Vietnam Left Her Alert To Death From The Sky

PHILADELPHIA - Warily, Tho Oldham craned her neck toward the sky. Rotor blades slapped the air above her with a familiar, unsettling cadence. Even now, 17 years after she left Vietnam, the sound of a helicopter remained a sound of warning. When she heard a helicopter, she looked up, always.

On April 4, 20 minutes after noon, two sounds played above Merion Elementary School in suburban Lower Merion Township: the low humming of a small plane and the harsh chirring of a helicopter. Tho Oldham looked up from her post as a playground monitor, and the plane seemed to be riding piggyback on the helicopter.

Sometimes, in Vietnam, she seemed to have a sixth sense about danger, a dark alert before the screaming of people and rockets. Something must be wrong. Then the plane seemed to be sucked into the helicopter, or the helicopter into the plane. There was a fireball, an explosion, the hot rain of fuel and metal. The helicopter landed in the schoolyard, she said, like a phone slammed in anger.

Seven people died in the crash. Among them were Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., whose plane was having its landing gear checked by the helicopter, and two first-graders, Rachel Blum and Lauren Freundlich, who were killed during recess. More children might have died, she might have been killed herself, had Tho Oldham not connected the sound of helicopters with the sound of danger. "I know that sound," she said. "If not, I am doomed."

Her name is pronounced Tah. She is tiny, just over 5 feet, her charcoal hair, once down to her waist, now bobbed at her chin. Her eyes, dark and intense, absorb light like shadows. For two years, Tho, 39, has worked as a lunchtime aide at Merion Elementary. She lives two blocks from the school with her husband, John, and her three sons, Chris, 15, Michael, 11, and Patrick, 8, a student at Merion.

At recess, Tho stands near the blue doors at the rear of the school, overlooking the sunken playground with its climbing toys and softball backstop and tree-lined sidewalk. Around her neck, she wears a whistle. When she blows it, the children are trained to look at her and stop talking and wait for her instructions.

As the fireball bellowed a thousand feet overhead, she blew her whistle like a siren and screamed at the children to run. "Plane crash!" she yelled, "Plane crash!" She pointed toward a knoll at the far edge of the playground. More than 50 children began to run. Joseph Mandes, a fifth-grade teacher, saw a flash of light from his classroom and the panicked scatter on the playground. "It was amazing how quickly she thought," Mandes said. "Otherwise, I think we could have lost 10 or 12 more kids, minimum."

About 20 children had been playing around her. They played here every noon, jumping rope, skipping, kicking a soccer ball. One minute they were playing, the next they were running for their lives.

"It was on top of my head, so close," Tho said. "When I see the fireball, I know we have to run for our lives. I knew one of them, the plane or helicopter, was coming straight to the spot where we were standing. I think I have some kind of psychic in me. I'm not kidding. I just knew it was going to come down right in that spot."

She had plenty of time to run toward safety, but she could not leave the children. So she kept blowing her whistle and yelling, "Run, run," and looking around, over one shoulder, then another, eyes frantic, gathering the children, herding them toward the top of the knoll. She was only 15 feet away when the helicopter slammed down.

"I was lucky," Tho said. "I was lucky, and the little girls weren't lucky."

Rachel, she said, ran toward the school, not away, in the confusion and terror. Lauren, she said, had muddied her white pants and shoes and gone inside to get cleaned. She must have come back outside, Tho said, and been trapped. Some second-graders had eaten quickly and were also on the playground. Her son Patrick is in second grade. Tho didn't know if he was safe. She was in charge of other children; she didn't have time to look for her own.

After a time, she saw Patrick's teacher. All her students had been accounted for. Patrick was still in the cafeteria, safe. The little girls were not safe. "I think she feels a little guilty," said John Oldham, Tho's husband. "I tell her, `You did all you could.' "

Lauren and Rachel had been two of Tho's favorites. Rachel was quiet and bright with a wide smile. When Tho spoke to her, she always answered, "Yes, ma'am." Lauren, a brunette, might have grown up to be a great beauty, Tho thought, like Jackie Kennedy.

Two weeks after the crash, she was still dreaming of Lauren. "She is coming toward me, smiling, always smiling," Tho said. She went to a neighbor's and cut daffodils for the girls and laid them under a tree at the school. "My heart so aches for them," Tho said.

Sometimes she has bad dreams. Or cries quietly. The crash has done something else, too. It has unearthed buried memories, memories of Vietnam, her inexplicable luck amid random death. "I don't know why I'm untouchable," she said.

Tho was born in Haiphong, in what was North Vietnam. She and her parents and two brothers fled south to Saigon in the mid-'50s, when she was 4 or 5 and Vietnam was newly divided, out of French control. Her father came from a wealthy family. When he took a job supervising a mining operation in the Vietnamese highlands, the family moved to the village of Nongson.

In the mountain village of Nongson, Tho could look out of her house, across a wide, muddy river to another slope and see the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When Viet-Cong guerrillas made their sporadic attacks with grenades and mortars and Chinese rifles, a gong was banged in the village, and her family, with other families, hurried a mile to a brick building for protection.

As the war escalated, Tho moved often, at first with her family, later on her own. Mostly, she lived and worked with relatives. She was a teen-ager in Saigon in early 1968 when the Viet-Cong opened the Tet offensive, attacking the capital and other cities from one end of South Vietnam to the other. She remembers hand-to-hand combat in the streets, a 24-hour curfew and weapons that sounded to a 16-year-old like Chinese firecrackers.

Earlier in Saigon, she had been walking in an open market, shopping for wonton soup, when two enraged soldiers, jealous of the same woman, turned their private quarrel into a wild, gruesome public horror. One soldier, Tho said, threw a grenade at the other and killed him. She was standing 20 feet away. "Same as that helicopter, I was that close," she said.

At Kontum, she worked as a cashier in a shop at a base where helicopters evacuated the wounded and dying. Kontum is where Tho learned to look up, because dangerous things fell from the sky. "VC attack very often," she said. "When we hear things, we always look up. We always look for the rockets."

In 1972, Tho met an American serviceman named John Oldham in Da Nang. She worked in a Korean restaurant. He was on his second tour in Vietnam. John came back to Merion in early 1973. For a year, he tried to get Tho out of Vietnam. Finally, in February 1974, in the dead of winter, she arrived in the United States.

Tho had come on a three-month visa. Two months later, she and John were married. They raised their three children in Merion. All have attended Merion Elementary.

Physical evidence of the crash is scarce on the playground. The scorched base of a tree. Rectangles of new sod. Open space where an oak once stood. Still scattered is emotional debris.

Some children have been afraid to go out for recess, Tho said. One little boy was stuttering. Another boy began counting planes that flew safely over the school. He was up to 700. Ringing an oak are flowers and notes, left by the children to their fallen classmates. Tho has found a new spot on the playground to watch the children at recess. The old spot gives her chills.

"I'm strong," Tho said. "I've seen a lot of bad things, more than this. I will recover."

A few days after the crash, Tho was lauded by the Lower Merion school board as a hero - an ordinary woman who displayed grace in extraordinary circumstances. "She reacted in a way all of us would hope to react," said Merion principal Gold. "But I'm not sure the rest of us would have been that spontaneous. We don't have her background."