That change is due almost entirely to the efforts of an ordinary Vietnam veteran who accomplished an extraordinary thing–he convinced his country to appreciate, and honor,  the service and sacrifice of Vietnam veterans, and finally welcome them home.

 

That Vietnam Veteran is Jose G. Ramos of Whittier, CA, the Father of “Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day.” How Ramos did that in over a decade of effort, is a remarkable story, which is vividly told on the Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day website (www.whvvd.org). 

 

For Vietnam War combat veterans in particular, and Vietnam-era veterans in general, and their families, the Vietnam War, and what happened in civilian America while those veterans were in military service, is a present, immediate memory. But for many Americans, most particularly the young in their schools, the Vietnam War is as remote to them as the War of 1812 was to those who served during the Vietnam War.

 

For many in America, what happened in the Vietnam War, and what happened in America during that  war, is not known at all, including by millions of immigrants to America, legal and illegal, who have come to America since that war ended in 1975, and whose allegiance to America is new to them, if it exists at all and not to the country from whence they have come.

 

The direct involvement of the U.S. began in 1955, after the defeat of France by Vietnamese communist forces at battle of Dien Bien  Phu in 1954. U.S. involvement in Vietnam ended in 1975, when communist forces of North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam’s military at the battle of Saigon, two years after American troops had been withdrawn on March 30, 1973, and after the Democrat Party took  control of Congress in the 1974 elections and as its first act cut off all military funding to the anti-communist South Vietnamese.

 

 Involvement of American combat troops began slowly in the early 1960’s under President John F. Kennedy, who first sent special forces troops to South Vietnam. Military involved escalated  dramatically into full fledged warfare under President Lyndon B. Johnson. It continued  under President Richard Nixon until the Treaty of Paris in January 1973. U.S. prisoners of war came home first on Feb. 15, 1973, and all troops were withdrawn by March 30, 1973.

 

From the first special forces sent to Vietnam to those brought home in 1973, some 2,594,000 Americans were deployed to serve in war in South Vietnam, out of the total of 8,744,000  Americans who served in the armed forces in the Vietnam War Era.

Casualties in the Vietnam War included 58, 272 Americans who were killed in action or died due to non-combat causes in Vietnam.

Another 303,664 were wounded in action, including 153,303 who required hospitalization.

Missing in action at the end of the war were 2,646 Americans; 1,677 have still not been accounted for as of the end of 2011.

Some 725 Americans suffered unspeakable torture and degradation as  prisoners of war of the North Vietnamese communists, who eschewed the Geneva Accords on their claim that  captured Americans were not prisoners of war but “war criminals.” Sixty-five died in the inhuman conditions imposed by their communist captors. (While there are many excellent books concerning what American prisoners of war endured, see especially  by two prisoners of war, “When Hell Was In Session,” by Rear Admiral Jeremiah A. Denton; and “Surviving Hell,” by Col. Leo Thorsness. See also about another extraordinary prisoner of war, “American Patriot: The Life And Wars Of Col. Bud Day,” America’s most decorated military hero, by Robert Coram.)

The Vietnam War is the first war, as far as is known, in which veterans were not welcomed home. Instead, many were vilified by 1960’s liberals, progressives,  anarchists, socialists, or communists, on coming home.  Troops were actually told by their military units not to wear their uniforms on going home,  to avoid being taunted, cursed, vilified, or spat upon by the self-righteous members of the 60’s “anti-war movement.” 

The members of the so-called anti-war movement  who demonstrated their anti-war superiority by in fact being anti-veteran,  denigrating and vilifying  troops as “baby killers” and “war criminals.”  They were of great aid and comfort to the North Vietnamese communists. The hypocrisy of the alleged anti-war” protests led in the main by self-righteous nobler-than-thou college students — the “Occupiers” of the 60’s – was exposed when the anti-war movement collapsed after  President Richard Nixon ended the draft and those students were no longer threatened with actually having to serve in it. 

The North Vietnamese military leaders and historians have credited anti-war Americans as making their communist victory possible. For example, they openly admit that the famous Tet Offensive was in fact a terrible defeat for them by American troops, after which it did not appear they could survive because their losses were so heavy.  

 

But they were able to hang on after television anchor Walter Cronkite, referred to as “Uncle Walter” and regarded as the “most trusted man in America,” declared on television that the Vietnam War was “unwinnable.” That declaration by the amiable, avuncular, and very liberal Cronkite, which was echoed lemming-like by liberal media generally,  gave hope to the communists, malaise to the country, and adrenalin to the anti-war movement of  60’s radicals of every stripe. In short, while the war was being won in Vietnam by those who served, it was being lost in America by those who didn’t serve.

 

The North Vietnamese communists acknowledge they would not have succeeded but for the anti-war movement in America. They actually honor and designate as heroes those Americans who gave them hope and changed the course of the war,  making victory possible for the  North Vietnamese communists.  

 

For example, the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly, Saigon,  capital of the then-Republic of Vietnam)  includes an exhibit “honoring heroes” who helped the Vietnamese communists “win the war against the United States.” Featured prominently are photos of  anti-war activists John Kerry (now a U.S. Senator) and Jane Fonda, the celebrity movie star queen of liberal anti-war Americans. Known as “Hanoi Jane,” after she went to North Vietnam to publicly support the North Vietnamese defeat of Americans, even posing for pictures of her as if firing a communist anti-aircraft gun at American planes. She did this while American pilots shot down by those guns were nearby being tortured by their communist captors in the hellhole known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”

Years later, after the communist bloodbaths in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia she helped bring about – as had been predicted by the American military—Fonda made a belated teary apology for her treason, which caused  untold American deaths and great anguish to the prisoners of war whose suffering she ignored.  Fonda was quickly forgiven (if ever blamed) and embraced by liberal media and her Democrat co-progressives. She is celebrated even now “one of the 100 most important women of the century.”

 

However, many Vietnam veterans continue to have a very different view of Fonda, as succinctly expressed by the sign on the back of the truck of Vietnam combat veteran and Agent Organge victim Robert Sigala of San Jacinto,CA,, who was himself spat upon at the airport when he came home from combat. The sign in the back window of this pick-up truck speaks for many veterans: “I’ll forgive Jane Fonda when the Jews forgive Hitler.”

Almost twenty-five years would pass before there was even the thought that America had erred in its treatment of Vietnam veterans, and that there should be a “Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day” in America. And then along came a Vietnam veteran, no celebrity, no “war hero,” just an ordinary Vietnam veteran with an extraordinary dream that he could convince Americans to at long last pay respect to, honor, and give a delayed welcome home to Vietnam veterans: Jose G. Ramos. A man on a mission — on a bicycle. 

 

In 1998,  Ramos returned to Vietnam. He participated in a 16-day, 1,250 mile bicycle ride through Vietnam, organized by World T.E.A.M. Sports. It resulted in a documentary, “Vietnam, Long Time Coming. “ It won an Emmy and  the Directors Award at the Oscars.  It also led to Ramos launching, in 2000, a  crusade for a “Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day. “

That  campaign involved a decade of hard, frustrating, unpaid work which nearly bankrupted Ramos as he traveled the country to convince cities, towns, states, and the nation to adopt Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day. Among those efforts, in 2004, Ramos and the “WHVVD cycling team”  bicycled almost 3,000 miles from his hometown of Whittier, CA, to Washington, D.C., to gain attention and support for adoption of an official Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day.

In January, 2008, ten years after conceiving of the idea and eight years after launching his crusade, Ramos went to the nation’s capitol again, and held a three-day vigil outside the White House in the winter cold.

Then, on March 30, 2008, Ramos staged the first Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day celebration at home again in Whittier.

A year later, Ramos’ campaign took on new energy and success: The second annual Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day, held on March 30, 2009, in Whittier, CA, drew a crowd of 5,000. Oscar winning actor Jon Voight, who once co-starred in an anti-war movie with Fonda (to his regret), and who is in fact a conservative who strongly supports veterans, made a surprise appearance and endorsed Ramos’ Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day campaign.

Then, on September 25, 2009, Ramos achieved his greatest success: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law the first “Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day” bill (AB-717) in ceremonies at the Twenty Nine Palms Marine Base, joined by California Assemblyman Col. Paul Cook (USMC, ret.),  and Vietnam veteran Jose  G. Ramos.

California has since then observed Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day annually with bi-partisan support: First by Proclamation of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the  conservative “Terminator;” and then by his successor in 2011 and again in 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown, the liberal “Moonbeam.”

Other states have joined in the belated Welcome Home. For example, The Oregon  Legislature in 2011 adopted legislation designating March 30 of every year as “Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day.”  Gov. John A. Kizhaber, M.D., signed Senate Bill 74 into law to create an official day recognizing the service and sacrifice of Vietnam veterans, who, uniquely, were not welcomed home by their fellow Americans. He said the Oregon legislative act “is an effort – small, but significant – to rectify that.”

The United States Senate, too, heard the call of ordinary Vietnam veteran Jose G. Ramos and enacted legislation establishing March 30 to be observed annually and nationally as Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day.

 

As a Vietnam Era veteran who, like more than two thirds of veterans of the Vietnam War Era, was never deployed to Vietnam,  I want to salute and “welcome home” especially all those who were deployed and endured combat; but also all who responded in the Vietnam-era when our country called them to duty.  No matter what their individual beliefs may have been as to that particular war, they served.

 

I want to salute, too, that Vietnam veteran who has proved once again that in the free America he helped protect by his service, one good ordinary American can make a difference and accomplish an extraordinary amount of good—Jose G. Ramos  of Whittier, CA, the American veteran who has made March 30  of every year, “Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day” in America.  

 

 

In the Vietnam War, as in all wars, “all gave some, and some gave all.” May America and Americans on every March 30 continue to honor and “Welcome Home” the Vietnam Veterans who did come home; and honor and remember, in an attitude of gratitude,  all those Vietnam veterans who never came home. 

Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com