Like no other war before it, the Vietnam War aroused in returning American veterans suspicions that the nation and its political leaders had heedlessly and needlessly used them as pawns.
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Those suspicions almost passionately coalesce around the issues of American prisoners of war and missing in action.
President Clinton’s decision Thurdsday to lift the American trade embargo of Vietnam set off an avalanche of angry response from Vietnam veterans who wanted the embargo to remain, though others see benefits.
Tom Stack, a veteran who co-organized one of the largest Vietnam veterans’ reunions ever in 1986, when 350,000 vets paraded in Chicago, called Clinton’s repeal of the embargo a “sellout.”
“This will be the death knell of the POW/MIA issue,” said Stack, who teaches criminal justice at Daley College in Chicago and attributes recurring bouts of cancer to America’s use of the defoliant Agent Orange in the Mekong Delta while he served there in 1968-69.
“Without the leverage of the embargo, the Vietnamese won’t have to release any information anymore. . . . You have to play hardball with the North Vietnamese. The Vietnamese haven’t been forthright.”
Ever since the war ended in 1975, veterans groups have voiced fears that the U.S. may have left behind hundreds of prisoners in Southeast Asia.
They have also accused the Vietnamese government of callously withholding both remains and information about the fate of the 2,238 Americans listed as missing in action.
A coalition of area veterans groups has scheduled a press conference at 10 a.m. Saturday at 343 S. Dearborn St. to voice opposition to lifting the trade ban.
“We are dead-set against lifting it,” said James Balcer, head of the city’s Department of Veterans Affairs and a POW/MIA activist. “We believe that it will only retard resolving the POW/MIA issue.”
Nearly every major national and regional veterans organization, including the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and VietNow, has long advocated continued political and economic isolation of Vietnam.
Those calls revolve around the strong feeling among many veterans that the U.S. “let down” the 8.7 million men and women who served during the war, especially POWs and MIAs.
Veterans of other recent wars have been more fatalistic about unaccounted-for comrades. There are still 78,750 missing in action listed from World War II, and 8,100 from the Korean War.
Those earlier veterans never made much of an issue of MIAs, apparently accepting them as normal casualties of any war.
But they came home to a grateful nation that had stood behind them.
Vietnam was an unpopular war at home, and as the warriors themselves returned from the conflict, they were ignored and sometimes ridiculed.
Many veterans have long feared American political leaders in 1975 were so eager to get the war behind them that they failed to force Vietnam to make a full accounting of all the Americans it had imprisoned.
Not all veterans think lifting the trade ban with Vietnam is a bad idea.
“I just think if trade is opened, every nook and cranny in (Vietnam) will be opened to us,” said Joe Fornelli, a Chicago artist and co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans Art Project.
“It’s just time to put the war behind us,” said another veteran who wanted to stay anonymous. “Germany and Japan committed far greater atrocities than the Vietnamese, and now they are our close friends . . .
“Other nations already are making a lot of money there, while the Vietnamese would prefer to deal with us. How many veterans who are out of work now would be employed if we could add Vietnamese trade to our economy?”
Such pragmatism doesn’t always settle well.
“No matter how you try to dress that up, that’s putting price tags on people’s lives. That’s wrong,” said Ed Rogers, past vice chairman of the national Vietnam Veterans Coalition, now veterans adviser to Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan.
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Tony Handzell, a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam, is the POW/MIA committee chairman at the American Legion post at 121 N. Douglas Av., Arlington Heights.
Concerned that vets from earlier wars never understood Vietnam veterans’ fears about MIAs, he has organized a meeting at the post Feb. 10 to air the issue.
Rescinding the embargo won’t change how monthly meetings at the post are conducted, Handzell said. The meetings can’t begin until he has solemnly laid out an POW/MIA flag on an empty chair on the dais.
And Handzell said he will continue to conclude his monthly committee report by turning to the post commander with the closing words:
“In the meantime, skipper, we’re leaving a light for those who are still missing.”