A sailor reunites with the Vietnamese refugees he helped rescue after the fall of Saigon. - NBCAsianAmerica
Lisa Dam fled Vietnam in 1978 with 50 other people, only to find themselves lost in the South China Sea, adrift on a fishing boat.
“Many ships passed by and didn’t rescue us,” Dam, then 19, said, recalling the days floating without food and water, nauseated and losing hope. Once he got closer and saw the families crammed into the boat, Pederson insisted on bringing them onto the massive container ship, assuring his captain he would take responsibility for documenting every single person.
For years, Pederson tried to find all 51 refugees on the boat. He had his first breakthrough in 2018 when a curious and computer-savvy Seattle neighbor saw a photo of the boat on his office wall and asked about it. Pederson provided her a list of the names he had kept for more than four decades. Many of them, like Lan Truong, sister to Anh and Van, say they have never forgotten what Pederson did.