Daniel Le still remembers the night more than three decades ago as if it happened yesterday. As a boy of 7 or 8, he fled Vietnam with his parents and three brothers, the youngest only 8 months old, crowding into the bottom of a 30-foot wooden boat with a single engine and more than 100 other refugees.
“We fled Vietnam in the middle of the night to avoid detection by the coast guard,” Le, now 46, recalled.
Today, Le runs the Bayou La Batre and Biloxi, Mississippi, offices of Boat People SOS, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the Vietnamese-American community along the Gulf Coast. Watching news coverage of migrants risking their lives on overcrowded boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea, he said he sees unmistakable parallels to what his own family endured escaping Vietnam in the late 1970s.
The comparison gained new weight after an estimated 700 migrants drowned when a vessel carrying them from Africa toward Europe capsized in the Mediterranean, a disaster that drew condemnation from European leaders and Pope Francis and underscored the increasingly desperate conditions driving people onto dangerous overseas crossings.
Le said the core motivation looks the same across both crises, even if the timelines differ. His family’s exodus from Vietnam played out over roughly a decade, while the Mediterranean deaths are unfolding in a more compressed, sudden wave. “I can relate because the condition of the country where they live must be really horrible if they risk their lives for freedom,” Le said. “Freedom is really priceless.”
Le’s father had served as an officer in the South Vietnamese military and spent four years in a re-education camp after the war before his release. That experience convinced him his family would never truly be free under the new government, Le said, and he made the decision to escape.
The family’s boat journey took them from Vietnam west toward Thailand. On the fourth night at sea, pirates boarded the vessel and robbed the refugees of jewelry and other valuables. “We were fortunate, they let us go,” Le said. “We saw a lighthouse, and we made a beeline straight to the lighthouse.” The family reached Thailand with nothing but the clothes on their backs and was placed in a refugee camp before an American family in Louisiana sponsored their move to the United States on June 13, 1980.
Le considers his family fortunate, given how many others did not survive similar journeys. “Thousands of people had died before us and after us,” he said. “That was brave and courageous of us to make that choice.” His parents eventually settled in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where they bought a fishing boat and built a new life, though it was never easy.
Le returned to the Gulf Coast about eight years ago after stretches living in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, drawn back to a region with deep Vietnamese-American roots in the shrimping and seafood industry. Through his work with Boat People SOS in Bayou La Batre, he now spends his days helping a new generation of Vietnamese-American families navigate life along the coast, informed by a journey to freedom he says he will never forget.