From reporter Philip Caputo, who most recently wrote about the carnage at Kent State and who — in Means of Escape, the book I hold in my lap — wrote about his emotional return to Saigon to report its fall to the Vietcong, more than a decade after he’d left Vietnam as a soldier:
Impossible to look at all those small bodies, burnt and dismembered in the paddy mud, and not go numb. The only thing I felt was a dull anger. The U.S. Defense Attache’s Office, which was organizing the evacuation of the orphans, had more flights planned. The operation had been dubbed a “mission of mercy” and the aircraft were called “mercy planes,” but the real purpose of the flights was to provide a cover for evacuating Americans. Forty-three of DAO’s female employees had been aboard the C5-A that had unmercifully crashed, and half of them had been killed. After touring the crash site, I went to the DAO compound to gather the necessary statistics. It was in “Pentagon East,” the big brick building — it reminded me of an enormous high school–that had been Westmoreland’s headquarters. I got the numbers and then began to ask a few impertinent questions of a woman with the prickly, defensive manner of a midlevel bureaucrat, a GS-10, say. Where were these kids being flown to? To a processing center in the United States, to wait there for American families to adopt them. Why had we waited until now to evacuate them? She looked at me as if I were mad. The Communists were overrunning the country, orphanages had been abandoned. But, Madame, do we suppose the Communists are incapable of caring for orphans? The fact is, aren’t we using these kids as a way of getting our nonessential personnel out of the country without alarming the South Vietnamese? … more below
I filed a hard-news piece: no anger, no horror, just the straight stuff: SAIGON–At least 199 persons, most of them orphans between eight months and 12 years old, died Friday when…
Profitt had the right take on the mercy mission.
“It’s a goddamned government-sponsored kidnapping..” …
Nothing good.
It reminded me of the self-reverential attitude of the Bush administration and, frankly, too many Americans who think that they need to save the rest of the world from itself.
I don’t know what to think about this, really. My best friend (we have been close friends for nearly 20 years now) was one of those orphans (obviously, in one of the planes that didn’t crash). His story was especially unusual and poignant: Ngyuen (sic; I have told him I think he’s spelling it wrong, but it’s his name) and his mother were Cambodian, and had escaped the Khmer Rouge when he was little (but old enough to remember) by fleeing to Saigon.
His mother got a job in an orphanage. When Saigon was about to fall, she made an agonising choice. She took her seven year old son, and an orphan named Loi, into a dark room and switched the orphan’s medical-style bracelet onto Ngyuen’s hand, and told him he had to answer to “Loi” from then on. She then sent him on the airlift, and he has never seen her again.
In the U.S., he was adopted by a single mother who lived in small town southern Minnesota. He was the only one of his people in the area, and so he gradually lost his native language. (In my college linguistics class, it was stated that native languages can only be learned the first five years of life, so he only speaks a “second language”, and he does have a slight accent.)
He grew to accept this white Minnesotan as his mother, and became “Americanised”. But then she married a man who was racist, and more than that, just exemplified the “bad stepdad”. He eventually persuaded Ngyuen’s adopted mother to abandon him and move to Texas with him. Ngyuen became a ward of the state and lived in foster homes until he graduated from high school.
The FBI did come around a few years after Ngyuen was adopted, and determined that he had been naturalised under false pretenses, but did not deport him or anything. He re-adopted his given name only in his mid-twenties, after I had known him as “Loi” for some time. This was in part due to a brief contact he had managed to make (through charitable organisations) with his mother before they lost touch again (and sadly, he lost photos of her in the process of moving a couple years ago).
Now, on the one hand I think his story could reinforce your point. He has clearly carried a huge void inside him as a result of being torn away from his birth mother, and of course what then happened to him in Minnesota…I can only begin to guess how that hurt.
But I’m sure glad he’s here.
-Alan
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Wow is right.
In 1975 I was doing summer daycare at the local YMCA, and a 15-year-old Vietnamese boy was assigned to me as an “aide”. His story of fleeing Vietnam by sea, Thai pirates, refugee camps in the Phillipines, separation from family members, etc., convinced me that Voltaire’s Candide was much less fanciful than I had previously thought.
I also remember going to see ‘The Killing Fields’ at a matinee showing. I was late, and the theater was dark when I found a seat. At the end, the lights came up and I discovered that the whole place was filled with Cambodian refugees.
The Pentagon dweebs and the think-tank pinheads make all these geopolitical calculations, and every time it’s the little people who suffer. Every time.
Hard work upholding the white man’s burden, I guess. And, if some kids die in the process, well better dead than red, I guess. What it makes me think of is the endless apologia for blowing Iraqi women, children, and the elderly to bits, to liberate them. We have freed a lot of Iraqi children from their limbs, and their heads. Messy business spreading democracy at the tip of the gun. The hubris! The hubris, that we think it’s up to us to decide what is best for every other country in the world.
And what kills me, what kills me, is that a lot of the same people who champion the cause of liberating people all over the world from their respective straits, will look at our own ghettos and inner cities, our own countrymen, and say, well, they need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. You’d think the cognitive dissonance would cause their heads to explode.
You would hope that it would, yet they just keep mouthing the same shit over and over and over again. The poor of American, the downtrodden of America, have only themselves to blame. They are just lazy and want the government to take our hard earned money so they can drive caddies, watch big screen tv and collect their monthly welfare checks. Cognitive dissonance my ass, these people are so out of touch with reality that they make GW look like a stateman.