushes on the roads used by the Communist forces. To flush us out of our hide-outs, the Communists began to burn the jungle around the villages, and the villagers were ordered to clear out all the underbrush. At times they would force our family members to search for us, using them as human shields so that we would not fire. I later heard that my nieces and nephews were forced to crawl under jungle bushes to look for me. This tactic by the Communists forced us to move deeper into the jungle away from the village fields where we had been able to get food. Now we lived on jungle roots and whatever game we could shoot, such as deer, wild cow, monkeys, and even elephants.
The year 1977 was a turning point for me. The Communists found our hiding place and surrounded us early one morning. Our group scattered in all directions, with six of us running together. We ran all the rest of that day and into the night back towards our village. There three of our group surrendered and told where the rest of us were headed. The three of us left decided to split up, with two heading back to their own area and me left on my own. I was determined not to surrender so I spent three months living on my own in the jungle. I had a grenade that I was saving to use on myself if I found myself surrounded with no hope of escape. The Communists were certain that I would try to make contact with my parents so they separated my mom and dad and took them to other villages to live.
This was a very bad time for me. I was running for my life every moment of every day and scared to death. I was constantly on the move, grabbing a few hours of sleep whenever I could under a bush or in a ditch separating the fields. In my desperation I remembered a missionary lady named Betty Mitchell who had come to my school to have a Bible class for the children on Wednesday nights. She had told us about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. I decided to pray to Jesus and ask Him to send the Holy Spirit to be with me. Suddenly I felt such a peace come over me, and I was no longer scared. I had no Bible and no preacher to lead me in a prayer of salvation, but I had the Holy Spirit with me! From that point on, I found myself praying hundreds of times a day. Though I was still by myself in the jungle, I knew God was with me. Finally I was reunited with the Resistance group, and a Christian member of the group prayed with me as I surrendered my life to Christ. I remember that it was on Christmas Day, December 25, 1977.
In 1978 we decided to leave Vietnam and cross the border into the mountains of Cambodia to get away from the constant fighting. I was in the third group to leave. At this time I became a courier, traveling with messages from the group in Cambodia to the leaders back in the villages. It would take me about a week of hard walking to reach my home village. Meanwhile, the Communists kept hunting for us, even crossing the border into Cambodia. They had 9 divisions and 1200 in each division for a total of 10,800 men hunting for us. We had many battles, with the Communists suffering hundreds of casualties, but we would have only a couple of our men wounded. It brings to my mind the story of Moses leading the Israelites through the 40 years in the wilderness. Surely God was with us as He was with Moses.
While we were in Cambodia, a rival Communist faction called the Khmer Rouge contacted us in hopes that in exchange for food and “protection,”we would fight for them against the Cambodian government. We were taken to their headquarters in the Dong Rek Mountains between Cambodia and Thailand and put into a small compound surrounded by land mines. As evil and brutal as the Khmer Rouge were, they did not hurt us. It reminds me of the story of Daniel and the lions’ den, where God stopped the mouth of the lions so they could not harm Daniel. I used my time there to learn Thai, which would really help our group in future months. While in the Khmer Rouge camp, I got very sick and was taken with five others into a nearby town for treatment. We were put in a fenced-in rice warehouse guarded by a Montagnard traitor and given some vitamins. While I was in the warehouse, the Khmer Rouge camp was attacked by the Vietnamese Communists, who were still looking for us. The members of our Resistance group fled into the countryside, but two were killed by the land mines which the Khmer Rouge had sown around our compound. The group stayed in the Dong Rek Mountains for a couple of years before going to a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Cambodia.
Eventually I was released from the warehouse and dumped into a field close to the rice fields in which my group was hiding. Two Thai families adopted me, and I lived with them for three months. In the meantime, my uncle had contacted the French Red Cross in Namuym, Thailand, which, in turn, got in touch with the American Red Cross. It was decided that four of us would go to Bangkok to try to contact the American Embassy. We still hoped that the Americans would support us in our fight against the communists back in Vietnam. Since I knew Thai, I would be the translator. The leader of our group wrote many letters to various government agencies. Upon reaching Bangkok, we turned ourselves in to the police and were interned in an immigrations jail for nine months. We were confined with 400 others in a bare concrete building.
One day to my great surprise, Betty Mitchell visited the immigrations jail. She had been working at the Dalat School in Penang, Malaysia, and had seen a news magazine article about the refugee camp, Site Two, on the Thai border. As she read the article, she recognized some of the names of the refugees. She and a fellow missionary, Dawn Deets, traveled to the camp, where she learned that some of us Raday were in the Bangkok jail. Though she was only allowed to visit the women’s side of the jail, we did get to see her briefly.
Finally we received word that the United States was going to grant us asylum. Our relocation to the United States took some time. First we were sent to a camp in Bataan, Philippines, for five months to learn English. Here I encountered some C&MA missionaries, including Betty Mitchell and Charlie Long. Then we flew to Korea, Los Angeles, and then to Greensboro, North Carolina, arriving on Thanksgiving of 1986. I was assigned to a group that would settle in Charlotte. My sponsors were a wonderful couple, Bob and Nancy Malone, from the C&MA church in Charlotte. Over the years they have become like parents to me and grandparents to my daughters. Later I decided to move to Greensboro, where my aunt and uncle were living and where I hoped to find work.
In Greensboro, I began attending a TEE Bible class that Betty Mitchell was holding in her home. This is when I met Geri Mitchell. I vaguely remembered her as a little girl who had accompanied Betty on her visits to the villages in Vietnam, but at that time, I had absolutely no idea that she would become my wife one day long in the future. Since I had just gotten a second job delivering newspapers and had to wake very early in the morning, I asked Geri to give me a wake-up phone call at 4:00 each morning so I would not oversleep. That is how we got started talking, and we became good friends. I was from the jungle and didn’t know anything about dating. I think our first “date” was to Burger King! Anyway, something must have clicked because Geri and I became engaged in January of 1989, and we were married on August 5, 1989. Our missionary friend, Ken Swain, who had translated the Raday Bible, performed our wedding ceremony, which we had carefully planned to combine the best of both cultures, American and Raday.
Geri and I still live in Greensboro, where we stay busy working with the Montagnard population of a couple of thousand people. We have two daughters, Miriam, who was born in 1991, and Esther, who was born in 1994. We are blessed to have “Grammie,” Betty Mitchell, now 90 years old, living with us. I am employed at Ryerson Tull Warehouse where I assemble orders of bars of steel, bronze, and aluminum for shipping all over the U.S. In my free time, I garden. My aunt and I have adjoining yards so we have a combined garden where we grow corn, cucumbers, squash, various varieties of lettuce, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, egg plant, and blueberries, among other things, but unfortunately the weather here is not suitable for rice or bananas. I guess my father’s and mother’s lessons in the fields of Vietnam are paying off!
Looking back over my life, I see God’s hand constantly guiding and protecting me. Will I ever go back to Vietnam? Geri and I did go back several years ago with our daughters, but it was difficult for both us and our relatives as I am still a “suspect” person to the present-day Communist regime. Once again, God rescued me from what could have been a tragic detainment. But that’s another story….
(Keo Eban’s Story as told to Virginia Hinson)
I was born under a longhouse in the Raday tribal village of Buon Dha Prong, Daklak Province in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. I was named Y Det Eban, but later I earned the nickname Keo, which means “candy.” I’ll tell you more about that later! I’m not sure of the date of my birth—no one issued birth certificates in our village, certainly not the midwife who delivered me. Later on I would choose the date of September 20 for my birthday, and when my uncle signed me up for school, he recalled the year of my birth as 1958 so that date was put on my school enrollment certificate. Many years later, when I applied for refugee status, my birthday was listed as September 20, 1960. To be honest, I don’t really know how old I am!
I am the youngest of four children. My parents, my two sisters, my brother, and I lived with 5 other related families in our longhouse. A longhouse is just that—a long, narrow, thatched roof house for several families. Traditionally when a girl married, she and her husband stayed in the family longhouse. When a boy married, usually to a girl from another village, he moved into her family’s longhouse. Our village at that time had around 25 longhouses, each made with bamboo walls, bamboo floors, and a roof made of long grass woven around a bamboo frame. I loved walking on the bamboo floor, which would spring up and down with each step I took. Since the houses were built up on stilts, notched logs served as our stairs up to the front and back doors. Of course we had no electricity in our village—electricity would not come to that part of Vietnam for another forty years! Our water supply was a nearby stream. This is where we got our drinking water, washed our clothes, and took our baths. Some of the villagers had even rigged up a bamboo water pipe from the stream to make a shower. Though the stream was neither wide nor deep, amazingly it never ran dry.
My earliest childhood memory is going to work in the fields with my mother. She began taking me to the fields as soon as I could walk. Our family, like many other Raday families, grew rice, cucumbers, corn, pumpkins, and bananas. I guess we had about 200 banana trees with five different varieties of bananas, even purple ones. The bananas were our cash crop, and twice a year a truck would come to collect our banana harvest. Unfortunately the small amount of money we got for our bananas never went very far. Our other crops were for our own use or to sell in the market at a city three miles away from our village. We would get up at 5 A.M. once a week or so to gather our fresh produce and carry it into the city. There we would set up our produce on a mat by the side of a road and wait for customers to come by. My family also raised cows, but not for the milk. Our cows were raised for meat and for sacrifices to the many gods our village worshiped. You see, if our village needed rain for the crops we would plant in May, we would sacrifice a cow to the god of rain at the end of March. If we were going to fish in a nearby river, we would need to make a sacrifice to the river god before we went to the river. There were also gods of the jungle and gods of the fields, not to mention evil spirits that could make us sick. All these needed to be appeased with a sacrifice of a cow, buffalo, pig, or even a chicken. Sacrifices also were made by family members whenever a loved one died.
Since I was the youngest of the family, I stayed working in the fields with my mother long after the other boys had gone to school. Girls from my village did not attend school. My brother, who was enrolled at the school, came home with some frightening stories. He told me that the teacher would hit the students’ fingertips with a ruler as punishment or make a child kneel on the concrete floor for ten or more minutes in front of the class for getting an answer wrong on the blackboard. On top of that, the students had to shave their heads once a week! After hearing my brother’s reports, I decided I was not going to go to school—ever. I hated school even though I had never been.
One thing I did love was candy. Just about every day a peddler selling a white taffy candy would come to our village. I loved that taffy! As soon as the peddler showed up, I would start crying for candy. We did not have any money to spare, but my mother would barter with the man, giving him an orange or some bananas for a piece of candy for me. Soon everyone started calling me Keo, which is our word for candy, and the nickname stuck. When I did finally go to school around age nine, I was teased a lot by the other children. “Keo, would you like some keo?”
It was my uncle who decided that it was time for me to go to school. Our village didn’t have a school so we had to walk three or four miles down a jungle path to another village to attend the school there. That path was scary! None of us would ever walk it alone because we would see monkeys and an occasional tiger in the dense jungle. The school was a little three-room cement building with a tin roof and wooden benches instead of desks. We started off with about 20 students per class, but dwindled down to about 9-10 as the weeks went by. Our lessons were in Vietnamese, a language which I didn’t understand at all as my family spoke Raday, but I soon picked it up. I decided school wasn’t so bad after all. I was still in first grade when the war came to our village. It was 1968, and the Tet Offensive had begun, so the school had to close. Later on I attended 2nd through 5th grades in the city of Buon Me Thuot.
I have many memories of the war. Our village was in South Vietnam, and there was an American base
just about a mile and a half from us. Often the American soldiers
would come to the village for the jar alcohol (rice wine) some of the villagers made and to eat some of our food. Sometimes they would stay all day, and my grandmother and the ladies of the village would cook for them. The Americans liked Montagnard food. I remember one time when a tank came through our village. The big army trucks had churned up the path into a mud pit. A G.I. riding on the back of the tank slipped and fell off into the mud. He started hollering for the tank to stop, but the men inside the tank could not hear him yelling. He then started shooting his rifle, but still the tank did not stop. My uncle and I saw all this happen, and when the G.I. gave up and started walking back to his base, we walked with him—not beside him, of course, in case he was mad at us for some reason, but a little way behind him to make sure he got back safely.
Another memory is not so good. An American helicopter had developed engine trouble as it flew near our village and had to make an emergency landing in our field. One of the men of the village had been shooting at a bird, and when the Americans heard the gunfire, they assumed that they were under attack. They must have radioed for backup because the next thing we knew there were six or eight helicopter gunships shooting up our village! We all ran for shelter, and it is a miracle that none of us were killed. For the most part, though, we liked the Americans, and they liked us. They often would throw food to us from the trucks and helicopters. I remember that everything was green, army green, and that one time I got a can of chicken. Around this time my brother and my brother-in-law joined the American army, as did my uncle. They would serve as scouts for the Americans, a decision that would have huge repercussions for us Raday.
In 1973 the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, but the war did not end for us. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to the communists, and those of us who had supported the Americans were now the hunted people as the Viet Cong (they called themselves the Bo Doi, the North Vietnamese Armed Forces) sought revenge. One night around 4:00 A.M our village was invaded and five of us were captured. I and the other four were tied into a long line and taken into the city for questioning. Since I was only around 15 years old, I was released the next morning, but the others stayed in custody for six months. I knew it was just a matter of time until I had to endure that again so I started making plans to leave the village. First I needed some equipment. When the South Vietnamese Army surrendered, they had thrown away their rifles, packs, uniforms, grenades, and anything else that might identify them as combatants. I found a gun and a uniform, and late on the night of October 25th, 1976, when I was around sixteen, my cousin, three friends, and I left the village to join the Resistance Army in the jungle.
Our base camp was very rough, just a clearing seven miles deep into the jungle. We slept in hammocks and lived off any food we could scrounge from the jungle or steal from nearby fields. There were times when we averaged one meal very three days or so. When we couldn’t find food, we would eat a jungle root called ening. This root is poisonous unless prepared very carefully. First we would peel it, slice it very thin, boil it, and put it in a basket in water in a stream with running water, stirring it frequently. The water would flush out the poison. This became our miracle food, the manna which kept us alive when we had nothing else to eat. The Viet Cong suspected that we must be getting food from the villages so they set up ambushes in the fields at night. We would hide in the jungle and listen to the soldiers talking. We could tell by their dialect if they were enemies. We would simply wait until they went away before we raided the corn, beans, bananas, or manioc. Often the villagers would send us messages to tell us where the VC were.
Very early one morning close to harvest time, when the rice was tall, my cousin and I sneaked into the fields near our home village so that we could visit our parents. My mother was so excited to see me! She went back home and fixed a meal of rice and vegetables and brought it to us in the fields. We couldn’t stay long because my father was very worried that we would be caught and the whole village punished. This was the last time I ever saw my mother and father.
I spent eight years in what I call the killing fields because we were fighting every day. There were only 17 in my group and only a total of 45 in the Resistance, but we would split up in our maneuvers with two or three of us going in one direction and two or three in another so the VC thought we had many more men than we actually had. We used weapons and ammunition discarded by the South Vietnamese Army and the Americans. We also mounted ambushes on the roads used by the Communist forces. To flush us out of our hide-outs, the Communists began to burn the jungle around the villages, and the villagers were ordered to clear out all the underbrush. At times they would force our family members to search for us, using them as human shields so that we would not fire. I later heard that my nieces and nephews were forced to crawl under jungle bushes to look for me. This tactic by the Communists forced us to move deeper into the jungle away from the village fields where we had been able to get food. Now we lived on jungle roots and whatever game we could shoot, such as deer, wild cow, monkeys, and even elephants.
The year 1977 was a turning point for me. The Communists found our hiding place and surrounded us early one morning. Our group scattered in all directions, with six of us running together. We ran all the rest of that day and into the night back towards our village. There three of our group surrendered and told where the rest of us were headed. The three of us left decided to split up, with two heading back to their own area and me left on my own. I was determined not to surrender so I spent three months living on my own in the jungle. I had a grenade that I was saving to use on myself if I found myself surrounded with no hope of escape. The Communists were certain that I would try to make contact with my parents so they separated my mom and dad and took them to other villages to live.
This was a very bad time for me. I was running for my life every moment of every day and scared to death. I was constantly on the move, grabbing a few hours of sleep whenever I could under a bush or in a ditch separating the fields. In my desperation I remembered a missionary lady named Betty Mitchell who had come to my school to have a Bible class for the children on Wednesday nights. She had told us about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. I decided to pray to Jesus and ask Him to send the Holy Spirit to be with me. Suddenly I felt such a peace come over me, and I was no longer scared. I had no Bible and no preacher to lead me in a prayer of salvation, but I had the Holy Spirit with me! From that point on, I found myself praying hundreds of times a day. Though I was still by myself in the jungle, I knew God was with me. Finally I was reunited with the Resistance group, and a Christian member of the group prayed with me as I surrendered my life to Christ. I remember that it was on Christmas Day, December 25, 1977.
In 1978 we decided to leave Vietnam and cross the border into the mountains of Cambodia to get away from the constant fighting. I was in the third group to leave. At this time I became a courier, traveling with messages from the group in Cambodia to the leaders back in the villages. It would take me about a week of hard walking to reach my home village. Meanwhile, the Communists kept hunting for us, even crossing the border into Cambodia. They had 9 divisions and 1200 in each division for a total of 10,800 men hunting for us. We had many battles, with the Communists suffering hundreds of casualties, but we would have only a couple of our men wounded. It brings to my mind the story of Moses leading the Israelites through the 40 years in the wilderness. Surely God was with us as He was with Moses.
While we were in Cambodia, a rival Communist faction called the Khmer Rouge contacted us in hopes that in exchange for food and “protection,”we would fight for them against the Cambodian government. We were taken to their headquarters in the Dong Rek Mountains between Cambodia and Thailand and put into a small compound surrounded by land mines. As evil and brutal as the Khmer Rouge were, they did not hurt us. It reminds me of the story of Daniel and the lions’ den, where God stopped the mouth of the lions so they could not harm Daniel. I used my time there to learn Thai, which would really help our group in future months. While in the Khmer Rouge camp, I got very sick and was taken with five others into a nearby town for treatment. We were put in a fenced-in rice warehouse guarded by a Montagnard traitor and given some vitamins. While I was in the warehouse, the Khmer Rouge camp was attacked by the Vietnamese Communists, who were still looking for us. The members of our Resistance group fled into the countryside, but two were killed by the land mines which the Khmer Rouge had sown around our compound. The group stayed in the Dong Rek Mountains for a couple of years before going to a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Cambodia.
Eventually I was released from the warehouse and dumped into a field close to the rice fields in which my group was hiding. Two Thai families adopted me, and I lived with them for three months. In the meantime, my uncle had contacted the French Red Cross in Namuym, Thailand, which, in turn, got in touch with the American Red Cross. It was decided that four of us would go to Bangkok to try to contact the American Embassy. We still hoped that the Americans would support us in our fight against the communists back in Vietnam. Since I knew Thai, I would be the translator. The leader of our group wrote many letters to various government agencies. Upon reaching Bangkok, we turned ourselves in to the police and were interned in an immigrations jail for nine months. We were confined with 400 others in a bare concrete building.
One day to my great surprise, Betty Mitchell visited the immigrations jail. She had been working at the Dalat School in Penang, Malaysia, and had seen a news magazine article about the refugee camp, Site Two, on the Thai border. As she read the article, she recognized some of the names of the refugees. She and a fellow missionary, Dawn Deets, traveled to the camp, where she learned that some of us Raday were in the Bangkok jail. Though she was only allowed to visit the women’s side of the jail, we did get to see her briefly.
Finally we received word that the United States was going to grant us asylum. Our relocation to the United States took some time. First we were sent to a camp in Bataan, Philippines, for five months to learn English. Here I encountered some C&MA missionaries, including Betty Mitchell and Charlie Long. Then we flew to Korea, Los Angeles, and then to Greensboro, North Carolina, arriving on Thanksgiving of 1986. I was assigned to a group that would settle in Charlotte. My sponsors were a wonderful couple, Bob and Nancy Malone, from the C&MA church in Charlotte. Over the years they have become like parents to me and grandparents to my daughters. Later I decided to move to Greensboro, where my aunt and uncle were living and where I hoped to find work.
In Greensboro, I began attending a TEE Bible class that Betty Mitchell was holding in her home. This is when I met Geri Mitchell. I vaguely remembered her as a little girl who had accompanied Betty on her visits to the villages in Vietnam, but at that time, I had absolutely no idea that she would become my wife one day long in the future. Since I had just gotten a second job delivering newspapers and had to wake very early in the morning, I asked Geri to give me a wake-up phone call at 4:00 each morning so I would not oversleep. That is how we got started talking, and we became good friends. I was from the jungle and didn’t know anything about dating. I think our first “date” was to Burger King! Anyway, something must have clicked because Geri and I became engaged in January of 1989, and we were married on August 5, 1989. Our missionary friend, Ken Swain, who had translated the Raday Bible, performed our wedding ceremony, which we had carefully planned to combine the best of both cultures, American and Raday.
Geri and I still live in Greensboro, where we stay busy working with the Montagnard population of a couple of thousand people. We have two daughters, Miriam, who was born in 1991, and Esther, who was born in 1994. We are blessed to have “Grammie,” Betty Mitchell, now 90 years old, living with us. I am employed at Ryerson Tull Warehouse where I assemble orders of bars of steel, bronze, and aluminum for shipping all over the U.S. In my free time, I garden. My aunt and I have adjoining yards so we have a combined garden where we grow corn, cucumbers, squash, various varieties of lettuce, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, egg plant, and blueberries, among other things, but unfortunately the weather here is not suitable for rice or bananas. I guess my father’s and mother’s lessons in the fields of Vietnam are paying off!
Looking back over my life, I see God’s hand constantly guiding and protecting me. Will I ever go back to Vietnam? Geri and I did go back several years ago with our daughters, but it was difficult for both us and our relatives as I am still a “suspect” person to the present-day Communist regime. Once again, God rescued me from what could have been a tragic detainment. But that’s another story….