AMERICA AND VIETNAM: A NEW ERA : Renewal of Vietnam Ties Angers Vets : Reaction: Orange County’s POW-MIA families also show little support for President Clinton’s historic decision. Some vow to fight normalization.

Normalization of relations with Vietnam was not pleasant news for Madeline Bond of Fullerton, whose son, Ronald, has been missing in action since 1971, when his jet fighter was shot down in the Vietnam War.

“I told myself today, ‘Ron, we tried. And, we will still keep trying,’ ” said the 74-year-old mother following President Clinton’s decision Tuesday to establish diplomatic ties with Vietnam.

In Orange County, the historic decision received little support among the county’s POW-MIA families and Vietnam War veterans, who said that they may call for a boycott of products made in Vietnam and exported to the United States.

The announcement, viewed as an official abandonment by the county’s Vietnamese Americans who fought for and then lost their country before escaping to the United States after 1975, came as bitter news.

“It’s a very dark, very sad day,” said Chuyen Van Nguyen, 46, a former fighter pilot for the South Vietnamese government.

“We have always had the intention of protecting Vietnamese people from atrocities and human rights violations that have gone on since the war,” Nguyen said. “But this, this is like what [Rep. Robert K.] Dornan said, that Clinton had put business before honor. We haven’t completed our task. They’re still living under an oppressive government, [but] now we’re shaking hands with the same old enemies who had killed our GIs and Vietnamese comrades.”

Vietnam veteran Bob Kakuk, 49, of Huntington Beach, said Clinton failed to keep a campaign promise to bring home U.S. military personnel who were captured and held as POWs and have an accounting for those missing in action. An estimated 2,200 U.S. servicemen are missing in Indochina.

“Our only option now is to boycott any trade products from Vietnam,” Kakuk said. “Because if we buy anything from Vietnam, we’re buying the blood of our American servicemen who never came home. Until there’s a full accounting of all our men and women missing, we don’t need to buy these products.”

Even those with moderate viewpoints on normalization, such as Charles W. (Pete) Maddox, president of the board of trustees for Rancho Santiago College District and a Vietnam veteran, had difficulty accepting the decision.

“What’s difficult is to see us collaborating with the enemy and that’s what we’re doing,” Maddox said. “They tortured people. If [Vietnamese] people don’t like what the government is doing, they are sent to re-education camps. What people don’t realize is that when one person goes into a re-education camp, his family has to support him or he doesn’t make it. He can die there. Given the number of people killed in Cambodia and Vietnam by the Communists, it’s difficult to see normalization.”

Maddox, 46, who as a sergeant drove Army supply trucks in Vietnam, said he is “really torn” by the issue. He said he “is disgusted” with the U.S. government’s lack of commitment to the POW-MIA issue. He said he favors establishing diplomatic ties because it may improve the Vietnamese economy and, in turn, help poor people.

“It’s difficult to say whether I’m for or against normalization,” he said. “I think we fought over there for a just cause. We just didn’t as a nation have the will to get the job done.”

Maddox said that Vietnam vets had been asked to kill other human beings and, in a sense, “violate a basic human law of nature.”

“Yet, we have never been officially forgiven, and now it may be too late,” he said. For Madeline Bond and her husband Errol, 80, it’s been a sad 23 years since they heard any news about their son, Ronald.

“My comments couldn’t be printed in your paper,” Errol Bond said angrily. “I think it’s a sad thing that we have a President who snuck away from the war and then turns around and deserts our boys. I’ll tell you it’s been a sad 23 years, actually, 24 years this September.”

Bond’s son, Air Force Capt. Ronald L. Bond, then 23, was in a jet fighter that disappeared over Laos on Sept. 30, 1971.

In the intervening years, the Bonds have done everything they could think of to find out the fate of their son. And what they have discovered is evidence they say strongly suggests that Ronald survived the crash and, conceivably, could be alive today.

Along their way, the Bonds have encountered official roadblocks as well as some surprisingly warm moments, including marching arm-in-arm at anti-Communist civic events in Little Saigon with Vietnamese Americans.

“We’ve marched with Vietnamese here on many occasions on events for POWs and others too,” Errol Bond said proudly.

Madeline Bond said she saw Clinton’s announcement on television alone, which left her depressed, she said.

“As the mother of a son shot down during the war, I feel let down,” she said. “If you knew your son was alive for six weeks after his shot-down date and nothing has been done about it, and there’s no proof that he’s alive or dead. No proof either way. How would you feel?”

It is the sense of not knowing that continues to drive families such as the Bonds.

“You know what the sad part about today’s announcement was,” said Errol Bond, who later saw a televised replay of Clinton’s announcement. “There was [Sen.] John McCain, a former POW himself, and there wasn’t one single person who said anything about a possibility that there might be any of our boys alive over there.”

“We fought a lot for all these POWs and MIAs . . . so hard,” he said. “But you know that copper-top battery commercial on TV with the rabbit? You seen that? That’s us. We’re going to keep going.”