Ron Baltierra remembers the crisp Vietnam night being rich with stars and the three armed figures walking straight toward him in the rice paddy just south of Saigon.
He spotted the men, whom he assumed were the enemy, through the night-vision scope mounted on his semiautomatic M-14 rifle. And he waited, his chest pounding.
Through a green haze, he saw the men getting closer. At 50 meters, Baltierra fired, killing one man. He fired again, and dropped another. The third man escaped.
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For Baltierra, an Army sniper, that night marked his first kill, and he “loved it.”
“After I got the taste of killing, it was like playing baseball,” he said Tuesday. “You wanted more.”
The feelings of that 20-year-old eventually waned.
After spending a year in the Vietnamese countryside, Baltierra left in 1969 with memories of a “hard-working and loving people.”
“I said, `This is wrong.’ I said, `These people are no different than I am.’ “
That is why when President Clinton extended diplomatic recognition Tuesday to Vietnam, Baltierra praised the decision.
“I believe we should open the door to the whole world,” said Baltierra, 48, owner of a Chicago construction company.
Not everyone agreed.
On the one side are those like Baltierra, who think it is time-20 years after the fall of Saigon-for the U.S. to forgive and forget. Consider, they say, Japan and Germany, which the U.S. defeated in World War II.
On the same side are those who say that by opening the doors to Vietnam, that country’s economy will prosper and, in turn, help a people who have suffered long enough.
Also, their argument goes, an open Vietnam means better access for officials in search of Americans missing in action.
Roy Dolgos, 50, president of a Vietnam veterans group, said the move came 20 years too late.
“For the sake of the MIA/POW issue, we should have had Americans over there sooner,” he said. “Judging from previous wars, we always open up sooner or later and have relationships with these countries anyway, so why drag it out? . . . Times and conditions change. We have to get on with our lives and move forward.”
On the other side are those who lost relatives in the war and some Vietnamese immigrants.
They think what Clinton did is wrong, that thousands of American and South Vietnamese lives were lost for nothing. Some said the Communists cannot be trusted.
As for the argument that a prosperous Vietnam will translate into a better life for the masses, they disagreed. The ones who will prosper, they fear, are corrupt Vietnamese governmental officials.
Besides, some argued, a president who avoided service in Vietnam should not have made such a decision.
For Emily and Edward Badsing, each 82, the issue opens old wounds. Their 20-year-old son Michael was killed in Vietnam in 1965.
“Every day, my husband and I feel (the war) was a waste of our young people,” she said. “I didn’t like the idea about our boys going out there years ago. It was the wrong thing for our government to do.
“I’m an old lady now. I don’t really understand about politics and agreements like this, but I suppose it will do some good.”
Ann Curran, 81, a Bensenville widow, has a son who is missing in action. Lt. Patrick Curran, a Marine navigator/bombardier, was shot down over Laos two weeks after arriving in Vietnam.
To this day, Curran said, thinking of her son hurts.
She said she is opposed to full recognition of Vietnam, but that there was nothing she could do.
Washington, she said, “does what it wants to do anyway.”
“I never even heard of Vietnam, and there he was,” Curran said. “I watched him take off in the plane when he went there, and afterward, I realized he was a lamb being led off to slaughter.”
Jim Balcer, 45, director of veterans affairs for Chicago, said he opposes the presidential order.
“Until they (the Vietnamese Communists) begin to deal with us with honesty and integrity or until they are removed, we should not give them this recognition,” said Balcer, who was a Marine in Vietnam.
Bob Jackson, 51, of Glen Ellyn was angry at Clinton.
“Restoring relations with them gets back to the feelings a lot of us had when we were there,” said Jackson as he relaxed in the lounge of the Wheaton Veterans of Foreign Wars post.
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“Those are memories that a lot of us don’t want to bring up again.”
In the Vietnamese community, the feelings were just as mixed.
Thomas Nguyen, 28, a Wheaton businessman who returned from Vietnam a few days ago, was grateful to Clinton because he believes the move will improve the American perception of his native country.
Nguyen’s last memory of Vietnam was as a 7-year-old watching an American soldier holding a gun out of a helicopter as it whisked Nguyen and other members of his family and others from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
He returned to Vietnam in 1992 for the first time to visit his father, whom he had not seen for 20 years.
Nguyen said he also thinks diplomacy will open doors economically for Vietnam.
For Vietnamese living in the U.S., he said it will mean being able to visit or maybe return there without fear.
“Most people still have a bad perception of Vietnam,” Nguyen said. “I’m constantly being asked if people are dying and so on. That’s become tiresome. . . . I think this decision is long overdue.”
Joe Hertel, curator of the Vietnam War Museum in Chicago, said he was concerned with human-rights abuses in Vietnam.
He said the people must be given freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
“The whole situation is motivated by economics and corporations,” Hertel said. “It’s big business pushing the president to go this way. . . . Money has replaced dignity, human rights and loyalty.
“I believe by recognizing the Communist government of Vietnam, President Clinton has sold the soul of America. He stabbed the heart of Vietnam veterans and the Vietnamese people with a knife of corporate greed.”
Cuong Trinh, 46, manager of Viet Hoa grocery on Argyle Street, served in the South Vietnamese Army from 1972 to 1975. He, too, is opposed to the normalization of relations.
“We wasted 30 years of time and millions of lives, wasted all for nothing. If we had normalized relations 30 years ago, there would have been no killings, no refugees, no bombs. . . . This conclusion is very sad.”
Ha Nguyen, 54, executive director of the Vietnamese Association of Illinois, served in the South Vietnamese Army and was in a re-education camp for three years after the war.
“We can’t hold bitter feelings toward the Communist government forever,” he said. “It should end sometime. There have been 20 years of exile for the Vietnamese community here. Twenty years is a lot of time for healing.”