And so, speaking with my friends and my spiritual director, after first theology I said, "I would like to join a religious order." We were talking about the Dominicans and the Jesuits. That year, 1956, Shadowbrook burned. And, of course, everybody was talking about that. I also had a friend [who was an English Canadian seminarian] who gave me a book by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I fell in love with his poetry. It was through his poetry, really, that I got to know the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. And so I said, "I want to join the Jesuits." Then it was a question of joining the French Canadian Province, the English Canadian Province, or the New England Province.

Paris was a strange place. I asked Fr. DeLubac when he was here at Weston, about going to Paris. He said, "Oh, don't go to Paris. Go to Rome." [Chuckles] But I wanted to go back to France, because my ancestors came from there back in 1619. I took the France, a beautiful ship, atomic-powered with stabilizers that so controlled for turbulence, especially in the English Channel, that we never felt it. The ship schedule was well organized, too. We'd have our dinner with young people going to Europe.

The Vietnamese were used as directors of operations in Laos and in Cambodia. You had communities of Vietnamese there. The communists from North Vietnam were using those Vietnamese communities as bases of sabotage. Then the Cambodian president, Lon Nol, expelled all the Vietnamese from Phnom Penh, and just threw them in the river. It was very tragic, because mothers would lose one or two of their children in the current.

Motorcycles and the Mekong River

One of the guys said, "Well, why don't I take you in on the motorcycle?" I said, "Fine." But you had to cross the Mekong River twice to get into Long Xuyen, the capital of that area. Finally I got there right after noon, and went to the seminary. They said, "An Binh, (their name for me), did you get the news? All the Americans took off at two o'clock this morning and the communists have taken Saigon." That was the first time I heard about it, and I was due in Saigon to take the first plane out.