50 years ago, Saigon fell to North Vietnam. On what is now known as Reunification Day, Kiem Do saved more than 30,000 people.
At the time, Kiem was deputy chief of staff of operations for the South Vietnamese Navy. He secretly organized and implemented the evacuation of 32 Navy ships, as well as several cargo ships and fishing boats, with more than 30,000 naval personnel and their families aboard.
“That disciplined retreat is only one of many little-known events of the war” that Kiem faced, according to a summary of his 1998 memoir, “Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer’s War.” “As the enemy’s army was closing in on Saigon, Kiem was making the decision of his life: should he try to save his navy’s ships and thousands of his countrymen, or accept his counterpart’s offer of plane tickets to safety for himself and his family?”
Fortunately, Kiem saved his countrymen and his family.
Born in Hanoi in 1933, Kiem was 13 when he began scouting for the Viet Minh, which was fighting for Vietnam’s freedom from the French colonial empire. At 21, he was sent to France for midshipman training at the École Navale in Brest.
“By the 1950s, he was fighting for South Vietnam against the communists — and his own brothers,” the summary states. He was involved in several conflicts, including the 1974 sea battle between China and South Vietnam.
After receiving political asylum, Kiem settled in Gretna. For 20 years, he was an Entergy cost engineer and a translator for the U.S. Coast Guard and New Orleans Police Department. He and his wife, Thom Le, have five children and six grandchildren.
Kiem’s “subsequent contributions to New Orleans,” the Historic New Orleans Collection states, “exemplify the profound impact the (Vietnamese) community has had on New Orleans.”
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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