Petty Officer Warren Carara left the quarterdeck to help the 80-pound, elderly woman board his ship. Across the tiny woman's shoulders was a long pole with all her worldly possessions suspended at each end. At first she resisted his attempts at helping because the communists had told her that the Americans would take her possessions from her before they raped her and threw her to the sharks. Despite the language barrier, something in the Sailor's eyes convinced her that he meant no harm, so the woman relinquished her burden to the American. To the great delight of his shipmates watching from the rails of the ship, Carara—though physically fit at 185 pounds—struggled with the woman's load as he returned to the quarterdeck.
The year was 1954, long before Vietnam had become the all-consuming affair that would rivet and divide the American people for more than a decade. Petty Officer Carara's ship, the USS Andromeda (AKA-15), was just one of a great many U.S. ships taking part in what had been dubbed Operation Passage to Freedom. It was an impressive logistical achievement, with more than 100 Navy and Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS) vessels moving over 300,000 people and 88,000 tons of cargo from North to South Vietnam. But it was more than a massive sealift operation; it was a tangible symbol of the ideological struggle under way in the world at that time.
The operation resulted from the Geneva Accords of 1954 that had ended the French-Indochina War after the French defeat by communist forces at Dien Bien Phu. The terms of the Accords, which divided Vietnam into two parts separated at the 17th parallel of latitude, included a provision for a 300-day grace-period, during which all Vietnamese could choose where to live. They could decide on the north, which had been ceded to a regime headed by Ho Chi Minh, a charismatic nationalist who was also an avowed communist; or go south, where it was hoped democracy would flourish.
Much of the world was caught up in the growing East-West struggle that had come to be known as the Cold War. Communism and capitalist democracies vied for the hearts and minds of the undecideds of the world, and the situation in Vietnam became what one observer described as a "podiatric plebiscite," meaning "an opportunity for people to vote with their feet."
And "vote" they did! Nearly a million people fled communist rule in the north, but fewer than 50,000 went the other way. While there were some extenuations involving religion, redeployment of guerilla forces, etc., the result was undeniably an early indication that communism would never be able to survive by people's choice—a principle made more "concrete" several years later, with the appearance of the Berlin Wall.
There are many heartwarming stories told by the refugees from the north, with gratitude the central theme. Henry Do was given a Snickers candy bar by an American Sailor and to this day cannot eat one without thinking about that Sailor and the "sweet taste of freedom."
Cuong Bui writes: "My father was on one of those ships, running from the communists in 1954 . . . . In 1975, he took me on another ship. This time we ended up in America, land of the free . . . . We are very grateful to America and all of its kind people."
Warren Carara and thousands of other American Sailors were some of those "kind people," proving that weapons are not the only means of serving a noble cause.