EXCLUSIVE: Two Bombing Victims Meet After 54 Years

This adaptation is from my story in Vietnam magazine (April 2020)

One of the most searing photographs from the Vietnam War got very little notice when it appeared in a single military publication and in several newspapers, including Stars and Stripes. The terrifying image shows a badly injured child being rescued by a man in civilian clothes in the aftermath of the My Canh floating restaurant bombing in Saigon.

Had that picture been more widely published in prominent newspapers and magazines, it might well have been as symbolic of innocent civilian casualties as the “Napalm Girl,” a 9-year old badly burned child who was photographed fleeing after an errant napalm bomb hit her village in 1972.

The graphic My Canh photo was on the cover of a 16-page pamphlet issued by the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office to focus blame on the Viet Cong “atrocity.” The double bombing on June 25, 1965 was given extensive media coverage—total casualties exceeded 100, and the public affairs office listed more than 20 Americans killed and wounded.

Amb. Taylor's hospital visit the next day.

The original brochure printed 17 photos, including the hospital visit by Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, seen comforting the toddler who was on the cover and incorrectly identified as a small boy. The photographers were not named.

I’d written an in-depth story about the attack for Vietnam magazine (June 2016) and posted it to my Old Asia Hands blog, along with the cover shot. Two and a half years later, this startling comment appeared on my blog: “The child was not a small boy as the Public Affairs Office claimed . . . but was a girl. I know this to be a fact because that child was me.” Her Vietnamese mother, Tran Ngoc Oanh, was killed, along with her friend, Army Sgt. 1^st Class Alfred Combs Junior. Sgt. Combs was an advisor for the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.

In the following days a relationship was established and I learned about the tragic life of this little girl. Her adult name is Aimee Bartelt and she is now an American citizen living in Clifton Springs, New York. After the bombing she was adopted by a friend of Combs, U.S. Army officer Robert Harry Bartelt. They came to the United States along with Aimee’s older sister, who was not at the My Canh that fateful night.

Now 56, Aimee said she was not quite two years old when she suffered crippling injuries. “Shrapnel went through my left thigh which did considerable nerve damage below my knee. My muscles are atrophied.” The gaping wound is clearly visible in the picture. She has had multiple surgeries and wore a leg brace until she was 10.

Aimee believes she was caught in the first explosion, and although she has no lucid memories of the incident, she is plagued by haunting images and has been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “Sometimes I’ll see a light, a flash behind me that kind of lights up the room, and be terribly afraid,” she said. “I imagine it’s the blast. That’s what my fear tells me.”

Carnage at the My Canh floating restaurant

There were two Viet Cong assailants who carried out the bombing. One of them shared his story in 2010 in the People’s Army, a publication of Vietnam’s Defense Ministry. Huynh Phi Long said he and Le Van Ray were with the Viet Cong’s 67^th Commando Unit in Saigon. One of them arrived on a bicycle, and one rode a motorcycle.

The explosives they carried were powerful Claymore-type mines which were set to detonate in succession. After the initial blast sprayed the restaurant, the second one was aimed at the gangplank to hit panicked customers as they ran from the barge. The terrorists escaped on a getaway motorcycle before the first explosion blew, just as they reached the nearby Nguyen Hue traffic circle.

The victims represented at least six nationalities, but most were Vietnamese: police officers, an army captain, a cyclo driver, a variety of vendors, a dressmaker, a pretty Vietnamese singer, and numerous children among the civilians. A Radio Hanoi broadcast quoted by the U.S. described the raid as “a new glorious exploit . . . dealing an appropriate blow to the U.S. aggressors.”

It was the attack on the floating restaurant that incited this notorious warning broadcast over propagandist Radio Hanoi: “You can get killed here. Get out while you’re still alive and before it’s too late.”

Ironically, the My Canh’s name translates into “beautiful view.” According to the U.S. military pamphlet the restaurant was not seriously damaged and reopened five days later. It continued to serve Vietnamese, Chinese and seafood dishes until it closed permanently after the war.

Ten years after the bombing, as young Bartelt watched TV coverage of the 1975 evacuation of Saigon, she started seeing flashes of dead bodies. “I knew the U.S. was withdrawing, and to me it was the same as being told that the Vietnamese weren’t worth it,” the young girl surmised.

“The images of children being crammed onto helicopters—it broke my heart and made me think that the same thing was happening to them, like the picture of me being taken away by the man, and my mother being left behind.”

Aimee's current selfie.

When she was in junior high school in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Aimee remembers a disturbing incident while horseback riding with a friend. “I was being bounced around on a horse and had a flashback that I take as being carried out by that man.”

But what ever happened to the mysterious hero in the dramatic front-page photo; the man who scooped up the little girl from the bloody restaurant floor? An online photo caption identified him as Army Major Abel Vela. An internet search turned up a hopeful link to the University of Texas at Austin, where I discovered that the journalism school had interviewed Vela for its Voces Oral History Project, which archives the voices of notable Latinos in America. I was given his phone number in San Antonio.

It was on the 54^th anniversary of the bombing when I called Abel. After a military career spanning 27 years, he and his wife, Angela, went into business operating a number of McDonald’s franchises in the San Antonio area. As a young boy in Texas, Abel worked in the cotton fields with his immigrant parents from Mexico. He was one of the military advisers sent to South Vietnam by President Kennedy in 1962.

On the night of the incident, Abel told me he was waiting across the street to meet friends for dinner at the My Canh when the first bomb detonated. He went into action rescuing the injured when the second explosion went off. “I got involved with saving as many GIs as I could. A horrible night, something you live with all the time,” Vela said, reawakening that ugly night.

Courtesy Angela Vela

The family still has a telegram from the Army informing Angela Vela that her husband suffered a wrist laceration, was treated and returned to duty.

Little Aimee was the last victim Vela reached. She was buried underneath another body. “The only thing I saw was a foot shaking and moving,” Vela said. “We got on the same military jeep. I wanted to take care of her. My wounds weren’t that bad.” Aimee has no doubt, “I feel like he saved my life.”

In 1970, Abel was stationed at Fort Bragg along with Aimee’s adoptive father, Robert Bartelt, a Special Forces Colonel. Col. Bartelt was Vela’s commander. The Velas didn’t know that the Bartelts were raising the girl rescued from the restaurant bomb explosions, and the Bartelts didn’t know Vela was the one who saved her life. A third person discovered the connection and brought the men together.

When Abel and Angela were invited to a social event at the Bartelt residence in Fayetteville, they were told not to talk to the kids. The Bartelts didn’t want to upset Aimee, who was not yet aware of the details surrounding her early life in Vietnam. When Aimee was 8 years old she discovered the Public Affairs Office pamphlet in her mother’s closet and began to figure things out on her own.

On the night of the party, the Velas spotted the young girl from a distance. “My husband recognized her because she was walking with a limp,” Angela recalled. “He remembered that when he picked her up (at the bombing scene), her little leg almost fell off.” Aimee said she was never told about this stealthy meeting. “It was chilling that that happened,” she said after I informed her.

Undated photo of Abel Vela. (Valentino Mauricio/University of Texas at Austin)

In June 2019, Aimee made an emotional phone call to wish Abel “happy birthday.” He turned 93, and it was the first time they had ever talked. “It was like a blur to me, amazing,” she said of the reunion. “I was so touched and moved. Angela told me they had remembered me all these years.” Aimee added, “Meeting Abel on the phone and knowing that he was alive, and hearing about details of that night, kind of catapulted me to the land of the living.”

The My Canh survivor had discovered my 2016 article as she investigated the calamity for a book she was planning to write, preferring a fictionalized account so she could make it a happy ending. “I’ve looked at a lot of pictures from that night and they are very gory, hideous pictures,” Aimee disclosed. “It wasn’t until I started doing my recent research that I began to understand the magnitude of devastation of that night.”

The Vietnam magazine article also answered her questions regarding the enemy’s motive. The People’s Army exposé said the bombing was a revenge attack for the public execution of Viet Cong commando Tran Van Dang. Dang had been shot five days earlier by a South Vietnamese firing squad near Saigon’s central market.

Furthermore, a Vietnamese-written history of Viet Cong commandos suggested the My Canh restaurant had been branded as a CIA gathering place and claimed 51 intelligence officers were killed in the attack. In the bomber’s interview with People’s Army, he identified the restaurant owner as “a trusted intelligence lackey of the CIA.”

For Americans who were in wartime Saigon, the My Canh remains a durable memory—a nice restaurant where they dined, the site of Saigon’s most vile terrorist incident, or where they were near-casualties themselves.

As a young Army officer, Norman Schwarzkopf almost went to the My Canh that Friday evening. Instead, he had dinner across the street on the rooftop of his hotel, the Majestic. After the first explosion, Schwarzkopf, who would become America’s Gulf War commander, looked down in time to see the second blast hurl fleeing customers into the river. 

Armed forces radio announcer Adrian Cronauer and three friends had just left the My Canh after dinner and witnessed the immediate aftermath. The bombing would later be loosely depicted in a Hollywood movie about Cronauer, Good Morning, Vietnam, starring comedian Robin Williams. 

From the U.S. Joint Public Affairs pamphlet

Although the explicit photos from that night are gruesome, Aimee finds comfort in them. “My early years were nothing but different black-and-white depictions of the same media images displayed over and over,” she said. “I know it sounds unusual that I didn’t find them disturbing, but I felt a sense of belonging with the people there that night.”

Because of her research and the cathartic phone call with Vela, Aimee says she is finally learning to let it go. “For the first time in my life I am seeing my young existence as truly real,” she said. “The My Canh bombing was real. That night was real. Now I feel like Pinocchio the morning he woke up, fully realizing, ‘Holy Crap, I’m a real kid!’ I am so lucky to know this.”

Aimee’s struggles are not over. “I live four blocks away from a hospital, so a lot of times they have mercy flights with helicopters coming in, and sometimes at night I hear them flying over and they scare me so terribly, and I want to panic.”

The New Yorker has never been back to Vietnam where she surely has maternal relatives. She thinks she was born in Saigon and has been told that her birth father was a French pilot. Aimee has a son who lives in North Carolina.

As for the Texan who saved her, Vela’s first enlistment at the end of World War II involved another agonizing rescue: the freeing of Jews from concentration camps. “They walked out and started eating grass, the bark of the trees, whatever they could find,” Vela told oral history interviewer Valerie Harris.

Vietnam was the scene of another brush with death for the Army veteran. He was nearly killed in a mine explosion when the South Vietnamese unit he was advising came under fire. As the men ran for cover, Vela triggered a mine and was injured by shrapnel, but escaped the main thrust of the blast.

Vela looked back at his career in his 2008 interview. “I wasn’t looking for Purple Hearts. That’s taking a big chance. My job was to save people’s lives.”

Married for more than 70 years, the couple’s family now extends over five generations. Abel is the patriarch of patriotism, telling me, “I’m proud that I was able to continue to serve my country.” Angela adds, “All my children know about Aimee. We have prayed about the situation and about the little girl all through these years.” Aimee was told she could consider the Vela family like her own.

Aimee has spent the past eight years on a rescue mission of her own. She has been serving on the board of directors at Seneca White Deer Inc., a nonprofit that helps preserve a herd of rare white deer on the former Seneca Army Depot in New York. “The deer would never have survived without the protective fence surrounding the munitions base,” she explains. “So it turns out that both those deer, and this war baby, would not be in this world if there were no such thing as war.”

Rick Fredericksen was a Marine newsman at the American Forces Vietnam Network and was at the My Canh when it was shelled in 1969. The barge shuddered but the mortars missed their mark.