76-09-A6

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Amnesty

Transcript With the pardon of those who not only didn't heed the call of duty, but went so far away they couldn't hear it, memories of the Vietnam war, pleasant and unpleasant, are reawakened. One that came back to me was of a unique incident. In fact, it's hard to believe it wasn't considered newsworthy. I can assure you it wasn't, certainly not by the media which found so much immorality in our participation in the war and so little to criticize about Hanoi. The story has to do with ten separate individuals who fought in Vietnam and returned to this country over a period of about five years. Some were officers, others enlisted men. They had served in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force. Their paths had never crossed in Vietnam. They didn't know each other and upon their return they were scattered all over the United States. They had only one thing in common besides being veterans of the Vietnam war. Each of them was convinced of the rightness of our being there to help the Vietnamese people. Each of them wanted to do more to help. Ten men in a nation of more than 200 million. What would the odds be against even two of them ever coming together? But they evidently talked about what they felt and what they wished they could do. A listener would hear and say, "you ought to know so and so, he feels the same way". A street address would be given. Two men would correspond. To brief it down, eventually these ten men, strangers all, were in touch with each other. There came a day when they journeyed to Washington. Their request sounded simple -- "We are Vietnam veterans who want to do something to help the Vietnamese people before the American withdrawal. Will you send us back"? It sounded simple, yes, but it took quite a bit of doing. They were now civilians asking to be sent to a war zone and they finally made it. Their destination was the village of Cat Lai and they had decided on their mission. They wanted to build houses for disabled Vietnamese veterans. They called themselves the Cat Lai Commune. Day in, day out, they worked. The villagers accepted them and quietly understood. One of the happiest notes in this story is the lack of surprise on the part of the people in Cat Lai. What these ten young men were doing was keeping with what the Vietnamese had come to believe was typical of Americans. In the evenings they would sit around in the warm twilight having a beer with the villagers and the disabled men they were trying to help. On one of those evenings they told a young Vietnamese officer that, back in America, there were many Americans who thought the people of Vietnam would be better off under Hanoi. He replied, "I think my country is the h--l of the world and you have come to this h--l to help us. We have been at war for thousands of years. We want peace more than anyone, but we want peace without communism." I don't know what finally happened to those ten men or when they came home. But as the planes from Canada and Sweden bring others home, I'm going to try and remember the Cat Lai Commune.		Details Batch Number 76-09-A6 Production Date 02/22/1977 Book/Page RPtV-114, SihoH-53 Audio Youtube? No
		Added Notes Armistead Maupin was one of the 10 men, according to Tour of Duty by Douglas Brinkley. Perhaps Reagan got this story from a 1971 National Review article The Ten Vets Who Went Back written by Armistead Maupin] The Nixon Presidential Library has an Oval Office audio recording that includes two of the men that went back, Maupin and Charles P. Collins III.