One thing that I think could have been explored was that this is not unique to U.S. vets, but also to Australian and NZ vets. Also, it's not so cut and dry as the article makes it seem. For example, it doesn't talk about what happened to the South Vietnamese soldiers after the war, or how they're relegated to driving cyclos or xe om as their citizenship was stripped and so they cannot lawfully hold jobs. Another example are the war babies, the half-Viet, half-American or half-Australian subclass of people who are generally looked down upon. The other subclass of course, are the overseas Vietnamese (Việt Kiều), or those who were able to flee Vietnam to the refugee camps in the Philippines before heading to the U.S. I think that the overseas Vietnamese are worth mentioning, because a lot of the foreign investment in certain industries is driven by them.

It also does not talk about how the Vietnam War (American War) was one war toward the end of a series of wars that were continuously fought, beginning with the Vietnamese against the French in the earlier part of the century and finally ending with the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to topple the Khmer Rouge. It would have been interesting to get more perspective on why the Viet government downplays that string of wars within the country and has actively encouraged an oversimplified view of that period within the educational system, while making military training courses in school mandatory. In fact, this desire to control a certain view of those wars and the American war is so great that when I lived there, any time that a program related to Vietnam was scheduled, that TV station would cut out for the duration of the program, nation wide.

What I think this article gets wrong, is that the Vietnamese have simply forgiven the veterans. I also think that it presents the people in an oversimplified way. There are still a lot of tensions between North and South and the Central highlands, as well as the Mekong region, not to mention the many ethnic minorities (including the Khmer). From what I have seen, the government in power has done a great job of making sure that the details of the American War are all but forgotten.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the country as the new subclass of half-Vietnamese emerge. They are much more accepted into society than the half-Vietnamese children of the war years, but they are also marked as being somewhat different than "real" Vietnamese and they are often afforded better opportunities to study at international schools and eventually universities abroad, two things which Vietnamese parents have become very interested in. The war that really seems on the minds of many Vietnamese is the potential war that could erupt between Vietnam and China, with which Vietnam has had a strained relationship with for most of their history.

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.

Excellent read.