The American Surgeon Who Escaped the Viet Cong

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February 29th through March 3rd on NFL Network and streaming on NFL Plus. And we're back with our American stories and up next a story from Watt Wong. Today Watt is a surgeon but his journey to getting there was far from ordinary. He's here to share the story of his family fleeing Vietnam and arriving in America with nothing. Growing up in South Vietnam I was really young at the time but the things that we remember are the things that we did all the time and so we were Catholic so we went to the mass all the time. Every morning we would go to church. Our village was along the seashore. It was a fishing village and so my dad was a commercial fisherman. He would leave every morning come in every night and so we would run out to the dock to see the day's catch. We didn't have running water.

Though we had the electricity it was really limited so we had a light in the house and my grandparents my dad's parents they had the only TV in the village and so we all of us would swarm to his house and watch his TV. We didn't have an ice machine we had an ice box so my mother if she needed ice she would send me to the ice factory. She always ordered the bigger block of ice because I would walk along the beach in the hot sand when I picked up the big block of ice and started walking home. Ice is cold so the ice would fall on the sand and then it would start to melt so then I would pick it up and start walking a little bit more and it would fall again.

So by the time I made it home that block of ice was a lot smaller than the block that I started with. So those are some of the simple fond memories of the things that happen all the time but at that time the North Vietnamese communists which they were supported by China and by the Soviet Union were trying to overtake South Vietnam which was non-communist but so we were the democratic side of Vietnam and it was a civil war going on during that time and so ultimately South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese communists. That's when I remember things such as the troops storming the South Vietnam and people just scrambling under military fire. I remember as a six-year-old hiding underneath the mattress underneath the bed and the North Vietnamese troops would run through our house and ransacking the house and hearing gunfire in the village and thinking oh my goodness this is this is not going to end well. I remember hearing them yelling you know where's your dad because my dad was part of the South Vietnamese military.

He had served a while back but at that point any grown man was considered a foe to them and so they were looking for any men. So the North Vietnamese as they came down we knew democracy was going to end because Christianity was not going to be allowed. There was going to be a lot of tyranny as far as religion as far as economy as far as finances and my parents knew that was coming and so when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese and that was April 30th of 1975 when it happened it happened in a hurry. The North Vietnamese troops came in rapidly and my parents decided to flee and so as the troops were storming the ground the only place you can flee is to the ocean. We knew that the U.S. had some presence in the ocean and so we thought okay well if we stay on land you know we're doomed but maybe if we head out to the sea maybe there would be somebody to receive us. We just had to flee.

We didn't have time really to say any goodbyes. My immediate family and cousins and aunts and uncles we all jumped on my dad's boat. I had three siblings and one of them was a newborn and as we fled land and headed out we saw a larger vessel and we thought oh thank goodness you know here's somebody that can help us and as we approached that ship come to find out that was a communist ship and so they started firing on us and my grandmother was hit and of course she was hurting and she told her husband my grandfather listen we need to get back to the land because I won't be able to survive this. So when we went back on shore my grandfather told my dad son there's no life for you here take your family with you take the kids we've lived a good long life and you go make a new life for yourself and your family. I think back now and I think okay so I'm a dad now with two kids and I can't imagine my parents telling me that and then I had to choose between do I stay with my parents or do I take my family to a new opportunity whatever that opportunity was. We didn't know that it was going to be better we just knew if we stayed it wasn't going to be good so my grandparents stayed and I can't imagine my dad what he felt. He took the four kids the wife my mother of course and headed back to sea and eventually we came upon a U.S. ship that received us. We really had no idea of what a U.S. ship was going to look like versus a communist ship and so when we came and approached one and it turned out to be friendly my dad boarded first and then my mother handed me to my dad and then handed my youngest brother who was a newborn at the time to my dad and so the three of us got on the naval ship first and right then they cut off any more people coming onto the ship because the ship was full. So then my mother and two other siblings were still on my dad's boat and so they separated us then because they had no more room.

We're now apart from one another and who knows when we would see each other again you just literally watch it float away. That was hard on my dad because my youngest brother was still breastfeeding at the time and so here he is with a newborn baby being breastfed and he can't feed the baby. I learned pretty quickly where to find milk in the ship and so we just stumbled through it but eventually got my younger brother fed and I do remember the first good memory of being on that US ship was when we were looking for something to eat and the first US food that I ever put in my mouth was a Hershey's chocolate bar and it was the best tasting thing I had ever put in my mouth.

Gosh that Hershey's bar was good. So of course we were fearful and not knowing what we were getting ourselves into but several weeks later we were all reunited. We all met together back again in Guam which was US owned at that time. Basically we just stumbled across one another on that island then we were all brought to Florida. We were at a immigration camp there and from there the different families were sponsored by American and US families to different locations within the US. So there was a farming couple in Kentucky, Campbellville, Kentucky that through the US Catholic Charities Association they sponsored my parents and the four kids and so we packed up got onto a Greyhound bus to Campbellville, Kentucky from Florida. There my dad who worked in the ocean his whole life was now transplanted into a farming community and at the time none of us spoke English. The only English we knew was yes and no. So I started kindergarten in Kentucky and somehow along the way I started learning English and somehow along the way we were supposed to bring a blanket to take a nap with while not understanding English. My parents didn't pack a blanket and so I when I showed up for first day of school and all the other kids are napping and they all had their blankets and I'm standing around looking at the kids I don't have a blanket to take a nap with and so we quickly learned and remember things that made it easy for example math because two plus two will always be four regardless of whatever language you speak and whether you attend a Catholic mass in Vietnam or you attend one in Campbellville, Kentucky it's hey we all worship the same god we all have the same savior and we're all trying to get to the same location but the rest of it it comes quickly when you have to speak that language. The material things that you accumulate over time all of that you set aside hoping you'd find a new life a better opportunity for yourself and for your kids.

And you're listening to Wat Wong tell the story of what happened to so many families when Saigon fell when South Vietnam was captured by the communists and there were consequences when we left Vietnam but my goodness Americans did step up the role the Catholic Charities plays in so much of this and all kinds of Protestant Charities as well and stepping up and taking care of the least of these when we come back more of this remarkable story Wat Wong's story here on Our American Story. With so many streaming devices out there today what sets Roku apart? Roku players are made for one thing to get you the entertainment you want quick and easy that means a simple home screen with your favorites front and center channels like iHeartRadio that launch in a snap and curated selections of tv for when you only sort of know what to watch not to mention all the free tv you can stream including over 300 free live channels on the Roku channel find the perfect Roku player for you today at roku.com happy streaming the 2024 NFL scouting combine presented by noble where a dream that starts small can get big this guy's just different where a journey that starts quiet can get loud and where a name that's unknown can become the future we will hear his name call the 2024 NFL combine presented by noble where you can witness the future stars of the NFL next is here february 29th through march 3rd on NFL network and streaming on NFL plus Denise has been playing jazz for 40 years last concert one of the musicians fell sick with RSV respiratory syncytial virus or RSV is a highly contagious virus that can lead to breathing problems this time she's choosing to help protect herself with Pfizer's RSV vaccine abrisvo abrisvo is a vaccine for the prevention of lower respiratory tract disease caused by respiratory syncytial virus RSV in adults 60 years of age and older abrisvo is not for everyone and may not protect all who receive the vaccine don't get abrisvo if you've had a severe allergic reaction to its ingredients people with a weakened immune system may have a decreased response to abrisvo the most common side effects are tiredness headache pain at the injection site and muscle pain ask your pharmacist or doctor about Pfizer's RSV vaccine abrisvo respiratory syncytial virus vaccine for full prescribing information please call 1-844-989-7284 or visit abrisvo.com brought to you by Pfizer and we return to our american stories and to the story of Wat Hoang after fleeing vietnam we'd heard about how he and his family had begun to assimilate into american life here's what to tell us about more of his adventures here in america i think in growing up and and in hindsight you see the things that your parents do or did you appreciate their efforts you know my parents made a lot of sacrifices along the way and i hear stories like for example growing up in south vietnamese culture we eat a lot of rice and in kentucky it was all potatoes and so my dad would come back and come home from hard day's work and the farming couple that sponsored us they would have a little bit of rice and so we would cook it up and there really wasn't enough to go around and so my dad would just go hungry and sacrificed it and saved it for us and so there's no telling how many countless sacrifices that i don't know about they've made but they instilled on us the work ethic the faith that is required you know through life and so i tried to teach that to our kids as well so in south vietnam catholicism was not necessarily the most prevalent religion but it was for us and it was impactful for us and my parents if they had their preferences i would be a priest right now but i didn't go that route much to their dismay so i went to med school instead that's a funny story my younger brother was asleep and my cousin and i were playing while he was taking a nap and we had a coin i don't know maybe in a quarter or something like that and we were just spinning it on top of my brother who was asleep on his forehead thinking oh this is kind of fun that quarter landed in his mouth he woke up and inhaled and swallowed that coin so that got us in so much trouble so we went to the emergency department the doctor came to see him took him to surgery took the coin out saved the day came back out my mother of course is still mad at us but her son is saved and and i thought to myself you know what that's pretty neat he saved my younger brother's life i think i want to do that one day it was just by chance doing something silly something i shouldn't have been doing that kind of piqued in in interest we never know what's in front of us and the experiences that we go through at the time that we go through it sometimes you don't really appreciate it until much after the fact when we were growing up we were poor and in the us we were poor my parents were not educated so they did mostly labor jobs and one of the jobs that my mother did was we worked in a car accident and one of the jobs that my mother did was we worked in a crab factory we picked the meat out of the crabs and so here i was middle school and in high school picking a stinky crab and why am i doing this you know all my friends during the summer were hanging out the house watching tv and all that and i'm going to a stupid factory we were paid by production so the more crafts you crack the more you get paid what i'm getting at is the motor dexterity that's required to crack a claw precisely to get that meat out so that there aren't any shells in that meat it helped improve my hand speed my manual dexterity so my left hand is just as good as my right hand and yes my mother woke us up at four o'clock in the morning every day to go to the craft factory and it smelled horrible and i hated it and i dreaded it but here i am as a surgeon 30 years later with finger and hand dexterity that could not have been more polished than because of that manual work that i did so another something that i thought gosh why am i doing this which then i later appreciate um so in college at lsu during my freshman year as i was walking around campus thinking about what i was going to do for summer job i saw a flyer about the southwestern publishing company and i had no idea what the southwestern publishing company was but it said 400 a week summer job and i thought man 400 a week that's good money for a college student in 1987 and so i went to one of their seminars not knowing what i was getting myself into and so come to find out it was door-to-door book sales blind cold calls knocking on the door seeing if a mom or dad might want to buy educational books for their kids and i thought there's no way there's no way but i gave it a try and so we learned how to approach someone a complete stranger trying to determine what their needs were and maybe provide a product or service that can help them and their children do better for themselves so fast forward 20 years later i'm sitting with a patient who i've never met before this person could be from any walk of life and they have a problem an unmet need and so you try to identify with that person see what their needs are and how can i make their life a little better and so that experience as a 19 year old college student knocking on 180 doors per week code calling really shaped how i communicate with people to this very day you know trying to identify what their needs are and hopefully make a difference in their life as you're going through these experiences in life most of the time it's there for a reason we just don't realize it at the moment but you do learn to appreciate those things later on as i was growing up i had a lot of horrible dreams about the troops storming the village and crawling under the bed and the nightmares with them and that lasted for decades it took a long time for those dreams to go away the us we and i say we because i feel like i'm obviously i'm part of the us now we're a welcoming society and every one of us has a culture and a background that's interwoven into one another and so the us was welcoming and the us catholic charities association really did a great job with bringing us in and finding families and assimilating us within the us i just remember the kindness of our sponsoring families they had kids and grandkids that were about our ages and so my siblings and i you know played with them and ran around the farm and did silly things but i just remember their their kindness if it wasn't for them and what all they did for us you know we wouldn't be where we are now i can't imagine what my parents went through everything is falling apart around you you're leaving your parents you don't speak the language the only thing that we had was literally the clothes on our backs who knows where are you going not everyone came to the us it all depended on the immigration services and where they decided so we were just happened to be within that group that came to the us you never know what happens in life and how that might impact you later on but appreciate it for what it is when you're going through it and try to make the most of it and great work by madison on the production and a special thanks to what wang for sharing his story with us and what a quintessentially american story it was his parents wanted to be a priest it was his parents wanted to be a priest he disappointed them and became a doctor his work at the crab factory well that helped him with his hand dexterity and also his discipline he had to get up at 4 a.m his door-to-door book sales gig taught him to listen taught him empathy that helped him with his bedside manner he had bad dreams he said from all that happened in south vietnam but they diminished and the us he said well it's a welcoming society our cultures are interwoven my sicilian grandparents my lebanese grandparents would agree and a special thanks to catholic charities for all the great work they do the story of wat wang the story of america in the end here on our american stories most tvs are smart nowadays but with busy home screens and remotes with too many or too few buttons smart shouldn't mean complicated that's why roku tv is the smart tv made easy the customizable home screen puts your inputs streaming favorites like iheart and free live tv all in one place from simple settings anyone can understand automatic updates with the latest features and much more roku tv is more than a smart tv it's a better tv learn more today at roku.com happy streaming the 2024 nfl scouting combine presented by noble where a dream that starts small can get big this guy's just different where a journey that starts quiet can get loud and where a name that's unknown can become the future we will hear his name called the 2024 nfl combine presented by noble where you can witness the future stars of the nfl next is here february 29th through march 3rd on nfl network and streaming on nfl plus are you looking to step up to a 4k smart tv one that gives you unparalleled clarity and picture resolution then we've got good news for you because the visio 65 inch v series 4k smart tv is now just 348 with all your favorite apps built in you can stream straight out of the box you can even sing along to all your favorite music and radio on the iheart radio app looking for a smaller or bigger screen visio offers unbeatable prices on all v series 4k smart tvs head to walmart.com today and score the 4k tv you've been waiting for hey hey it's malcolm gladwell host of revisionist history ebay motors is here for the ride your 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