I work with homeless and at-risk veterans. One of our clients has the inverse story to this, but it's fascinating and amazing and nearly unbelievable, and probably worth posting considering its vague relevancy to this article.

He was deployed to Vietnam in a combat role. Near the end of his tour, he received word that his brother had been drafted and was soon to be deployed. This man sent word up his chain of command that he would stay a second year in country so long as his brother did not have to deploy. They accepted these terms... an act that would be unheard of today. A drafted military perceived these situations much differently.

He completed his second tour, but only barely. Two purple hearts later, he headed back to Saigon in preparation to go backs to the states, exit the military, and return civilian life. In another unheard of act, he was discharged while in Saigon. His required time in service had been met during his second year of deployment, and they exited him ASAP. As was common for servicemen in their off time, he spent quite a lot of time at the brothels. He got one of them pregnant.

He is the type of man who wouldn't look at the life growing in this prostitute as anything other than his son or daughter, and felt compelled to raise it rather than abandon it. So he stayed in Vietnam. The war ended, Saigon fell, and he used what money he had earned killing the Vietnamese to make a life next to them. With the help of his newly-wedded wife's family, he came into a decently large property and tried to settle down as well as he could.

Over the next few years, he lived in a constant state of paranoia. He stayed as hidden as was possible, and fortunately his in-laws did what they could to aid them. He and his wife would go on to have 4 more children. After some time, most locals knew that he was there, and things were very tense. The government came to know he was there, and did what they could to take away his land and force him out of the country. They succeeded in taking much of it, but he and his family still had enough to live comfortably.

The tension reached a boiling point and he had to flee to the Philippines. He left his family in Vietnam and tried to survive as a fisherman in there, sending money back when he could. Eventually, he was driven out of the Philippines as well and had himself smuggled back into Vietnam. Things had cooled down there significantly, and he considered his threat level relatively minimal at this point. For the next two decades, he worked as a fisherman in Vietnam.

In total he spent 37 years between the Philippines and Vietnam, mostly in Vietnam. During this time, he organized sending half-Vietnamese to the States to avoid persecution. He doesn't know how many, but estimates in the hundreds.

As you can imagine, these are mere cliff notes that cannot contain everything that occurred in those 37 years. His story is truly amazing, and his views of the Vietnam War itself should be heard. Having lived through the Vietnamese side of the turmoil that took place for years after the war ended has shaped his American perspective of it significantly.

Unfortunately, he came back to the United States during the recession and has really been struggling to adapt to the culture shock and to the current economic state of the US. He's living in poverty, but the Vietnamese communities are helping his family out as well as they can. He's trying to have his family immigrate with him, but so far only his wife and one child are here. We're hoping to have the LA Times pick up his story.