2 Veterans Deride Clinton’s Trip to Vietnam

John Keaveney and Hung Trieu Doan, two old soldiers who carry their wartime memories to work each day, thought about President Clinton’s arrival in Hanoi on Thursday and winced.

Both were cynical as they considered a president who evaded military service during the Vietnam War and who became the first president to visit Vietnam since the war ended a quarter-century ago.

“Don’t forget those young men who were the cannon fodder,” said Keaveney, 51, a former Army infantryman who served two tours in Vietnam and runs a Westside nonprofit group that serves homeless veterans. “Mr. Clinton, you need to come see what’s really happening with your veterans. There are some people who will never recover,” he said, his face growing flushed.

“He doesn’t know how bad and deceiving the Communists can be,” said Doan, 70, a former colonel in the anti-Communist South Vietnamese army who founded a nonprofit group in Westminster five years ago to assist former Vietnam political prisoners.

A half-dozen elderly Vietnamese immigrants gathered Thursday at Doan’s Mutual After-Life Foundation. They listened to Vietnamese-language radio stations teeming with coverage about Clinton’s visit and read newspaper articles with commentaries about the event.

Echoing the staunchly anti-Communist tone of those articles, Doan, a diminutive man with placid manners, said through a translator that he doesn’t expect any improvements in the lives of those still living in his native country after Clinton’s visit.

“The Communists will lie and flip-flop whenever it is to their advantage,” he said. “ Mr. Clinton wants to make history by being the first American president to visit Hanoi. This may be good publicity for the president and for the Communist government, but it is not good for the American or Vietnamese people.”

American veteran Keaveney was born in Scotland. He came to the United States at the age of 19, winding up in Santa Monica, jobless and wild.

He said he was drafted four months later, in 1969, an era when half a million U.S. troops were in South Vietnam. He served a standard one-year tour, surviving facial shrapnel wounds during an ambush in Quang Tri province, then volunteered for a second tour because he was alienated by the antiwar movement. “I said, ‘Send me where life is a little easier to understand.’ ”

He said he spent his second tour as a sergeant and advisor to South Vietnamese troops.

Today, Keaveney is a compact man with a deliberate stride who offers friendly “hullos” to the men who live and work at the New Directions Regional Opportunity Center, where he’s chief operating officer. The 156-bed center, a block north of the Wilshire Boulevard in the southern corner of the 600-acre West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs complex, also offers drug rehabilitation and job training to veterans.

He believes his presence in Vietnam and Clinton’s historic visit were motivated by the same thing: economics.

Like Keaveney, Doan could not contemplate Clinton’s visit without replaying an escape shared with so many other Vietnamese immigrants. It was April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell to the Communists. Doan, as an officer, feared he would be killed.

He said he and his family were able to escape in a small boat with 100 other refugees. They were picked up by an American Navy ship, but fearing the worst, during the dangerous sea voyage, Doan tied a rope around his wife and their six children, the eldest 13, the youngest 6. “If we were going to die,” he said, “we were going to die together.”

They spent months at a refugee camp in Thailand and later at Camp Pendleton. A church in Ontario eventually sponsored the family, and he still lives in that community with his wife, a former nurse.

Doan found a job as a machinist at an aerospace firm in Irvine, where he worked for nearly two decades before retiring and devoting time to his foundation. Although travel restrictions to Vietnam have been lifted in recent years, he has not returned for a visit.

“When the Communists are gone,” he said. “I’ll go to Vietnam.”