He was a medical officer with the South Vietnam army when he was captured by enemy forces and detained in a concentration camp for three years and starved by his communist captors as part of their brainwashing process.
Released in 1978, Dr Tien Manh Nguyen tried unsuccessfully to flee the country several times before finally escaping in 1980 in a small boat with his fiancee and her 13-year-old brother who had to leave their sick mother behind.
The threesome braved rough seas and visits by Thai fishermen-turned-pirates and after a 10-day voyage managed to reach Malaysian shores. But it was prime minister Malcolm Fraser and his two immigration ministers who were the real heroes according to Dr Nguyen. Thanks to Mr Fraser's reversal of Gough Whitlam's policy on refugees Dr Nguyen and his fiancee, Ai-Minh, now his wife, and her brother were allowed to settle in Australia.
But that indirect help wasn't the end of Mr Fraser's involvement with the family.
Dr Nguyen's brother-in-law, Kien Cao-Xuan, who was looked after by a foster family, had a school excursion to Canberra in 1982. He wrote a letter before the trip asking for help to bring his still very sick mother to Australia from Vietnam.
"On the excursion they saw Mr Fraser.They weren't supposed to meet with him but seeing Mr Fraser he ran and basically gave him the letter," Dr Nguyen said.
"Three weeks later he [Mr Fraser] sent my brother-in-law a letter of support to show Immigration. The next year the mother was accepted to come to Australia."
Now Dr Nguyen, living in West Pennant Hills, and his brother-in-law are both GPs. With his wife, a piano teacher,Dr Nguyen had three daughters, all of whom have been through university. In 1987 he formed the Council of Vietnamese Refugees Supporting Organisations to help other Vietnamese asylum seekers.
In a speech at their 30th anniversary in 2011 he said: "I was so lucky to be in this wonderful country. To me and all other Indochinese refugees, the then PM Malcolm Fraser and two ministers for immigration of that period, Mr Michael McKellar and Mr Ian McPhee were real heroes who reversed Whitlam's policy and gave us a chance to resettle in Australia."
Such was the link that Mr Fraser retained with the Vietnamese community that a member of his family on Friday rang the president of the Vietnamese Community in Victoria to tell them of his death before the news was released.
Dr Nguyen added: "Of all the prime ministers of Australia Malcolm Fraser is great, if not the greatest, in the area of human rights, of compassion and of social justice. What he did was never done before by any prime minister. There was nobody who could match him in those areas like Aboriginal land rights, his strong stand against apartheid and his promotion of multiculturalism and especially taking in the Vietnamese refugees.
"To us he is a true hero. He set a shining example for us all in terms of compassion towards other human beings."
