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The link I provided summed it up pretty well also.

I have always had a soft spot in me for South Vietnamese who served with us, and have always felt it was a black mark to have left so many behind who I felt we should have helped escape.

So you can imagine how I felt when we ran from Afghanistan, but in those cases, we even supplied the Taliban with lists of who worked with us.

Shameful. Granted, the South Vietnamese we brought here weren’t likely to become instant Jihadis so it was different, but how tough would it have been to find out who the people were on those lists we gave to the Taliban, and get validation of whether they should be extracted before we ran away, but...heck...we left our OWN citizens over there.

What a Charlie Foxtrot, combined with malice and a desire by the Biden Administration to see America laid low.

But, as I said, I think we should have treated those people better who took a chance and worked with us.

I knew a Vietnamese immigrant who worked on machinery for us a few years back, and I had a difficult relationship with him.

He was extremely difficult and obstreperous, and I grew to dislike him. He was difficult to understand, stubborn, and refused to work with you to resolve issues. I would even avoid talking to him if I could.

Then, I was forced to work with him closely for several days in a row where we had to spend many long hours in waiting and observation, so I asked him where he was from and when he came to America.

He said he was Vietnamese, and had been a junior ARVN officer when Vietnam fell. He came to America in 1979, and when I asked what he did between the fall of Vietnam and his immigration to America, he said that he had been in a “re-education” camp in the jungle up until 1978.

I asked if they had finally released him and allowed him to emigrate, and he said no...he had escaped the camp and made his way to the coast, stolen a boat and made it out to sea where he was rescued after a few weeks, then ended up in Australia for some reason. After a little while there, he came to America. (This was quite a few years back, so I can’t remember his exact words)

I was stunned. All the time I knew this guy, I knew nothing about him or his past, and resolved to never take for granted what a person may be or where they had come from.

But the thing that I will never forget, when I asked him what it had been like in the re-education camp, he didn’t say anything. He just got a very far away look in his eyes, and said almost inaudibly “The things we had to do...” and said no more.

It reminded me of a college history professor, a somewhat elderly gentleman who was telling us one day in class about having kidney stones, which is an odd subject to discuss with a class. Years later, after I went through several months of acute and painful kidney stones, I understood completely (I had to command myself to shut up about them, even to my poor wife) and I remembered that “far away” look the professor got in his eyes when he was talking about it.

It was clear the professor was far away too at that point, and I recall thinking “Holy crap. Whatever kidney stones are like, I don’t want them because they must really suck!”

That was the exact same look the Vietnamese guy had in his eyes when he said those words “The things we had to do...”