CONFLICT OVER NORMALIZATION : Normalizing Vietnam Relations Stirs Both Anger and Optimism

For Vietnam veteran Bob Kakuk, 49, of Huntington Beach, President Clinton’s expected announcement on normalized relations with Vietnam is a symbolic violation of the U.S. soldier’s credo never to leave fallen comrades behind.

“When we were in basic training, we were taught you never leave your men there,” Kakuk said in reference to missing U.S. servicemen. “And here, we’re doing it again.

“[But] we have a President who hasn’t kept one campaign promise,” Kakuk said. “When he was running for President in 1992, he promised that he wouldn’t allow normalization with Vietnam unless every one of our POWs was brought back or we had information on them and had gotten every question answered about them.”

Kakuk, an ex-Army machine-gunner, helped found Vietnam War Veterans of Orange County. The group encouraged Orange County cities in the late 1980s to fly POW-MIA flags as a remembrance of fallen comrades in Vietnam and other wars.

“This is not the end of it,” Kakuk said. “Don’t forget, these families still have family members unaccounted for.”

In recent weeks, Kakuk said he has telephoned and written dozens of letters to elected leaders in Washington, trying to get them to hold off their support for normalization. “It seems we have become a nation that forgets about [POWs and MIAs],” Kakuk said. “We just write them off the face of the earth. We, as veterans and as American people, should not let this happen again.”

As a business owner, Vietnamese-born Long Pham takes a pragmatic view of the United States’ intention of normalizing relations with Vietnam, a decision he fully supports.

“Open relations with Vietnam would mean more business, travel and educational opportunities,” Pham said. “The present government is like a gatekeeper. Without normalization, they only open their rear doors to selected [countries] to make secret deals.

“If we normalize, we open the front door to public scrutiny and possible long-term [reform],” he added.

Pham, who lives in Mission Viejo and co-owns an engineering consulting firm, visited Vietnam in 1994, after President Clinton lifted the embargo on trade with Vietnam. The trip convinced Pham that not even tough sanctions against Vietnam would produce economic and political change.

“It’s no good to leave Vietnam isolated,” Pham said. “What were we able to win in the last 20 years to improve the country when we had the trade embargo?” Pham said diplomacy with Vietnam would directly benefit its people and could allow the U.S. to monitor a strong-willed government where anxious foreign investors will be flocking.

When he visited his homeland, Pham said he spoke to Vietnamese citizens who said they favored diplomatic ties with the United States.

“They told me they thought it is very selfish of the U.S. to abandon them,” Pham said. “They couldn’t understand why Vietnamese Americans would want to remain isolated from their friends and family in their country.

“Official diplomacy,” he added, “would give more people the opportunity to go back there and help their relatives and friends. It will protect the visitors and those who live there.”

Since her father’s jet plane was shot down over North Vietnam on Sept. 16, 1966, Deborah Robertson Bardsley, 40, of Santa Ana has tried to overcome what she considers a wall of indifference in her quest to find out what happened to Air Force Col. John L. Robertson.

“I’ve been to Vietnam twice. I’ve done two documentaries. I’ve spoken to [Prime Minister] Vo Van Kiet,” she said. “There’s so much that Vietnam has in the way of military photographs and reports that I feel we have a right to have this information before any normalization.”

Like other MIA families, Bardsley and her mother, Barbara Robertson, have struggled to put the issue at the forefront of the nation’s agenda. But now, on the eve of President Clinton’s expected announcement favoring what these families had hoped to defer, Bardsley is angry.

But she hasn’t given up.

“For me, it will just get more difficult,” Bardsley said. “I will never give up. My father is a part of my life. The only thing is to deal with the fact that I will never get to know what happened to him.”

Bardsley said she has seen Vietnamese military photographs of such detail that she believes “someone” in Vietnam knows what happened to Col. Robertson and other MIAs and POWs.

Her anger rose as she tried to explain what she called America’s campaign to “let bygones be bygones.”

“Look at all the recent [films] we have out now telling us that it’s time to forget,” Bardsley said. “There’s such a propaganda campaign going on to change our minds, to make us believe that it’s about humanity and fairness, and it’s about as far [from] a humane . . . thing as you can get.”

An elated Dr. Co Long Dang Pham reacted with a sigh of relief when he heard about Clinton’s expected announcement.

“This has been long overdue,” exclaimed Pham, president of Orange County’s Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce. “It’s time to move on.”

Pham has been a force in building economic ties with his homeland. Last October, he visited Vietnam as the head of a 27-member delegation that explored business opportunities for U.S. investors, including many Vietnamese Americans.

The physician has been an outspoken advocate of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam, a position that has resulted in protests and death threats against him by angry Vietnamese Americans.

Normalization, he said, is the only way to safeguard investments in Vietnam.

“If we bring businesses to Vietnam, we can help improve [that nation’s] economy,” Pham said. “Vietnam has the human and natural resources. They need the technology, management and organization. All these things, no one can give to Vietnam except the U.S.”

After normalization takes effect, Pham predicted, U.S. investment in Vietnam will take off within six months to a year. And an economic boom in Vietnam would open doors for better enforcement of human rights, he said.

“You can read the human rights reports, and see that Vietnam is not as bad as a lot of other countries like Burma, China and Romania,” Pham said. “We should definitely demand more from the government, but that should not bar us from building diplomacy.

Unlike many of his countrymen, Pham believes it was clever of Clinton to act on normalization--and act promptly.

“The more presence of American people in Vietnam, the quicker the economy will improve and help the people. With a better life, they will receive better education, social infrastructures and medical care. This can all lead to democracy. We have to go step by step. It’s a simple as if you don’t know how to walk, how do you know how to ride a bike?”