From the S&S archives:
Christmas returns to Luong Hoa

LUONG HOA, Vietnam — The people of Luong Hoa wish you a Merry Christmas.

This village, on the muddy banks of the Vio Oriental river in the northern end of the grassy delta called "The Plain of Reeds," is not the kind of place Santa Claus visits.

Army helicopters drop — literally — in tight, 100-yard spirals from 2,000 feet to land at the little patch of hardened mud that serves as Luong Hoa's heliport. Flying too wide of the barbed-wire circle around the hamlet offers your underbelly to Red sharpshooters.

Luong Hoa is an island — "a little dot of Catholics in a sea of Viet Cong" is the way one American adviser described it. The Catholics of Luong Boa have been facing a tidal wave of destruction for a long time and the only thing that has kept their heads above that sea is the courage of two men — a priest and a stubborn mayor.

Long An Province's tough, veteran communist units have tried everything they dared for seven Christmases to break the will of Luong Hoa — or, what's left of it. Originally, there were four flourishing hamlets that made up the village, Now the people of three of them have fled.

The rich rice fields around the last holdout haven't been worked in years — the people could not go out to face Red snipers and kidnapers.

But the Reds didn't know the villagers had one last fortress they would hold to the death — a church. And the communists didn't know that almost every one of Luong Hoa's 1,517 remaining villagers is a Catholic.

Their "fortress," which they refuse to give up, is an old stucco building with a red tile roof. It's not much of a prize, but it's all Luong Boa has left and it intends to keep it.

Now, the villagers are going to get the first Christmas Midnight Mass they've had in seven years, and the happiest Christmas they can remember.

Father Paul will say the Mass. Father Paul was sent to Luong Hoa in 1960 to replace its last pastor, who built the church in 1930 and died of old age in the same village 30 years later.

Father Paul tells about Christmas and communism: "Three years ago, Dec. 21, was the day."

The little church was riddled with machinegun bullets when a VC platoon moved into the village in the middle of the night.

They rounded up the families, herding the entire village into the church. Father Paul was dragged to his house, a few yards away. The communists emptied their sub-machine guns into the walls, floor and ceiling all around him as he sat in a chair in the middle of the room.

Then two guerrillas stood on either side or him and laid pistol muzzles against his temples. They asked him if he "agreed" the VC were the saviors of Vietnam.

Father Paul Nguyen Van Chieu stared at the Viet Cong officer but spoke not a single word.

The communists were so taken back by the priest's cool courage they couldn't decide what to do. They held him, in the same wooden chair, till dawn.

When the sun came up, American helicopters began roaring in and the Viet Cong had to run for it.

Nguyen Van Mau, the village chief, was helping his wife decorate their house for Christmas. There is an elaborate statue of the Virgin Mary in one corner of the room.

Mau remembers that 1964 Christmas, too — when he hid in a swamp outside the village while VC stole everything he owned and blew his house up.

But Mau has his eyes on this Christmas — the best one in his five years as village chief. This year, he proudly predicts, there will be no mortarings, no machine gunnings like past Christmases.

Mau remembers the starving months last Christmas, when no food could be brought in because the guerrillas sank boats, stole the food and killed the boatmen, and the Army helicopters didn't come nearly often enough to fill the stomachs of Luong Hoa.

But the government changed that with a Christmas gift of its own in January to Luong Boa. It sent the 51st Vietnamese Ranger Bn. to set up camp at the hamlet.

For the first time in years, the people ventured outside the mud and wire walls of the village and began to work the nearby fields again.

Red snipers who shot at the villagers found themselves getting shot back at. The Vietnamese Army launched a series of assaults in the spring on the river, and boat traffic began to Luong Hoa again.

And now, Christmas miracle of miracles, there are even a few piasters left over among the shoeless villagers to decorate the church again.