Third Vietnamese Family Arrives

Woman Looks Up Former U. S. Boss

By Howard Carr

Staff Reporter

In 1968, when William L. Cofer was working as a legal clerk for the U. S. Army in Bien Hoa, VietNam, He used to tell his Vietnamese secretary – “Bamboo” as he called her – to look him up if she was ever in the United States.

Last night Bamboo took him up on his suggestion.

Shortly before 9 p.m., she, her husband, five children and 19-yer-old brother-in-law stepped off Piedmont’s Flight 922 to Smith Reynolds airpot here. Waiting for them was Cofer – now a 34-year-old lawyer – his wife and two childreen. Cofer is the Vietnamese family’s American sponsor – the man who, with a few friends, will be responsible for setting the third Vietnamese family to arrive in Forsyth County.

For Cofer, the story began a few weeks ago, one night at his Montecello Drive home when the phone rang ... a collect call from Fort Chafee, Ark.

“As ssoon as I heard her voice I recognized it,” Cofer recalled yesterday, “and I said ‘Bamboo.’ We call her that because it was easier to say than ‘Co Van’ – her Vietnamese namd and title. But I could tell she was just delighted that I remmember wjo she was.”

Cofer had gotten to know Bamboo during a year’s tour of duty in Vietnam in 1967-68, when he was a legal clerk and she ws a secretary, commuting between her U. S. Army job and her family in Saigon. They corresponded occasionally after he returned to Winston-Salem, exchanging letters and Christmas cards, but after a while they lost touch with each other.

“ I thought about her when the evacuations was going on, and my wife asked me about her,” Cofer said yesterday. “But the call was completely out of the blue.”

In the leter Bamboo’s husband, Ngo Gia Nam, recently wrote to Cofer from Arkansas, he said ther left Saigon April 25 “because of my wife working foe the U. S. Army for a long time and my private opinions, we cannot live under Communists. So I decided to evacuate immediatly even if we must lose all our properties.”

Last night, as the family’s suitcases rolled around the baggage ramp, the 36-year-old Bamboo – her given name is Le Thi Cam Van – looked down sadly and said, “That is about all we took out. Everything is in the bags.”

“They even had English classes,” she said with an easily understandable Vietnamese accent. “Some of the classes was very big though, 200 people.”

The Ngo spent last night at Cofer’s three-bedroom home off Reynolda Road, and today they willl move into a bachelor apartment that is rentd by a friend of Cofer’s. They’ll stay there until they can find a house.