I was six, almost seven, so it was time for me to start school. Missionaries in Southeast Asia sent their children to boarding school at Dalat, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Vietnam was part of French Indochina until 1954 when it was divided into North and South Vietnam, with Ho Chi Minh and his communists in charge of the government in the north, and Ngo Dinh Diem as the president of the supposedly democratic South Vietnam, but he was really a dictator. Many Catholics moved to the South to avoid persecution by an atheist government. In 1956, when I first started at Dalat School, the communist Viet Cong had not yet organized their terrorism campaign to overthrow the south so traveling to Dalat was pretty safe. My parents and I took the train to Bangkok,
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