Examining the Myths of the
Vietnam War
SESSION 15
The Vietnamese Point of
View
Steve Sherman: All right. We are
going to proceed here with some speakers and I will let them
introduce themselves, but Mike and Bill, Bill will later come
into this. Right now Mike. He got away. You have to introduce
yourself, okay. Let me make one comment here. What we put up at
the website we have a number of bulletin boards over there where
people could throw comments in and I was surprised at some of the
comments that came and also I was surprised at where some of the
comments came in there [from], but I got from a friend of mine --
well, I think he is a friend of mine -- I got a comment as to why
are you doing this thing without discussing Amerasians? Well,
shortly after that, I got somebody who wanted to discuss
Amerasians. So, we were asked, we do it.
Michael Sheppard-Nguyen: Good
afternoon everyone. How are you today?
Audience: Fine.
Michael Sheppard-Nguyen: Thank you. I
will talk a little bit about my show. My name is Michael Sheppard
and they call me an Amerasian. Amerasian, my daddy is American
soldier. A lot of Americans, when I ask this question, you know
who an Amerasian is? A lot of people, they don't know, a lot of
people they don't know and they don't know what is going on after
1975. Today, I want to talk about Amerasian after 1975. I have
some information. In 1975, we have 65,000 Amerasians in Vietnam.
On April 30, 1975, when South Vietnam fall down, all American
soldiers come back to United States, the baby is left behind. The
Communists, they take all the baby Amerasians and put in the
jail. My mom got killed in 1968. The reason they killed my mom
because my mom got married with American solider; that is
disgrace. Tell me why. I don't know why, when my mom loved my
daddy and they got married, that is the reason the Communists,
they kill my mom. It is not fair. In 1975, if any baby got the
brown hair, blue eye, tone or whatever, it’s the baby Amerasian,
is loaded to hell, loaded to jail. I have been in the jail for
six years and eight months when I was only nine-year-old. Little
boy, I worked for eight hour to ten hour per day. Every single
day, I carry a lot, the body of my friend who didn’t grow.
They die because they don't have medicine; they die because they
don't have food, because they are too small for work, too hot
outside. They die because they don't have food and they go to
jungle, they got some of the mushroom, and some mushroom got the
poison and they eat the mushroom with poison and they die. One
day I carry 12 little girls, put in the ground and nobody knows
that. I am the witness. I asked a lot of people what Amerasians
doing wrong because I never having the gun or I never killed
nobody. Why they hurt like this? Did John Kerry have no mother?
No, he doesn’t know. I don't feel right because why we have
support for enemy, why we support, why we give the Communists,
Vietnam Communists, money. It is 29 years after the War is done.
I got a lot of pictures on my hand right now. They killed 6,800
people in 1968. That night we called New Year night and that
night they killed my mom and they killed my uncle. I lost my
family in 1968 on that night and in the part of Hue, Vietnam
6,800 people got killed only one night. 1975 and 2004, we have
still a lot of people got killed. You ever heard about a
[unintelligible] the people in the park in Vietnam
[unintelligible] to Cambodia. The VC Communists and the Cambodia
Communists, they take the people and they cut the head off. This
is Human Right John Kerry is talking about? This far, if the
people [unintelligible] 21 years in 2004. I grew up in United
States; I came to the United States in 1990. I think a lot about
my father. I came to United States with both my hands, I worked
two jobs, I be right up with my family and now I be with the
group, with the young people fight for freedom for Vietnam. You
guys all can visit my website www.humanrightsforvietnam.org.
All information about human rights are present there. I just ask
with all you have what we can do right now. How we stop the
Communists when they keep killing the people? How we can stop
them? In the War, when we are fighting, they kill the people it
is okay, but now it is 29 years over. They still kill a lot of
people, a hundred people die everyday. How we can stop them? How
we make the Vietnam Human Rights? How we could have the freedom
for religion. In Vietnam, if you said God is like Jesus or God is
Buddha, you go to jail. God is Ho Chi Minh; Ho Chi Minh is
the God they say, the Communists they say. They don't have
freedom for religion, they don't have freedom for speaking
anything. My friend in Vietnam go to the website, any website in United
States, they have the power and they log off. The young people in
Vietnam can't go to any website out here, there is no freedom in
there. I heard John Kerry talking about Human Right Act for Vietnam
and he said he will approve Vietnam, we have the human right; no
it is not. One thing is very hurting when the people say and we
people heard it. Now they sell the people. If you have $500, you
can buy one lady, $500. They put people sell the girl on the
eBay, four girls on eBay for sale. They sell the baby, the girl
was 7-year-old, 9-year-old to Cambodia for having sex toy. What
we can do, how we stop them? How we stop that business because
that is illegal business, they sell people business, we need to
stop them. All sit down here, all we have family. If your wife or
your children got for sale like that how hurt it is, our children
very hurt. I told my daughter, I say, ‘you are a very lucky
girl because you are born in United States. If you were born in Vietnam,
may be they will get you and they sell you to Cambodia, to
somewhere.’ The lady, 18-year-old and 22-year-old, $500.
They say the lady market, 20 girls, 30 girls, you can pick up
anytime you want with $500. I have the group. We say the Young
Fight for Freedom, but we don't have power; we don't have money,
and we don't have a spirit to fight with Communists. I know
Communists, they are strong, they got billion and billion dollar,
but we work very hard. We work because we love the people. We
love my land mom [motherland], my Vietnam, worked very hard and
we came to admire. I go around anywhere, I ask for your help.
Could you any power you have to Congressmen, to Senator, to White
House whatever, stop Communists do that business, sell the people
to another country, sell the baby to another country, and stop
killing the people. Every time I look on the picture, they take
the baby. Who said Vietnam have freedom? No, the Vietnam life in
the Communists is the hell and I had been in the hell for six
years and eight months. We love 42,000 Amerasian babies. My
friend died in my arms because they are too small. Even the old
people, like 18 or 22, if you live in the jail with no food, you
die. We have a baby girl, little girl, a little boy, when we get
sick in the jungle because the jailers they put all of us in the
jungle and mountain, we got sick, we don't have a doctor, we
don't have any medicine and we got sick and we go. Everyday we
have a little food liner, we need to work for like eight to
twelve hours outside in the rain, and so cold mountain. Every
single night we have somebody, have something go. I want to write
a story. I want to let all the people in the world know, I want
to let all American people know about this, know about your
children left behind but in Vietnam I can't go to school because
I lived in the jail. I don't know how to write too much. I have
learnt English on the TV, I have learnt my English on my job. I
look at people talking and I learn that word, because after 1975,
all Amerasian people, we can't go to school. That is why we have
the Bill 3260 approve for Amerasian automatically come to
American citizen, because my father American and I am American.
Why I have a caste, and all we don't have to go to school because
Communists, they don’t let me go to school. No school for Amerasian.
You go to jail. Even the mother language, we can talk but we
cannot write because we never had class, we never go to school,
we cannot go to school, we go to work. How we can learn English?
The difficulty is my dream, I want to write my story, my life, I
want to let all the people know, I want to let all American
soldiers, Vietnam vets know what your child left behind after
1975, what is going on, where they are. In America, Amerasian
family office, I work for them when I go to Philippines and I
work in California. We have only almost 22,000 Amerasian come to United
States. We lost more than 45,000 baby lost after 1975. Where they
are? Or they got Vietnam Communists killed them off because their
father is American soldier, that is only one reason, because the
baby like me, we never go fighting, we never go kill VC, because
we are little boy but they kill the baby because their father is
soldier. I heard John Kerry went to Vietnam before. He said a
soldier go to Vietnam for they kill the people, kill the baby,
blah blah blah. I want to ask him, how many babies, how many
people John Kerry killed in Vietnam when he was in service. Did
he have some baby in Vietnam? That is my question I want to ask
John Kerry. Did he know anything about Amerasian in Vietnam? He
don't know nothing about it. All he knows is business and money,
but he don't know. The reason I wanted to come up today and talk
about this because I need all your help. Now, we have the Bill
for Human Right as on the Congress, they just passed about two
weeks ago that they will cut support for Communist Vietnam, we
don't send the money, because I think why, I have worked hard, I
pay the tax for my country. That money is useful for United
States. That money is not sent to Vietnam. Then why we stop
support Vietnam Communists. If you give them more money, they buy
more weapons and they kill more people. That is what they do. If
they don't have money, they don't buy weapon. If you give more, a
billion dollar, they buy more tanks, they buy more AK-47 and they
kill more people. Then why, what we can do just stop them. If we
want to stop them, we need to pass the Human Right Act in the
Senate and Congress. That Bill must be passed. Don't let John
Kerry whole lie the first time on 201 (the first bill) and I ask
that everybody can have, write a story, write the newspaper
something about Amerasian. Let all Vietnam base or American
people know about the baby in Vietnam because all the people they
don't know about this and we have another Bill called Amerasian
automatically become American citizen and that Bill is still in
Congress too and I am fight for that Bill. I want that Bill
passed in the Congress because all we don't go to school. If now
go and take the test, we fail, all will be failed. That the third
reason, second reason is all we American. My father American, I
am American, this is my land, this is my father country. It is
only different that I am born overseas, but now father comes back
to country, I have come back to country, I need and demand
citizenship automatically. I don't need to look like I am not a
person from oversees come here. That is my feeling. Some may be
wrong, may be right but it is my feeling. The last one I want to
say I don't care what John Kerry say, I don't care the TV or the
newspaper whatever they say. That all Vietnam vets, all the baby
sit down here, you are a hero in my heart. From my bottom of
heart, you are a freedom fighter. You fight for freedom. You save
a lot of the people in Vietnam because after 1975, throughout the
country, the Communists killed a million Vietnam people, but when
the time you are there in Vietnam you save a lot of Vietnam
people back there. That I why I don't care what the people say.
The Vietnam vet is still hero, it is freedom fighter. Thank you
very much.
Mike Benge: I would like to make one
slight correction. Vietnam Human Rights Act has not cut off aid
to Vietnam. It only caps at the oh-four levels, 2004 level, the nonhumanitarian-aid,
that is not the humanitarian aid and it does not cut off aid to Vietnam,
it only caps it at the 2004 level.
Audience: Where is it?
Mike Benge: It is now in the US
Senate and Senator Brownback is supposed to be drafting a similar
Bill in the Senate now. Is John Kerry going to get elected?
Steve Sherman: Also, I think the
Johnson Vanik Amendment was far more stringent than this
Human Rights Bill.
Audience: Jackson-Vanik.
Steve Sherman: Jackson-Vanik.and I
really personally can't really see why we don't get this
accomplished.
Nguyen Khac Chinh: Good afternoon
ladies and gentleman. May I introduce myself? I am a lawyer from Vietnam
and now I am a Vietnamese-American. I would like to congratulate
you and thank you for having been fighting in Vietnam. See this
[unintelligible], isn't it. Thank you for your sacrifices, your
sufferings, your injuries, your pains, and death. We talked about
the spirits of your fallen comrades are here because in this very
home, I salute them and invite them to our meeting. You are Vietnam
veterans. So let us speak in Vietnamese and all refresh your
memory. Either you understand me or the sounds of the Vietnamese
language. We will rock your dreams I hope. I see that many among
of speak Vietnamese and understand it. I am very happy.
Nguyen Khac Chinh: [Speaking in
Vietnamese] Let me tell you a story which happened
long ago, yet it remains so contemporary. This is the story of
the "paper tiger".
Before
and after April 30, 1975 I did not leave Vietnam, nor did I
follow the fleeing horde. Not only did I stay in the country, but
I also set up an organization called the "National
Liberation Front". We fought the Communists with whatever we
possessed, hidden firearms, a radio station with 1 kilometer
range, a printing shop to supply us with both pamphlets and
counterfeit Vietnamese currency.
The day I was
arrested, on December 27, 1975, at 9:00 a.m., a Communist
policeman grumbled as he handcuffed me,
"A thousand
armies and ten thousand horses cannot beat us, what can you do, a
weakling who can't even tie up a chicken?"
I thought it was
just a passing profanity, but the guy pointed his finger to my
face exacting a response. I retorted,
"I fight
you with what a thousand armies and ten thousand horses cannot
prevail!"
"What is
it?"
"This!"
I showed him my head.
I stayed back in
Vietnam because I could not believe the Americans could have
skedaddled. They must have a plan for a victorious come back, or
at least a decent retrieval within 3 or 5 years. Yet 3, then 5
years passed by. On Dec. 27, 1993, at exactly 9 a.m., I was
finally released from prison thanks to the intervention of Pen International,
I had been the first finalist with my short story written in
French in an international literary contest in 1966.
I was
flabbergasted when I learned that the U.S. was about to establish
diplomatic relations with the Vietnamese communists, which meant
that the 17 years of my youth spent in prison were in vain! No
wonder the Communists had been repeating to me that the Americans
were "a paper tiger" which I had vehemently refuted.
For 2 years they had interrogated me. One of their questions had
been, "What do you think of the Americans before 4/30/75?
And how do you evaluate them since that date?" My response
had to be in writing. I had been allowed to write for as long as
I needed instead of doing hard labor. After 6 months, they had
forced on me their answer that the Americans were a paper tiger.
A tiger for all it looked, armed to the teeth, using the most
advanced methods of killing, feeding itself on living flesh, but
to and behold! this tiger was made of paper because it was beaten
when confronted with the Communist wooden sticks, hammers and
sickles.
A
paper tiger, indeed! This tiger was trounced by the Vietnamese
Communists and fled to save its own skin, leaving behind solemn
promises, longstanding friends, and its very honor in order to
survive in shame and contempt.
So, what then,
were the causes of the American defeat? How could a real tiger
become a paper tiger? One of the causes should be found in the
"anti-war cry" of a Jane Fonda, coupled with the
"guilt" of a Vietnam veteran, a medal-studded hero of
the Vietnam war, a John Kerry who is toying with the hope of
becoming a future American president, a commander-in chief of the
American army which he deprecated and betrayed!
A
strange phenomenon which "ten thousand" books on the
Vietnam war have not singled out, dissected, accurately assessed,
is the fact that after 4/30/75, in the eyes of the Vietnamese
Communists, the Chinese Communists, and the whole world, the
Americans look formidable but, in reality, they are only a
"paper tiger". A small gang of Vietnamese Communists
was enough to chase them away!
Is
this the end of the story? Not yet. There ensues a lesson. The
lesson teaches that bravado can browbeat the Americans. Fight
them, and they back out!
This
lesson, unfortunately, was not learned by a John Kerry, a John
Edwards, a Hillary, or a Kennedy, but it became the bible for Bin
Laden, Osama, Omar, Saddam Hussein and their likes. "Quod isti
et istae, cur non ego?" The Vietnamese succeeded, why not
us, a thousand times stronger and richer than they?
Thus, the
Americans were put down, and became a target for attack. To cite
only the attack on 2 American embassies, the assault on the
American military headquarters in Saudi Arabia, the one on the
USS Cole warship, and recently the destruction of the Twin Towers
in New York and the Pentagon.
Let's
frankly admit the truth even if it hurts. Which truth? The truth
that the April 30, 1975 misfortune triggered the September 11,
2001 tragedy. If there weren't 4/30/75, there wouldn't be 9/11/01
! Still, they are clamoring for troop withdrawal ! Withdrawal
from Iraq after Vietnam? Where else and when? Until there is no
more American soil to come back to?
To denounce the
Iraq war on the grounds that Iraq did not possess arms of mass
destruction, that Iraq had no ties with Al Qaeda, is tantamount
to saying that it was the best policy not to arrest or destroy
Bin Laden ! Bill Clinton might have felt qualms about arresting
or destroying Bin Laden for fear that American voters and the
world would condemn him, just as G. W. Bush is condemned because
he ousted Saddam Hussein. As a consequence, Bin Laden was allowed
freedom to act. Then came 9/11/01, and public opinion accused the
Administration for not having arrested or killed Bin Laden. The
same would happen if Iraq were not attacked, if Saddam Hussein
were not removed from office, and if 9/11/01 were to repeat a few
times, G. W. Bush, as the president, would be blamed for not
anticipating and acting promptly at the right time. Those
misconceptions and contradictions only happened when individual
ambitions prevailed over reason and public interest.
Furthermore,
there is also a lack of circumspection and knowledge. "Speak
up when you know, if you don't, just listen." Don't pretend
to ignore you are ignorant.
They haven't, so
far, understood why the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. The cause
is not the WMD, as the gossip goes. Granted that Iraq could have
had WMD, some nuclear bombs and a few tons of biological weapons
wouldn't have worried the Americans so much as kids being
threatened by a cane. Let's remember that, in the past, thousands
of Soviet nuclear warheads pointing at the U.S.A. could not have
deterred the Americans. On the contrary, the Americans kept on
harassing their enemy day and night until the USSR surrendered.
Now,
why the war in Iraq? Those shortsighted politicians did not grasp
the justification behind the Iraq war. Left to themselves, only a
few months in office, not even the whole presidential term would
suffice to reduce the U.S.A. to a doll's shirt. Did they see the
difference between the Afghan war and the Iraq war? How could
they fathom the more consequential reasons behind the Iraq war?
In fact, in the
Afghan war, the U.S. had been placed in a defensive position. A
mere tramp had had the impudence to strike her an almost deadly
blow. The invincible U.S.A. could not have predicted that because
she had backed out of Vietnam, she had diminished her world
esteem, and that, being a tiger in the flesh, she had shrunk into
a "paper tiger" whom the Vietnamese Communists had
skinned alive and displayed for all to see, claiming they had
caught the mighty tiger, an example to be followed by others. On
the contrary, the Iraq war, in which the U.S. played an active
role, was meant to eradicate any future adverse happenings. If Iraq
hadn't collaborated with Al Qaeda, it had, nevertheless, remained
the king of repression and terrorism, only steps away from Al Qaeda.
Thus, "Birds of a feather flock together."
Consequently, 9/11/01 had to be eliminated in self-defense and in
the defense of the world. Obviously, Bin Laden would have
company, and together with Saddam Hussein, both had to be removed
because the latter would never forgive the U.S. for having kicked
him out of Kuwait. Not to mention some other countries which,
either through resentment, hate, or envy, had taken advantage of
the murky situation to act against the U.S. Should the U.S. wait
until Saddam Hussein possessed the WMD to act, adverse opinions
would tax the Administration with being sluggish and negligent.
When the Administration decided to act, they complained about the
incomplete proofs of WMD and collaboration with terrorists!
That's
the price freedom and democracy have to pay for the services of
opportunists. War and peace signify law and order. If you want
peace, make war, "Si vis pacem, para bellum."
It is also the
price paid to "hateful egotism" which turns white into
black, right into wrong, thus creating an absurd and grotesque
picture of America! Imagine a country at war that, while needing
all the support it could mobilize to fight for a good cause,
reviles against itself, calling itself wrongdoers and liars. They
think they vilify the Administration, but who is the
Administration? They themselves helped elect it to represent
them. Therefore, they are vilifying themselves!
What a subject
of ridicule! What a mess! What a loss! The Vietnamese experience,
the "paper tiger experience" are not enough to wake
them up. They want to change the paper tiger into a worm to be
stomped under foot! Just listen to John Kerry - John Edwards, and
you'll see ! The U.S. will even lose its title of "paper
tiger".
[Applause]
Steve Sherman: My apologies for not
making sure that everybody had the translations in hand here
before we started. There are some copies floating around here.
All the media that are present here have a copy.
Audience: Do you have any extra
copies?
Steve Sherman: I am not sure how many
extra copies we have. -- Thank you very much -- but I will post
this on the internet on to this session. Is that fair enough?
Audience: Yeah.
Steve Sherman: What I propose right
now is that I give you the long overdue break for one hour and a
quarter. [Break] I met this young man at Texas Tech a
couple of years ago. He gave a very impressive talk and it was so
impressive I brought my grandson next year to Texas Tech because
I expected him to be there give an equally impressive talk. Well,
he wasn’t there because he was having a meeting (as it was
described by his good friend who was there) he was having
a meeting with the VC. That’s a problem, I really wanted him
to meet my grandson. The VC was having a meeting with were the
Venture Capitalists. There has been a lot of progress in his life
since he came to United States as a young refugee about ten years
old and doing business with the Venture Capitalists is different
than running away from the VC. I will give you his biographical
information here instead of playing coy with you. He arrived as a
10-year-old war orphan. His father was a Vietnamese pilot, who
was captured and put into reeducation camps. His father could
have left the country but chose not to do so while he sent his
wife and son away. After he graduated from UCLA, he became a
Marine -- good plan. His served as helicopter pilot in the first
Gulf War and he has a number of business ventures that he has
been in; he has written a number of books and publications which
are quite interesting and if we are lucky in about three minutes,
he will give us a call. And if we aren’t lucky, I have got
something else from him that I will read to you anyway. While I
am over here, I will read you another message that I got today in
the e-mail and this message is so unusually significant -- if I
can find it -- but it is actually quite typical of the messages I
have received and Max probably would be interested in the
totality of these messages. I don't know who this guy is.
‘My thoughts and prayers are with you and your fellow
veterans as you meet in Boston this week. The only coverage I
have heard of your seminar is on the Geoff Metcalf show,
but I am hoping the event is going well. We need to ask you
Vietnam veterans to whom we have already owe a great deal to find
one more battle for us all and that may well be the most
important battle of all, the disgraceful and traitorous John
Kerry from achieving the Presidency of our great nation.’ We
didn’t come here with specific political objectives and we
came here in this last battle, but this last battle is the
writing of the history and the two tend to go hand-in-hand. The
history is being distorted in this presidential campaign and has
been distorted for a long time and that is one of the things that
we are trying to approach over here. I have got a number of
messages like this; there is a whole section on the website where
you probably haven't seen it yet, because it has gotten hidden
away, where people put in their comments and we collect some
more. You talked about having something like this for a press
release, but I am looking at this more as a need to have the
discussion that we are having and to make it wider. So, I will be
happy to work with you and give you that information, so you can
try to put it together in some comprehensive fashion.
Audience: I have seen some of your
own quotes and all the others [INAUDIBLE].
Max Friedman: The main road in
basically two paragraphs, well I think becomes the soul of this
meeting. I am going to jump into my shoes as a historian for a
moment because that is what the government says they pay me for,
who wants to fight one more battle for us all and it is not even
about John Kerry as a politician and I was talking to John
O’Neill for the first time, I read his original speech that
he didn’t give before Congress in 1971 and the thing was he
wanted to reclaim the honor of the Vietnam veteran that had been
besmirched in the story by Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the
War and lot of other people and this is….let us come back to
this again, we can't talk to him as yet, all right.
Quang X. Pham: Hello.
Steve Sherman: Hi. Can you hear us?
Can you hear us here?
Quang X. Pham: I can hear you.
Steve Sherman: Hi! We’ve got you
here very well. In fact, it is probably one of the better hookups
we’ve had here. I’ve got your picture up here on the
screen and I’ve given them a brief biography of your
background, but in this session here, we are really looking at
the Vietnamese point of view. I wanted to give you an opportunity
to say some of the things, particularly what you wrote in
…… the journal article or any other things you care to
comment on.
Quang X. Pham: Well, how am I coming
through?
Steve Sherman:
Very well.
Quang X. Pham: Well, good evening
from the West Coast. I wish I was there with everybody and I just
want to make sure I thank all the United States Vietnam veterans,
as well as all veterans of the Armed Forces of Vietnam present.
Thank you for your service. I believe it is an important time for
the country and I really appreciate Sherman for inviting me on
this to talk about the Vietnamese perspective on the war. The
Vietnamese perspective, just like the American perspective, is
quite diverse. It depends on who you talk to. Obviously, the
North has a perspective, the southern folks have a perspective,
those who left in ’54 and migrated South have a perspective,
those who left Vietnam before ’75 to come to United States,
France have a perspective, those who left in April of ’75
have a different perspective and those who left by boat or by the
Orderly Departure Program or by the Humanitarian Operation
Program. So let me just say that the Vietnamese perspective is
very, very wide. It is safe to say that the primary perspective
on the war as far as the media is mentioning today of what
happened 30 years ago is opposite of what most South Vietnamese
have experienced over the years.
First, I am going to explore many of the
scenes -- I won’t got into them too deeply here on the phone
-- but they are in my book which is coming out next year. Number
one, I would say, why is the perspective lacking? Why is this
Vietnamese perspective lacking as far as the expat and the South
Vietnamese perspective lacking. I would say the loser mentality
but it is because we did lose and after the ’75 a lot of
people who got out, and let you remind you that a lot of the
people who got out is less than 7% of the total population of
Vietnam, a 130,000 got out in ’75 and about 2.7 million live
outside of Vietnam now out of the 20 million or so Vietnamese in
the South in 1975. So it is not a whole lot of people. A lot of
people got out were busy with life, coming to a new country,
bringing families over, reuniting with people they haven’t
seen for a long time and it is busy. Life as a refugee, just like
life as an immigrant, could be a shock. So, for many years
Vietnamese didn’t have the time to talk about the war, not
with their kids, not with their friends and definitely not with
the American public. Secondly, the media’s portrayal of
South Vietnamese over the years has not been kind. The
perspective of that view of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam
could be summarized as three main key points. One, they were
corrupt. Two, they were inept, and three, they were unwilling to
fight. My father entered military service in 1954 along with many
South Vietnamese who were answering their call of duty. There was
a draft, at the Vietnamese Air Force, VNAF for all volunteers and
he fought that war longer than any person I know, American or
Vietnamese. He, outside of four years, like most of his peers, were
in country and served until ‘75. After ’75, they had to
pay the price at reeducation camp, then hard labor camps. Number
three, what happened after ’75? Let me back up. Point number
2 was should the US have been there in the first place? I think I
have seen the syllabus. The United States, over the years has
shown to be in Vietnam as early as the 1940s with the Flying
Tigers’ flying mission over Hanoi, that was in 1942 when I
believe the predecessor of the CIA, the OSS, was in Hanoi talking
to Ho Chi Minh back in 1945, which [inaudible] powers on
specific US opinion in the first place that obviously got someone
to question the need to be addressed. United States encouraged
support for South Vietnam a long time before Saigon fell. And
lastly, look after 1975. Over 3500 books in English have been
published in the United States about the Vietnam War. The
majority of the books ended in ’75. Well, I’ve penned
an op-ed piece in the LA Times on May 5th
which you are talking about, yeah that as an issue. Certainly, as
far as most partisan perspective and a lot of Vietnamese
concerned, the United States had abandoned South Vietnam. I would
say, well, if that is black and white as that, how much more can
you ask a country to give? United States gave South Vietnam aid
for over 20 years, sacrificed 58,235 lives, giving it over 150
billion dollars. When you compare that to what is going in Iraq
after 18 months, certainly the Iraq timeline is much more
aggressive than the Vietnam timeline ever was. After ’75,
from ’75 to ’79, the country basically shut down from
the outside world, a million in South Vietnamese soldiers,
government teachers were rounded up for reeducation camps. About
50,000 died of malnutrition, a few were executed from trying to
escape or oppose their captors. In nearby Cambodia, over two
million died in their killing fields. The Dominos didn’t
fall but the blood kept flowing and my point in the op-ed in May
was that, well, if we pulled out of Iraq, that’s fine and
dandy but all those people who retrain, all those people who
became liberated from Saddam Hussein in April of 2003. What is
going to happen to them? If you tell me or if the government
tells me, ‘we don’t care’ well, I think part of
the reason why the Vietnam syndrome lingered for so long was that
there were a lot of Americans who cared to what happened to
refugees from Vietnam, and there were a lot of prayers, a lot of
love passed to get us all over here, but that the price we paid
to get people out and we are grateful. I am definitely grateful
that my mom, my father survived the reeducation camps and we got
an opportunity, but I believe the exit strategy in Vietnam was
not well thought out and the exit strategy from Vietnam was
definitely not well thought out. I do think that Americans can
expect because of the pullout of a certain place if things
aren’t going right or they like another red policy, but
America does have a higher moral in that America should think
about the exit strategy and perhaps of the people we were trying
to help in the first place. My last point is, if we don’t
think about that, just like Vietnam, should we think about going
into any place at all? Thus, given that we are going to take care
of the troops that we sent overseas, the men and women, who were
answering the call of duty. Thank you very much for your time. I
just wanted to say once again, thank you for all the veterans who
have served our country, Vietnamese and Americans, and that you
have answered a difficult call of duty and when I look back at
what I call my 100-hour war - Operation Desert Storm, I am
humbled. My father and most of the people in Vietnam went through
a 10,000 day war and after all, before he died my father was able
to come to feet with it all and looking back and saying, ‘I
don’t want you to look back,’ I don’t look back. A
great [inaudible] when I get to see my kids and my family again.
It is those people who did make it out, the Americans, the
Vietnamese, that we should be grateful for. Thank you very much.
Steve Sherman: Thank you.
Quang X. Pham: I don’t know if
there are other speakers, but I will be glad to take some
questions now.
Steve Sherman: We are trying to get
the microphones organized. We have to get the microphones working
to get things on tape. So, here is the first question from Lee
Lanning.
Michael Lee Lanning: Yeah, hi. First
of all, thank you for your service to our country. I think it
counts no matter what war it is in and I am sure you did a great
job. My question is, tell us a little about the book that you
have written and what you are going to be focusing there. It
looks like it can be a major book, sounds looks like…it is a
Random House in print, is that correct?
Quang X. Pham: It is a Random
House in print; it has been a long journey, and the book, it is
going to be called The Passage to Peace: My father, the
Marines, and the aftermath of Vietnam. [Final Title: A
Sense of Duty] It is looking back at my father’s service
over 21 years, at his reeducation camp. It is going to be about
the great opportunity that this country gave me in terms of
freedom, citizenship and an opportunity to pursue my childhood
dream which was to serve my country. Had I been in Vietnam, I
would have followed my father’s footsteps and become a VNAF
pilot, but instead I did that here and then coming strife with
the aftermath of the war, mostly my reviewing with my father in
1992 until his passing away in 2000. My hope is that it would
shed a little more light on the aftermath of war more than what
happened during the war. Now, this is a great country, no doubt
about it. In the history of our country only two types of people
have been allowed to come in, the United States, in mass, and
that is the Vietnamese and the Cubans. No other immigrant group
or refugee group has been allowed immigrate in that large a
number and this is in the face of some congressional opposition
is that what you find primarily from the Democratic side that
didn’t want the refugees to come here.
Steve Sherman: Jon?
Quang X. Pham: Did I answer your
question, sir?
Steve Sherman: Yes, he says. Jon?
Jon Cavaiani: You are able to get
back into Vietnam now?
Quang X. Pham: I made a trip back in
’95, the day after I was discharged from active duty, I
alighted in Saigon, which was week before they celebrated the 20th
anniversary of the fall of Saigon or should I say, we, this is a
bad day for all Vietnamese overseas, but people of Vietnam call
it a Day of Liberation depending on which side of the war you
stayed on. Actually, we have no grudge with the folks overseas; I
went back in ’95.
Jon Cavaiani: I was curious. We had a
young gentleman here who was an Amerasian, who is here in America
now and he was just talking about the plight of the Amerasians
post 1975 and I was wondering if you had any input?
Quang X. Pham: Certainly. I remember
the generation kids in the refugee camps at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas,
in May of 1975 and having grown up in the United States all
through the years, sometimes kids, probably out of ignorance and
just being kids could be mean. Those kids with blue eyes and
yellow hair that were half American and half Vietnamese, Amerasian
kids, what they are called Bui Doi “the Dust of Life”.
They were victimized in the camps, but sadly when they got
Vietnamese, not the refugee camp, myself included we got to our
first destination and for myself it was Oxnard, California. Other
people went to different parts of the country. We became the odd
kids out; so we had a little taste of what it was like to be
different. I believe that United States Congress passed the
Homecoming Act in the late ‘80s, which allowed many Amerasian
kids to come over to United States. Certainly, Amerasians in Vietnam
weren’t the only ones and most of services of that area
confessed there were a number of Amerasians in the Philippines as
well, but that under a wartime condition.
Nam Pham: Hi, Quang.
Quang X. Pham: Hello.
Nam Pham: My name is Nam Pham. People
may think that we are cousins because we share the same last
name.
Quang X. Pham: Probably thought as
common as “Smith”.
Nam Pham: Yeah, but as you mentioned
earlier from a perspective of South Vietnamese, many of us
because we basically belonged to a losing side. Therefore, we may
have a different take of the war and I just wondered if you also
feel that sometimes even though the war was a losing cause, but
the cause was worth fighting for.
Quang X. Pham: That’s a great
question. I think first of all the death of the United States who
fought in Vietnam, having served as United States Marine Corps Officer,
I can say that is a myth. The United States pulled out in
’73, South Vietnamese lost. We lost our country, we lost our
culture, we had to come to the United States, but the United
States is still in existence. When they left after An Loc and a
number of operations in ’68, I can’t say that it was
defeated in the battlefield. So your question sir, the losing
mentality, if you look at what the refugees have done in this
country and I would say compared to any other immigrant American
group, there are still problems with social issues, economic
issues, and mental issues. But there have been a number of
Vietnamese whose kids have gone out and done very well in this
country and that’s a testament to the generation that fought
the war in Vietnam as well a testimonial to the great
opportunities of this country. The American Dream is still alive.
I don’t like it when people say it is not, but you got to
fight for it, you got to work for it. Doesn’t come easily.
The losing mentality, my father was very proud to have served the
Republic of Vietnam. Once again, when he came over he didn’t
blame his friends, he didn’t blame the government. He said,
‘we lost and I paid the price and I am glad I am alive, I
moved on’ and I think a lot of people that moved on on the
outside with their jobs, I think their inside now that they are,
a lot of them are retired now, they have more time to think about
what happened in ’75. They ought to be proud of their
service as well, they fought. Remember, the Vietnamese soldier
didn’t have just a 365 day-tour to countdown. For the
Vietnamese Air Force guy, at least I know that the Skyraider guys
were suffering very high casualties and as their model jokingly
became he flew and he died and that’s what happened to a lot
of my friends, my father’s friends. You couldn’t get
out of the military once you were trained and you know, some
people did, were able to go to different jobs and, you know, kept
going, didn’t come back to the States or what the Americans
that’s referred to as “the world.” So in summary,
I think Vietnamese vets should feel very proud and I think living
in Orange County, I see their pride in July 4th
parade, the South Vietnamese Armed Forces Day. They are making
some makeshift uniforms together and they are showing their
pride. I don’t believe it’s a militant type of pride.
They took the pride in their service. Win or lose, soldiers
answer the call of duty of their government and if the
governments made a mistake, at least they can look at the
Americans and say, well, you know, I answered the call and
that’s all I could do.
Steve Sherman: I went to a meeting in
Houston a while back where they were talking about the
educational system and they did a survey in Houston to find out
what qualities advanced the student, what made the student good,
and they covered everything, the economic status, the family
background and everything else and they couldn’t find any
determinate of high academic excellence except one thing which
was probably not politically correct so they probably trashed the
report. They said if you are from Vietnamese ancestry, you do
really well in the Houston schools.
Quang X. Pham: Well, I’m not a
scientist or researcher or a historian, but I can tell you that
in August of 1999, I was invited to give a keynote at the
Vietnamese Science Association which honored all the
valedictorians, Vietnamese-Americans in the Houston area; there
were about 12 of them. It was amazing to see 700 people in the
community, mainstream Vietnamese, come out and celebrate with
kids and they are doing hard work just as any kids and graduate
at the top of their class. I believe the trademark of being very
resilient is in the Vietnamese all over the world and no matter
where you are and that is part of our history, overcoming natural
disasters, floods, dominations and occupations, as well as the
Diaspora of 1975. A lot of that is to overcompensate what
happened in ’75. Certainly in my generation, when I got to
school in sixth grade in 1975, there was nothing I could do to
get my father out, there was nothing I could do to get my country
back. You know, all I could do is do the best I could in school,
pursue what I wanted and give back to the country and I believe
all of these second and third generation kids are doing the same
thing.
R. J. Del Vecchio: Hi, sorry about
the delay we are having. It was still…
Quang X. Pham: Real quick
statistics after is when I publish it before, this is in no way a
disrespect to the American veterans, but you know the number, I
know the people like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund can count
very well. The American causality number is 58,235, not counting
the people who have passed away from Agent Orange or different
causes since ’75, but that the count approximately for the
Army of the Republic of Vietnam is around 300,000. So when you go
back and look at the image of corrupt, inept and unwilling to
fight, I know of no Vietnamese Generals, Officers, Enlisted Men
[inaudible], I know from ex-generals that I speak, they worked
very hard when they got here in ’75 like everybody else. The
inept part, we trained, the United States trained, many
Vietnamese officers. My father got here in ’57. There was a
lot of training that came from the advisors and from US schools
from Ft. Bragg to Lackland Air Force Base to Hulbert Air Field.
About the willingness to fight, there’s way you can tell me
or the next generation of those 300,000 brave men just laid down
their arms. They were still fighting.
R. J. Del Vecchio: Hi. I just, I
think I’m the lone old Marine left in the group tonight
except for the speaker.
Quang X. Pham: Well, you know I am
pushing 40, so I can tell the young Iraq veterans that I am a,
you know, from the old Corps.
R. J. Del Vecchio: Anyhow, I just
wanted to say, no question. I just wanted to say congratulations.
You know, I love the fact that you got here, you survived, and
you joined the Marines and you served this country and with all
the tragedy of the whole South Vietnam situation, the one
positive thing I look at is that this country has benefited and
will continue to benefit, I believe, enormously from people like
you. Thank you.
Quang X. Pham: Well, I appreciate
that. That means I’ve asked many historians and Vietnam
experts that, well, tell me something about it. If we wanted,
could we have won in ’75, whatever that looked like, and
two, if it didn’t end in ’75 what did that mean for us?
My generation would have had to fight the war and you basically
gave me the thing that you did just now, sir, you said, you know
what? The best thing that happened is we got people from South
Vietnam that wanted freedom, wanted to work hard and you accepted
them into this country. There is no perfect story for everybody
and it wasn’t easy, but it was easier here than anywhere
else to come up I can tell you that.
Steve Sherman: I think I can speak
for the other veterans here and certainly for myself that I am
proud to have you as a fellow veteran.
Max Friedman: Steve, can I ask him a
question?
Steve Sherman: Yes.
Max Friedman: I would like to
congratulate you in honoring your father. I think it is great.
Well, did you enjoy writing the book, because I have something to
follow up on this?
Quang X. Pham: You know, the book, by
which time he got here, my father was released from reeducation
in October ’87. He didn’t get to come to the States
until May of ’92 when we had waited all our lives in the United
States for 17 years and I was headed back to the Far East and the
first Gulf in May ’92 as part of a Marine expeditionary
group, got on a ship and sailed over the Gulf again. When he came
though and he was coming and I was going, so that is the point
that was lost because I did not want not to make it back to see
my father. It was a tough journey writing the book because he was
down again and when he was alive, he started writing. He
wasn’t ready to talk yet. Once again, he wanted to move
forward and two, what you’ll learn from my book in the
Spring is that the Communism that they read out to these people,
told him it was going to be 30 days and that unlike the United
States where you have electronic records or the Marine Corps SRB,
you know Service Record Book. After ’75 if you had to
extract information of a captured Vietnamese and they basically
had to confess over and over again, so when I ask the old
American question, ‘what did you did do in the war
daddy,’ you know, he froze, because that’s what they
asked him. For whole first five years he was in reeducation, hard
labor. It was a catharsis for me to hear the things about my
father from ex-Vietnam pilots, the Danang officers, the people he
flew with, especially the enlisted men that he flew with because
my father had been an enlisted man before he went to flying
school. So it was a special time and I’ve been able to, like
he had, to let go of a lot of the emotions, a lot of hang-ups and
just grateful that I was able to at least get to know my father
for eight years. You know, thousands of Americans who lost their
father in Vietnam when they were very young, in 60s or early 70s.
Max Friedman: My follow-up is this.
You were in the Persian Gulf War. My son’s unit in Iraq, Operations
Iraqi Freedom, had Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thai or Laotians
in there and so far nobody is telling their story and I’d like
you to keep something in mind. If your book is a success and you
think that you would like to continue on with the story of the
Vietnamese contribution to American world freedom, go out and
find these people from Southeast Asia, the sons and daughters of
those who served in their country and came here and served in a
new country because it is a beautiful, beautiful story to be
told.
Quang X. Pham: I believe that duty
and honor and country transcends generation and definitely
transcends South Vietnam and United States. I can tell you that
we almost went to Paris, France, just because we had family, we
had more family in France than we did in United States; we only
had one uncle here. Had I gone to France, I probably would have
joined the Foreign Legion. I wanted to join the military. You are
absolutely right, the Vietnamese had been the focus because of
the involvement of the United States in Vietnam. The other
countries in Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Laos, and the Vietnamese
minorities, the Nungs, the Montagnards, they have been way
overlooked. It’s part of this tragedy and I do think the
book, you can go and blame the American press, you can blame the
American mainstream by not telling their stories or our story,
and you know what, the American press wrote what they saw, for
the American audience. So it is our job, the second, third
generations here, who grew up here, who are fluent in English to
write their stories to resolve that. Instead of blaming, I just
say that was an oral history, get out a tape recorder, take some
notes. One day, it will come together. It took me 6 to 9 years to
wrap this up. Many rejections, many points, where I put the book
down for a couple of years but it will get down, if you get
started on it and the main point I would tell people is your
parents, your family, they’re not getting younger. Once
they’re gone, that part of history can’t be retrieved.
Max Friedman: Good luck.
Steve Sherman: I am probably feel the
same about you about the role of the press, but we will leave
that for another discussion. Thank you for calling us today,
being with us tonight and thank you for the ….. and I look
forward to getting your book when it comes out.
Quang X. Pham: Definitely. I will
make a trip to Boston and New York so look on www.A_Passage_to_Peace.com
[ www.qxpham.com ]
and if there are any follow-up questions, you can send me an
e-mail there and I can answer to the best of my ability and thank
you again for your time.
Steve Sherman: Thanks for being with
us.
Quang X. Pham: Semper Fi.
[Applause]
Bill Laurie: Speaking of the children
of Southeast Asians in the Middle East, the first Hmong, Laotian Hmong,
was killed in an action in Iraq about three weeks ago.
Steve Sherman: We had hoped to have a
few more representatives of various communities here tonight.
That didn’t happen. It maybe a function of my failed cellphone
here because we were supposed to have a group of Montagnards
coming up from North Carolina and I have been incommunicado for
this week, but there are many other stories yet to be told. Where
we can find them and add them to the websites; we will do so.
Pham, you have any…
Nam Pham: Like Stephen said, my last
name is Pham, my first name is Nam and I am often say with my
friends that I am a Vietnamese by birth, but I truly am an
American by conviction. Now, I am trying to call myself a
Vietnamese-American and as a Vietnamese-American, I would like to
echo what Quang and Bill Laurie had expressed to you. As
Vietnamese we thank you for you fighting for our countries. And
also as an American I also would like to thank you for fighting
for our countries and seriously the reason why I feel very proud
to be an American is because I appreciate the values that we all
Americans stand for. We stand for fairness, we stand for freedom,
we stand for opportunities and Quang’s exemplary success is
basically an American story. Neither he nor I or any other
Vietnamese could have achieved what we have achieved here had we
been able to stay in Vietnam. Having said all that, I just like
to share you with some of my thoughts about Vietnam War. I
basically grew up with the war. My parents came from North
Vietnam. They basically sneaked out one by one, not together but
one by one in 1955 because they had experienced Communism
firsthand. They knew that had they stayed in North Vietnam, a lot
of terrible things would have happened to them and so we moved to
the South and we again had to leave South Vietnam because we knew
that had we stayed back in Vietnam, I would not have been allowed
to finish my education. My father certainly would disappear in
one of those infamous camps that we are talking about. Quang
mentioned that after 1975 there were more than one million South
Vietnamese people, men, women, military officers and non-military
people had been sent to those camps and many of them lost their
lives in there. As a matter of fact, when during the war one of
the fears that we had was that there would be a bloodbath after
the Communists took over and we didn’t hear about that much
after the war, but actually there was a bloodbath. Aurora
Foundation in the early 80s did an analysis officers of stories,
life story of people who escaped from Vietnam and they indeed
concluded that within the first year of the Communists taking
over the South, more than 60,000 documented South Vietnamese were
executed during that period. When I was teaching at Tessa University,
I often said that there were more people killed in Indochina
after the war than during the war. Quang mentioned that 100,000
people died in the camp. We have about 2.3 million South
Vietnamese successfully migrated to the US. About one million of
them were boat people and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
had estimated that for each Vietnamese who succeeded to reach
safety, there was at least one perished on the sea. So one
million succeeded, there were another million [who] perished in
the sea. Cambodia, the killing fields, we all know about that.
About two million Cambodians were killed after the war. If you
put into thousands of other casualties during the war between
Communist Vietnam, Communist Cambodia, Communist China, so there
were more people that got killed after the war. I used these
statistics just to make a point that I alluded to earlier. As a
little boy I grown up with war. My first experience with
Americans that I used to remember I was six years old, I was
walking along the North route. There was a GMC truck with a few
GIs in that. I was walking along with a couple of my buddy
friends, and the truck stopped and the GIs gave us candies. I was
the poor kid from a little village in a plantation, rubber
plantation. So we thought what kind of white people or black
people is this? Because the first experience we had with
Westerner was with the French and from what we learn in our
history was that they were not very kind to the Vietnamese. But
here these people who looked like those mean French gave us
candies and as I passed later on, especially now having been
living in America for the past 20 years we knew that when America
came to Vietnam, the soldiers came with very, very good
intention. You were a fighting force. You were fighting for what America
always stands for. So many of you have been back to Vietnam after
the war. When you came back, you were surprised by the fact that,
oh, how come Vietnamese were so friendly to Americans considering
that we burned them, we killed them, we shoot them, how come they
were so kind, and I think that was a puzzle for many Americans.
For us, it was no mystery. We understood, especially in the
South, we understood the reason why American came to save Vietnam.
You came with good intention, you tried to save us from
Communism. You were fighting for freedom, for democracy, for what
Americans stand for. Therefore, no problem. Also, I left Vietnam
-- let me take a step back. During the war, I also learned about
the atrocities of the other side. I was growing up in a small
village in the plantation and one day I woke up early in the
morning. Hearing my neighbors, I called my uncle and my aunty. My
aunty was crying, screaming and I ran over, I say what happened.
Her husband was assassinated at middle of the night. He was
basically 19 years old and his hands were chopped off, his ear
was cut off with…..on his chest and his cold body there was
a sheet of paper saying that this guy did not listen to
revolution, therefore this is revolutionary justice, and he did
not want to join the guerilla and therefore he was killed at
middle of the night and his body was mutilated. So growing up
with that idea, learning about America, I mean American and
hearing the story that my parents shared with us about other
types of atrocities that North Vietnamese had committed in North
Vietnam, again it is North Vietnamese. So we have no choice but
left South Vietnam when the war was ended in April of 1975. Quang
also alluded to some of the problem that the Vietnamese people
had after the war. Anyone who was associated with the American,
with South Vietnamese [Government] were either sent to the camp
directly for indefinite years into hard labor. Their families,
wife and children, were basically exiled from the city. They were
sent to what they call New Economic Zones. Their house, their
business were confiscated by the government, and even the Chinese
could not escape Communism and you know, the Chinese are very
practical and China was basically number one friend of Communist
Vietnam. But when Vietnam and China had the border skirmish,
Vietnamese expelled about 600,000 to 700,000 Chinese-Vietnamese
that created another flood of refugees and so that is the basic
thing happened to ordinary people and anyone who dared to
challenge the Vietnamese government authority since 1975 of
course would be crushed by sending to those camps, executed or
forced to flee to Cambodia. Three Sundays just past Easter, Quang
also mentioned about the Montagnard. Most Montagnard are
basically minority people in South Vietnam, they were fighting
side by side with the Green Beret, they were trained by the Green
Beret. So, of course, they had become enemy number one of the
current government. Past Easter, few months ago they peacefully
marched in the Central Highland to demand the return of their
ancestral land and also the freedom of worship. Most of them have
been baptized; they’re basically Christian, and of course
they government cursed them, beat them up, kill them. The number
of people who were killed ranging from the official count was two
and the number that were reported with names from the field
inside Vietnam were a few hundred. And just last week the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees, opened an office in Cambodia and more
than 200 Montagnard coming from the jungle from Cambodia and Thailand
to those refugee camps. So Quang also mentioned that during the
war, South Vietnamese government whose reputation was corrupted,
very dictatorial, very authoritarian, but even with today’s
standards, South Vietnamese during the war enjoyed more freedom
than any Asian countries. We got freedom of the press, freedom of
religion. My father belonged to the Rubber Plantation Union. He
was chased by the Communists every night. He was also once in a
while arrested by the police. South Vietnamese Union was the most
independent trade union in Vietnam ever, even by today’s
standards in Asia. Vietnam now, many of you come back and see
that basically compared to 20 years ago, 25 years ago might seem
to be a little better. There are many reasons for the improvement
of their life. We are here. Every year the Vietnamese-American,
-French, Vietnamese-French, you name it, send back to Vietnam
roughly three to four billion dollars and no question asked, no
string attached. So they use the money to improve their life and
also the government had to allow some small business to be
conducted. Otherwise, people would starve and they would start a
revolution. So out of necessity, they had to change the economic
policy a little bit, only but in terms of political environment it’s
a one party system. As a matter of fact, in the so called Vietnam’s
Constitution, there is an Article basically saying that the only
party that is allowed to lead Vietnam in any aspect of life is
the Communist Party. That’s why it is said that the only
party in the US could do anything is basically either the
Democratic Party or the Republican Party. It’s the only so
called Constitution that has such an Article and that Article,
Article No. 4, basically copied directly from the old Chinese
constitution 30 years ago. Even the Chinese no longer have that.
Just one last point I share with you; Vietnam War has ended for
many of us, certainly for many of South Vietnamese soldiers,
American soldiers and we, most of us, felt that we lost the war,
but actually if we continue to fight for what America always
stands for, maybe in the near future we won’t lose the war. Vietnam
will need US help for a lot of things. They will need your
support to get into WTO, they need our support to get further aid
from the World Bank, from the IMF. If our governments demand some
accountability, I only mentioned accountability not the
temporarily put aside democracy inferior than anything. We would
just demand that Vietnamese government have to be held
accountable for what we give them. We will finally win the war
because with accountability the Communists can no longer have the
monopoly of everything. They will lose their control, they will
lose their power, maybe slowly, but with the US leadership with
our pressure, freedom and democracy and opportunity, what we
Americans stand for, we will come to Vietnam in the near future
and that’s what you have fought for 30 years ago. That was Quang’s
father fought for 30 years ago, my father fought for 30 years ago
and that’s what many of us now still doing that. Thank you
very much.
[Applause]
Steve Sherman: Actually I kind of
worry that if the election goes the wrong way they might get that
Article 4 in our Constitution, and that’s a dreadful
thought. We talked earlier before about the Human Rights
Amendment and then you talked about accountability. One of the
things, however, that we really have to remember is that when the
Soviet stopped giving three billion dollars worth of aid to
Vietnam and all of the Communist nations in Eastern Europe fell
and the Communist leadership there were set up against the wall,
that didn’t happen in China and it didn’t happen in
Vietnam. Why that didn’t happen in China is probably because
the inertia in the size of China, but why it didn’t happen
in Vietnam is because my wife and a few other people were sending
that three billion dollars over to them which replaced that
Russian money. I am afraid to tell my wife she can’t do that
anymore, but if you wanted to stop it that was the place to
start. Max?
Max Friedman: Maybe Dolf taught me
this. He taught me a hell of a lot of things about Vietnamese
culture. The only election I think he said the Vietnamese view
Communism as one page of ten thousand pages of their history. I
don’t you went to the meeting in 1977. Somehow I got invited
to the formation of what they call the Lions for Democracy, the
Preservation of Democracy and Culture in Vietnam, which was the
Vietnamese exiles, especially based in Washington with American
friends. They were going to fight a new war and it wasn’t to
be a physical military war. It was to be a cultural thought war.
The idea was to preserve Vietnamese culture, customs and thoughts
in the United States so they could take those back to Vietnam and
they called this the Fourth War. In 1977, they were entering the
Fourth War for Vietnamese Freedom. I haven’t forgotten. I
haven’t given up. I don’t think anybody in this room
has given up that someday Vietnam will be free, so we encourage
new friends. You still got friends.
Steve Sherman: Well, one of the
problems that we are facing as Vietnam veterans and participants
in this conference is getting our message out and we’re
facing a pretty well established opponent. I don’t now if I
am just paranoid, but a couple of things happening this week
aside from the fact that we probably luckily didn’t get a
lot of media attention. But during the course of this week, I had
spoken to Daniel Ellsberg in the prior weeks and I knew he was
coming to Boston. I advised him to come here and join us and I
found out only at the beginning of this week that the Joyner
Center hastily set up a Vietnam Conference that took place two
hours a day on the same Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday that we are
doing our thing and Daniel Ellsberg was one of the keynote
speakers. So I suspect that we were reacted to and I also noted
the fact that this movie took place here yesterday, about the
same time we were inviting students to come into this side of the
room and maybe it is just paranoia on my part, but . . .
Special Forces helped Montagnards to buy
some land in North Carolina and we bought a pretty good spread
and we collected a fair amount of money. Some of the Americans
who were working with them were offered larger sums of money to
assist the Montagnards and they discovered where that money was
coming from was from the Vietnamese government and it was
intended to subvert the operation. Had a larger pool of money to
deploy to our country to use in changing public opinion then we
had, Special Forces had, to assist our friends in our own
country. Meanwhile, the Communists, like the Democrats, were
saying you are interfering in the internal affairs of our
country. I was talking to the American Montagnards. They are
projecting the things that they are doing on to their opponents.
In the same way, I see the Democratic Party saying Bush lies and
other such charges on their opponents when we know where the
stuff is coming from. So it is a difficult thing to fight. I
think you are right in trying to preserve the culture is the
important thing to do and these are the things we are going to do
because we’re the kind of people we are. Let’s not be
fooled into thinking that anymore than the émigrés in the Paris
cafés from the Russians, we are hoping to go back there and take
it over.
Max Friedman: Let me go back to the
message from this fellow in Houston.
Steve Sherman: Yes, his name was Houston,
I don’t think he was from Houston.
Max Friedman: I think it is Kip
Houston. Because it, it ties in with something you just said.
First of all, a little paranoia is good for you. It keeps you on
your toes. Secondly, if things, strange things, start happening
that means your enemies have recognized you as being an effective
or potentially effective force which means you keep doing what
you are doing because they are going to begin to start hurting
and the line I thought was really good. To fight one more battle
for us all and that maybe well be the most important battle of
all. In theory, that actually should be one of our slogans. Not
the call to the final battle, the most important battle and
through people like us who were not here but who have taken the
time to hook up to your website and give you support. You have
already accomplished something way beyond what you had two,
three, four weeks ago; what you had, say even yesterday. You have
the people here in this conference room committed to doing
something concrete. You got a lot of other people, your support
people out there. The Internet is your way to the world to reach
these other people. One is to get support for your project, which
you definitely need because you put up so much to do this, but
also these are people who may have something else to offer,
stories, money, other contacts. They may be teachers, they may be
writers, maybe talk show hosts or they could be on talk shows.
So, everytime you get a letter like this that’s another
soldier in your force and they want to fight this last battle and
they don’t want to lose it, they want to win.
Steve Sherman: When we came home, we
came home alone and we spent a long time -- I know I did --
before I really had any other veteran friends. It was not until
about 1987 when they had a homecoming for us in Houston that I
even knew the Special Forces Association existed. But when
I found that I was home, and it was an important step for me and
I think it is kind of important thing for all of us to have those
connections and those ties brought back to us particularly where
they are lacking and I know from what I do within the Special
Forces Association in locating lost sheep is a very, very
heartwarming thing on both parts, to reach out and find somebody
who hasn’t talked to another fellow in 30 years and well, I
could even tell him where his best buddy is and if the best buddy
didn’t die in Vietnam, that’s even better. So
there’s a lots of things we can do. I think at this note,
however, I just want to say thank you all for bearing with me
this evening and hope to see you tomorrow morning and I want you
to invite you to share Jon Cavaiani and mine mutual birthday.
There is some cake over here Jon, may I offer it?
Jon Cavaiani: I already had a piece.
Steve Sherman: No, I was offering it
on our behalf to others here.
Jon Cavaiani: Oh yeah.
Steve Sherman: All right and to thank
our beneficiaries for providing that. So it’s not only me
and Jon, but it’s also the birthday of penicillin and the
same year too. All the same year.
Participant: Not coincidental either.
Steve Sherman: Not coincidental. They
knew we would need it sooner or later.
Logan Fitch: I am going to depart
from the program and this is something I had hoped and expected
to do in the morning, but I know a lot of people are taking off
and I promise I will be brief and I really will. This has
nothing, but has something to do with this meeting, but it is a
personal plea from me to you and what I want to ask you to do,
well let me tell you that. One of the things Steve asked me to do
in the conference is sort of be the liaison to the press,
although we haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of press, but
I did that and I went on radio talk shows over the last couple of
days and with some other folks and what I have found is that we
don’t have a whole lot of media access and the access that
we do have is primarily thinking along the same lines that we
are, therefore sort of preaching to the choir you might say. What
I want to ask you, everyone to do is make an effort to fight that
last battle and when I am talking, I don’t know what this
gentleman is talking about, but I don’t know what I am
talking about when I am talking about the last battle. I am
talking about this Presidential election, which I believe has
such profound implications for our country and for the world. I
mean, it sounds dramatic and it is, but I honestly personally
believe that. We have stature. We are veterans and lo and behold
it is sort of popular to be a veteran again. We are pretty well educated,
some of us are very well educated. We’re successful and we
can make a difference. How can we do that? Any number of ways.
Speak to the Rotary Club, write a letter to the editor of the
newspaper, call into a talk show, if you have powerful and
influential friends beyond yourself ask them if you can get a
forum. Again, I have no basis or no official standing to ask you
to do this, but I just wanted to express my feelings and how
important I believe it is and ask for your help and your support
to get out there and make a difference because I honestly believe
that if John Kerry wins this election, he will have validated
everything he said back in the 70s and we will have lost that
last battle. Thank you for your time.
Jon Cavaiani: I’d just like to
say I am also leaving in the morning and I want to thank you guys
for everything that you guys are doing. I have been remiss in the
past other than the fact that I go out to speak to colleges and
universities about Vietnam. But other than that I’ve been
remiss in getting involved. I can do that as Jon Cavaiani. I
can’t do that as a recipient of the Medal of Honor. That can
be mentioned, yes, I have it, but it’s Jon Cavaiani that has
to get up and talk and it’s Jon Cavaiani every morning when
I look in the ugly mirror. So, I wanna say thank you for what
you’ve done and the input that all of you’ve provided
as well as if I can be of any help, Jon Cavaiani will help. Just
please contact me and if I can do something for you or if
there’s something that I can do for the group and for our
ultimate hopefully victory at the polls so be it. God bless you
and thank you very much.
Steve Sherman: See you back here and
early at 8:30 tomorrow morning and ready for the next half day of
slave labor.
-----------
------------- 