Four decades later: Vietnam veteran to reunite with crew member

Navy veteran Jim Milstead still gets emotional 41 years after his boat was attacked by the North Vietnamese.

Navy veteran Jim Milstead is pictured with his Vietnamese boat crew in 1970. His long-lost friend, Soan Ngo, whom Milstead thought had died following an attack of their carrier in January 1971, has his hand on Milstead’s shoulder. The two will be reunited Feb. 17 in Florida.

Laura Lewis

Jim Milstead points out a Tango carrier in a book, “The Brown Water Navy: The River and Coastal War in Indochina and Vietnam 1948-1972.” The boat is like the one he and his seven Vietnamese crew members were on when they were attacked by the North Vietnamese on Jan. 4, 1971.

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Soan Ngo is pictured with his wife, Hanh. They run a Japanese steakhouse in Venice, Fla.

On Jan. 4, 1971, the Navy petty officer 2nd class and his Vietnamese crew sustained severe and mortal injuries following the 5 a.m. strike of 11 rockets by the North Vietnamese on their 60-foot Tango personnel carrier in the Cau Lon River in the Nam Can region.

Milstead, a career Navy officer who has since retired to the Brick Landing community outside Shallotte, had been serving as an adviser to the crew when the attack occurred. After sustaining shrapnel head injuries of his own, the Maryland native was told most if not all of the seven Vietnamese crew members on his boat had perished.

That was what he thought for more than four decades, up until this past Dec. 13 when Milstead received a phone call from Jack Gang, a Florida Realtor.

“I had just gotten my first Social Security check, because I’m 62 years old,” Milstead said. “The phone rings, and it’s a guy I don’t know. He starts asking me, ‘Were you in the river division in 1971 with a guy named Soan Ngo?’ (pronounced “No”) I thought, does he think I have Alzheimer’s or is he trying to swindle me?”

Gang continued, he had a good friend in Venice, Fla. “He’s been looking for you for 40 years,” Gang told Milstead. With Gang’s help, Ngo had found Milstead’s picture through an online posting of a Calabash VFW golf tournament.

“Once he knew I wasn’t trying to swindle him, he opened up,” Gang said.

Soan Ngo was one of Milstead’s Vietnamese crew members on the Tango carrier. All these years, he thought Ngo had perished in the North Vietnamese attack. Gang said he would give Ngo Milstead’s phone number.

But when Ngo called and left a message, Milstead was too overwrought to pick up the phone. By the time Milstead’s wife, Cathy, arrived home that day, her startled husband was relaying nonsensical things about “Soan…Vietnam…40 years ago.”

“She thought I was saying I had a Vietnamese son that’s 40 years old,” Milstead laughed.

It took awhile for him to regain his composure and realize his friend was still alive four decades later, but by Christmas Day, he had a nice conversation with Ngo on the phone. They talked again this past Jan. 4, the 41st anniversary of the attack that severely injured them both.

“I promised him I’d come see him,” Milstead said.

That’s just what he’s planning to do Feb. 17—President’s Weekend—when he and Cathy are traveling to Venice, Fla., to visit Ngo, where Ngo and his wife, Hanh (Hana), run a Japanese steakhouse.

Ngo, contacted by the Beacon last week, said Milstead was special to him. The two are the same age and met in 1970 when both were in their 20s. Ngo, Milstead said, spoke the most fluent English.

“We shared together everything in the war,” Ngo said, recalling how they would sit and watch the sun set during their days in Vietnam.

“It’s hard to tell you what I am feeling,” Ngo said.

Milstead, he recalled, was “a very homesick guy far away from home. We would look at the sunset. I was very poor in English at the time and could not talk with him, but we understand somehow.”

Though Milstead had been told Ngo hadn’t survived the day of the attack, Ngo said he was taken to a hospital.

“It was an American doctor, lucky for me, that saved my life,” he said. “I don’t know where Jim go.”

In 1972, Ngo returned to Saigon to train for work as a civil engineer. He continued to work for the water department after the government collapse in Saigon. After a few years, however, Communist rule proved to be “too much pressure,” Ngo said. He feared for his children’s future.

“I had to figure out a way to get away from the country,” he said.

Ngo, his wife and three young children became boat people, Gang said.

In 1981, the family arrived in Thailand. They were accepted as refugees in Bangkok, then transferred by way of Singapore to an island belonging to Indonesia. That same year, they traveled to New York City, where Ngo said he worked for a veteran as a dishwasher.

Later, the family moved to Key West, Fla., eventually settling in Venice, where they have been for the past 20 years.

In 1987, Ngo became a U.S. citizen. Ngo said he appreciated everything about living in the U.S., which “opened up everything for me and my family. I was reborn again.”

When Milstead travels to Florida next month to visit his long-lost friend, he plans to present Ngo a plaque from Solid Anchor base in Nam Can.

“This guy has Americanized himself now,” Milstead said. “Realistically, the story is his, because he escaped communism and fled the country with nothing. He doesn’t have any mementos.”

So Milstead is going to give him the plaque.

“I’ve had it for 41 years,” Milstead said. “I’m going to let him have it for the next 40.”

When each turns 100 years old, “he can give it back to me,” Milstead said.