Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 457 - What is the U.S. Spending to Find POW/MIA Personnel 50 Years After the End of the War?

Transcript

457 - What is the U.S. Spending to Find POW/MIA Personnel 50 Years After the End of the War? · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to the Vietnamese podcast.
0:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Today I have Dr. J. Vethon.
0:03
[SPEAKER_01]: You've been a guest before, and today we have more to talk about.
0:07
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a POWMI related, and this is a regarding funds that are going back and forth from the US government to Vietnam.
0:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a lot to talk about.
0:16
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you for coming back on the podcast.
0:19
[SPEAKER_03]: My absolute pleasure.
0:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So before we start this, there's something that we had talked about before in our just our pre-interview right now that I have a big question about the topic that we're going to talk about, which is figuring out
0:35
[SPEAKER_01]: where money is going from the U.S. government to the Vietnamese government in the tune of like $85 million in the past few years.
0:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Vietnamese government is saying that, you know, it's all good.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: We're all happy, basically.
0:50
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm wondering why this is important to talk about.
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how I wanted to open up.
0:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is just a question that I've been having after I've read the paper like twice.
0:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, why is this important
1:03
[SPEAKER_03]: which community you're talking about the vehicle community or American general.
1:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the community that cares about the POW and my issue, right?
1:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's important because we're now 50 years after the end of the war, 52 years after the last American troops, 60 years after many of these men went missing.
1:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there always has been an American desire to recover the soldiers that were killed and not recovered during the war.
1:35
[SPEAKER_03]: It's sort of like a moral responsibility.
1:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Other militaries don't see it that way, but we have always, we always have.
1:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And part of that was because families of the missing pressured the United States government to find out what happened to their loved ones.
1:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Oftentimes, I'm especially in Korea, Vietnam, Cold War era, there were questions about did men survive, you know, because there was oftentimes other American survivors who may have seen that American being captured in a return,
2:07
[SPEAKER_03]: or there was media from the communist country showing this guy captured or there was an intelligence reports during the war after the war saying yeah we got this guy so there was hard questions about what happened to a lot of people.
2:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And you can adjust the numbers up and down depending on where you're at.
2:27
[SPEAKER_03]: So a lot of this really goes back to trying to get answers for the families and the families themselves wanted to get answers because if you ever gone to a funeral, and I referenced Keirney Forster's dad at Arlington last October, you see the incredible amount of emotions that are generated.
2:51
[SPEAKER_03]: amazing closure that happens for that family and then when you realize this is really worth it.
3:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, let's open up about what this document says and how did it come to life?
3:11
[SPEAKER_03]: So the document really is a follow up paper, follow one paper from the assessment that I wrote for the League of Families and we published in February of 2024, which the league, myself and those Griffiths, our other people, senior leadership of the league, went there to discuss it with the leadership of the various Indo-China government's mainly Vietnam, because the paper focus mostly on Vietnam.
3:39
[SPEAKER_03]: So, in the 18 months or less than since that paper had come out, we had been myself and I think there are people who had continued to monitor and look for Vietnamese applications that might shed light on what I call Vietnamese knowledge ability.
3:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And that had always been the crux of the issue.
4:01
[SPEAKER_03]: How much does Vietnam, Panorot really know?
4:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And so what we had and I'll spare the details, but basically what had happened is we started finding other Vietnamese publications that said we're peeling back of the late of the sort of the bamboo curtain on what they did know and so we discovered two things.
4:24
[SPEAKER_03]: One was and the main one was that they had moved all their.
4:31
[SPEAKER_03]: they had a very strong program during the war to grab American materials from flyers to like, and the air defense guys who shot these planes down had to prove it.
4:41
[SPEAKER_03]: They had to say, here's a piece of the wing, here's a piece of the tail.
4:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And so the air defense forces had a program to go out and find this material to prove it, and then all that material was deliberately sent to their museum.
4:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And that was kind of the missing link.
4:55
[SPEAKER_03]: We hadn't quite realized the extent of this collection program and to transfer it into museums.
5:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And that was kind of the missing link.
5:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And when we discovered a book on the history of the military, the main military museum in Hanoi, which talked about it, that's what generated me to go out and write another.
5:15
[SPEAKER_01]: When I think about the methodology of the research or digging into the facts, how do you get to the other side if the other government is sort of closed off or or they're defending the position like how do you get to the veracity of this stuff.
5:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, again, it goes back to we would not have known this unless the Vietnamese government had published, and as I mentioned my last podcast, the Vietnamese comments have had a massive publication campaign to talk about the war.
5:49
[SPEAKER_03]: They're justifiably proud of what they did, and they wanted to capture those lessons, capture the history, and so they published a lot of books, and so we have managed over the years to get copies of these books.
6:01
[SPEAKER_03]: We review them and then in the book and it was published.
6:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I think 20 years ago They're just saying here is what we did if we went out and grabbed this aircraft.
6:10
[SPEAKER_03]: We went out and grabbed this information and In fact 1992 when we first began to open this up
6:18
[SPEAKER_03]: the military museum gave us what they called the red book, which was basically a handwritten index of everything that they had logged into the museum on American POWMIAs.
6:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And this was just a major expansion of that red book what we found in their books.
6:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's been 52-ish years since the last military were there.
6:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think that we're looking for any, but I don't think it'll be still alive.
6:52
[SPEAKER_01]: That's my heart, right?
6:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just guessing.
6:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But what we're looking for are remains or any evidence of records in the ground, so to speak.
7:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, we're looking for two things.
7:03
[SPEAKER_03]: We're looking to remain.
7:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, it's the most important being able to repatriate those guys and have a nice barrel.
7:13
[SPEAKER_03]: But in the absence of that, somebody crashed, see somebody guy hit with a shell, you know, impacted into a mountain and high speed, and there's nothing left.
7:21
[SPEAKER_03]: They're also looking for what happened to that guy.
7:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And so if you think about, and I'll give you an example.
7:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So when President Biden went over to Handleways with 10th or 23, the Vietnamese government handed him five artifacts.
7:36
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, artifacts for five guys who were still MIA.
7:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Four of those guys were out of laus.
7:42
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the guys was shot down in 1961, and his ID card was in perfect shape.
7:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I met the one guy from Vietnam,
7:52
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... was in a was known as a last number live captive in a was american forces on hit the ground they were in contact with them and then they lost contact uh... and the Vietnamese never returned what happened was when they shot and killed them when he was trying to resist capture they buried them so they like next to a uh... uh... uh... sort of a cool typhoon comes by washes it away but
8:17
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're not going to be able to recover his remains, but by giving us the ID card, you know, although the Vietnamese have told us what happened in this guy years ago, there are other guys like that.
8:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And I use the example of the ID cards in the 10-long museum.
8:35
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't know what happened to that guy, but obviously the Vietnamese do, and they can tell us well we can't recover him because we lost a grave, but here is his ID card.
8:43
[SPEAKER_03]: We shot and killed him and this is what happened.
8:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And the story, we can cross that guy off.
8:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so now my brain goes to the reason they're not doing that is it's a slow milk is that that is what I think that is well, as I often tell many of my compatriots in this issue, neither side is an any hurry to solve this issue.
9:06
[SPEAKER_03]: for the Vietnamese government 30 years ago, it was a major political negotiating point because they wanted recognition.
9:15
[SPEAKER_03]: They wanted to win.
9:16
[SPEAKER_03]: They wanted lifting a trade embargo.
9:18
[SPEAKER_03]: They've gotten all that.
9:20
[SPEAKER_03]: We've exchanged embassies our relationship.
9:24
[SPEAKER_03]: The Vietnamese government and US government relationship has moved well beyond this to many other things, intellectual property,
9:35
[SPEAKER_03]: thing on the Vietnamese government's list of things about you.
9:39
[SPEAKER_03]: But there are still people in the Vietnamese military who are responsible for this.
9:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And for them, it is a job and a money-making effort.
9:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And on the US side, it's the same thing.
9:54
[SPEAKER_03]: They're going out through their doing this, but it's also a job for a long time when they can wrap themselves in the flag and say, look what we've done.
10:02
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you look at it, I'm sure we have ROI perspective, you know, 25 guys and 10 years for $87 million is not exactly what we're looking for.
10:12
[SPEAKER_01]: What would be a good remedy?
10:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Would a good remedy be like, okay, let's just stop the program.
10:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody hush hush now, like jobs are all gone.
10:20
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't issue any money.
10:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Would that be the solution in your mind or would it be like,
10:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We drop down because that's what eight and a half million a year on average.
10:32
[SPEAKER_01]: We drop down to a million a year and we cut the jobs and I mean what is the remedy here?
10:37
[SPEAKER_03]: So you have to understand how the process works in Vietnam.
10:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So they whole work called joint field activity which are scheduled.
10:47
[SPEAKER_03]: efforts between the DPA, a mainly the lap and the VNO, the Vietnamese office for missing piercers.
10:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we're going to go on and look for these five guys.
10:56
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to spend 30 days out in the field doing it, right?
10:59
[SPEAKER_03]: So when the JFA team leader arrived and his team arrives in Hanoi,
11:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Colonel high handsom was called a price list.
11:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, and the price list is you knock down a tree.
11:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm making numbers up knock down a tree is a hundred bucks.
11:12
[SPEAKER_03]: You knock down a fence is a hundred fifty bucks.
11:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You tear up a price field is a thousand.
11:16
[SPEAKER_03]: You got to hire all these guys, right?
11:19
[SPEAKER_03]: So they do everything and then at 30 days after the end of the JFA, the Vietnamese government hat, the V&O guys, I thought the government hands them up, you know, Bill saying, okay, here's uh,
11:33
[SPEAKER_03]: and they want $2 million in advance for for for for fieldwork and they got to hire people both of the class.
11:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So the amount of money that we're being that we're spending,
11:47
[SPEAKER_03]: is astronomical compared to the result.
11:51
[SPEAKER_03]: So what we're saying is we need to cut the costs, we need to expand this dramatically so that we can get more people in the field to find people.
12:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And we need to take a look at this as no longer, a money-making effort, but let's just solve this issue so we can move forward and do other great things together.
12:14
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the motivation?
12:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I know what you just described.
12:17
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no motivation each side to like wrap this up cleanly.
12:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, exactly.
12:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's where it's going to take.
12:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's why we're kind of pulling back the curtain on this.
12:27
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot of other.
12:30
[SPEAKER_03]: If you took a look at, we've taken very close look at what DBA spends in their published budgets.
12:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And I have it.
12:37
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't go down that road because I wanted to focus on Vietnamese knowledge, ability in this paper.
12:43
[SPEAKER_03]: The other paper sometime next year when we focus on the DBA site.
12:48
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, so we need to have, and the league is pressed for this heavily.
12:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Now you need to be a decision made at the highest levels.
12:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's just solve this issue.
12:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's open up our records.
13:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Give you what we have.
13:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell you what we don't have.
13:03
[SPEAKER_03]: You got, we'll go look for stuff and we're done.
13:06
[SPEAKER_03]: and I think that that is a noble effort you have to spend in all this time and effort and money.
13:12
[SPEAKER_03]: We just need to the Vietnam War era families are getting old.
13:17
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, these kids it's sons and daughters now and grandkids.
13:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I, I, I, I'm not even sure why it's still lingering to be honest with you.
13:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I, I think it, I mean, how many more, how many more cases do we need to, how many more cases on the books?
13:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, they're still after the precise number.
13:36
[SPEAKER_03]: It glues me, but it's 1500 and 70.
13:39
[SPEAKER_03]: I was going to say 71 something like that in Southeast Asia.
13:43
[SPEAKER_03]: It's quite a bit.
13:44
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not yeah.
13:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And a lot of them are easily solved.
13:48
[SPEAKER_03]: There's probably 300 over the water losses are never going to find.
13:52
[SPEAKER_03]: There's probably another couple 100, some guy on a sawed team was in the jungle and fell off a helicopter trying to get out and nobody has any clue what happened to that guy.
14:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And so what we have to understand is, we don't expect the Vietnamese, there's two things to understand.
14:10
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't expect the Vietnamese to have perfect knowledge about every loss, right?
14:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Where we draw that line is unknown
14:18
[SPEAKER_03]: they have not been as open as we need them to be.
14:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And the second thing is, the league in particular has said, we don't expect to find every guy.
14:26
[SPEAKER_03]: We just want the fullest possible accounting and possible meaning, okay, we can recover of the 15, 71 or how many left.
14:35
[SPEAKER_03]: There's probably, I'm making up a number, 12 hundred that we could find lots.
14:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you could solve that for those families, they would be beyond thank.
14:47
[SPEAKER_01]: So on a mechanical level, the league hires you or you you write this paper and it goes out.
14:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Where does it go from here mechanically within our government in the US?
14:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So what happened on this is that there's going anywhere into the US government because DPA itself is shall we say highly resistant to anything that I might put out.
15:09
[SPEAKER_03]: So it gets published on the lead's website and then it goes out to other organizations that are involved in this issue and gets spread like wildfire.
15:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Now the good thing about this paper.
15:20
[SPEAKER_03]: unlike the longer assessment that we talked about last year was that the Washington Times Bill Gerds, one of the country's finest national security defense journalists picked up the paper, wrote an article about it.
15:36
[SPEAKER_03]: That set off some alarm bells, other journalistic outlets,
15:47
[SPEAKER_03]: They, in fact, query the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi, which then felt compelled to respond and refer to it as scandalous.
15:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So, um, this one did pick up some some press, unlike the, unlike the first one.
16:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And mainly because the money amount amount of money did spend full lack of, remains being found.
16:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, so what happens when the government in Vietnam says, this is scandalous, but scandalous, the paper scandalous, or these things.
16:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Charges are scandalous, that, so I basically broke it.
16:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So the US government always, I should say the DPA is always saying,
16:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Vietnamese cooperations outstanding back so good right so I said oh and so the families are saying we we don't quite accept that so I had to break it down into discrete parts and so when I then said there's Vietnamese operational cooperation which the league and everybody else agrees is for the most part pretty good and then there's Vietnamese knowledge ability cooperation which is a different
16:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So DPA is not going to, and it has no, you know, there's no obligation as somebody once told me to respond.
17:05
[SPEAKER_03]: But in fact, because of the press,
17:12
[SPEAKER_03]: release, is our understanding that when director McCabe from GPA went to Hanoy shortly after that, the Vietnamese were shall we say unhappy about what is happy and let them know it.
17:23
[SPEAKER_03]: But I don't know the details, unfortunately.
17:27
[SPEAKER_01]: See, and this is the beauty of living in America, I'll just be honest, the fact that somebody can write the research that they did, and it can change operations within the highest level and pressure in the highest level is such a beautiful part of this experiment called the United States.
17:48
[SPEAKER_03]: it's the wonders of an independent press, you know, and the people who are engaged and being able to talk to their legislative people they voted for and stuff.
17:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, you know, this, the whole genesis of this was to, was to open up people's eyes that were struggling here to finalize.
18:09
[SPEAKER_03]: It's given me another 100 years at this space, 150 years at this space.
18:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
18:13
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't keep doing this.
18:14
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't keep having business as usual.
18:17
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't.
18:17
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to rethink what we're doing.
18:19
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to look closely amount of money we're being spent.
18:22
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to look closely at how the Vietnamese interact with us.
18:27
[SPEAKER_03]: certainly something is not right here.
18:30
[SPEAKER_03]: DPA is doing a good job on digging up old World War II guys that were buried and it couldn't quite identify them at the time and interviewing.
18:38
[SPEAKER_03]: That's great.
18:39
[SPEAKER_03]: We're happy for those things.
18:40
[SPEAKER_03]: But the Vietnam War is still tangible.
18:42
[SPEAKER_03]: There's still people alive for that.
18:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And we need to rethink this on both sides, the Vietnamese side and the American side, how we're doing this.
18:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So what would the ROI look like to satisfy the league
18:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I think we need to, personally, I think we need to do a lot of things differently.
19:03
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to cut costs from the Vietnamese side.
19:05
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to expand operations.
19:08
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to start using new technologies, light our drones, GPS, and in fact,
19:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Dear friend of mine, Glenn Heinz, who runs Healing Through History, which is a separate MIA organization, as built a database where we can now, if Colonel Tom Smith went down on the plane, and we've never, we've been, you have never really looked at imagery since the war.
19:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Glenn's built a database that can tell you, okay, here's all the pictures.
19:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Of that area forward and backwards from all in all the different camps like that and the U.S. government's never been able to do that so I think a lot of this has to do we need to eliminate a whole bunch of the U.S. government bureaucracy Farm some of this out to some nonprofit you can move a lot faster at a lot less cost and can do the job just as well
20:04
[SPEAKER_03]: There needs to be a government-to-government type interface, but there needs to be a reduction in bureaucracy on both sides to move faster.
20:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think we could probably find a lot more guys, a lot quicker.
20:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And one last quick example, Glenn was helping the people's army find some of their own guys.
20:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's a guy out there with a GP thing, doing like this, the size of a lawnmower,
20:33
[SPEAKER_03]: one guy with a backpack doing what it would take an entire team of lab assistants and archaeologists honest that 30 days to do and so that's the kind of I think things that we need to look at that can help move this issue forward in a much more rapid fashion.
20:52
[SPEAKER_01]: My God, what you just described is so huge but it's like massive
20:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And massive undertaking, when I think about how quickly or slowly a government or both sides of the government's move, I mean, it's a herkulean effect to kind of impose that like efficiency.
21:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the word efficiency and government don't go together.
21:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're really suggesting that the government be better on both sides and be more efficient.
21:26
[SPEAKER_01]: from just a paper or just from the mouthpiece of the league.
21:32
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you get things rolling?
21:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the only well.
21:35
[SPEAKER_03]: So anyways, the only
21:38
[SPEAKER_03]: the only ones that could change the DPA structure would be DOD itself because DPA is a part of DOD or congressional mandate.
21:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, certainly Congress stepped in 10, 12 years ago and forced DOD to merge the lab, what's called J back at the time, and then DPMO to create
22:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And then that so it could go either way on the via the Mesa, I can't speak for their government how they work, but again, the VNOS and P, which is an interagency department staff by foreign affairs, public security, mostly their defense guys, military guys.
22:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And some civilians from the public security guys, but they, they themselves could probably, you know, change a few things, but what we need to do when I think is important and I can't, I don't want, I'm actually very clear that I'm not speaking for the league and this, that's the league speaks for itself.
22:45
[SPEAKER_03]: We just need to take, we need to become much more nimble and in a lot of different ways.
22:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's a lot of processes that make this whole thing so slow.
22:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I put myself in the position of the families, 1500 of these cases.
23:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like a very painful ordeal after 52 years.
23:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't know how much hope that they can have.
23:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure a lot of these family members are in their 70s or 80s.
23:18
[SPEAKER_01]: whether they're siblings and just probably doesn't sound like any parents or supply, but siblings and baby sisters or baby brothers that were like kids when they knew that their older brothers were missing.
23:29
[SPEAKER_01]: They're probably in their 70s and 80s now.
23:32
[SPEAKER_01]: What is that body of people look like in America?
23:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Like what is the demographic makeup of the people that are pushing to find the remains?
23:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's changed quite a bit over time.
23:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So initially it was
23:46
[SPEAKER_03]: parents searching for their son, their husband, whatever, and that made up the large part of the league for many, many years.
23:54
[SPEAKER_03]: But as time has gone on, the parents passed away, the wives moved on, the brothers and sisters passed away, and then it became uncles and children.
24:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So the grand example that I'll use again is tyranny forest, or she was two years old, never newer dad,
24:12
[SPEAKER_03]: When he went down, it's very end of the war in December of 1972, but she spent most of her adult life searching for her father and became a member of the league.
24:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's the year point about what could be out there.
24:27
[SPEAKER_03]: So when they finally got around to digging the rice paddy where the Vietnamese witnesses had pointed with the airplane a quote crashed.
24:34
[SPEAKER_03]: They had the excavated, and they did find part of our credit card, they found the dog tag of the pilot, and some teeth, and his ID card, but the thing that they found 13 were called Oceus material, pieces of bone, and they identified her dad from a piece of bone, the size of your fingernail.
25:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, so it's it's a it's definitely an arduous process, but on the excavation of an eye degree, but it was an amazing thing to see the closure in that family and both families.
25:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that sounds really rewarding, whoever's helping in aiding in that um search.
25:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I think about your relationship to Vietnam.
25:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And in our last episode, I'm not sure if we went into this.
25:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So we perhaps have.
25:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But do you go back to, do you go to Vietnam at all?
25:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So I went twice last year.
25:36
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm trying to go back again at the end of October.
25:40
[SPEAKER_03]: We're getting a member still waiting for.
25:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So waiting for my visa application to be approved, I've seen the retaking a little time on this one.
25:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So I love the Vietnamese people, I love the Vietnam itself.
25:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm looking forward to going back when I went back in October.
26:01
[SPEAKER_03]: When I went last
26:03
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... looking because Glenn is Australian is so he follows the Australian military battles quite closely uh... his team actually found uh... twenty uh... uh... dead people's army guys and on their mass grave and so we went look at couple different ones trying to find them and so it was equally rewarding to me trying to find uh... the Vietnamese martyrs at which what they call them as it was trying to and we actually went to two different
26:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So to me, as an ex-soldier, it is equally rewarding to me to find Vietnamese soldiers who are tasked away in Americans.
26:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And because every family needs closure, it's not just about the Americans.
26:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And I really think, and you have to look back over history.
26:51
[SPEAKER_03]: This was the issue that sort of brought to bitter enemies slowly back together, you know, but the care that, you know, what's now unfortunately called more legacy, or a period of M.I.s wrapped up into more legacy issues.
27:04
[SPEAKER_03]: But you see when Vietnamese families are told that, hey, we found your son or brother or uncle, the emotions are exactly the same.
27:16
[SPEAKER_03]: They're no different, no different at all.
27:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's, uh, we all bleed bread and it's a universal thing to want to get reunited with your family.
27:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, when I think about your issues with the visa, the two times that you went back last year, were they relatively quick to get your visa and then this time's actually taking a long time?
27:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
27:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it's curious.
27:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm curious because for me, uh,
27:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, when people say, what's the difference between the Vietnamese government and the U.S. government?
27:53
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, this is, um, this is sort of like the difference.
27:57
[SPEAKER_01]: However, the new administration today in America could be very similar to the delays that the Vietnamese government's doing too.
28:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'll say that, you know, publicly that we are blurring the lines of like,
28:12
[SPEAKER_01]: What it feels like to live in a lawful country it sometimes when I think about it.
28:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're relying on factions to make decisions, to grant visas, or to yank visas.
28:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're basing things not on
28:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, if this is a scandalous thing, then let's deal with it.
28:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's let's invite Dr. J. Vith over to talk about it and let's openly discuss this.
28:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's culturally not, you know, like the stringer for example, you know, the con, this contesting of the Pulitzer.
28:49
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like some people in my community in the Vietnamese community have really taken up arms and said that movie should not have been made.
28:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, how is that?
28:57
[SPEAKER_01]: If that's not really similar to communism, yeah, I mean, I think I've got to make that that surprises me because
29:05
[SPEAKER_03]: I can remember years ago kind of having side conversations about this, you know, like some Vietnamese guys, the Kong-on guys talking about.
29:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, no, that wasn't taken by Nick that was taken by this guy, and it was part of a, uh, there was a lot more Vietnamese journalists photojournalists out there than Americans realized and they never got the credit because the Americans or whatever wrote it.
29:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there was this underlying current of this is just an example of the Vietnamese not getting the journalist to credit that they deserve.
29:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And so like I said, it was kind of an open seat, I heard it before.
29:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And I didn't really have a dog in the flight and really nobody's kind of listened to the stories and thought.
29:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And so the stringer is now I've been seeing the stringer, it's not going to come out to Netflix till the end of November, I think.
29:59
[SPEAKER_03]: November 28 just put it out there and there's already a blowback.
30:06
[SPEAKER_03]: from the knit-up-nick-up faction saying this is a complete BS.
30:11
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I haven't written movie.
30:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if Kim Fulc has actually weighed in on this or not.
30:17
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think she can because she would just a younger.
30:19
[SPEAKER_03]: He has not.
30:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
30:21
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I'm actually looking forward to seeing it and the secret it says.
30:24
[SPEAKER_03]: But like, so anyways, to your point, I'm just surprised that there's anti-movie people.
30:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, this is like, I have to always come back to it.
30:36
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a real big point for me.
30:38
[SPEAKER_01]: What's kicked into our culture is not communism or American democracy, it's none of that.
30:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It's what's really kicked into the culture, is this power control.
30:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the Vietnamese culture, it's like, we have to respect our elders.
30:52
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to do the right thing, but we sidestep the truth, we sidestep.
30:58
[SPEAKER_01]: what we need to do to repatriate evidence.
31:03
[SPEAKER_01]: We do things that are like convenient because there's not a lot of fighting or there's not a, but they don't want that, you know, relationships to be disrupted.
31:15
[SPEAKER_01]: They want things to be sad as cool.
31:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of my friends, good friends of mine have said,
31:21
[SPEAKER_01]: let the Pulitzer rest within a Vietnamese man's hands and why are we disrupting that?
31:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said because we are not a monolith, we should be able to disrupt the narrative of Nick Oat winning this and looking at evidence that we should be a much more open society as humanity grows.
31:42
[SPEAKER_01]: That's my belief is that that's why podcasts like this exist is because maybe
31:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Jay, I don't really agree with the way you're approaching this, but I am here to listen, and I do agree with the way you're approaching this.
31:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just saying, I'm here, so I want to practice this idea of transparency, and really let's get to the truth of humanity.
32:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, if you really want to take land from people, just take it and say, I'm doing that.
32:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm taking land from it.
32:10
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want $85 million over 10 years, let's just call it what it is.
32:16
[SPEAKER_01]: beat around the bush about this anymore.
32:19
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to milk it.
32:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's figure out a way to milk it.
32:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But let's make it make sense.
32:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
32:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I, I, I, that's why I love talking about these things that that are taboo.
32:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's the same thing with the general Luan picture, you know, shooting that guy, you know, who was that guy?
32:35
[SPEAKER_03]: He shot.
32:36
[SPEAKER_03]: That's become a big controversy.
32:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's probably going to explode again here with the Lockhart film, which I like, Lockhart film, which I did not see last night.
32:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you share this detail, so that guy who's getting shot, the picture we're talking about is the gun being pointed by this general into this supposed communist person.
33:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, bro, the guy who's being shot has been contested.
33:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
33:06
[SPEAKER_03]: So what it happens is a second.
33:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the second or third day of the Ted of Fence have been sigh on.
33:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And General Luan, who was the chief of police in sigh, actually, the whole chief of police for all's happy at mom.
33:19
[SPEAKER_03]: a very brave man who was leading his troops.
33:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there had been a bunch of commando attacks.
33:28
[SPEAKER_03]: That was the initial wave that was called urban commandos and attacked the embassy and a bunch of other stuff, which in their whole store I can get into if you want to.
33:37
[SPEAKER_03]: So there was a guy named Bay Long.
33:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And he had been part of the commando team that was attacking the South Vietnamese Navy yard.
33:49
[SPEAKER_03]: According to Communist publications, he was killed that first day, January 31st.
33:55
[SPEAKER_03]: The next day there was a Vietnamese police major and his family that were killed, except for one kid who then went and became a U.S. senior military guy, and is he's running out
34:11
[SPEAKER_03]: The South Vietnamese Marines grabbed this guy, kind of lumped them up, you see his face a little beaten up.
34:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And they drag them up and they tell the one what this guy has done in the one holds the pistol out in Street Executes, right?
34:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Street justice, right?
34:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So the story was that the guy who will on kill was this high-ranking guy named Bay Lop.
34:34
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... but uh... other people are saying no it's not they love it's another guy who is kind of a low-level career who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time uh... and you know so so there's there's two different groups here who are to contesting who this guy who was shot and so you know it's and the families are fine is that it's a whole mess so it's a it's an interesting historical
35:02
[SPEAKER_03]: issue, I guess.
35:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So you say the director, Naja Lockwood could have had this wrong?
35:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, is this on her?
35:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't, I can't, I had not seen the film, so I can't speak what it is.
35:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I, I think she follows the hysterical narrative that it's bail-up.
35:17
[SPEAKER_03]: I know that she interviewed the bail-up family and she also interviewed General Luan's daughter, which, um, who's a lovely person.
35:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't know what they've said about it.
35:31
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that the Baylot family thinks it's him, but there's no proof right now.
35:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So a third party is going to try and do some AI digital, facial or facial recognition stuff because they think it's somebody else, so you don't have to think about that.
35:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Photograph is one of the most famous photographs of the Vietnam War.
35:55
[SPEAKER_03]: if not me malhane must be a graph to be a more you know that's that in the napalm uh... can full of picture those two pictures really i mean arguably they say change the uh... direction of the uh... war and that and the photograph of the helicopter on the uh... the cia helicopter all at the last day so there's there's some very seminal pictures that are still steeped in controversy
36:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that when we dig up the past and we try to rectify the things that are wrong, it could lead to beautiful stories of healing, of reconciliation, of just even rectifying the budget that is going out.
36:44
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these are so important,
36:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's frustrating to think that we as human beings cannot because we're so stuck on power and money and greed and you know, our jobs need to at the same place that we get recognition, recognition is just as powerful as money and everything else, you know, getting that.
37:04
[SPEAKER_01]: If not more powerful sometimes.
37:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and then that's why I like talking about these subjects because if you're not doing it J who is right if you're in the league is not well opening this I would like to go back to what we talked about earlier when I was trying to say about how finding people's armies martyrs is equally important to me on giving example so we were in Hanoi in March of 2024 we remain the VNO guys.
37:32
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... who were not happy with my assessment accusing them of of not cooperating uh... the deputy started talking about well i'm getting letters from the families of the commandos to attack the u.s. embassy on the morning of january thirty first and tech there's what happened to those bodies i've come you guys can't open your file so i said okay i will look into it
37:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And that had been also a mystery, too.
38:00
[SPEAKER_03]: What happened to the guys who were attacked the embassy and died?
38:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Because three guys, the capture of three guys, two disappeared, which is a very interesting story.
38:07
[SPEAKER_03]: The third guy survived the war, was killed in the traffic accident in 1976.
38:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So I came, I came back to America, I dug into the files, and I was actually able to track.
38:22
[SPEAKER_03]: uh... the movement of the command of bodies i interview a whole bunch of the MPs uh... and then we did a whole bunch of other stuff interview some found the enemy's guys anyways i was able to track the movement of the bodies from the embassy to was called the seventeen field hospital which was a small american field hospital that was near the area
38:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I was able to track the movement of the bodies from that American field hospital, and that's what they took the captured commandos.
38:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the movement of the bodies from that hospital in Jolunds called Chau Ray Hospital.
38:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So I know where the bodies were taken.
39:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Then there's some news articles that said, like on February 21st, the South Vietnamese city authorities had like a thousand unclean bodies, and they just buried them in a mass grave in what was then, Qi was cemetery.
39:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So I can't put a link between Joe Ray Hospital and Qi was cemetery, but I'm a hundred percent convinced, I mean, it makes sense, they don't know these people are.
39:27
[SPEAKER_03]: But, unfortunately, what has happened is, in 1986, the Ho Chi Minh City authorities cleaned all the city's territories out, moved all the bodies out, and turned them into parks, right?
39:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So, there were some discussion that maybe they knew about this mass grave, but they did, they did it up.
39:49
[SPEAKER_03]: So, that's one of the things I want to do when I go there is
39:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But one of the government knows your intentions with that, because that seems like a very noble and balanced counteraction.
40:02
[SPEAKER_03]: They do not, because they sort of like when you fill in the form out, they're asking you why you're coming.
40:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And I, I, nothing, I've got nothing fit into the box.
40:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I just collect tourism, which is kind of what I'm doing.
40:13
[SPEAKER_03]: But I want to do that.
40:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I really, I really want to go to Chiwa and see if we can pin down the location, because it was a big area, and who knows,
40:24
[SPEAKER_01]: But can't the government, the Vietnamese government do that?
40:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it sounds like work that they can do them soon.
40:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I gave my report.
40:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I actually had a translator in the Vietnamese.
40:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I gave my report to the command of association and Ho Chi Minh City and to the colonel who was chewing my butt in Hanoi, right, you know?
40:41
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like we gave them that and there was just a thank you appreciate, it was no really response after six weeks of a lot of research trying to figure out what happened.
40:54
[SPEAKER_01]: What would a nebulous thing to have to deal with with the, I mean, all governments like that, but I mean, specifically Vietnamese government, well, I, you know, I, all governments like that.
41:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's your actor coin.
41:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I, maybe they did do something and, you know, they don't, they don't feel any need to tell me apparently, but I did, I did, like I said, I wanted to bring this out to your listeners that it was that this was not just me hammering the Vietnamese about the Americans.
41:24
[SPEAKER_03]: move this issue along faster to gain closure of our families and so both people, both countries, both governments can focus on other things.
41:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if I was the Vietnamese government, I would pull you aside and say, hey, Jay, can we do this a different way?
41:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
41:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, do we have to do it this way?
41:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, what did we do to you?
41:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Or what did, you know, I mean, my buddy to the US government.
41:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I would love that.
41:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Make a big thing, call me, it's time they want.
41:54
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not trying to create an adversarial relationship with them.
41:59
[SPEAKER_03]: The league doesn't want that.
42:01
[SPEAKER_03]: The league has spent years working with the Vietnamese and loud and Cambodian governments going to do it.
42:06
[SPEAKER_03]: It's going to move this issue along.
42:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And to the great credit of the league, they weren't holding this out as refining the war.
42:15
[SPEAKER_03]: The league was solely focused on finding answers to what happened.
42:23
[SPEAKER_03]: in many ways, you're 100% right.
42:26
[SPEAKER_03]: If they would just stop and say, you know what, time to time to open up the archives and just, you know, do this.
42:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
42:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's my point in almost everything that I question is like, why can't we as human beings move the
42:44
[SPEAKER_01]: of how our lines, just a little bit, maybe we could use the recognition lines a little bit and get to the meat of this ROI, right?
42:54
[SPEAKER_01]: We wouldn't, you know, and I can do this together.
42:56
[SPEAKER_03]: This is, I think that this is if the Vietnamese people, government was sitting right in front of me, this is what I would say to them.
43:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I said, you would accrue so much good will.
43:08
[SPEAKER_03]: in America by doing this.
43:10
[SPEAKER_03]: The war is long over.
43:12
[SPEAKER_03]: No one is holding a garage anymore.
43:14
[SPEAKER_03]: No one has sitting there going, oh, you killed Billy Botany.
43:17
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, that was years ago.
43:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Vietnamese government would accrues so much goodwill by doing this, which may impact other things.
43:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Terrific, you know, that they're not thinking about, you know, because this is an issue is very dear to a segment of American
43:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to make an analogy back to this whole stringer thing because this episode relates to communicating in a way that is honest and authentic, and genuine.
43:51
[SPEAKER_01]: If I was Niku, I would say, you know what, maybe I did, or I didn't shoot this picture, maybe, but you know, in the case that I did not shoot it, let me reserve space for the guy who did shoot it.
44:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And let's, I don't need to share it.
44:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I benefited for almost 60 years off that prize.
44:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a great life.
44:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And I am here to say, you know what?
44:20
[SPEAKER_01]: The other gentlemen, you could, we could pass the torch on.
44:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We could, thank you for taking the picture that I got to benefit all these years.
44:30
[SPEAKER_01]: What is wrong with that kind of response?
44:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I think people, well,
44:36
[SPEAKER_03]: That would be a very generous and spiritual response, very humane response.
44:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm not accusing Mr. Uthav, not having that, but I think when you have accomplished something and you've been, you earn something, you feel it is kind of yours, you know?
44:55
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's difficult, I think, especially if you're convinced that you did this,
44:58
[SPEAKER_03]: and not somebody else, somebody's been a horn and get credit for what you did, the natural human response, I think, is to, you know, that's not true.
45:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm the guy I did it, you know?
45:08
[SPEAKER_03]: So I can't speak for anybody in this.
45:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just sort of talking as a human now to do your moments.
45:16
[SPEAKER_01]: and I keep driving that point home over and over and over because I see so much fake stuff because we have all these motives and agendas.
45:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We have money and we're recognition.
45:28
[SPEAKER_01]: We have all of that built into the excursing through our veins as Vietnamese or Vietnamese Americans or white Americans.
45:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We were constantly dealing with...
45:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Doesn't make it hard to describe your Vietnamese or American or Chinese or Russian or German or anything.
45:41
[SPEAKER_03]: We're all... We're gonna do it in
45:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Jay, is there more that you would like to add to this discussion today?
45:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I can only say that I would hope that the Vietnamese community or the veterans community who's listening to you will try to support the league financially.
46:04
[SPEAKER_03]: The league has struggled the last couple of years, almost lost at a couple of times.
46:12
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the sort of thing I think that we continue to monitor to honor American feet of MIAs to think about this issue.
46:22
[SPEAKER_03]: to honor our veterans and totality, but like I said, there's one thing I could ask is just, you know, try it if you can just give a few dollars to the league, help support it.
46:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Those, that money goes a long way.
46:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And where could they, I mean, I hope that you can send me a link to that and is there a link?
46:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, the
46:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful.
46:46
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll add that in the description when the time comes.
46:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Jay, thank you so much for spending time with me today and making sure that we get these details right because it's important to have this conversation.
47:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynne.
47:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynne, Catherine Wynne, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
47:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.