Little Saigon

Kieu Li played a fascinating, if minor, role in the Vietnam-American conflict. In 1970 she was seventeen years old. She was a singer. While entertaining the Viet Cong at night — often underground in tunnels, or in other makeshift “theaters” — she gathered information. By day, she would go into the village of An Cat to her work as a seamstress. There, she would meet her “contacts,” an eighteen-year-old man named Huong Lam, and an American lieutenant. During these secret meetings, taken at great risk to herself, she would pass to them the intelligence she had gathered while among the Communists. When Kieu Li’s secret spying became dangerous, she simply failed to return to the Viet Cong one night, and fled to the American base in Dong Zu. There, she continued to work in an intelligence capacity for the South. In a fascinating ending to Li’s story, she later married the American lieutenant — Bennett Frye — and now lives in Westminster, California, where she is active in helping refugees become settled in their new home. She is a popular singer. In this excerpt from a lengthy taped narrative, Kieu Li describes how she went from being a simple peasant girl to living the perilous life of a spy.

An Cat, a village twenty miles north of Saigon, was my home. I had a hut outside the village. It was small but the thatch roof was good when the monsoons came and there was a garden in the back. I wove material on a loom that I sold in the market place and I was a seamstress. This, I traded for other goods. I played my guitar during the slow market days. My mother died in 1964 of fever and my father disappeared in the spring of 1966: I believe the Viet Cong were responsible.

An Cat was supposed to be safe from the Viet Cong. But we all knew that was not true. No one could be trusted unless it was your family or best friend. The Viet Cong would put your head on a stake if you supported the South. Americans and ARVN would kill you if you supported the north. Trying to remain neutral was like remaining completely motionless in a stormy sea. It could not be done.

I saw Huong Lam one morning at the market. I was playing my guitar because no one was buying. I had known him ten years before, when we attended school together. He had left the village. Since then, I had not thought of him often. He was on a bicycle and he had grown from a boy into a young man. He seemed nervous as we talked. He said he had work for me. Two days later he came back with a small bundle. Inside I found the green cotton uniform with the patches on the shirt. It needed to be mended. I knew then that he was with the Americans. He told me one evening as we walked to the road from An Cat that he was a scout.

Huong Lam was a shy man, but very strong. I could see his courage in the set of his jaw, in the clear and unwavering gaze of his eyes. He would stand by my table in the marketplace occasionally. When there were no others around, he would become confidential. He admitted to me that for a year, he fought for the Communists. This was shocking to me, I learned that he felt betrayed by them. He feared their ruthlessness and believed that their promises were empty. He said that they were killing the Vietnam he loved.

But he spoke of the Viet Cong with a quiet respect and I began to wonder if he were secretly still with them.

We became friends.

Eight weeks later, he became very sad and serious as he walked his bicycle beside me down the road. He proposed that I express my sympathies for the Communists and offer myself to them. The Viet Cong were always in need of morale boosting — and perhaps I might sing for them. They were scattered throughout the Iron Land, just north of my village. [Editor’s Note: The Iron Triangle was an area of concentrated Viet Cong influence, the southern tip of which lay some thirty miles from Saigon. It was among the most vigorously bombed, shelled and defoliated areas of the war. The triangle’s points were the villages of Ben Cat and Ben Suc, and the junction of the Saigon and Thi Tinh Rivers.] Some of the people of An Cat, I know, were Viet Cong by night. Lam told me that I was risking my life to spy on the Viet Cong. He seemed both eager and afraid for me. With the disappearance of my father still fresh in my heart, and the stories of murder and torture by the Communists, I agreed to try. Even as a girl, I always felt the need to support one’s beliefs with action. It may have helped that I was seventeen and rather naive. If more of the Vietnamese had felt that way, our homeland would not be under the Communists today.

To become sympathetic with the Communists was easy. A word here, a comment there, and soon, I was approached by a young man who began to share his ideas with me, to “educate” me. This was over a period of weeks. I accepted his theories with eagerness. The inevitability of Communist victory was easy enough to feign. I made a point of letting him hear me sing and play. In modesty I will say that I had a very lovely voice.

Months later, he first offered to lead me into the Iron Land. There was a need, he said, for singers in the tunnels. I believe he regarded me as a lucky catch. He said I might meet the great poet Pham Sang, whose troupe of actors was famous for its underground performances. I would have my own theater and my own audience. One part of me was very flattered and nervous and one part of me knew that I could aid the cause of freedom by playing this dangerous game.

It was long after dark that I met him by the creek and we rode bicycles along a trail that led back to where the trees were dead and the bomb craters looked like volcanoes under the moon. I had my guitar strapped to my back. We rode and rode. When we were perhaps ten miles from An Cat, I began to wonder if this man was deceiving me. Would he go to such elaborate lengths just to rape a village girl? The trees naked from defoliation stretched their bony branches toward us. The trail became too bad to ride on. Walking my bicycle behind him, I realized that he had simply seen through my own deceit and was taking me out here to be tortured, raped, and murdered by the Viet Cong. And me, innocent enough to have brought my guitar! Still, I followed, because escape was not possible.

We left our bicycles by a twisted tram tree and hiked up the steep side of a hill. Two men watched us. They wore black-and-white checked scarves, so I knew they were the Viet Cong, I could sense people around us, but could not see anyone else.

From the top I looked down into the huge bomb crater below us. And there was my stage!

The audience sat in this natural amphitheater, along the sloping walls. There were no lights or sets but people all around to hear me! And a band of musicians! I was led past the Viet Cong by my guide. At the bottom was the small, earthen stage. The musicians said they knew some of the songs I asked them for. We played ten in all.

The guitar player played with a green stick so as not to be loud. The drummer had an old snare drum with tent canvas on it, which made a dull thump-thump when he hit it with his sticks. For one cymbal he had an American helmet, and for the other a canteen. There were watchmen all along the perimeter of the crater, with their backs to me, looking for the enemy.

I sang love songs. Our performance was well-received. The audience was not permitted applause, but a low humming sound of approval came after my first song.

After the show, the Viet Cong colonel in charge told me that I was to sing no more songs of love, only songs of struggle and victory. He was a twisted, angry man. But he smiled before he dismissed me and said I had the loveliest voice he’d ever heard.

I met the poet Pham Sang that night, and he told me very quietly to damn the Communists and sing whatever I wished. He said we artists must be free from all tyranny of thought. He was a thin, sad-faced man and I liked him.

For a few minutes I sat with other performers and a few Viet Cong soldiers. We talked of the war and drank bad tea.

Early that morning I returned to An Cat, my heart filled with contradictions. I did not like the Communists’ ideas, but the people seemed good people. They liked me. I loved to sing to an audience, but they were an audience of enemies.

It was one week later, after performing three more nights, that I passed along my first information to Huong Lam. It was about new tunnel work near Cu Chi, the exact place that an underground munitions shop was being constructed. Sympathetic villagers were helping move the fresh earth by hiding it beneath the false bottoms of their water baskets. It was good intelligence. And with those words of betrayal my life was set. The only thing more intimate than betrayal is trust. I was now an enemy of the Communists, and that first secret I told guided my life from that point as surely as a rudder guides a boat.

One day Lam said it was time for me to meet with his commanding officer. This was the man to whom my information was passed. It was unwise for me to be seen too often with Lam, and very dangerous to be seen with an American. So, his friend, known to me only as Tony, was to often serve as my contact. Tony was a Liaison Officer, a loyal man who followed Lam everywhere and did all that Lam wished.

Toward evening we left the marketplace. We walked the road toward my home as we sometimes did together. But when we were out of sight of the village, we cut through the jungle on a small trail that I had never known about. The foliage was dense but the trail was good. Lam was ahead of me and I followed his back. For a Vietnamese man he was large and his back seemed like a powerful ally to me. Every few seconds he would turn to look back at me. In his eyes I saw strength and purpose. I also — for the first time — believed that I saw doubt, I told myself there was kindness there too, but I suspected that I was only Lam’s tool, his spy — not truly a resident in his heart. That was how it should be. Always with Lam I had the feeling that his true thoughts were kept from me. Yet I believed in him.

We walked the trail to where it intersected the road to Saigon. We crouched in the bushes for nearly five minutes. Three American vehicles went by, going south toward the city. Then three more. A moment later, a jeep came slowly toward us and stopped. It had a blue scarf tied to its antenna. Lam rushed me into it and jumped in behind me. We went down the highway only half a mile before turning into the jungle on a small road. I recognized it as one of the roads to the rubber plantation. Tony pointed the way.

I was sitting next to an American soldier with dark hair and thick, strong arms. I could tell because his sleeves were rolled up as he drove. Like most Americans, he seemed large, but later I found out he was actually shorter than the average GI. He looked at me once, nodded, and said nothing. A necklace bounced around his neck along with his dog tags as we bumped over the road. It was an ocean wave inside a circle, made from silver. Squeezed in the back with Lam and Tony was a huge black man, very frightening, who neither looked at us, nor spoke.

We drove toward the plantation house. I could see its old majestic walls through the trees as we approached. The walls were covered with flowering vines and all the tram trees around it were healthy and full. A hundred yards from the main house we stopped at a smaller house with a courtyard in front and an old fountain that did not work anymore. There was a statue in the fountain, stained black from the rain and weather, of a man and woman embracing. It was French in attitude. Here we parked and sat on stone benches around the fountain.

Lam introduced me to Lieutenant Bennett Frye. I could not say his name properly and when I said “Flye,” both of the men smiled. He pronounced my name perfectly. His Vietnamese was good. My first impression of Lt. Frye was that he was a hard man and very intelligent. His eyes held none of the doubt that I often could see in Lam’s. When he looked at me, it was with a mixture of aggressiveness and respect that I found strange. But I had the feeling from him, even stronger than from Lam, that I was only a tool and not really a human. This was all right with me. He had none of the reckless energy that we often associated with the Americans. Lt. Frye’s energy was controlled.

The black man was Private Crawley. He said nothing during that entire first meeting, but he listened very intently to everything that was said.

Lam was strange at this first meeting. He attempted a level of familiarity with me that he had never shown before. He sat a little closer to me on that stone bench than he had sat at any time. He interrupted me often, explaining to Lt. Frye my loyalty and intelligence. He seemed proud of me.

It was agreed that we would meet here once a week to pass the information I was to collect. If Lam was not able to join me, I should wait for Lt. Frye alone in the clump of trees by the highway. His jeep would always have a blue silk scarf tied to the antenna. At this first meeting, Lt. Frye told me of several things the Americans were very interested in. These involved enemy strength in the village of Ben Cat, and any specific information I might get on a suspected Viet Cong headquarters in the Bo Ho Woods.

Once, when he interrupted Lam, I saw a moment of anger in Lam’s dark eyes. It was then I understood that Lt. Frye did not trust Lam in all things, as I did not. Huong Lam had once been a Viet Cong himself. Could anyone fully trust a man who had once been the enemy?

It was obvious by the way that Lt. Frye looked at me, that I was not trusted either. I had not expected to be. But when you trust yourself, no suspicion from another even matters. At one point, as his doubting eyes bore into mine, I returned his gaze with the arrogance that only the innocent can have. Many weeks later, I learned from him that I had won his respect that day, if not his trust.

We drove back to the place in the jungle where he had picked us up. Before we left, Lt. Frye flattered me immensely by saying he would like to hear me play and sing, if I would be willing. You can imagine how inflated by vanity I was — a seventeen-year-old girl with an important American as a potential audience! He was a very handsome man.