The closest most Australians ever got to the 1968 Tet offensive was moratorium marches or history classes. Hoa Lieu, business manager at Dimension Data remembers the event because the South Vietnamese army took up a defensive position in his family home.

He was nine years old, and says the war had not been much of an influence until it landed on his doorstep.

"Our home was in the outskirts of Saigon, and until then everything had been very peaceful," Lieu explains unflinchingly. "When the Viet Cong troops took control of the area the fighting literally went on in the street outside my house."

For a moment his characteristic smile appears strained as he describes how his father handed him his two-year-old brother, and instructed Lieu to take care of him.

"I was carrying my brother as we were running through the streets," Lieu remembers. "The fighting was everywhere. A helicopter exploded over our heads, and a tank ahead of us was hit by explosives, the heat was incredible."

While the South Vietnamese army struggled against the northern forces, Lieu's parents managed to get his four sisters and brother to the relative safety of his grandparents' house in central Saigon. When the fighting subsided his family returned to the shell that was left of their house, to patch up the bullet holes and rehang the doors.

"Everything stopped with the war, schools were closed down and it was hard to buy things," Lieu said. "I was really too young to understand what it was like for my parents, trying to keep us together through it all."

For Lieu the chaos of war subsided for a time as he grew from childhood to adolescence, then returned with the withdrawal of US troops in 1975. Without the support of the Americans the South Vietnamese forces give way to the Viet Cong.

"I saw the South Vietnamese running away from their posts, soldiers were stripping off their uniforms and throwing away their weapons so they would not be able to be identified by troops from the north," Lieu said, remembering how children would pick up the discarded weapons and fire live rounds into the air as thought they were toys.

Within about six months of the Communist government supported by the Viet Cong taking control over things settled down, and Lieu went back to school. Disturbed by the way history can be distorted he choose to focus on science rather than the humanities, and eventually enrolled in finance and accounting at the Ho Chi Min University.

However, history again interrupted his course as the government began to crack down on private enterprise within Vietnam, and launched a campaign against the brutal Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia.

"My parents were worried about what was going to happen, my friends were being conscripted and sent to the war with Cambodia," Lieu said. "The government was also making it very difficult for many people at the time, so they organised for me to leave secretly by boat."

And so it was that Lieu found himself floating in a leaky boat in the South China Sea, with no food, a limited amount of water and an entourage of 200 odd souls. Unable to carry the load, the boat sank within two days leaving its human cargo scrambling for dry land.

-It was amazing that nobody died," he said. -My wife was one of the last people off the boat, she had stayed back to help a family escape, and ended up swimming out through one of the windows with a small boy in her arms."

Washed up on an island still within Vietnamese waters the group were soon found by the Navy and placed under arrest. However, they managed to pull together the money to bribe their captors and even buy another boat to complete their journey. This new vessel carried them to a Malaysian refugee camp, where Lieu was interviewed by Australian immigration officials.

-The interview lasted about two minutes, and it was all done through a translator," Lieu said. -I was asked what I would do if I went to Australia, and I said I would work during the day and study at night and make a life for myself. He scribbled down a few notes, and I ended up in an immigration hostel in Cabramatta."

Eager to fulfil his promise, and mortified by the food at the hostel, Lieu soon moved into a flat at Potts Point in Sydney and worked looking after a friend's children. He began taking English lessons at night and soon found himself gainfully employed reconditioning clutches and breaks during the daytime. Until he arrived one morning to find the factory had burnt down.

Undeterred, he soon found another job repairing poker machines in Parramatta.

Within a year he was enrolled in an electronic engineering traineeship in Sydney TAFE, which helped him into a research and development role with the poker machine company. By 1985 PCs, and LANs were starting to emerge, and Lieu was tempted into a position with an IT company.

Having crossed into a boom industry in the early years he literally never looked back. An 8 year stint at Datamatic, and a part time course in management at Medowbank TAFE, saw him head-hunted to fill a position at Com-Tech, which recently relaunched as Dimension Data.

Having endured leaky boats, cold winters, decades of night classes, a myriad of different jobs, and the isolation of a new country, language and culture, Lieu has used his own survival as an inspiration.

-I keep thinking about what I had said at the refugee camp in Malaysia. It felt like a promise, not to the immigration officer, but to myself." Lieu said. -In many ways I have been lucky, and I feel I need to make the most of it."

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