Posted on 07/04/2007 2:20:49 PM PDT by Lorianne
Many who read this were born and raised in the United States. Native patriotism, embedded from early childhood experiences of flag and fireworks, parades and anthems, is a home-bred version. It resides deeply and passionately but even today on July 4, for many patriotism is an expression of gratitude shaped by birthright, not by choice.
There are exceptions. For instance, this account of a Lee's Summit man's bravery, wisdom and resourcefulness...a man who saw America fundamentally for its abundant opportunity at a time when most Americans could only see their country's flaws - a man whose gratitude burned so fervently that he not only chose America, but he gifted to his new home what was most precious to him.
Partly from a desire for personal privacy and because his own culture dignifies modesty, he requested anonymity for himself and his family. Their names are pseudonyms.
Ben Vua took a phone call that sent a bolt up his spine. The message was delivered calmly but emphatically: "You had better get home and get your family or you may never see them again."
Home was Saigon, and Ben Vua, a 45-year-old colonel in the South Vietnamese armed forces, was training at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, several thousand miles away. It was April, 1975 and his family - wife, Thien Su, their six children and his father - resided in the outskirts of the South Vietnamese capital. The message's urgency was grounded in political and military realities. The U.S. government's policy of vacating its personnel from South Vietnam was on the fast track. Saigon's fall to the communist Vietnamese People's Army could be measured in days.
Ben Vua accepted the news with grave concern but, rooted in military discipline, he did not panic. Suddenly, he had a new mission, one without military objectives - to save his family, who faced an ominous fate at the hands of a communist regime, against which he had soldiered for 20 years. Quickly he requested and received leave. Somehow, he would get home. He also pushed aside another grim reality. If he returned and did not escape, his certain capture would result in either countless years of brutal imprisonment or execution. When he arrived at the San Diego airport, Ben Vua found a deteriorating situation. Commercial flights to Saigon were cancelling all over the place and the few remaining were booked tight. He waited for hours, hoping somehow that a standby seat would open up. Late that day, when the last scheduled flight lifted off, Ben Vua was not on it. But a ticket agent gave him hope. It was possible, if he was willing to wait, that another flight might schedule. The seemingly impossible became real. At 4 a.m. the next day, a flight took off and Ben Vua was on it, headed west in the pre-dawn darkness over the Pacific.
Although only half the seats were occupied and the passengers were quiet, Ben Vua could not sleep. His mind was galloping. With Saigon in chaos, he had logistics to think about, such as how to get home and find air transport out of the country - quickly. As the jet engines droned on during the 12-hour flight, he also found himself remembering.
Ben Vua remembered back to 1949, as a 21-year-old fighting against the French for a then-unified Vietnam. He was captured and spent weeks in a crude French military prison. Released, he returned to school. After the French defeat in 1954, Vietnam was split into North and South. Ben Vua's home was in Hanoi in the communist north and he recalled the bleak and sterile communist viewpoint that made human life so conditional. He found the raw cruelty of Ho Chi Minh's Workers Party intolerable and he and Thien Su joined some 900,000 others who fled the North for the South. Ben Vua recalled his strong sense of purpose in joining the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the South. So many were the campaigns and battles that he could no longer count them all as he fought a war of resistance against the communist insurgency for 20 years of what became known as the Vietnam War. He could reach down inside his sock and feel the hollow place where a bullet almost cost him his left foot.
He thought fondly of Thien Su. When they were young and just weeks into their marriage, they had been refugees from North Vietnam. He remembers smiling to himself thinking of their six children - ages 12 to 20 at that time. He recalled their lives together in South Vietnam where, by necessity of wartime service, he regrettably spent much of his time away from them.
His thoughts took him back to his childhood in Hanoi and a particularly poignant memory of his grandmother. He was quite small and sitting with her when she handed him a chopstick and asked him to identify it. He thought it was a game and exclaimed, "It's a chopstick!" She said, "Break it in two." With little effort he was able to do so. Then she said, "It is not a chopstick. It is you." That puzzled Ben Vua, of course. Then she gave him three chopsticks to hold together and said, "Break them in two."
He took the ends into his two small hands and trying very hard, was unable to break them apart. His grandmother said, "Those three, they are your family. Together you are strong and cannot be broken." He never forgot that.
The inevitable fall of the South to communism was, he thought, a bitter pill to swallow. But now there was only one acceptable outcome left - get his family off Vietnamese soil. Their future and his, he considered, was now dependent on a successful repatriation to a giant, sprawling country far across the ocean to the east - the United States. During the flight Ben Vua was visited by an American man who engaged him in conversation. The man was on a mission for the U.S. government and found the prospect of Ben Vua's position, knowledge and resources intriguing. The American needed two things: transportation and information about how to navigate his way in and around Saigon. Ben Vua possessed both - his military jeep and a driver who had intimate familiarity with the city. In return, the American could get Ben Vua access to U.S. military air transport out of Vietnam.
On the ground in Saigon, the two men encountered a city under siege, surrounded by the Viet Cong, who were shelling the capital. The streets were teeming with inhabitants, enduring bedlam or trying to get out. Reaching Ben Vua's home, they were true to each other's word. Ben Vua provided the jeep and driver and the next morning the American gave Ben Vua an affidavit that would get his family on U.S. air transport out of Saigon - in just four hours. The two men never saw each other again.
Ben Vua huddled with his family and told them that time was a critical commodity. They could gather a few things, but would leave essentially with the clothes on their backs. Thien Su was concerned about money. Ben Vua remembers telling her, "Our money is useless. We have our heads and our hands. We can always make more money." But there was a problem. The affidavit provided for eight passengers. Ben Vua, Thien Su and the six children made eight, but Ben Vua fully intended for his father to go as well.
The airport was frantic and nearing anarchy. Holding on to each other they made their way to the giant C30 cargo plane. It was an obvious choice for Ben Vua to make but an anguishing one for his family to accept. He would stay and his father would go.
Ben Vua embraced each of them before they hurried up the ramp into the crowded fuselage, assuring them he would rejoin them again. But the peril he faced staying behind was not lost on any of them. Just before the cargo hold was closed, the pilot asked Ben Vua why he had not boarded. Ben Vua explained that the affidavit called for eight only and he would need to stay behind. The pilot shrugged and told him to get on the plane.
The big green transport took off - destination, Guam - and climbed in a very tight spiral over Saigon gaining sufficient altitude to avoid Viet Cong surface to air missiles, ringing the city's perimeter.
The family spent four months on the tiny Pacific island, getting acclimated to an eventual transition to the United States and Ben Vua had an important decision to make. Once stateside, where would they settle? After years of divisive dissention about the war and then its final calamity, America had a bruised ego and was collectively in a foul mood. Under the circumstances, it would have been easy to settle on the west coast and congeal into an Asian subculture. Many Vietnamese refugees would do just that. But Ben Vua wanted to give his children the best opportunity to succeed - as Americans.
Ben Vua had spent time training at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He often visited the fort's library and read The Kansas City Star. One article, he recalled, lavished considerable praise on a school district southeast of Kansas City. Armed with that recollection, Ben Vua explained to Thien Su his desire to move the family to a little city in the Midwest he had never been to before - Lee's Summit, Mo.
In 1975, there were barely 20,000 people living in Lee's Summit. It was a homogeneous, white community with Middle American values - and some prejudices. The idea of "minority," however, was a reality for which Ben Vua had neither time nor energy. Once in Lee's Summit, he and Thien Su placed the kids in public schools and he vigorously worked two and even three jobs. Thien Su worked a night shift at a nearby manufacturing plant.
It took some time to overcome language and cultural barriers, but the family found its rudder. There were tears and multiple challenges, but through it all, Ben Vua remained resolute and never wavered. The family settled quietly into the community. As the children advanced through school and achieved, Ben Vua and Thien Su bought a suburban home.
All six children are now raised and married - nurses, a dentist, a publisher, an accountant and an executive. Ben Vua and Thien Su are grandparents to five and two of them have entered college. Ben Vua and Thien Su are now retired, living tranquilly and enjoying the company of their adult children and their American-born grandkids. Ben Vua, like most Vietnamese, is slight of build, as unassuming as anyone can be, and courteous almost to a fault. He has a practice of making eye contact with whomever he meets and engagingly smiles easily and warmly. There is also a quiet gallantry about him and a serenity born of a knowing that one has achieved a dream.
Ben Vua recounted this story, not with flair and certainly not for recognition. He had something to communicate about his gratitude and love for the United States.
He was a patriot even before he found his home in America. The Vietnam War, a conflict still so sensitive in the American psyche, for Ben Vua was worthy of the effort. For Ben Vua it was a struggle for his homeland and for his children's future. The threatening communist formula was so dismally bleak that to prevent it, he risked his life countless times. As he led his countrymen, he was keenly aware they were not fighting alone. He was awed that a far away nation so affluent and immense would send its young to his little country and join in that struggle. For Ben Vua those Americans who died, who were maimed - those who risked it all - did so, not for a geo-political outcome, but for his children. In those days spent in Guam, with a new future to create for himself, his beloved wife and children, that future had a context beyond their own personal success. Ben Vua would spend his remaining life repaying a profoundly deep debt of gratitude.
So, Ben Vua gifted to his new nation what he would never be able to do for his birth land. He kept a promise he made to himself to give his new home the best of himself - his children. Those six productive, contributing Americans who love their country, understand as deeply as any native born citizen what the founders of the United States conceived in the Declaration of Independence.
So far, of their 4 sons, two are serving in the Army, one in Hawaii and the other just completed a tour in Iraq.
Between the time we abandoned them as a country and the time she escaped, she simply refers to as “the bad time.”
I wish some of the staunch opposers to this war and demanding we up and leave Iraq or Afghanistan would seek out some of these Vietnamese and ask them about after we left. Then, imagine a fate ten times worse for the Iraqi’s and Afghani’s, as well as seeing leaving now will just postpone the inevitable for a while.
Like it or not, they are fighting us, whether we cut and run again or not.
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After Sen. TED KENNEDY fooled a post-WATERGATE Congress into cutting off all our funding for the then Free South Vietnamese people to fight for their own Freedom with,
...with the full Anti-Freedom backing of:
HILLARY Diane RODHAM
WILLIAM Jeffreson CLINTON
JOHN KERRY
JANE FONDA
TOM HAYDEN
RAMSEY CLARK, etc
came:
Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education (SLAVE LABOR) Camp
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts
http://www.JourneyFromTheFall.com
.
What Price for the still Free (that’s US) to pay now with this Anti-Freedom Gang pushing hard to do the same thing again to the Free Iraqi people this time around..?
As they aim to re-occupy our Oval Office...
in a new time of war
in a new century
with our own Freedom
directly at stake
...right here at home..?
12 Million suddenly missing Iraqi purple voting fingers on our TV screens for starters..?
BET on it.
.
NEVER FORGET
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