How the Great Auk Helped Me Photograph Vietnamese Refugees
Photographs and text © Mark Petty
It’s summertime, 1961. I’m about to become a third-grader. Mom tells me that in order to earn my 25-cent allowance I have to read an article in Reader’s Digest and tell her about it.
There are several issues of Reader’s Digest on our coffee table. I thumb through one and find an article about a now extinct North Atlantic bird called the Great Auk. In the 1800s man hunted the flightless, 30-inch tall bird to extinction. But the article isn’t about extinction. It’s about a mother Great Auk teaching its offspring to survive by hunting bait fish. Though flightless, Great Auks were good swimmers and could hold their breath under water for up to 15 minutes - longer than seals.
Bait fish live in giant schools for their protection. Predators encountering a giant school of bait fish can get distracted easily by the multitude of fish, all seemingly swimming in different directions. The mother Great Auk teaches its offspring to stay focused within a school of fish - pick a fish out of the hundreds of fish within range and chase that fish until it is caught and eaten. Then pick out another bait fish in the school and do the same.
Fast forward to the end of the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s and the evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to the U.S. I’m a staff photographer for The Pensacola News-Journal. I’m at Aragon Court, a housing project built in 1940s for low-income whites (as opposed to the all-Black Attucks Court low-income housing project that was built in Pensacola on the other side of town in the days of segregation).
I am walking around and around between several chartered buses huddled in a parking lot. It’s like being in a school of giant fish. Each bus is full of Vietnamese families who were previously evacuated from Vietnam to Eglin Air Force Base, an hour east of Pensacola, and are now being relocated to Aragon Court, their new home. A lot of media are present. It’s a national news story and the three existing major T.V. networks are present, plus United Press International, and the Associated Press. Cable news doesn’t exist.
Everything is orderly inside the buses but it’s rather chaotic outside them. I can’t find any information about what is going to happen so I begin to worry about covering this story coherently once they start opening the buses and letting the refugees find their new homes.
And then I spot him. He’s an arm baby, but he’s looking at me in a way no child his age has ever looked at me. Due to the reflections in the window I cannot see who is holding him, but I see him, plain as day. He’s not just looking at me, he’s watching me intently. I make friendly childlike gestures toward him the way we typically do with children his age. He doesn’t respond. He’s watching me, but not as a child - more like an adult. It is striking.
Through the bus window I shoot my first photograph of him and decide he is how I’m going to document the refugees’ arrival. He’s the focus of my story among myriad refugees searching for their new homes. As the buses start to unload I stand by the door of his bus and wait for him and his family as many other potential stories walk past me. Once his family exits I follow them everywhere they go, past a national news camera crew and into the back door of their new home. I follow them inside and introduce myself to them.
For many months after the initial story runs I continue to drop in on him and his family whenever I am in the neighborhood to continue documenting their acclimation to life in America. Our facial expressions and hand gestures are our only means of communicating. They were always happy to see me, and I, them.
My wife and I move from Pensacola in 1977 and I lose touch with him and his family immediately.
Aragon Court no longer exists, though Attucks Court is apparently still there. At various times through the ensuing decades I contact churches in the area, and across the Florida Panhandle, in an effort to find out where he is and how he and his family are doing. I have not been successful in that endeavor, but I have not given up yet. I hope he is doing well. He must be in his early 50s by now.
