Dateline Yorba Linda – Last Friday night the Vietnam War Returned Prisoners Of War (RPW) gathered at the Nixon Library for the 40th anniversary of our 1973 dinner at the White House. Ross Perot was there. Once again we honored the man who, in the midst of the maelstrom of war, took his own money and fought that we would not be but a forgotten footnote in a tough war.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger addressed us via video, and our most decorated member, Col. Bud Day (Medal Of Honor, Air Force Cross) spoke to us from his sick bed. There was one common theme, that the much-maligned President Nixon kept up the fire. In 1972, he took the war to the communist home place. He let them and their citizens know that the terror they rained on South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was not a one-way street. You who teach about our war on the campuses may wish to consider what we who were there have always known:
We were not freed by negotiation, but by a stalwart leader who simply said “enough.” We were alive Friday night to come together because our cage doors in the jungle and cell doors in Hanoi were blown open by B-52 bombers over
Hanoi and Haiphong.
Among us was our only Vietnamese pilot Dat, shot down as a young lad over North Vietnam. After his release, he had to flee his country when that sitting Congress in America cut off the funds and spelled the doom of the Republic of Vietnam.
We thank God that his suffering finally ended. He got to America after he and his countrymen were deserted by smirking politicians and too many in the media here in their darkest hour.
Col. Bob Barnett, who rode down the streets of Hawthorne with me after our return in 1973 with our wives, Anita and Carole, both now gone to be with God.
I sat with Col. John Fer from San Pedro, and next to me, on the other side, was the only POW shot down and captured during the Vietnam War by China. Col. Terry Uyeyama, a Japanese- American POW, held in Hanoi with the others, once again joined me in our mutual admiration society. This truly speaks to what a great country we have, made up of all men.
What came to my mind as I looked upon my valiant brethren: “What truly great, great men of honor I am privileged to sit among.”
I took my Vietnamese student Chi Chiem with me because after coming here as a high schooler, she graduated from Long Beach State last Thursday. She will go on to achieve a masters degree in linguistics. She is here on a student visa, but has become so American in her love of this country and the freedoms here that I will not allow her to once again return to the slavery of communism.
All of these men who suffered so much at the hands of people who looked like Dat and Chi, showed themselves to still be men of honor. They embraced both of them. That speaks well of my fellow POWs, and it speaks well of an America that I sometimes wonder if it still exists.
Make no mistake: It still existed last Friday at the Nixon Library.
I tip my soiled old, and now threadbare, Green Beret to my fellow RPWs and to President Nixon who blew off our cage and cell doors by simply refusing to quit.
Some of our citizens today may wish to remember that as the whining reaches a tremendous crescendo in a much less costly war in which we were directly attacked.
As long as we, who truly knew our enemy in Vietnam, live, do not tell us that quitting is alright.
Among us is a man named Dat. He suffered in the gulag beside us and then had to flee the country we suffered to preserve.
Why? Because too many of our fellow citizens have a strange malady called “quitting fever,” which not one of the men in Yorba Linda suffers from.
Maj. Smith,USA, Ret.,Returned American POW, Vietnam/Cambodia, may be contacted at majorzippo@yahoo.com
