Binh Nguyen was an engineering student in Saigon during the Vietnam War. He was 19 when war broke out, and the pressures of being drafted were heavy on his mind.
All high school students had to pass a national exam, Binh said. If you didn't pass, you had to go to war.
"They would flunk the students if they needed more (soldiers)," he said. "So that was the pressure for college and high school students."
Binh was one of five panelists during "Perspectives of the Vietnamese," the last of a series of lectures and panel discussions on Vietnam held in the Anthropology Building Wednesday night.
Brian McKinsey, project director of the Voices in Vietnam Symposium, said it was important for people to hear the stories of the Vietnamese who fought in the war.
"We here in this country think about our involvement and what the costs were to us," he said, adding that 58,000 American soldiers died, but half a million Vietnamese were killed.
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Binh, now president of the Vietnamese Association in Albuquerque, recalled when a friend of his was drafted into the war at the age of 18.
When his friend died during his first battle, Binh was asked by the victim's mother to help him retrieve the body.
"The guard came to me and said, 'There's no body there. There's just a little piece," he said.
Hieu Doan, another panelist, spent seven years as a 1st Lt. Ranger in the Vietnamese army. When Saigon fell in 1975, he spent the next eight years in a Viet Cong concentration camp.
He said the prisoners were not given much to eat. They mostly ate small portions of sweet potatoes and pork on holidays.
"At that time I weighed about 70 pounds," he said. "I couldn't walk, only crawl."
Doan recalled when his wife, daughter and mother came to visit him while he was in the camp.
"They walked about 30 miles through the mountains, and I could only see my mom for five minutes," he said.
In 1983, he was released from the camp. He came to Albuquerque in 1991.
Ky Dinh said so many American soldiers died because President Johnson made the war impossible to win.
Dinh said nothing was glamorous about the Vietnam War.
"There were pajama-clad, innocent-looking peasants in the daytime that, at night, would cut your throat," he said.
Ngoi Ho was the only panelist who didn't speak English, but Dinh translated for the decorated war veteran.
Considered a spy because of his Catholic faith and because he was a commando for the Vietnamese air force, Ho spent 20 years in a North Vietnamese prison.
"He considered himself dead," Dinh said. "He had no hope to return home to his family."
He escaped from prison when he was 41 years old.
"He thanks God for giving him a new life in this country," Dinh said.
Dien Nguyen was a doctor and captain in the Vietnamese army.
"I got the call to go to college," he said. "What that meant was I had to go to a communist camp."
He spent eight years in prison for not embracing the communist regime, he said.
"Once we left the camp, we were not allowed to practice medicine," he said, adding that he came to Albuquerque in 1971 to work in the medical field.
Dinh said there will never be a conclusion to the war.
"We lost the battle, but in the hearts of the Vietnamese we are winning the war," he said.
