“I
make no defense of the war from this pulpit. . . . I seek only
to call your attention to that silver thread, small but radiant
with hope, shining through the dark tapestry of war – namely,
the establishment of a bridgehead, small and frail now; but which
somehow, under the mysterious ways of God, will be strengthened,
and from which someday shall spring forth a great work affecting
for good the lives of large numbers of our Father’s children
who live in that part of the world. Of that I have a certain faith”
( Hinckley, Gordon B., Conference Report, Apr. 1968, p. 24).
That part
of the world was Vietnam, and, for those of us who remember the
place and time, we do it with deep and poignant sorrow. Yet, for
those of us who recognize God’s great love for each of his
children, when we look beyond that dark time, we see how from
the ashes the shining purposes of the Lord began to be accomplished
in a small jungle kingdom.
It began
in 1962 with the organization of an LDS serviceman’s group.
That year was blessed with two Vietnamese converts. By 1966, the
escalation of the war had brought more than 2,000 members of the
Church into South Vietnam and their association with the Vietnamese
brought many teaching opportunities. The church began to grow.
In Salt Lake
City, church leadership kept a vigilant watch over the membership
in that country. In October 1966, it sent Elders Gordon B. Hinckley
and Marion D. Hanks to visit and conduct meetings among the membership
there. President David O. McKay had authorized Elder Hinckley
to dedicate Vietnam to missionary work if he felt prompted to
do so.
In a meeting
held at Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel, Elder Hinckley “offered
a beautiful, exceptionally appropriate dedicatory prayer: “‘We
have seen in other parts of Asia,’” he prayed, “‘the
manner in which thou hast turned the hand and the work of the
adversary to the good and the blessing of many of thy children.
And now we call upon thee at this time that thou wilt similarly
pour out thy Spirit upon this land’” He pleaded with
the Lord that there might be peace, and that freedom-loving men
might be allowed their free agency. He asked that an added measure
of the Lord’s Spirit might be poured out upon both the nonmembers
and those who already had the gospel, that the people might be
more willing to listen to the message of the Savior, and that
the members would be more eager to share the gospel. He also asked
the Lord to “‘open the way for the coming of missionaries,
and make their labors fruitful of great and everlasting good in
the lives of the people.’” (R. Lanier Britsch and
Richard C. Holloman Jr., “The Church’s Years in Vietnam,”
Ensign, Aug. 1980, p. 25).
In 1968,
at the height of the war’s escalation, there were more than
5,000 LDS servicemen in Vietnam and a growing population of Vietnamese
converts. By 1971 three districts of the Church functioned under
the Hong Kong Mission.
That year,
William S. Bradshaw was called to be the president of that mission.
He said, “At the time I became Mission President in 1971,
the U.S. was in the process of stepping down, of scaling down,
so the people were leaving. It was a constant struggle to keep
the groups organized. A great deal of time was spent in reorganizing
the various groups.
“In
1972, near the end of the year, we (the U.S. government) announced
that by the first of March (1973) we would withdraw all our personnel
and leave the war to the South Vietnamese. I started to get letters
of inquiry from the Church. One of the letters came from Elder
Hinckley who had missionary responsibilities in that area. He
wrote and said, ‘What is going to happen to the branch in
Saigon?’
“I
needed to write a letter of recommendation and tell them what
I would do.
“I
went in February to Saigon. I went up on that very same roof where
Elder Hinckley dedicated the country for missionary work. I prayed
and asked for guidance. I had the very strong impression that
we should go ahead and send missionaries. That we didn’t
need to worry about their safety.
“I
wrote a personal letter to Elder Hinckley and told him what I
felt. I got a letter back saying he had read the letter to the
First Presidency and the Twelve and that they were giving me permission
to send missionaries. The letter said I should get permission
from their parents.”
President
Bradshaw chose four elders from his mission, Colin Van Orman,
James Christensen, David Posey, and Richard Holloman. He wrote
to their parents.
Elders Posey, Holloman, VanOrman with
President William Bradshaw in front of chapel
Richard Holloman
had grown up in a military family and they were keenly aware of
the conflict in Vietnam. His mother, Ann Holloman, wrote,
“The
Hong Kong Mission President wrote us a letter asking for permission
to send our son to Vietnam which was then a part of that mission.
We were stunned. We had not long since returned from an assignment
to Okinawa where many of the wounded from the Vietnam war were
brought to the hospital. Bombers could be heard taking off regularly
for runs over Vietnam. We saw spy planes scooting around. Shooting
and bombing was still going on in the outskirts of Saigon. And
now they wanted to send our son there!
“We
had thought it a hard thing to bear to let him go to Hong Kong
- the other side of the world. When he received his Patriarchal
Blessing about one and a half years before he received his mission
call, he had been told that he would be given the opportunity
to teach about Christ to those who knew not of him. He was warned,
that though some would be converted, there would be some who would
be vengeful and hateful and attempt to harm him to keep him from
accomplishing his mission. But, he was promised that if he would
be faithful, and look upon them with his countenance lit up by
the Spirit of the Lord, fear would take hold of them and they
would dare not molest him. He would be allowed to go in peace
and safety to deliver his message. When his call came to go to
Hong Kong, we could see the prophetic implications from his blessing.
“When
the time came to put him on the plane, our human hearts were heavy
and fearful, and we really didn't want him to actually go.
“But
now, here was the real thing. Vietnam!! Who was friendly and who
not? And to have to learn another difficult language, on site,
without any prior preparation. We questioned the Lord: "What
could He be thinking? Why us? Why our eldest?
“But
as we reread the letter from the mission president, and reread
the Patriarchal
Blessing,
our testimonies burst back into flame, and we knew it was the
Lord calling him, not just the man assigned to be the mission
president.
“The
Lord had warned us, but also given a promise. We had to have confidence
in our son to be worthy of that promise. So, we wrote the mission
president that we trusted and sustained his inspiration under
his calling, and gave our permission. We were reminded that the
Lord had said there is no greater love that one can show than
to lay down one's life for a friend. Though we prayed hard and
often that our son might not be called upon to lay down his life,
if it became the Lord's will, we would try to be at peace knowing
that he was doing what the Lord had assigned him to do.”
“The
other parents also agreed and wrote their permission. “I
sort of thought the aerograms were tear-stained,” President
Bradshaw said.
“The
night before I left Hong Kong,” Richard Holloman said, “I
went with my companion to Victoria Peak and looked over Hong Kong.
I had great anticipation to go to Vietnam and start afresh but
I had no idea what it was going to be like.
“My
parents, especially my mom, had written a letter full of faith
that we would be protected and the Lord’s will would be
done. I felt very at peace to go. I felt very much protected.
I felt as if I was prepared for it.”
President
Bradshaw said, “I decided April 6 would be a good time to
do such a thing, so on April 6, 1973, the four elders and I got
on a plane and went from Hong Kong to Saigon.”
The Church
had procured a villa, formerly owned by French residents, for
use as a meeting house and the elders’ living quarters.
The branch members met them there. Colin Van Orman remembers they
were “warmly received.”
Primary being conducted outside the chapel
Richard Holloman
recalls, “It felt like something out of the Book of Mormon.
That we had been prayed for, for so long. That our going was an
answer to prayer by the Saints. That they had very much wanted
to have the full-time missionaries come and seriously take up
the work that the servicemen had not been able to do. Just going
to the chapel and having the members so overjoyed to have us there,
I felt like I was living scripture.”
After a meal,
provided by the branch, President Bradshaw and the missionaries
retired to their quarters where the president advised and gave
the young elders counsel.
President
Bradshaw said, “There was just this great feeling. We grabbed
each other and started to laugh and jump up and down. We thought
it was just the most terrific experience that the Church had in
a long time.”
“I
felt like I was in the most spiritual place I could be on the
earth,” Richard Holloman said. “I felt like it was
the right place, the right time, the right people. That it was
all arranged as if it was a plan coming to pass.”
President
Bradshaw also took the four missionaries to the Caravelle Hotel
where President Hinckley dedicated Vietnam to the preaching of
the gospel.
“We
took some pictures and had a very spiritual moment there on the
roof,” Richard Holloman said.
Elder Christensen and Elder VanOrman with
Sister Bradshaw on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel
“Just
to know,” Colin Van Orman said, “when we were on top
of that hotel, that was the place where he had been to dedicate
the land. It was a wonderful experience.”
President
Bradshaw said, “When I left a couple of days later, they
said, ‘When you come back, we’ll take you around our
city.’ I was worried somewhat. I knew where the black markets
in Saigon were. I knew where all the brothels were that serviced
military people. And the little kids without arms and legs selling
cigarettes. There could have been a lot of ill-will against young
Americans who were the same age as soldiers.”
The missionaries
didn’t feel as if they were in danger. Colin Van Orman remembered
the rumble of the B-52s and recalled being warned away from certain
areas and cautioned about straying from the roads at night because
of the suspected Viet Cong presence, but he always felt safe.
Richard Holloman
said, “When we first got there, we stayed as a foursome
for a number of weeks. Everywhere we went there were machine gun
nests at the intersections and barbed wire. You felt like you
were in a war zone.” He also recalled, in the morning, feeling
the concussion from bombs being dropped in nearby Cambodia.
“Knowing
there were people who weren’t very happy that the Americans
had left, I sensed a resentment or a feeling that we would have
been at risk if we weren’t protected. We could have been
easy targets.”
Beyond noting
those things, the missionaries didn’t have time to feel
threatened. Their first responsibility was to learn the language.
As part of their assignment to the Hong Kong Mission, the elders
had been required to learn Chinese. But, now, in Vietnam, they
had to start over again. President Bradshaw remembered, “Colin
Van Orman had only a couple of months left on his mission, so
he was learning a new language on the very end. That was an extraordinary
thing to ask someone to do.”
“It
was a real pioneering effort,” recalled James Christensen.
“We had no senior companions teaching us or helping us with
the language. We didn’t have any language books. There weren’t
any published language books. We were all brand new at it, all
four of us. We visited the local Catholic missionaries and a set
of Protestant missionaries who loaned us some of their books.
We got a few government books.
“We
ended up hiring Pauline Ben. She was a Chinese girl who lived
in the branch.”
President
Bradshaw remembered Sister Ben. “Her native language was
Mandarin but she knew Vietnamese and she knew English and French
and she started to teach them Vietnamese partly with reference
to Cantonese.”
“We
soon learned the Lord’s economy was far superior to our
own expectations.” Ann Holloman wrote, “The lady who
taught them the Vietnamese language was Chinese, and because they
had learned the Chinese language first, she was able to teach
them more easily than she could have from English, which she did
not speak.”
James Christensen
said, “We met every day for three to four hours in the morning
with Pauline. She’d come and we’d sit on the porch
of the old French villa that was the Church and she’d teach
us language.
“The
language came very quickly. We were very blessed.”
Ann Holloman,
mother, wrote, “Our son sent home many little notebooks
filled with every new word he would encounter. It seemed to us
like a difficult language as he explained that the same word could
mean different things when spoken with different tones.
“We
had a letter from one of his converts, expressing surprise at
his skill, saying that to hear him on the telephone, one would
have to think him a native.
“Our
son worked hard on his language skills and acknowledges that surely
he was given the gift of tongues because the Lord blessed his
efforts.”
“By
the time I left (six months later),” James Christensen said,
“we were teaching several of the discussions, giving talks
in the church, all in a language we had learned, essentially,
on our own with Sister Ben’s help and without any training
and largely without books or materials.”
After the
daily language lesson, the missionaries went out onto the street
and tried to make it work.
“The
first week or so,” James Christensen said, “we spent
a lot of time jumping on buses and traveling out to the end of
the bus lines and then riding the bus back to town, trying to
get the lay of the land and figure out what was going on. The
four of us did everything we could to figure out where things
were.”
“We
had a lot of referrals and people to look up. A lot of good teaching
opportunities,” Colin Van Orman said.
“Missionary
work in Saigon was extraordinary,” President Bradshaw said.
“Better than Wilford Woodruff on John Benbow’s farm
in England.”
James Christensen
said, “The way we found people was through the cards that
had been filled out at Temple Square. Vietnamese men who were
working in the army would pass through Salt Lake and fill out
these cards. Hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of the cards.
“We’d
go look these people up, if we could find them, and introduce
ourselves as missionaries from the Church. If they indicated to
us that they were interested, we’d say, ‘Okay, that’s
good, we’ll come back to you when we know how to talk.’
“In
a few circumstances, we’d get Vietnamese members from the
branch who would go out and help us. They would interpret while
we tried to teach but we only did that in a few cases.”
President
Bradshaw recalled the missionaries’ favorite proselyting
tactic. “It was to stand on a street corner with a map in
their hands and look lost. Within sixty seconds, someone would
come up and say, ‘Can I help you? Where are you heading?
I’ll show you the way.’ That way, they’d wangle
an invitation to the person’s home.
“They
taught families. They had a lot more success teaching families
than we did in Hong Kong. They were teaching a lot of lessons.”
While the
work was flourishing, the missionaries felt handicapped by their
lack of even the most essential materials like scriptures and
discussions.
James Christensen
said, “We spent every Sunday afternoon translating materials
into Vietnamese. We were not the primary translators. There was
a Sister Vy and President The, who was the president of the branch,
would stay after church all Sunday afternoon. The two of them,
together with the four missionaries, would work on translating
materials. We didn’t have discussions translated. We didn’t
have any of the tracts translated. The Book of Mormon had not
been translated. The hymns had not been translated.
Sister Vy teaching a Sunday School lesson
“The
first hymn that we translated was Love at Home. For a
few weeks after we translated that, because we felt such a real
need to get the Book of Mormon and some of these tracts translated,
we ended up using that same hymn over and over at church. We sang
Love at Home for opening hymn, Sacrament hymn, and closing
hymn for several weeks while we spent our time in translation
in other areas.
“When
we got the first several chapters of Nephi translated, we ran
those off on a mimeograph machine and carried those copies around.
That’s what we used to teach with.
“We
also carried around with us a French copy of the Book of Mormon
and the French Bible because most of the middle-aged people could
speak and read French. The young people couldn’t, but the
people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and on had some proficiency in French.
We would go teach people with a set of French scriptures in front
of us, speaking in Vietnamese, and we would have our English scriptures
with us to follow along with the French. We would have these two
sets of scriptures in two different languages while we taught
them in a third. If we got real excited, we would lapse into Chinese.”
“In
some ways, we flew by the seat of our pants,” President
Bradshaw said. “I’m glad we did. For two years, lots
of people joined the church and we had an active branch.”
Because the
LDS servicemen had been withdrawn from Vietnam, most of the members
were Vietnamese. Yet, there were some American civilian members
left in Vietnam. One couple, Lester and Yvonne Bush, were actively
involved in the branch. Brother Bush, a physician attached to
the U.S. Embassy, had been set apart as a counselor to Branch
President The. President Bradshaw said, “Yvonne spent more
hours than anyone could imagine, helping more people in that branch.
The Bushes devotion to the Church was extraordinary. It wouldn’t
have happened so well had they not been there.”
Elder VanOrman and President The with two investigators in chapel
James Christensen
remembers those of the branch and the Vietnamese people, in general,
with tenderness. “ This was a very humble people, the Vietnamese.
These were people who had really been beat up. I don’t think
there was a family we knew who hadn’t lost a father or husband
or son or two or three. Everyone had lost lots of people.
“One
was the woman who would come and cook for us every day. This was
a woman who had several children at home, who was not a member
of the Church, who lived in just a little lean-to of boards that
had been stuck up against a concrete building out on the outskirts
of Saigon. She would show up every morning between seven and seven-thirty.
She wouldn’t turn around and go home until after 7:30. She
considered it a huge honor to be helping us and to be working
with us.
“I remember
sitting around with her after dinner and saying, ‘We’d
love to teach you.’ She’d say, ‘Oh, no, no.
I’m not worthy. You’re not looking for people like
me to teach.
You’re
looking for people who are more important.’
“That
was a very common sentiment sometimes with these people. They
were very humble, sweet, kind people who considered their association
with the gospel and the missionaries to be a real honor. It was
wonderful. And they seemed to be quite receptive to the gospel.
“We’d
hold church and 3/4 of the people in the church were not members.
We’d have between 40-80 people and many, many of them were
not members. We’d invite someone and they’d just show
up. All the time.
“They
were very humble and good, sweet people.”
Ann Holloman
wrote, “A few years ago I had an opportunity to attend Women's
Conference at BYU when Sister Hinckley was honored at the main
fireside. She told about some of her experiences traveling with
her husband.
“She
said once as they took off and she looked down at the ground from
which they were leaving, she turned to her husband and asked him
how he could bear to leave those four little missionaries all
alone in a foreign country so far from even their mission president.
“He
replied he was not leaving them alone. ‘The Lord was with
them.’
“Sister.
Hinckley did not say it was Vietnam, but it could have been because
President Hinckley, as an apostle, did go there to dedicate the
land for the preaching of the gospel. I took it to be, because
their mission home was in Hong Kong, many hundreds of miles away.
“In
any case, surely the Lord was with them. They were able, with
the Lord's help, to reach in and lift up and out those who had
been prepared to receive the gospel, many by their contact with
LDS servicemen.”
Within the
next year and a half, President Bradshaw had been released, as
had Elders Van Orman, Christensen, Posey, and Holloman, and replaced
by other missionaries. Elder Holloman served the longest in Saigon
at 16 months. On April 30, 1975, just barely beyond two years
of the beginning of missionary work in Saigon, South Vietnam fell
to the forces of communist North Vietnam. The Saigon mission area
was closed, and the missionaries withdrawn.
The current
Church Almanac reports that there are approximately 100 members
in Vietnam in two branches. Richard Holloman estimates that more
than 90 percent of the Vietnamese members were able to escape
after the Communist take-over.
President
Bradshaw said, “When the two years came to an end and that
chapter in the history of the Church came to an end, it was easy
to feel devastated by the fact that we had to close that down.
“But
the work with the Vietnamese didn’t stop. There were large
numbers of ex-patriot Vietnamese in Paris and in Atlanta and especially
in California, all over the place. It wasn’t long before
there was an official translation of the Book of Mormon in Vietnamese.
Missionaries were being called to learn to speak Vietnamese and
go to Paris and go to Philadelphia and other places. There were
Asian branches all over the place.
“ The
older couples who serve in Saigon now teach English and act as
service missionaries, there’s a remnant of that work done
in Vietnam so, in spite of the horrors of the war, somehow that
silver strand that President Hinckley talked about hasn’t
been broken.” Of the fall of South Vietnam, Richard Holloman
said, “In our limited perspective, we might think that was
the end of President Hinckley’s silver thread, and we might
tie it off, but by no means did it break the thread. It just went
off in a different pattern.”
_____________________________________________________
William Bradshaw
teaches college-level Chemistry. Colin Van Orman is a physician,
James Christensen, an attorney, and David Posey, a Certified Public
Accountant. Brother Posey was not available for an interview at
the time of this writing, but keeps in contact with his former
Saigon mission companions. All currently reside in Utah.
Richard Holloman
retired as a Colonel from the U.S. Air Force. Twenty years ago,
he was involved in recovery efforts of American servicemen lost
in Southeast Asia. He continues to work for the government and
lives in Georgia.
If you are
Vietnamese or if you lived or served in Vietnam between 1973 and
1975; or if you have served with LDS Vietnamese communities, Richard
Holloman is anxious to hear from you. He can be reached at rcholloman@juno.com.
Sources:
Hinckley,
Gordon B., Conference Report, Apr. 1968, p. 24
R. Lanier
Britsch and Richard C. Holloman Jr., “The Church’s
Years in Vietnam,” Ensign, Aug. 1980, p. 25
Interviews
with
Bradshaw,
William S., April 2003
Christensen,
James L., April 2003
Holloman,
Richard C., April 2003
Van Orman,
Colin, April 2003
Letter from
Holloman, Ann, April 2003
