Now the police we finally got were pretty well-disciplined for the most part, because I had a very fine chief of police and his men were well-disciplined. I gave them money and supplies to keep them happy and that helped. We treated them nicely, and they stayed happy with us.

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Finally my visa expired. The Thais wanted to close the camp, and they wanted me to leave. So I returned to the United States. When I first came back I hoped to go to another refugee area. But it didn’t work out. That was it for me. They said I was too old. But I wasn’t.

I never put what I did in a religious context. There is a famous expression: Primum est esse, quam esse tale. It means that before you become something, you have to first exist. With the refugees I thought it was more important, for me, at least, to try to keep the refugees in existence, give them being, before I tried to make Catholics out of them. Or whatever it might be. With Buddhists or Catholics or whatever, it made no difference to me at all. I was trying to help them exist. Because, as that expression tells you, you must first keep a man in existence before you try to make him something different. A man or a woman must be able to live first before they can become anything. So my effort has not been, primarily, a religious effort. Because I don’t like to change a person’s religion. I want him to do his own thinking and then do what he thinks is the proper thing. But there is a very important step in his life first, and that is to keep him in existence, to hold him up, to be his brother. It’s not exactly religious in the sense of trying to convert him to something. It is just to allow him to exist.

My mother was my example in this. I have always been most interested in holding a person in existence, more interested in helping them survive than in making them spiritual or in trying to make a Catholic out of them. I felt they have their own reasons for living and their own indeas of what they want to do later. That is their business. That’s not truly mine, I always felt. But that’s not agreed on by too many people.

I don’t feel guided by the holy spirit or anything in my work. Not really. I don’t look at my work with the Vietnamese from a religious point of view. I pray but not too much. And my prayers are not always answered. I never expected divine intervention in Vietnam. I just felt that God stands up and he says, ‘You gotta do your own work, fella. So do it.’ And so I did it.

You know these evangelists on television, they’re always standing up and saying, ‘Oh, you pray and God is with you,’ and all that. All I know for sure is that you have to do your own work. God doesn’t do it for you. He watches.

I didn’t look at what happened in Vietnam in a biblical sense either, not in a sense of prophecy or warning or anything. I’m not a really truly strong religious person. That may be a dangerous thing to say, because people will take it wrong. It’s hard to express it correctly. It’s hard to explain. I just want people to live together and to live in peace and in dignity. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. That’s what my whole life is about. And I think that’s what we’re here for–to try to help people.

Many of the Vietnamese found a parallel for their own experiences in the tribulations of the Book of Job. I know that one of the young women who had been raped and beaten and then thrown into the South China Sea found comfort in the story of Job. She said, ‘Father Joe, don’t you think that the life of the Vietnamese people is like the Book of Job?’ I said I did.

And what did my work get me? Not many acknowledgments, I can tell you that. I got a bunch of plaques from the Vietnamese all around the world and a bunch of other things. I never received a thing from American organizations, though. But that’s all right. What good are they, after all? You can’t eat them. What would I do with them? And there is a danger in accepting those awards. You might come to believe that it is the reward for what you do. And it isn’t. It should never be. That’s not ever the reward for doing the right thing. When that happens you get your reward at the wrong time.

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