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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Arizona
Posts: 5,222
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If you think Vietnam is a nice place today...
From a friend.....
Subject: If anyone has doubts about who were the Good Guys...
I have heard at times from Vietvets that they wonder about the war, about their service, about what they did or had to do, and whether the antiwar people were right and it was a mistake for us to ever have gone there. For any such men, let me tell you a story, as I ride in a bus from Hue to DaNang this afternoon.
I have been involved in a charity to raise money especially for the old South Vietnamese soldiers, the rank and file guys who were their "tip of the spear" and who suffered loss of limbs and more as part of it. There are probably 50,000 or more of these guys still alive and living lives for the most part of dire poverty. They and their families are subject to discrimination that has gone on since 1975 and will only stop when their grandchildren die off. I started coming to Viet Nam in 2006 to set things up, had been back three more times through 2008, then had to stop because of a terrible chronic pain problem that wiped me out for 5 years.
This year the Directors of the charity thought it would be good for me to come once again, because for many of the old vets, to see a former comrade in the fight come to visit them is tremendously important. Men need more than rice for their stomachs, sometimes they need something for their spirit.
So I endured the 20+ hours of travel, that at my age is a real hardship, but got here, and started seeing vets around Saigon. Our contacts with the cops there got us permission, with the always condition of no talking politics or religion. Since none of that is what we're about, it works out OK.
We have vets also to take care of in other places, like Hue, where I visited in 2007 to set up contacts. So I and a traveling buddy, a VN from Raleigh, got here on Saturday and went right away to a lunch with nine badly crippled old guys. Between all nine were three working legs and 15 functional arms, but others who could not come are blind or paralyzed. So we had a nice lunch, they were just super happy to see me, and talked to us about all the other hundreds of badly off vets they know and hope we can help. Finally, we shook hands, took pictures, and left.
What we didn't know was that after we left the police showed up and grabbed all of them, took them to HQ and subjected them to interrogations and threats. What we didn't know is that the provincial police chief (like head of State cops in a state) looked at our website three years ago and decided he hated it, and me. And he'd been waiting for these years for me to come again, knew the second I applied for a visa, knew when we were coming, when the lunch would be, and of course knew where we were staying since they always take your passport and enter it into the police computer when you check in.
So at 7AM this morning the two "invitations" for us to show up at the police station at 0800 were delivered. By then my friend had the phone call from Saigon about the nine guys being picked up and taken to the jail. We knew we were in trouble. As we left the front of the hotel, two guys came out of the shadows and followed us to the police station, then made themselves known and directed us to a meeting room.
To make a long and abrasive story short, the police honcho told me about waiting the years to see me. His rationale for calling us in is that we violated VN law, by coming here on tourist visas while intending to do any charity work. He more or less made up the rule that unless you are a fully registered charity with the VN government and work through them, you cannot come here and give anyone money. And that all charities have to be nonprofit, nonpolitical, and nonreligious in their work. Since we target the old ARVN, he says that makes us political. When he pressed me, I explained carefully that I give money to orphanages and the poor in churches and on the street, and in the past gave money to a former VC officer to help all the crippled in her village. And that I do not see the old vets as a political thing, but only as the poorest of the poor with no government support, and especially needy. He of course waved all that away.
It was an hour long harangue, complete with descriptions of how everyone else who does anything here goes through the government, and that then everything is fine. He is great friends with two different US vet groups who have been coming here for years. Of course they bring people and spend money, some of which ends up with the right people, so that works out just fine. There was a lot of repetition, and my VN friend engaged in long exchanges, some of which ended up with the cop showing a bit of anger, after which my friend would back off with some kind of apologetic restatement. They wanted me to sign a document in VN about the interview, I explained politely I could not sign anything I cannot read, and they let it drop.
We went back to the hotel to wait for our appointment to see some nuns who run a local charity clinic. The top cop had said it was OK to just talk to them. Half an hour later one of his flunkies showed up to tell us on second thought, we should skip that and just go to the bus station for our ride. Which meant they even knew of our detailed travel plans. The guy even mentioned the honcho knowing I was sick for those years. Gee, it's nice to have foreigners so interested in my personal life.
Viet Nam today is run by a totalitarian government which believes in no human rights, really, they have the communist view that all rights are granted by the state, and the state can take them away at any time. They have a huge set of police organizations that exercise powers freely, and do not hesitate to come down on anyone they decide they don't like. If you come as a tourist and just spend money, everything is just fine. But the iron fist inside the velvet glove is right there, all the time, and everyone who lives here knows it and fears it. The war is 40 years gone, but the oppression is still right here.
So whatever doubts anyone might have, please put them away, we were the Good Guys, fighting for the freedom of the South. That we did so messily at times is nothing new to any war, we made messes in WW2 and Korea too, but we don't dwell on them because in the end we achieved real good. By Congress abandoning the South we threw away all the good we had worked and bled for, and too many of us died for.
The people in the South have suffered ever since, and every Vietnamese but the Party members and super rich suffer every day, because they have lost their freedom. It sickens me to see it in action.
We will not stop our work, we will play a little game and change some words on the website, and we'll see what other ways there are to bring help to those who need it so badly, but are still hated and held down by those who brought "liberation and justice" to the South.
And we all need to remember that freedom has never been the natural state of men, there have always been those who were ready, willing, and eager to rule over everyone else. Freedom can be taken way in one big jump, like what happened in April of '75. Or it can be eroded away, bit by bit, as has happened in other places and sometimes seems to be a danger to us. Being concerned about protecting our freedom does not mean you are stupid or paranoid. It just means you are awake.
S/F
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