KAPAAU — Mike Frailey doesn’t remember his parents’ faces.
KAPAAU — Mike Frailey doesn’t remember his parents’ faces.
He can’t recall how old he was when war ripped him from his family forever. What he does remember is regaining consciousness in a field hospital draped in bandages, the terror of the Vietnam war soaking through the eyes of a confused, horrified child and leaving an indelible imprint on his innocent mind.
And when he conjured those images — the first memories of his entire life — Monday at the North Kohala Public Library, tears again wet his eyes.
“I don’t have a lot of information from my time before I came to the U.S.,” said Frailey, who saw only one photo from his childhood in Vietnam for more than 35 years. “I started wondering, ‘Was that real? Did I dream it?’”
Frailey’s second vivid memory is of being dropped off at an orphanage by a stranger. He guesses he was about 5-years-old. Most of his time there was spent unsupervised and hungry. He and his friends would wander out into the streets, stealing food from Buddha offerings or begging at the feet of American soldiers.
“The orphanage was a horrible place,” Frailey remembered. “Sometimes, all we had to eat were bugs that we caught.”
But Frailey wasn’t destined to spend his life in poverty-stricken loneliness on the streets of Vietnam, nor as a child soldier in the country’s army, which began enlisting children as young as 9-years-old.
Instead — due in part to the efforts of Cheri Clark, an American nurse who travelled to Vietnam during the war to help alleviate the orphan crisis — Frailey came to America in April 1975 as a part of Operation Babylift. He was one of approximately 2,500 orphans who were evacuated from war-torn Vietnam only days prior to the fall of Saigon.
A soldier’s part
While Frailey can’t recall much of his early childhood in Vietnam and the conflict that surrounded it, Keith Nealy recalls it all too well.
Nealy was a combat salvage diver who served three tours in the war between 1969-72. He spent much of his time in Cua Viet along the demilitarized zone, or the DMZ, separating North and South Vietnam.
“We were right in one of the hottest places in Vietnam,” Nealy said.
Nealy’s concerns as a soldier went well beyond bombs and bullets. As a diver salvaging wreckage and blowing up abandoned payloads from damaged planes, both drowning and vicious marine life were ever-present sources of unease.
A particular worry were great white sharks in the curtain, a term referring to the end of underwater visibility where mammoth shadows lurked, darting about lethally.
“Once you blew something up in the water, sharks were attracted to the dead fish and the vibrations,” said Nealy, who dove in an area notorious as the breeding grounds and home to the colossal predators. “We had one eye on what we were doing and one eye over our shoulder the whole time.”
Upon his return from the war, the transition back to civilian life proved difficult for Nealy. The growing anti-war sentiment in America only complicated the issue.
“Coming back was pretty rough because everyone thought we were warmongers,” Nealy said. “When I went through the airport, people would spit at me and shout obscenities and call me ‘baby killer.’ Even friends and family were very distant. It took me years to get over that.”
A chance meeting
Frailey grew up in a small town in Missouri. At the age of 29, he applied for a passport but was told he was not a citizen. Right around the time he became eligible for citizenship, his parents had divorced. Amid the emotional bedlam, his application for citizenship was never filed.
Thus, despite having been legally adopted and subsequently serving in the United States Air Force, the Immigration and Naturalization Service told Frailey there was no record of him — in effect, that he did not exist. It was not until February of 2009 that Frailey officially became an American citizen.
“The loss of identity is really recurrent in our lives,” Frailey said of himself and fellow Vietnam war orphans.
That lack of a sense of self contributed to what Frailey described as a shame — one that helped bring he and Nealy together roughly one year ago at a ManKind Project men’s circle meeting.
“I felt great shame in being Vietnamese,” Frailey said. “My parents got death threats in the mail. Everything I read or learned about Vietnam was always negative. I never even told people I was Vietnamese for many years.”
Frailey’s revelation echoed loudly throughout more than just Nealy’s ears the first time he heard it.
“I was in tears,” Nealy said. “I was carrying a tremendous amount of shame for 40 years for what America did to his country. I had never met or talked to another Vietnamese person since I left Vietnam, and here I was face-to-face with my first Vietnamese conversation, and he was an orphan.”
The two men — both North Kohala residents — who shared experiences both strikingly similar and starkly opposite because of the war in Vietnam, connected. And on Monday, they gave a joint presentation to a small group at the North Kohala Public Library about how their lives were shaped by the conflict.
Nealy went on to become a filmmaker and is writing a book called “Nine Lives in Search of Courage.”
Frailey is married and now travels the world taking photos and capturing reunions of some of his friends and fellow orphans with their birth families.
“Finding our birth families is really the final healing of what the war did to us,” Frailey said. “I haven’t searched for my birth family. I don’t want the disappointment, so I live vicariously. I document my friends’ reunions, and right now, that’s enough for me.”