There were mass dolphin die-offs in the bays. There were all kinds of accounts of fishermen seeing, you know, alligators rolling in zombie-like circles near the surface. And there was so much oil that a slick the size of Manhattan drifted into Texas waters and began lapping at that coastline and tarring the beaches.Īnd lo and behold, shrimpers and crabbers and oystermen, you know, they started pulling up mutated specimens in their nets, just misshapen shrimp, crabs with shells that looked very bizarre. And that took 10 months to cap that well. And that kicked off the largest peacetime oil spill in world history, that is until the BP spill in 2010.
But there was - in 1979, there was a Mexican oil rig that exploded. I mean, you know, you mentioned that oil spill, which, I mean, I knew nothing about when I started researching. Did the fishermen notice other effects on the fish or shrimp that they caught - or crabs? And there were some big oil spills around. And so there was this expansion, and then there were all these problems including, as you mentioned, pollution from some of the industries. You know, one little detail you drop in here is that the shrimping industry had expanded a lot years before because of the success of Red Lobster restaurants, which just drove demand. And so now, without a country and sort of cast on our shores, they started rebuilding their lives as fishermen.ĭAVIES: Right. But also, many of them had been fishermen back home before the war intruded on their lives. This is, you know, a shrimping and fishing industry that was already in decline.Īnd then, of course, after the fall of Saigon, the United States started resettling hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees, and many of them began to relocate to the Gulf Coast because the climate was familiar to them. And all of these plants were receiving permits from the state government to discharge toxic chemicals into these bays. And all along these coastlines, the petrochemical industry was sort of metastasizing and setting up one sprawling plant after another. There were, you know, increasing numbers of hurricanes that would scatter the catch. And there was also a dwindling catch every year. There was a gas crisis that was caused, in part, by the Iranian Revolution. So by the late '70s, shrimping and fishing along the Texas coast was already in pretty rough straits. Tell us about the white fishermen and their families. This occurred in bays on the Gulf Coast of Texas. KIRK WALLACE JOHNSON: Thanks for having me.ĭAVIES: So set the scene for us. He's the author of two previous books - "To Be A Friend Is Fatal" and "The Feather Thief." His latest is "The Fisherman And The Dragon: Fear, Greed, And A Fight For Justice On The Gulf Coast." Kirk Wallace Johnson, welcome to FRESH AIR. Kirk Wallace Johnson's writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times. As tensions escalated, there were cross burnings, death threats, arson attacks on boats and one home, and a violent encounter that led to the shooting death of a white fisherman. The locals blamed the Vietnamese for declining catches even though the bays were being increasingly poisoned by petrochemical plants and oil spills. Our guest writer, Kirk Wallace Johnson, has a new book about an intense conflict on the Texas coast between white fishermen and the Vietnamese newcomers. The display was intended to intimidate Vietnamese fishermen and residents of the coastal town who, just a few years before, had supported the American side in the Vietnam War. It's a deck swarming with men, some in army fatigues and many wearing Ku Klux Klan robes with a mannequin hanging in effigy from the vessel's outriggers. If you'd been standing at the right point aside a harbor on the Texas Gulf Coast in 1981, you might have seen a shrimp trawler cruising by, sporting a Confederate flag. I am Dave Davies, in today for Terry Gross.