Who is Larry Engelmann?
Carl Robinson
Carl. Briefly. My life and the focus of my work was changed some time in the late 1970s when I noticed a very important shift in the ethnicity of my students at San Jose State University. I had been teaching there for a short time when Vietnamese students began appearing in my history classes. I noticed them because they were such extraordinarily good students and always earned the highest grades in my classes. By 1981 about 34 to 40 percent of my students were Vietnamese and my teaching assistant in my American history courses was Miss Melissa Pham, who had only recently been the Valedictorian at her high school (Gunderson) in San Jose. {She pointed out to me the times when Bao Dai visited San Jose to spend time with a granddaughter, also at Gunderson High School.) She served as my teaching assistant for four years.
I had begun writing as a second career (out of financial necessity and out of the love of writing) by that time and had done well – publishing not only in several scholarly journals but in Smithsonian magazine, Life Magazine, the Saturday Review and the Sunday Supplements to the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle. I had published one book (Intemperance, 1979) and was writing a second, a biography of tennis stars Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen (The Goddess and the American Girl, 1988).
But then something else came up. Several of my Vietnamese students asked me why I’d never written anything about the experiences of the newest immigrants to the US. I knew so little about these students and their families. I proposed such a story to Jeffrey Klein, editor of the Sunday magazine of the Mercury News and he thought it would be a nice story for the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. I approached others with the idea – Life, the Washington Post Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine, the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. All showed interest but wanted to see the stories.
I began by contacting a local veterans’ affairs counselor, Jim Barker, and by approaching several of my students to interview them and their families. Melissa Pham acted as my initial translator, although there would be a half dozen more. Jim Barker introduced me to John Delger, the ship’s photographer of the USS Midway. He had made copies of all of his photos from April 1975. I met with him, saw and copied his photos and thought I’d do a story about the very people who landed on the Midway along with Degler’s own story.
But the stories sort of ran away with me. I acquired three more locaters/Tanslators – Nguyen Thi Hoa, Nugyen Thi Kim-Anh and Tram Tran – and then my key translator, Tran Thi My Ngoc. I began making visits to the homes of my ex students only to discover how wide their connections were. Many fathers or uncles had been ARVN soldiers. They introduced me to their commanding officers. I was invited to meetings and gatherings of the local Vietnamese Air Force and Airborne units. Always one or two of my translators accompanied me, introduced me and translated for me. We recorded everything. I hired a secretary to transcribe the taped interviews.
Local veterans like Dennis Chambers, USN pilot and POW, came forward to tell their stories. I interviewed Congressman Pete McCloskey who led me to other members of Congress – Millicent Fenwick and Don Frasier. I drove to Sacramento for interviews and then to Orange County to interview Nguyen Cao Ky and Col. Le Khac Ly. Frank Snepp was interviewed at his home in southern California and then I went to Colorado Springs, CO to interview Col. John Madison and to Boulder for Bill and Pat Johnson. From there I made a trip to Orlando to interview Thomas Polgar, then up to Grandather Mountain, NC, for William Westmoreland.
General John Murray was a friend of some of the men and women I interviewed in California and he agreed to be interviewed at his home in DC. He got on the phone after speaking with me at length and gave a recommendation (and arranged times and places) to interview Alexander Haig and a score of other people involved in some way in the evacuation. Edward Lansdale showed up at the home of some friends in San Jose and they called me and I interviewed him.
Let’s say I was one lucky man at that time. I interviewed three members of the Deer Team from 1945 – at length and on tape (still untranscribed). I interviewed Tran Kim Phuong, the last Vietnam Ambassador to the US, at his home in Maryland. On and on it went.
Through another friend I found Father Joe Devlin, the boat people priest from Song Khla, and learned he was living 15 minutes from my home. I found Father Joe, spent two days talking with him and became a dear friend of his. When he passed away he left me a large trunk of all of his photos, diaries and papers along with a day by day diary on tape from Song Khla.
My Tran departed to work in Pulau Bidong with boat people. I accepted a position at Nanjing University in the autumn of 1988. (My initial interviews ran in the above mentioned Sunday Supplements – Washington, San Jose, SF and Chicago.) My Tran flew up to Bangkok and met me there and we flew to HCM City and Hanoi for more interviews. She did all the leg work in setting up the interviews.
I seemed to hit it off with Bui Tin in Hanoi at the Defense Ministry, perhaps because he learned I was from San Jose and his two sisters had fled Saigon with assistance of the US Marines in April 1975 and settled in San Jose. His son, daughter in law and two grandchildren were already in the Kai Tak open camp for boat people in Hong Kong. My Tran translated all this as we taped [Yes, Bui Tin does speak English but chose to be interviewed primarily in Vietnamese, now and then correcting My Tran’s translation]. I flew to HK and visited the Kai Tak open camp to find Bui Tin’s son and his family had already departed for – San Jose. I made friends with Red Cross workers who liked what I was doing – recording stories of the boat people by then. They listed me as a Red Cross employee and took me out to Chimawan Island to interview boat people there several days in a row, then to Whitehead Camp.
Sheldon Meyer of Oxford University Press had seen my Sunday Supplement story and offered me a contract for a book titled, later, Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. I traveled to Quantico, VA., where Col. George Slade introduced me one after another to his Marines, all of who had been in Saigon on April 29 and 30. Through them I found Maj. Jim Kean and through him a half dozen other Marines who had been under his command in Saigon.
Clearly, I had more work and more sources than I knew what to do with. When I came back to San Jose from a year in China, My Tran continued to line up interviews with former NVA veterans and, when he showed up in San Jose, with President Nguyen Van Thieu and his bodyguard. It went on and on and on. Everyone eager to tell their story, to have it remember, most overlooked by other writers in the past.
When I presented my manuscript to Sheldon Meyers it had exploded to 1500 pages of text. That would never do, he said. He had me cut it to just under 500 pages. That left me with 1,000 pages of unpublished stories. In addition to that my translators and my “finders” were still locating new sources who wanted to go on the record. I found an outlet for many of them in an online blog – God bless the Internet. The goal was to make the information provided to me available to researchers around the world. I plan in time to donate my papers and transcripts and tapes to the Texas Tech Vietnam War Archive. In any case, Tears Before the Rain was published in 1991 by Oxford University Press.
Suzie Benzinger, the costume and stage designer for “Miss Saigon” in New York, contacted me and told me she had read Tears and had purchased a copy of the book for every member of the cast of the musical. She also borrowed and used my tape recording of the children’s chorus at Chimawan singing “500 Smiles Away from Home.” She invited me (but I could not make it) and Jim Kean and his Embassy Marines to opening night for Miss Saigon in 1991 and they were introduced to the opening night audience.
My extraordinary translators around the world continued to search for sources for me. They found Tran Dinh Truc, the survivor who rode in the wheel well of Ed Daly’s last flight from Saigon – he was living in Sydney, Australia. He was interviewed and the interview transcribed and translated by another of my translators who lives now in Saigon (HCM City). His story was integrated into my story, “Homesick Angel,” which is on Ed Daly’s last flight from Saigon. People continue to get in touch with me.
I’ve published about a dozen stories in Vietnam magazine over the past decade, now available on my blog. “Homesick Angel” will appear in June in the magazine and “Our Woman in Saigon,” on the top woman agent of the American CIA in Saigon [Le Thi Ngoc Ha] will appear in October (Yes I interviewed her and her handler, Bill Johnson, Base Chief of the CIA in Saigon, and her brother and her ex husband and two of their children.)
And on and on and on. In 1999 I published “Daughter of China” with Wiley, in New York, a story of my incredible year in China, and after. In 2005 I published “Feather in the Storm”(Random House) about a child growing up in a “black family” during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the PRC.
I have been working on “Sputnik and Spam: Coming of Age at the End of the World” for the past few years and hope to finish this year – the story of the impact of the Cold War and the first two Sputniks in 1957 on a generation of children in Austin, MN, home of the Hormel Company and, naturally, of Spam. I have also been writing the story of the solved and unsolved murders of half a dozen little girls in San Jose form 1969 to 1976 in a book titled “Our Share of Night.”
I think that’s it. You asked about me and I think I’ve provided too much information on what I have done, and what I do and what I am doing. I grew up in a working class family in Austin MN. I attended the University of MN (BA and MA) and the University of Michigan (PHD). I have two daughters – both living in Evanston, IL, one a graduate of the U of Iowa and the other a graduate of UCSC (University of California Santa Cruz or Uncle Charlie’s Summer Camp.) I have a closet full of untranscribed interviews on Vietnam. I hope to get to them, one by one, in the coming years. If not, Texas Tech can do that work for me.
Anthony Paul
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Larry Engelmann
Thanks Tony. I have always appreciate and enjoyed your support, your kind words, and shall never ever forget our brunch with Lung Xing at the American Club in HK. Wonderful, once in a life time occasion. Larry
Larry Engelmann
Lance Woodruff
Bangkok 10110 Thailand
Telephone contact from abroad:
Mobile: +66 (01166 for US landlines) 87 070 0594
Office: +66 (or 01166 for U.S. land lines) 2714 9504
Telephone from inside Thailand:
Mobile: 087 070 0594
Office: 02 714 9504
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