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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Long Read: “Legacies of War”

Long Read: “Legacies of War”

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The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. Annie Gowan and Linda Davidson, in the Washington Post, report that “Forty years after the fall of Saigon, soldiers’ children are still left behind“:

… When the last U.S. military personnel fled Saigon on April 29 and 30, 1975, they left behind a country scarred by war, a people uncertain about their future and thousands of their own children. These children — some half-black, some half-white — came from liaisons with bar girls, “hooch” maids, laundry workers and the laborers who filled sandbags that protected American bases.

They are approaching middle age with stories as complicated as the two countries that gave them life. Growing up with the face of the enemy, they were spat on, ridiculed, beaten. They were abandoned, given away to relatives or sold as cheap labor. The families that kept them often had to hide them or shear off their telltale blond or curly locks. Some were sent to reeducation or work camps, or ended up homeless and living on the streets.

They were called “bui doi,” which means “the dust of life.”

Forty years later, hundreds remain in Vietnam, too poor or without proof to qualify for the program created by the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 that resettles the children of American soldiers in the United States.

Now, an Amerasian group has launched a last-chance effort to reunite fathers and children with a new DNA database on a family heritage Web site. Those left behind have scant information about their GI dads — papers and photographs were burned as the Communist regime took hold, and memories faded. So positive DNA tests are their only hope…

The pictures are as astonishing, and heartbreaking, as the stories.

Reader Interactions

21Comments

  1. 1.

    Lee Rudolph

    came from liaisons

    What fraction of those “liasons” would more correctly be called “rapes”? Surely not zero.

  3. 3.

    gbear

    I was surprised to hear this story this morning and realize that it wasn’t until 1975 that we finally got out of there. It seemed like it was over long before then. I graduated from high school in 1972 and had a draft card, but my lottery number was in the 150s and I knew there was no way I was going to get drafted.

  4. 4.

    Chris

    @Lee Rudolph:

    I remember reading something a long time ago about the number of rape allegations in re American troops on the western front of WW2. As I recall, it was substantial, with very few investigations.

    If that’s the U. S. Army with populations they were liberating, I imagine the record with populations that guerrilla warfare had taught them to see as enemies must be… not good.

  5. 5.

    Cervantes

    @gbear:

    I was surprised to hear this story this morning and realize that it wasn’t until 1975 that we finally got out of there.

    US forces stopped fighting, more or less, in ’73. The Vietnamese kept fighting each other until Saigon fell in ’75.

  6. 6.

    gwangung

    @Lee Rudolph: yes. But musicals like MISS SAIGON don’t help, romanticizing a subject that’s darker than many people care to think about.

  7. 7.

    PhoenixRising

    @Cervantes: Yeah, obv this is celebrated in Viet Nam as ‘Reunification Day’, with parades, dances, etc.

    It’s not so celebrated in Cambodia, where the start of the revolution included the wholesale slaughter of everyone who had fought for the US-backed government during 5 years of civil war–that ended by May 1, out of respect for the holiday of workers.

    The Khmer Rouge really were nuts, but they were logically consistent.

  10. 10.

    raven

    Hines Ward, Superbowl MVP is half African-American half Korean:

    In 2006 Ward became the first Korean American to win the Super Bowl MVP award. This achievement threw him into the spotlight of media in South Korea.[27]

    From April 3 through May 30, 2006, Ward returned to his birthplace of Seoul for the first time since his parents moved to the United States when he was one year old. Ward used his celebrity status to arrange “hope-sharing” meetings with multiracial Korean children and to encourage social and political reform. At one hope-sharing meeting, he told a group of children, “If the country can accept me for who I am and accept me for being a Korean, I’m pretty sure that this country can change and accept you for who you are.”[27] On his final day in Korea, he donated $1 million USD to create the Hines Ward Helping Hands Foundation, which the AP called “a foundation to help mixed-race children like himself in South Korea, where they have suffered discrimination.”[28]

    In January 2007 former Steeler and Pro Football Hall of Fame member, Franco Harris, owner of R Super Foods, honored Ward for his philanthropic efforts by featuring Ward’s picture and story on boxes of Super Buns. Like Ward, Harris also won a Super Bowl MVP award (in Super Bowl IX), and also is biracial, being of African American and Italian American parentage.

    In September 2010, President Barack Obama, appointed Ward as a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.[29]

    There is not much difference in the treatment of these offspring, if anything it it worse because our involvement in Korea has been much longer than it was in Vietnam.

  13. 13.

    Mike in NC

    After the unfortunate experiences in Korea and Vietnam, with hundreds of unwanted children, American soldiers were kept at arm’s length from fraternizing with civilians in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

  14. 14.

    John Revolta

    @Lee Rudolph: Hell, I dunno. My first thought was, “How many of these kids were the product of some scared lonely kid just trying to grab some comfort in a weird scary place before possibly getting his head blown off for no reason?” Unlike nowadays, not everybody in ‘Nam had signed up for it.

    Some sad shit either way, though.

  16. 16.

    raven

    @John Revolta: The prostitute situation in the Nam was systematic and often controlled by the US command. Most big bases had whore house districts close to the gate and medics performed VD checks on the girls.

    I believe it was sometime around the beginning of 1966 that Newsweek and TIMES magazine (almost 100% sure it were these two) had on their COVER a picture of the 1st Cavalry Division’s “Sin City” or “Boom Boom City” or some called “Happy City” with story inside about the An Khe Plaza, the 1st Cavalry Division’s sanitary “Sin City” that housed bars and brothels (okay…Whores) UNDER STRICT ARMY MEDICAL SUPERVISION. As I recall, “Sin City” opened the first part of 1966, right after I got there in December of 1965. The “ladies” were there to “service” us guys in the 1st Cavalry Division. Ah…the 1st Cav Div! Always FIRST with everything!! **Note: I guess I walked through the area 3 or 4 times but NEVER engaged in ANY activity though. Just wasn’t for me. If I did “engage” I would fess-up to it. By the way, this “facility” was outside of the perimeter in An Khe–not on the grounds of Camp Radcliff, home of the 1st Cav Div. (Click on picture to enlarge)

  18. 18.

    Tripod

    @Cervantes:

    Those assholes Cheney and Rumsfeld where in the White House during the Mayaguez incident. They declared victory and ignored the US Marines that got left behind and eventually killed by the Khmer Rouge.

  21. 21.

    Cervantes

    @Tripod:

    Those assholes Cheney and Rumsfeld where in the White House during the Mayaguez incident. They declared victory and ignored the US Marines that got left behind and eventually killed by the Khmer Rouge.

    At one point, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Ford (briefly) contemplated killing the captive American crew with a bomb strike just so they would not have to deal with a drawn-out and compromising hostage scenario.

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