March 11–18, 1999

cover story

The Last Action Hero

Harrowing escapes! Crazed parachute jumps! Marathon swims! The wild misadventures of Ly Tong, bright hope and legendary hero of the Vietnamese community in Philadelphia and beyond.

by Christopher McDougall

		The Guest of Honor: Ly Tong at a reception in Philadelphia. photo: Sandor Welsh

It's go time, Black Eagle! So make up your mind: Do you stay safe and sound aboard this Vietnamese Airlines flight full of panicked passengers and try to explain on landing just what the hell you meant by pulling a knife on a pilot… or do you squirm through that cockpit window and free fall into your most outrageous adventure yet?
Just seconds left, Eagle: The plane is starting its fifth pass over Saigon, howling over the rooftops at 1,000 feet. No way the pilot can buzz the city a sixth time without getting all of you blasted to atoms. Down below, North Vietnamese soldiers and air force crews are already at full scramble, launching fighter jets and ratcheting anti-aircraft guns to pull the plane tight into their cross-hairs. One squeeeeze of a sweaty trigger finger and…

Hold fire! Hold fire! the pilot is screaming over the radio. We're a commercial airliner full of passengers! There's a guy on board with a time bomb! But the pilot knows in his heart it makes no difference what he says; no matter how innocent the excuse or the tailfin markings, army gunners get awfully trigger-happy when a plane—any plane—comes zooming in at bombing level over the capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

The pilot looks back over his shoulder. The engineer and the stewardesses are still tied up on the floor. The quiet man in the business suit is still standing near the roaring open window, undecided. During the first five passes, he'd blizzarded the city with 50,000 homemade leaflets announcing that Ly Tong—the Black Eagle—was on his way home and ready to rumble. "People of Saigon—fill the streets! Occupy the radio and television stations!" the leaflets command. "Ask the police to join the revolution or return to their barracks. An overseas invasion force is on the way! I will soon be there to lead the fight. Await instructions!"

If you don't blow us up, the pilot said, they will. Are you going to jump?

That was the plan; that was why he'd left his quiet existence as a graduate student in political science at the University of New Orleans to return to his past life as Black Eagle, and to Vietnam, the homeland he'd fled as a hunted man 18 years ago. Back then, he was a South Vietnamese fighter pilot known for wild bravery and rebellion, a tough kid who lied about his age to enlist at 15, who once beat the crap out of a superior officer and always volunteered for the most dangerous missions in his squadron.

Shot down over Saigon in 1975, he was thrown into a Communist prison camp and spent the next five years at hard labor, trying several times to break out and landing each time in a metal sweatbox as reward for his troubles. Finally, he made it over the fence and began the amazing escape which would make him a legend. Relying on wits, nerve and cunning disguises, he eluded border patrols and manhunts for nearly two years as he trekked across Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and the deadly Straits of Johore to arrive, safe at last and soaking wet, at the American Embassy in Singapore.

Granted asylum to the United States, Ly Tong lived the life of a retired hero, accepting the adulation of fellow refugees and the love of a famous Vietnamese actress. He joined no political parties-in-exile and showed no interest in overthrowing the Communist regime that had conquered his country. He'd already survived combat, beatings, starvation, malaria, shoot-to-kill prison guards and a swim across shark-filled waters. The time for heroics was over… until one day, he boarded a passenger plane in Thailand with a knife and a sportsman's parachute in his carry-on bag and ordered the flight crew north to Saigon.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? The pilot was getting frantic.

Suddenly, the wind settled the question.

One second he was there, and Whoooosh!—a blink later, he'd vanished. The pilot searched the sky below. There he goes! The tremendous backdraft from the jet engines must have sucked him through the little oval. He's free falling, tumbling… the parachute is rippling from the bag, but the cord's tangled around his legs! Black Eagle is trussed like a chicken and rocketing headfirst toward the country he'd thought, insanely, he could overthrow on his own.

The day was Sept. 2, 1992. Was this the final adventure of Ly Tong, the James Bond of Saigon?

The Indomitable Loser

South Philadelphia, six years later. Inside the Hai Tien Restaurant at 16th and Washington, the suspense was eating so badly at the ex-commando in combat fatigues and black beret that after shaking hands, he continued gripping a stranger's in nervous anticipation. Nearby, Ngo Minh Hang was clutching two books of self-published poetry to her chest. Inside were odes she'd written to Ly (pronounced "Lee") Tong in a fever of inspiration after hearing of his self-sacrifice.

"Tonight," she said, breathlessly, eyes glowing, "I'll sing one for him."

Similar tributes were buzzing from table to table in this jammed restaurant on a cold, dreary November Sunday. A Buddhist priest in saffron robes was describing the prayer ceremonies his Philadelphia temple had dedicated in Ly Tong's honor. Two other tables were packed knee-to-knee with admirers who'd rented two vans and braved the sleety roads from New York.

All told, some 500 Philadelphia-area Vietnamese had gathered to witness something of a miracle: the return of Black Eagle.

Not only did Tong survive his kamikaze coup d'etat in 1992, but it turned him into perhaps the most loved and celebrated Vietnamese exile in the world, eclipsing such elite company as Jimmy Tran, the California auto mechanic who tried to blow up a Saigon art museum, and Thich Quang Do, head of an outlawed Buddhist church who sparked a valiant but short-lived revolt.

Philadelphia's 50,000-strong Vietnamese community has embraced him as probably their greatest hero, thanks not only to his high-flying heroics, but also to the media campaign of his old friend Quang Le, editor of the city's influential Vietnamese language newspaper Thoi Moi ("New Life").

Le, a former POW who's known Tong since they were both young men in the former Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), began cranking out special issues in a "Free Ly" campaign. Philadelphia Vietnamese began blitzing the U.S. State Department and the Hanoi government with petitions and testimonials on his behalf. They posted Ly Tong love poems on the Internet at Valentine's Day and flooded the mailroom of his Hanoi prison camp with cards and letters.

Worldwide, Tong dominated news in virtually every Vietnamese enclave in the United States, Canada, France and Australia. One Houston magazine sponsored a poetry contest with Tong as the sole subject. Old Air Force buddies compiled a book on The Life of Ly Tong, and a Vietnamese radio station in California read excerpts from it for an hour each day. Buddhist temples set up prayer ceremonies.

But thanks to Philadelphia's support during his years in a Hanoi prison camp, Tong made the city one of his first stops during a triumphant homecoming tour. It's a special honor, since many Vietnamese have heard the legend, but because of his imprisonment for the past six years, very few know the truth about his one-man invasion. There's a secret added attraction, as well: Many present here tonight are hoping that Tong will reveal his next scheme to conquer the motherland.

Even though Tong was captured shortly after plopping into a Saigon swamp and sentenced to 20 years hard labor (the equivalent, for a man pushing 50, of a death sentence), his doomed, almost comical mission transformed him, overnight, from mortal to mythical.

Once details leaked of his misadventures after splashdown and his wild bravado in prison (including telling the warden "You may cut off my head, but you will never cut my hair!"), Tong was seen as a rare and sacred figure in Vietnamese folklore: the Indomitable Loser.

"Traditionally, this is a fighter who leaps recklessly into the fray and is repeatedly saved by divine grace," explains Douglas Pike, associate director of the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University. Think of Don Quixote, or Indiana Jones with a touch of Bugs Bunny—always outmatched, apparently doomed, yet supremely confident and unyielding. It's a hairy role to assume, because to maintain it, the Loser must take insane risks to prove the gods are on his side.

"Heroism is not based on achievements," adds Yen Do, editor of Southern California's Nguoi Viet, perhaps the largest Vietnamese-language paper in the United States. Rather, it's based on chinh nghia—"just cause"—and tackling something much larger than oneself, no matter how bad the odds. "Even when someone tries and fails," says Do, "he's a bigger hero."

Examples abound: About the time of Christ, the two Trung sisters led barefoot peasants into combat against seasoned Chinese warriors and, after getting smeared, committed suicide by leaping together into a lake; 500 years later, Triey Quang Phuc became a Vietnamese Robin Hood, hiding in a mosquito-infested swamp with his band of marauders and running daring raids against Chinese overlords before their eventual, inevitable, defeat; Ho Chi Minh made his first splash during his days as a merchant marine when, on shore leave in France in 1919, the scruffy sailor tried to force his way into the Versailles Peace Conference to discuss Vietnamese independence with Woodrow Wilson; and in the 1960s, Buddhist priests burnt themselves to death to protest government repression. You can almost chart Vietnamese history, era by era, with some example of the Indomitable Loser, says Pike.

Small wonder that many exiles hoped Tong, if one day freed, could galvanize both refugees abroad and anti-Communists at home into a single, united thrust to rid their country of Marxist rule. "Ly Tong is our one and only hero!" is how the nervous ex-commando, still squeezing his sweaty hand into mine, put it. "Ly Tong is our one and only hope!"

Tong even won fans among North Vietnamese Communists, says recent émigré Sang Lyn. He was in Saigon when Tong came parachuting to earth in '92. "We couldn't believe anyone would come back and try again (after the surrender of South Vietnamese troops in 1975)," says Lyn, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1996. "We knew he left a safe life in America, so he had to be very courageous."

Is he a hero, though, or a nut job? Some suspect Tong is really a deranged glory-seeker who may single-handedly ruin budding U.S. relations with Vietnam. These advocates of normalization believe diplomacy and business deals will lure Vietnam toward democracy, not attacks by skydiving Napoleons.

According to the Vietnamese government, he is simply a hijacker, says Dzung Le, press officer for the Vietnamese consulate in Washington, D.C. "That is why he was sentenced to prison—for the crime of hijacking, not dissidence," says Le.

"I am not certain if Ly Tong is Don Quixote or Sancho Panza," says editor Do. "What I mean is, are his motives pure or selfish?" Then, pondering a darker explanation, he asks, "Or is something driving Ly Tong to self-destruction?"

Mythical hero or no, Tong was useless to the Free Vietnam movement behind bars. Then, this past September, the Asian economic crisis provided a surprise windfall. Angling for more U.S. concessions, Vietnam released five dissidents with American passports—among them, Tong.

Among the hundreds who've come to hear Tong's saga from his own lips is Ca Van Tran, a 61-year-old former artillery major who's survived starvation, torture, two bullet wounds, three prison breaks and exactly 12 years, 10 months and 17 days in Communist POW camps. Ca, frankly, doesn't give a crap about politics. He's here because Tong reminds him of a quality which unites all Vietnamese, Communists and exiles alike.

It's a little secret they've depended on for 2000 years, one that explains where they got the grit to battle China for independence for nearly 1,000 years, how they continued fighting after taking 5-to-1 casualties against the French, and how the North could lose nearly a fifth of all available soldiers in the Tet offensive and still defy the most powerful military machine in the world. It's called dau tranh, and it's a secret the Trong sisters, the Buddhist monks and even Ho Chi Minh understood, and if you want to know something special about Philadelphia's Vietnamese community, you should learn it, too.

Quite simply, Ca translates: "It means we'll accept more suffering than anyone else."

Run Through the Jungle

The first time the five of us escaped, they hunted us down in two days. They brought us back to prison and made us live in the pigsty," says Ca. "We tried again a year later, and they caught us in 15 days. This time, they beat us, starved us, shackled us with handcuffs and wooden stocks around our ankles. They'd decided to break us once and for all.

"So we waited a year before trying again."

Getting out of a North Vietnamese prison camp wasn't very difficult; getting out of the jungle, on the other hand, was another story. Once the war ended in 1975, tens of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers were rounded up for "re-education" and shipped off to prisons deep in the northern rain forests. Fences were simple wire-and-bamboo affairs, but the countryside was dense, cold and crawling with wild animals and bounty hunters. The only hope for freedom was slinking some 400 miles across the mountain highlands to Laos.

		New Life: Former POW Quang Le, 54, and his son, Kevin, 27. Le is the editor of Thoi Moi, translated "new life," a South Philadelphia-based Vietnamese language newspaper. photo: Kass Mencher

Ca was never at top strength, anyway. He'd been shot twice during the war, once in the lungs and once near the kidneys, and the bitter northern cold was tough on a southern boy from Hue. He'd joined the army fresh out of college in 1954, when the Geneva Conference ended French colonization by splitting Vietnam down the middle. With Ho Chi Minh and his Communist army soon sweeping down from Hanoi, patriotic teenagers by the thousands were joining the Southern resistance.

Recruiting fighters was not a problem—90 percent of the population were rural peasants, and generations of greedy, heavy-handed rulers had taxed and abused the people to the point where they had little to lose but their misery. It was a huge reserve of desperate manpower for the warring sides to draw on.

For the next 15 years, Ca would face almost constant combat. "We truly believed we could win," he says. "Even after the American soldiers pulled out in 1972, we thought we could win on our own." But when U.S. financial aid was cut off as well three years later, it was only a matter of months before panicked civilians were dangling from the treads of Hueys evacuating the U.S. Embassy, and South Vietnamese troops, with no money to buy ammo, were laying down their weapons.

As a prisoner, Ca lived on 12 kilos of cattle feed a month—the equivalent of a big bag of dog chow. By day, he hacked rubber trees in the forest with the other prisoners; by night, he schemed his escape.

"The third time, we made it to the border. It took us four months and 17 days. We lived on grass and weeds and any plants we found. There were five of us, the original gang. One of us collapsed and died. And then, bad luck caught up with the rest of us. Vietnam had gone to war with China and soldiers were patrolling the Laos border. They spotted us and almost shot us. As they were taking us back to the camp… " he pauses, his eyes misting for the first time. "… I wished they had."

Today, the former artillery major still wears an army coat and camouflage cap. He came to Philadelphia with his wife and children shortly after he was finally released in 1989. He now works sorting fruit in a South Philadelphia factory. His life, he believed, was over—until he got word of Black Eagle's mission.

Jutting his jaw so aggressively it looks like he's about to chomp through a tin can, Ca concludes, "Ly Tong taught me we have to keep fighting… for the sake of our children."

The Great Escape

Everyone is afraid of death; he's just afraid less." Tran Manh Khoi, commander of South Vietnam's "Black Eagle" Fighter Squadron, is describing Ly Tong to the Los Angeles Times in 1992. First Lt. Tong, he recalled, was always hot for danger and hard to control. "In his courage, he sometimes did reckless stunts," said Khoi. Every once in a while he'd have to bust Tong down to "reduce that courage."

In fact, Tong had barely joined the Air Force in 1965 before being thrown out for beating up a superior officer. It was pure chinh nghia, Tong said, "just cause," since he was sticking up for a weaker cadet who was being brutalized, but he was booted nonetheless. No matter; he changed his real name, Le Van Tong, to Ly Tong and re-enlisted.

His bravado caught up with him in April 1975, a few weeks before the fall of Saigon. Tong's A-37 bomber was hit by a Soviet anti-aircraft rocket and he had to eject, parachuting into the hands of Vietcong soldiers. A few months later, he tried his first escape, vanishing into the jungle during a work detail, but he was soon caught and spent the next six months locked inside a Conex, the 8x4 freight containers left behind by U.S. forces and converted by the Vietcong into punishment cells. Temperatures inside the metal box would hit 100 degrees by day and dropped to freezing at night.

But that didn't stop Tong from plotting his next escape. If he couldn't get through the jungle, he'd go over it. According to Nguyen Bay, a former prison mate and fighter-jet instructor reached by phone in San Jose, Tong was no sooner out of the sweatbox than he began asking questions about the controls of Soviet fighter jets during walks into the jungle on work detail. Just curiosity, Tong told him, killin' time. He later figured out, Bay said, that Tong was hatching a plan to steal a Vietcong plane from the adjacent base and fly out of prison.

Instead, he took one more crack at an overland break. Tong cracked the wooden bars of his cell, wriggled under the barbed wire and navigated the forest by moonlight. This time, he got lucky. He stumbled across railroad tracks, managed to scramble aboard a train and soon was 300 miles away in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. Tong learned to forge fake identity papers for himself and survived for a while by selling them to others on the lam. He knew, though, that hyper Communist police and surveillance would eventually catch up with him if he didn't get out of Vietnam.

So it was back on the road. From this point in the saga, it's pretty much all Tong's version. Since no one was with him, witnesses can verify only two things: In 1980 he was in an iron box in the middle of the jungle, and in 1982 he was 1,600 miles away in Singapore, wet and on foot. Only Tong knows for sure what happened in between, during those two years on the run. This is the story he tells in private, late that night after the Philadelphia reception.

There isn't a trace of past danger on Tong's serene, pink, boyish face. No scars, worry lines. Not even a gray hair. You can see why people say supernatural forces are on his side. His skin glows with it. At 50, and despite his harrowing life, Tong seems much younger than his cohorts. His inky hair is bound into a ponytail; his glasses are rose-tinted; he greets admirers with a firm grip and a calm smile. You know his drink is shaken, not stirred.

"I snuck into the Saigon airport and hid out there for five nights, living off dried noodles and trying to find an American plane that worked. But scavengers had stripped out most of the engine parts, so I had to give up and set out on foot." Using his fake ID papers, he was able to hop a bus to Cambodia, slipping off just short of the border. He struck out through the jungle, avoiding border patrols, and crossed into Cambodia undetected.

Skulking around the Cambodian waterfront, impersonating a fisherman, he began snooping for a boat to carry him across the Bay of Thailand to Bangkok. It didn't take long for real boatmen to get suspicious, and Tong was soon grabbed by Cambodian police and thrown back into prison—for a while. Once again, he cracked the bars and was off.

"I was running like a wild man. The police, dogs, village people were all out looking for me. I hid in the bush for six hours while ants were biting me. I almost fainted. Bandits, Vietcong, Pol Pot, all were prowling the Cambodian border, so I had to stay put."

Once the coast was clear, Tong struck out again for Thailand. He stuck to the forests as much as possible: "I caught snakes, frogs, sometimes landlocked fish in dry canals, and spent days living on them." He'd occasionally venture into the villages, checking for news and selling his shirt and last pack of cigarettes, one smoke at a time, for food.

After working his way west through rugged, booby-trapped no man's land near the border, he finally slipped into Thailand, again working by moonlight. Tong went straight to the Red Cross, those defenders of the weak and downtrodden, where, thank God, he would be free at last.

"They turned me in to the police." By now, he can savor the irony. "They said I had to be a spy, since no one could have crossed no man's land and made it there alive." Starving and locked back into shackles, he was shipped to a Cambodian prison camp to await extradition to Vietnam.

That's when love saved him.

"I'd met a Filipina nurse who treated the prisoners. One night, fighting broke out near the prison and I was able to take off in the confusion. I ran to the nurse's house. For two days, we had a love story while she hid me," says Tong. "Then she accompanied me as we took a bus to Bangkok." Years later, Tong said, he located the nurse and discovered she'd returned to the Philippines and had his daughter.

"But for me, it was back on the run." He cut through the jungle and made it over the border into Malaysia. Hiding in the back of a bus, he arrived in Kuala Lumpur and spent the day impersonating a tourist, visiting pagodas until nightfall. The tricky question now was, how could he weasel past the super-vigilant border patrols and enter Singapore?

There was only one way. As a boy raised in a fishing village, he'd often dive from boats and swim miles back to shore, so once the sun went down, Tong slipped into the choppy, shark-prowled Johore Straits and started kicking the three miles toward Singapore. "It took me about four hours," says Tong. "Then I collapsed in a park until I could walk again. I waved down a cab, went to the U.S. Embassy, and told them, 'Please! Send me anywhere there aren't any Communists!'

"They checked out my story, and sent me to America." But even as he was departing Southeast Asia, Tong swore he'd be back.

Pens and Swords

Communism nearly killed Quang Le, and it helped keep him alive.
"Every day I was in that prison camp, I dreamt about how I'd get out and fight the North Vietnamese Communists," says Le, the 54-year-old editor of Thoi Moi. "I used to be a policeman, but it was in prison that I decided to fight the North Vietnamese Communists by becoming a journalist."

As he tells his story in the Thoi Moi offices at Eighth and Passyunk, it's soon clear that "fighting the North Vietnamese Communists" is almost a verbal tic, popping from his lips about as often as most Americans say "ya know."

"Even after the surrender, I wanted to stay and fight the North Vietnamese Communists… The name of my paper is Thoi Moi, which means 'new time,' or 'new life,' or, 'new way to fight the North Vietnamese Communists'…"

His 27-year-old son, Kevin, listens and nods. His only boyhood memory of his father was seeing him in a prison camp; after his mother was released from her own four-year term, she and 7-year-old Kevin journeyed deep into the jungle, two days by train and one day by water-buffalo cart, for a 30-minute visit with Quang. "His face looked so sad," says Kevin.

That was the last time Kevin would see his father for the next decade. After that, he and his mother and sisters lived clandestinely in Saigon, working odd jobs and avoiding police who would ship them back to their rural village, where they knew there was little food and no chance of education. But even in the city, things were tough for the children of former South Vietnamese fighters.

"I couldn't get to school, I couldn't get jobs," says Kevin. "People start asking you questions, want to know where you're from, who your parents are. If they think your family fought for the South, that's it." His father was finally released in 1989, and after briefly visiting his family in Saigon, doggedly set himself to escaping Vietnam.

At a resettlement camp in the Philippines, he lobbied for refugee rights; arriving in Philadelphia with donated clothes on his back and $15 in his pocket, he immediately began looking up old friends from prison and asking them to donate a few dollars to create a newspaper he would call Chinh Danh—"the real name"—which would tell the true story of the final days of the war and the fate of the refugees.

"Weapons wouldn't work against the North Vietnamese Communists, so I had to find a new way to fight," says Le. He succeeded, perhaps better than he'd ever dared hope in prison: His newspaper grew, he sent for his wife and children, and when his old friend Ly Tong was in trouble, Quang was able to mobilize the Vietnamese of Philadelphia in his defense.

Kevin is listening, patient and respectful. He, too suffered after the war; Vietnam is still his home; but for him, the fight is over. Time to move on. He's working three jobs, as a paralegal, newspaper assistant and director of his own job placement company, and planning to go to law school. "Maybe I'll sue the North Vietnamese and get rid of them that way," he says, only half-joking.

He doesn't see the ghosts which haunt his father and Ly Tong, but he believes in them. Still, he's part of a new generation which would never hurl itself out of an airplane for the sake of a dream.

Flight of the Eagle

As he takes the seat of honor at the Philadelphia reception, the audience quickly hushes as Tong begins the tale of Black Eagle's Last Flight.

"I was living in California, making friends and spending time with… a certain wonderful woman," he begins. Glances shoot around the room. Everyone knows about his affair with The Actress, but no one reveals her name; it's a point of pride to keep that information private.

		Can Van Tran, 61, spent almost 13 years in a POW camp. He admires Tong's high tolerance for suffering.

"That's why I had to go to school, settle down, become focused." He worked by night as a security guard, studied political science by day, earned a master's degree and made the dean's list at the University of New Orleans. He avoided the heated, fractious Vietnamese political groups which wrangled furiously over strategies for reclaiming their country.

The newfound tranquillity didn't last. Always a take-charge guy, Tong founded a neighborhood watch group, but was horrified after shooting a 15-year-old burglar to death. He also began having trouble with his thesis adviser, who criticized his doctoral dissertation on "Causes of War in Southeast Asia" as too personal and sent it back for revision. Black Eagle, as his admirers called him, was 44 years old, alone, and facing life as an aging security guard and failed academic.

That's when he took off for Thailand, and his life became the prototype for the Indomitable Loser. He bought a small parachute from a sporting goods store in New Orleans, drew up crude flight maps and wrote a will, bequeathing his goods to the "poor orphans of Vietnam." Once in Bangkok, he took a hotel room near an air force base and set up surveillance. His plan, he said, was to steal a Thai attack plane for his mission to Saigon.

"Mr. Ly Tong was very generous," a hotel employee later told the Bangkok Times. "When he was drunk, he tipped us so handsomely," added a "service girl" at a local massage parlor. His plot failed, however, when he snuck onto the base and couldn't get the engine to turn over on a fighter jet. Slipping back off the base (leaving behind a note, as the Asian Wall Street Journal reported, to boast that he'd been there), Tong went to the airport and bought a first-class ticket to Saigon.

"I politely informed the stewardess that my parachute was a time bomb and I had 30 minutes to complete my mission." He tied her and the engineer up and forced the pilot to buzz Saigon so Tong could blizzard the city with leaflets calling for an armed revolt. "I only had 20 supporters in Saigon," Tong says, "but I believed the fever would spread by the time I hit the ground."

It was on his fifth pass over the city that Tong's troubles began in earnest. The pilot was receiving retreat-or-die threats over the radio and begging Tong to decide what to do. Problem was, Tong couldn't get the damn cockpit door open. He opened the little navigator's window to see what was wrong and Whooosh!—out he went.

"That's why I know the gods were with me," says Tong. In sudden free fall, he tangled his legs in his parachute cords, and plummeted. "I was going down like an arrow, and I shouted, 'Oh God, you've tricked me! Why aren't you helping me?'"

And at that moment, Tong says, the chute filled with air. He just righted himself in time to avoid splattering, and realized, as he wafted down, that the hair-raising drop saved him from being shot by air force gunners. He landed in a swamp and nearly drowned—but he shucked his chute and the waters dragged him from the path of searching soldiers and toward fishermen, who thought he was a boat thief and bludgeoned him with boat poles.

Though battered, the beating covered his escape. The boatmen turned him over to police, who accepted his bribe and believed his romantic lie that he was a Vietnamese American who'd come back to find an old mistress, but had to flee from her husband. "Just as I was shaking hands and departing the police station, however, the call came in from the Defense Department," he recalls ruefully.

The audience knows the rest, about his 20-year sentence and his defiance of prison rules to cut his hair. They know how he lived on meager food and loudly practiced tae kwon do each morning in his cell, grunting and shouting, to alert guards that they'd have a fight on their hands if they messed with him.

What they want to know are strange strategic particulars: "Where do you buy parachutes like that… How do you get a parachute through baggage checks… Where did you learn to skydive?" It sounds as if many of the men, especially the young ones and former soldiers, are a little too in love with Tong's story and might be planning aerial assaults of their own.

What they don't know is something Tong indicated later that night, during a lull in a post-reception dinner. It's something that Yen Do, the California editor, had known intuitively. Twice, Tong says, he tried to commit suicide in prison—once by slashing his wrists with a broken light bulb and bashing his head against the wall, another time by hunger strike. Both were political protests, he insisted.

But the explanation doesn't make sense. "I cut my wrists in Black April, the month the South collapsed, to make a statement that the fight goes on." It seems more likely that for Tong, the fight had ended. The pressure of being favored by the gods had caught up with him.

It's only a theory, but as he's talking, barely picking at his food, it's impossible to ignore that all the while, the right hand of the James Bond of Vietnam has been trembling uncontrollably.