It’s hard to think of March in the U.S. without hearing the echo of “madness” after it. These days—well, perhaps since its inception in 1974—it’s a lighthearted reference to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men’s and women’s basketball championship tournaments. Its popularity and media coverage is one of the U.S. sports highlights of the year.
In Saigon 1975, madness had an altogether different meaning. I’ll write more about that next week, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a bit of basketball fun and drama going on nonetheless.
In late February 1975, my mom reported the news from the courts:
The boys are still furiously playing basketball every day. Hopefully this weekend they will have a couple of games against the Chinese.
Our teams have been invited to go to Bangkok for a meet with the International School Bangkok team in April and we are trying to raise some money for them. We are having bake sales this weekend and the next . . .
About the same time, another American student, Fred C. Thomas was having a remarkably more harrowing experience. It was captured in an interview with IdeaConnection.com.
The story of his brush with becoming a 15-year-old POW is reprinted in its entirety here:
The outing that really did shake me up a bit, though, occurred when I was living in Saigon, Vietnam, just prior to the end of the war in 1975. Our family was one of the few US government families allowed back into Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. I was 15 at the time, most of my adult height of 6'2", and a big basketball enthusiast.
In order to facilitate my playing some basketball, my Dad, a fluent Mandarin speaker, arranged for me to visit a Chinese secondary school in Cholon, the Chinese part of Saigon, to practice with and play on their team a few times a week.
Cholon and the Chinese Community in Saigon: Cholon is a district in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) known for its vibrant Chinese community. It has historically been a center of commerce and cultural exchange. ~Chat GPT
On Saturday mornings, the team would load onto a bus and visit other schools in the provinces around Saigon for games. It was on one of these Saturday trips I got quite the scare.
We were headed to a school northwest of Saigon, near a town called Cu Chi. I was seated near the back of the bus with a few of the team's players that knew a bit of English, and we were going on about how high the great NBA Connie Hawkins could jump or some such banter. I had brought a US basketball magazine for the ride to use its pictures as a foil for conversation with my limited English-speaking teammates as I spoke very little Chinese.
We were having a good time.
While we drove along, the bus would cross open landscapes of rice patties and then move into and through groves of rubber trees. As we approached Cu Chi and were engulfed within one of these rubber groves, a band of four Viet Cong soldiers appeared in the middle of the road about 50 yards in the distance with their AK-47s pointed at the bus. As the bus started to slow to a stop, my teammates seated both in front and behind me pushed my Anglo head down and cautioned me to be quiet and hide simultaneously. As I ducked into the floor space in front of my seat, they threw the equipment bag, which was at the back of the bus, on top of the seat I had been sitting in moments before.
When the bus stopped, I could hear the yelling of the Viet Cong soldiers at the driver. He opened the bus door and got off. More yelling. In the meantime, I felt as if my heart had stopped. I knew that if they found me I would be toast. I was scared and really ready to panic. Then I heard and saw at foot level, where my head rested at this point, two of the VC walking down the aisle of the bus. The first hollered to the second, who was approaching the seat in which I was hunkered down and covered with the bag of basketballs. He had found the ice chests with the team's lunch for the day behind the driver's seat. Both quickly removed the ice chests from the bus. Well, the story continues, but for here let it be known I did not become a 15-year-old POW that Saturday. I did have the fright of my life, though.
I learned many years later that the Cu Chi area had about a 75-mile network of tunnels riddled through subterranean out of which the VC would emerge from small camouflaged holes. Our bus hijackers and my potential captors that Saturday undoubtedly emerged from this now post-war famous labyrinth. Scary then, interesting now.
Thank you to Fred Thomas for sharing this fascinating glimpse into the
American life of teens in Saigon before the final fall.
Image: A banner from Fred Thomas’s basketball team in 1975. Most of the boys attended Phoenix Study Group, the American School in Saigon. We would practice/play out at the gym on Tan Son Nhut Airbase. This is a memento we would give to the Vietnamese teams we would play at their schools in and around Saigon. In April of that year, we were evacuated with the fall of Saigon. Operation Frequent Wind. [Caption from a 2018 Facebook post.]
Image: Sports page from 1975 February/March “Dragon’s Mouth,” the official newsletter of the Phoenix Study Group, Saigon.
Click here to see short (4:22) video featuring the “Dragon’s Mouth” newsletter.
Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
Kat ❦
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To learn more about my books or school visits, visit Kat-Fitzpatrick.com.