The port of Vung Tau Special Zone was a reception site for the Vietnamese refugees from Cambodia, at least in July and August 1970. From there, Vietnamese refugees were dispatched to locations in South Vietnam as part of the part of the overall Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) pacification program. There are two sets of pictures that shows the arrival of fluvial convoys of Vietnamese refugees. The first set was taken by Hungarian-American photographer Lászlo Kondor (born 1941) while he was serving in Vietnam (1969-1970). It shows the arrival of the LSU-501 transporting 2.500 Vietnamese refugees on 23 July 1970. The pictures are available on Wikimedia (as fair use). The second set of photos was taken by Australian photographer Denis Stanley Gibson (1937-2010), correspondent for Fairfax Media (Australia) and United Press International (UPI) while he was touring Vietnam with infantry battalions (1966-1970). It shows the arrival of a convoy of 3.500 ethnic Vietnamese from Cambodia on 14 August 1970. The Australian War Memorial has made 50 pictures available online. Further testimony on the transit of Vietnamese refugees from Cambodia via Vung Tau Special Zone port and airfield comes from the account published by Australian veteran Alan Baker on the website Airlift in Vietnam (26 September 2010). Baker recounts that on 9 August 1970, he and other pilots transported three planeloads of Vietnamese refugees to Tan Phat/Bao Loc 80 miles north in the central highlands. “The refugees brought all their possessions with them – bamboo poles, sacks of rice, wooden racks, chickens, firewood. According to a government representative, they would receive a plot of land and building materials.”

Military basis and transit point for refugees Vung Tau Special Zone was an air base facility of the Republic of (South) Vietnam Air Force. It was used by the United States to station army, air force, and navy units (1966-1975) and by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) as their main base for operations (1964-1972) during the ‘Vietnam War’.

Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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