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Gadfly or Hero? Former Pilot Fights On Against Vietnam
The New York Times ^ | November 25, 2006 | SETH MYDANS

Posted on 11/26/2006 2:09:48 PM PST by jason1998

SOME old soldiers don’t even fade away. They keep on fighting, trapped in their own past as the world around them changes, ghosts of a long-dead war.

“I have the duty to liberate my country!” shouted Ly Tong, wearing bright yellow prison pajamas, through a double screen of wire mesh at Bangkok’s central jail.

“The only thing that matters is, the Communists still control my country,” he shouted over the hubbub in the caged visiting area recently. “I’m a pilot. This is what I can do.”

His country is Vietnam and the Communists have controlled it since 1975, when they defeated the South Vietnamese Army, for which Mr. Tong fought, along with its American allies.

But time has moved on, and President Bush was just in Hanoi, shaking hands and praising the government’s great capitalist strides forward.

Mr. Tong, 62, who emigrated to America and became an American citizen in the 1980s, could only watch in frustration from his Thai jail cell.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: freedom; ly; tong; vietnam

1 posted on 11/26/2006 2:09:53 PM PST by jason1998
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To: jason1998; killjoy

Killjoy -- Reckon there's anything we Thailand hands can do to help this fellow aviator out in prison -- and to get home to America?? If we can, I'm a starter.

BUMPping


2 posted on 11/26/2006 2:48:35 PM PST by Brian Allen ("Moral issues are always terribly complex, for someone without principles." - G K Chesterton)
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To: JimSEA

ping


3 posted on 11/26/2006 2:51:56 PM PST by Brian Allen ("Moral issues are always terribly complex, for someone without principles." - G K Chesterton)
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To: jason1998
Here's yesterdays version
4 posted on 11/26/2006 3:10:11 PM PST by ASA Vet (The WOT should have been over on 9/12/01.)
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