Orson Swindle and Paul Galanti were looking for a place to hold a "Tet Dinner" so former American POWs could commune and celebrate the Vietnamese New Year in 1986.
Swindle, a former Marine pilot shot down and held in North Vietnam for six years, read a glowing review about a Vietnamese restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. Swindle walked into the place and was concerned at its size-less than 30 seats in the whole restaurant. He asked the diminutive owner, Nguyen Van Thoi, if he could accommodate 25 or 30 former POWs and guests for the dinner.
"You POW?" asked Thoi (at his insistence, his friends called him "Thoi," never Mr. Nguyen).
"Yes," said Swindle.
"Me too!" Thoi exclaimed.
At that moment began what Swindle calls his closest friendship. And also began the Annual Tet-POW Dinner hosted by Thoi in one of his Washington-area restaurants. Swindle came to Washington as an assistant secretary of commerce in the Reagan administration and stayed, recently finishing a term as Federal Trade Commissioner. During that time, says Swindle, "we literally had lunch at least once a week."
Galanti, a POW for six-and-a-half years, would come up from Richmond several times a month to do the same thing-sit down and chat with his close friend, Nguyen Van Thoi.
Swindle, Galanti, and 20 other former POWs met again for their 20th Tet Dinner on 28 January 2006, and lifted glasses to their friend Thoi in remembrance, for he died in December after a two-year battle against lung cancer. Men who bore years of brutality in North Vietnamese POW camps without breaking wept when they heard of Thoi's death. And again at the overflowing Buddhist service.
At this dinner, held at one of his three Nam-Viet Restaurants, the voices were stronger, if occasionally breaking.
"I still expect his calls," remarked Swindle to the gathering of some 90 guests, for he and Thoi talked almost every day.
"I am just certain sometimes when my phone rings, it is Thoi," Swindle said, then paused. "And then I remember. I'll never get that call again."
"I am known as a look-on-the-brightside kind of guy," says Galanti, who once said "Happiness is having a doorknob on the inside," referring to the POW camps. "But he makes me look like Scrooge."
Thoi kept this sunny determination through a tortuous personal journeyherding water buffalo on his father's rice paddy in the Mekong Delta, nine years in the South Vietnamese army as an interpreter for various American units, two years in a communist re-education camp after the fall of Saigon in 1975, and release through a combination of his charming the camp political officer and a bribe scraped together by his wife, Ngoc Anh Thi Tran.
On one of his dozen trips back to Vietnam, Thoi looked up this political officer, now frail and ill. An American friend on that trip, Jim Earnest, said the officer was very moved, saying Thoi was the only former prisoner who had ever tried to find him.
After Thoi's release he secretly arranged for a small fishing boat to carry him and some 40 other refugees, including his wife and two sons, to safety in Thailand. When the boat was ready to depart, the captain, paid upfront, did not show up. After some agonizing, Thoi-who had never been to sea in anything-led the terrified passengers out to sea using only a basic compass. After five days of storms, evading both North Vietnamese patrol craft and pirates, Thoi, afraid that many in the boat were about to die from dehydration, made landfall having no idea where he was. It was just 12 miles across the border in Thailand.
There, CIA officer Joe Boys, still a close family friend, arranged in 1979 for Thoi and his family to get to Bangkok, then the United States.
There was only one place he wanted to go. say friends: Washington, D.C. For Thoi the city symbolized the generous spirit of the many Americans who had befriended him in Vietnam.
Starting with pumping gas in Arlington, two years in Texas, and more struggle back in Arlington, the American Dream finally started to become reality for Nguyen Van Thoi, culminating with three NamViet restaurants, four children, and an array of friends in whose hearts he is grafted.
"Thoi is here with us," said Swindle. "And as long as any of us are above ground, we'll celebrate Tet with him."
Mr. McCain, a member of the United States Naval Academy Class of 1954, is a consultant and freelance writer. He comes from a four-generation Navy family, and served a tour of duty on board USS Enterprise (CVN-65) off the coast of Vietnam.