How a Vietnamese helicopter pilot saved his family

There are probably hundreds crazy stories like that.

My mom and father had to run during the fall. Grandfather was part of the South Army and got killed by friendly fire from the American. Family burned all the medal from my grand father to hide his involvement from the war. Then my father family gave my parent golds before they ran away. I think they went to Laos then Thailand. Between Vietnam to Lao, the Vietcong caught my father in some field, a gun to his head. Suddenly they hear other people running so they left him to chase the other people.

We ended up in Laos and then they decided to grab a boat to Thailand. They missed the first boat cause they slept late. Later they found out the boat they missed was pirated and all of the people on the boat died. Anyway second boat got to thailand. Somewhere in there I was born in Cambodia and they decided to tell me when I was a teenager...

Dad decided to spend the money to build a farm there. It didn't work out so they move to Philippine or something before America. It's a bit vague but there other weird stuff in that story too. I don't recall how he became some priest, he's not one now btw.

I had a buddy that was the head of the dorm. We ended up having a crazy story time try to out do each other. Some viet girl basically told us her father was a Viet Cong spy, he spied on the US. >___>

When I was 9, we ran away from Kuwait because a friend of my father saw the Iraqi tanks move in and called him using a radio phone.

We put random stuff in the back of one of the toyota pickups that were used as runabout in the construction site, drove to the harbor, and my dad traded the car for an empty container on a cargo ship.

We lived in the container for 2 or 3 days until the ship got to Egypt, to which we disembarked, and we managed to get family to buy us plane tickets to Italy - bit of a feat pre-internet, I remember that for some reason, buying a plane ticket remotely could be arranged, but not a ferry ticket which is why we flew home rather than sail there via Sicily.

We get to my grandparents' house in Italy, and only then they explain to me what was going on.

That's the closest I ever have been to a war zone, and would like to keep it that way.

I think the best story is that of Orestes Lorenzo, the Cuban fighter pilot. In 1991, he defected by flying his Mig 23 to Florida and landing at a military air base. That wasn't enough - he had left his wife and children in Cuba. So a year or two later, he flew a Cessna back to Cuba, flying 10 feet over the ocean to avoid radar. He landed on a rural highway, and picked up his wife and children. They made it back to Florida, and today they live in Orlando.

He just recently flew an L-39 Albatros jet at an airshow in Cozumel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRXRBcuJE-U

Here's a shortened video if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHJm3Ptoo3o

Longer version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9svL4j9xCc

The story is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

The Major Bung Ly story (http://studentpilot.com/interact/forum/showthread.php?20184-...) where he landed a Cessna on a carrier was always impressive to me.

I asked a Vietnamese friend whose grandparents had been interned in one of the mentioned camps why the South had lost the war. He explained that the soldiers from South Vietnam had shown a suprising level of cowardice and nepotism.

There is perhaps another story, that of a soldier fleeing with expensive military equipment in the moddle of a battle, I bet he is laughing at his collegues who died fighting for their country. In this way it is a microcosm for everything wrong with South Vietnam.

It's a nice story and everything, but this is Hacker News, not CNN/FOX/BBC/<insert random newspaper here>.