At age 82, Rear-Admiral (Rtd) Yaacob Daud still remembers having to maintain his composure while carrying out his duties as the deputy commander of Task Force VII of the Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN).
The refugees had fled their homeland thousands of kilometres away following the fall of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) at the end of the Vietnam War (November 1955-April 1975), arriving on local shores in as many as 150,000 vessels.
Upon learning of their landings on the beaches of Kelantan and Terengganu in May 1975, the National Security Council mobilised a team. Yaacob and his teammates arrived in a Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) helicopter at one of the landing spots, only to discover a rowdy and disorderly situation.
“The refugees’ main aim was to make their way to the United States under a repatriation programme,” explained Yaacob. “They did not want to live elsewhere in Asia or Europe, as they figured that the US was their dream land when it came to wealth and opportunities.
“So, they used Malaysia as a stopover to achieve their goals.”
He was speaking at a reunion luncheon with two of his Federation Military College coursemates – the RMN’s First-Admiral (Rtd) Nicholas Eugene Peterson, and Brigadier-General (Rtd) Soon Lian Cheng from the RMAF – at his residence in Rawang recently. The Federation Military College is now known as Royal Military College (RMC).
Yaacob recalls having to oversee the temporary stay of an estimated 300,000 Vietnamese refugees in transit camps at Pulau Bidong off Terengganu, Lanchang in Pahang, and Sungai Besi in Kuala Lumpur.
With the assistance of the United Nations, similar camps were later established at Pulau Tengah off Johor, Pulau Besar off Melaka, Kota Bharu in Kuantan, and various parts of Sabah and Sarawak.
“The camps were transformed into Vietnamese villages complete with sundry shops, barbers and nightlife activities to cater for their needs,” Yaacob said.
Describing some of them as “undisciplined, uncouth and very demanding”, he recalled a riot that broke out at the Sungai Besi camp when the refugees’ repatriation to the US was delayed. “We had to resort to tough tactics to contain them after they razed some of their living quarters.”
All the refugee camps closed by 1996 after the UN High Commissioner for Refugees stopped funding them.
According to Yaacob, Indonesia’s defence minister General (Rtd) Leonardus Benjamin Moerdani and his top brass had contacted their Malaysian counterparts to learn from their experiences, given that some of the boats had also headed towards Kalimantan.
“A majority of the boats landed on our shores as the refugees considered Malaysia more sympathetic compared to Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Indonesia.
“We learnt that many of them had fled with the clothes on their backs and some gold or jewellery – of which much were stolen by pirates in the South China Sea. Hundreds of others lost their lives along the journey,” Yaacob said.
The navy reportedly repatriated to Vietnam the last batch of 300-odd refugees aboard the KD Sri Inderapura – a former 7,000-tonne USS Spartanburg County landing ship tank bought from the US – in the mid-1990s.
“It had been a monumental task containing them for 20 years, and it was a very big relief when all of the refugees were repatriated, either back to their homeland or elsewhere, including France, Canada, Australia, Norway, Japan and, of course, the US,” Yaacob added.
Overall, close to a million Vietnamese refugees were reportedly repatriated in the United States.
Yaacob’s military career began as an FMC Boys Wing student in 1957, before he enlisted as a cadet in 1961 and completed further training at the Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) in Dartmouth, England five years later.
The Jasin, Melaka-born was honoured as the queen’s parade commander in 1966, and represented the BRNC in boxing, hockey and shooting, for which he received colours.
In 1973, Yaacob was tasked to lead the Combattante fast-attack strike-craft procurement project, for which the RMN bought four vessels – KD Perdana, KD Ganyang, KD Ganas and KD Serang – from Cherbourg, France. He later became the squadron commander of KD Perdana, which had been equipped with MM38 Exocet missiles.
By 1981, he became the RMN Region 1 commander at Tanjung Gelang in Kuantan, Pahang, with the rank of first admiral. He briefly served as the RMN deputy chief for four months until March 1991, before being made RMN fleet operations commander in Lumut, Perak.
Yaacob retired in 1997 after serving as a special federal task force director for the National Security Council in the prime minister’s department.