"I'm sorry, so sorry," he says. "Soldiers don't cry."
But his shoulders contort, his body racks with sobs. His hands try to wipe away the tears.
"Please forgive me," murmurs the former lieutenant colonel, shaken by memories of nearly 13 years in a prison camp. "This is what re-education does to you."
Hung Huy Nguyen, 71, along with an estimated 1 million South Vietnamese, is a man who came to know death and torture in the years following a war that tore apart families, countries, generations.
His was a world where friends died suddenly. Violently. Where others slowly wasted away from malnutrition and disease. Where stealing a grain of rice led to lashes on the back, down bony legs. Where men and women silently endured, night after night, grasping at hope that someday they might see their children again.
There are no official figures on how many prisoners were executed or how many died from poor treatment. There are no known government records of who was sent to the "re-education" camps, or for how long. There are no archives on the jails, or of what went on. Such are the ways of war, and the treatment of those on the losing side.
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