At the beginning we had about four or five small organizations in there. Doctors Without Frontiers took care of medical treatment for the refugees. And then later Catholic Relief took care of the medical supplies. The Thai government kept a tight grip on the camps, and eventually all or-ganizations except Catholic Relief were forced to leave. I was left there with Catholic Relief, and we were the only ones there for the next three years.

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The Thais really were trying to get rid of the camp. They didn’t want the idea to catch on that the people of Vietnam could just come out and resettle in Thailand. The Thai government wanted to stop that, but they never really completely closed the camp until 1986.

I wrote articles about the camp for a Jesuit magazine. The people in the camp were at first a mixture of boat people from all over. But as the years went on they became more of the poorer Vietnamese–peasants who were fleeing from the Communists.

Most people were never aware that a great number of the boat people died on the ocean. There is no way to tell how many perished. But some people estimated it six years ago at about 100,000. I would have said that about 25 percent of those who went out on the ocean died.

Each morning we would go down to the beaches and there would be bodies–men, women and children–washed ashore during the night. Sometimes there were hundreds of them, like pieces of wood. Some of them were girls who had been raped and then thrown into the sea by pirates to drown. It was tragic beyond words. We would pull them off the beaches and bury them and say prayers for them. This happened every morning. Sometimes I hated to get up in the morning, as the bodies were always there. I wondered if anyone else in the world knew…or cared. Sometimes people would somehow still be alive. They would be on the beach exhausted or unconscious. They washed ashore at night, and we revived them and held them when we found them. They thought we were angels, but we were just men and women who cared.

Of course the weather took its toll on the boat people. The boats were terrible. Sometimes the refugees would be caught by Vietnam-ese authorities and towed back to Vietnam and put in jail. But the pirates were probably the biggest cause of the killing. The pirates stopped nearly every boat. They searched for gold first, even going so far as to take it out of the people’s teeth. The next thing that attracted them were the young girls. The pirates were concerned about getting caught, and the best way of not getting caught was to destroy the boat and the people in it and maybe even throw the girls overboard when they were all through with them.

Sometimes they passed young girls from boat to boat for 10 days or so, and they were raped hundreds of times. Then sometimes they tied them to ropes and pulled them behind the boats till they were drowned and cut them loose. Or they cut their throats and threw them in the sea, or simply just tossed them into the sea. These men were all fishermen, and they kept the girls with them during their work. Then they threw them away like garbage. And then the bodies washed up on shore or just disappeared into the sea.

We threw flowers on the water and said mass and prayers for those lost at sea in an attempt to commemorate and honor those unfortunate people. We always believed that so many died on the water that we had to try and honor them. When we learned that the pirates had killed everyone on a boat, we went out and would commemorate that day. We did that once a week while I was in Thailand.

I remember someone saying to me one time that the boat people were homeless. I was in a bad mood at the time, and I said, ‘No, the boat people have a home. It is at the bottom of the sea.’ That is where tens of thousands of them ended up. It was a tragedy almost beyond comprehension.

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