Brian Willson, Protester Injured by Train

Leftist Pierre Blais writes about Norm Morrison (a war protester who incinerated himself on the steps of the Pentagon in 1965) and Willson in an Op-Ed Page article (Sept. 4).

Blais writes that his friend Willson, as an intelligence officer in Vietnam, was invited to dinner by the base librarian, whose father “had been turned into a human crab” while imprisoned by the Ngo Dinh Diem government. “After dinner, the young woman sang Vietnamese folk-songs. One was about a young American Quaker and father of three who had done what Buddhist monks in Vietnam were then doing to protest the slaughter of their compatriots. It was titled ‘An Ode to Norm Morrison.’ When she translated the song, Brian wept.” This story has all the earmarks of the duping of an extremely gullible young man by a pair of Communist agents.

Blais goes on to tell us that Morrison “became a Vietnamese hero” complete with a monument in Hanoi. Not a “Vietnamese hero,” Blais, a Communist hero.

But after the Communists took over Vietnam quite a few Buddhist monks committed flaming suicides in protest. Tri Quang, who had been behind the anti-Diem suicides, met his death in a Communist prison. Blais, of course, does not mention any of this.

Religion is persecuted in Vietnam and in Nicaragua; Vietnam has taken over Laos and Cambodia and the Sandinistas are trying to topple the governments of their neighbors. There was genocide in Cambodia and that is the proper word to describe what the Sandinistas are practicing upon the Miskito Indians. The parallels don’t stop there. Blais and Willson say they don’t want another Vietnam in Central America, but in fact that is precisely what these two hypocrites do want.

CHARLES B. WAKEMAN

Los Angeles