Vietnamese Rebel Leader Promises to ‘Spare No Effort’ to Rescue U.S. MIAs

The leader of a rebel group fighting to overthrow the Vietnamese government told nearly 2,000 people who crowded into a Garden Grove auditorium Sunday that his forces will “spare no effort” to rescue Americans still missing in Vietnam.

“This we will do without any conditions and out of compassion for our former comrades in arms, because we respect human dignity,” said Le Quoc Tuy, a former member of the Vietnamese air force and now head of the United Front of Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Vietnam. The group organized shortly after the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975.

The overwhelmingly Vietnamese crowd greeted Tuy and other members of his group with thunderous applause. Banners in yellow and red--the colors of the Vietnamese flag--hanging from the walls said in Vietnamese “We Are Still Fighting, Are You?” and “We Will Definitely Liberate Vietnam.”

Gary Thomas, a spokesman for the National Vietnam Veterans Coalition, representing 27 affiliated veterans groups, said the coalition had pledged to offer “humanitarian assistance” to the rebels.

“They don’t need arms--they’re armed to the teeth,” said Thomas, a retired Air Force sergeant, adding that he visited the rebels earlier this year at their bases in Cambodia. “They will have an American POW out of Vietnam within the year,” he predicted.

Thomas said Tuy has about 2,000 soldiers fighting along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. And, while he said that he wants nothing to do with Rambo-style mercenaries who want to liberate Americans still believed held in Vietnam, Thomas told the crowd, “The only thing the Vietnamese Communists understand--or any other atheist Communist around the world--is the bayonet.”

An Ng Uyen, a 31-year-old Westminster resident who attended the rally, which was heavily advertised in the Vietnamese press, said Sunday that “there is still a lot of hope” that the Communist government in Vietnam will someday be overthrown.

“The (rebel) forces are still very small, so it couldn’t be anything short-term,” he said. “But in time, maybe.”