Note to Readers: Project C.U.R.E. has now been in existence over thirty-three years –that’s 33 years --. Some of our most successful work over those years has taken place in the mysterious, and beautiful country of Vietnam. I want to share with you here a slice of that experience by allowing you to be a part of the early days of Project C.U.R.E.’s involvement in Vietnam.
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Vietnam: October 1996: My life has already spanned an interesting mini-segment of world history. I was born after the end of World War I and before the United States’ involvement in World War II. By the time I was five years old, the Second World War was over, and all the international leaders congregated in New York to assure the war-weary world that never again would there be war. We had just come through the war to end all wars. And, finally, we had become civilized folks who, from that day on, would never have to experience the hardships and horrors of military conflict. All disputes and controversies could, in the future, be taken to a glorified powwow center that would be built in New York City. The mushroom cloud was making everybody bend their “weapons into plowshares”—whatever that meant.
I remember the kids in our classroom collecting pennies, nickels, and dimes and sending them off to help construct the United Nations building. The scary scenes from newspaper pictures and news filmstrips of the war front were still fresh in our minds. Out on the playground, if you really wanted to call some kid a bad name, you would call him a “moose-a-lini,” ’cause everyone was talking about the bad man from Italy … or you were “nothing but the toe-jam from the toe-jo of Tokyo.” We had switched from playing Cowboys and Indians to playing army. One kid would raise his fist into the air and yell, “Hi-ho Hitler,” and all the other kids would raise imaginary rifles, take aim, and shoot him dead!
But those bad days were all gone. I remembered huddling around the arch-topped, wooden radio in the living room of my grandpa’s house. We would listen to a newscaster named Gabriel Heatter or another man who would say, “All the news that’s news today is brought to you by Hemmingway.” They kept all of us posted on the ending of the war.
One day when the radio man said the war was over, we all ran outside and started honking the horns of all the cars in the neighborhood. Nobody was driving around at that time. Everyone was just sitting in the cars honking the horns. Gasoline was being rationed, and no one had extra to use just riding around.
Later that evening, everyone threw gas-rationing fears to the wind. The streets were jammed in our little town with people riding around in their cars, waving their arms out the windows, and cheering to each other … and still honking their car horns.
A short time later, my uncles started coming home from the front. They brought great things home for us to look at and fool with … like guns and hand grenades and parachutes and knives. But some of the neighborhood families’ kids never came home. Instead, the government sent each of those families a flag. They would hang their flags by their front doors or from their porches and leave them there for a long time.
For a little kid, it was a wonderful feeling to know that there would never be war again. I remember having decided while the terrible fighting was going on that if I ever had to go to war, I would be the captain of a big navy ship. But it was not to be that I would ever have to go to war.
However, something happened to the great “powwow” plan. Building the United Nations center didn’t stop people from fighting. Soon the newspapers were telling about Stalin and Mr. Mao from China helping North Korea invade Seoul, South Korea. LIFE magazine and newspapers started showing lots more scary pictures of dead and freezing American soldiers. The dads of two of my good school chums, Buddy Himbigner and Jerry Stump, went to the Korea “conflict.” Patrick Peterson’s dad also went but never came back. He was killed when the Chinese came over the border “like human waves.”
At our house we talked about how bad a deal it was that Mr. Truman fired General MacArthur before he could do his job. But Russia, China, and North Korea really didn’t want anyone else on the Korean Peninsula.
The construction of the United Nations building with the help of our nickels and dimes didn’t stop the people in another part of the world from fighting either. In the late 1800s, the French colonized the people of Vietnam, and later the Japanese came in and occupied Vietnam much as they had occupied Korea in 1910. Their occupation was very cruel, and history has recorded many Japanese atrocities in both countries.
But when the Japanese were defeated in 1945, the allies divided Vietnam into two zones. It was much the same course that was followed in Korea. Korea was divided at the 38th parallel, and Russia was put in charge of rounding up the Japanese in the north and deporting them back to Japan. The US was responsible for ridding the area south of the 38th parallel of the Japanese and sending them back from there.
In Vietnam, the British cleared the Japanese out of the south portion of the country and turned that area back to the French. It was China’s obligation to clear the Japanese out of the north. They did so and then turned the north over to Vietnam’s emperor, Bao Dai. The emperor soon conceded power and turned the north over to the rule of strongman Ho Chi Minh. He declared total independence for Vietnam in 1946 and attacked the French in order to reunite the country.
The New York powwow tried to work out a deal. The Geneva Accords were signed, and plans were drawn for a total national election to be held in Vietnam in 1956. Prior to the election, the country remained divided, but the leader of the south, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to go along with the new election agreements, and full-fledged civil war broke out between north and south.
The United States was scared to death that the Communists were going to take over the entire country, much like the North Korea situation. So, we began pouring tremendous amounts of support into the fracas to strengthen the south. Soon, American troops were trying to fight everywhere.
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had the Americans fighting the Vietcong, who were southern Communists fighting the southern government as well as all the north Vietnamese troops. Things really got complicated when the war spread over into Laos and Cambodia. We were fighting and bombing everybody everywhere.
Eventually, in April 1975, the US withdrew its troops from Vietnam, and Saigon fell to the Communists. The “Commies,” at that point, took Laos and Cambodia as well as all of Vietnam. In 1976 Vietnam officially reunited as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. By 1986 Nguyen Van Linh, the Communist Party’s general secretary, championed doi moi or “renovation,” and Vietnam subsequently endeavored to open up to private enterprise and trade. The US still maintained a policy of boycott or sanctions against Vietnam, but relations were beginning to thaw, as evidenced by Washington’s opening of a diplomatic office in Hanoi in 1991.
It really seemed interesting to me that I had been around and witnessed all of those major political conflicts that ended up in the military involvement of the US, yet the conflicts were spaced in time in such a way that I was never expected to actually go and be physically involved in any of them. I was too young during the Korea mess and already had a family by the time the Vietnamese conflict heightened. Additionally, my county of residence in rural Idaho always covered their military quotas through volunteers seeking a more exciting option than working on the family farm.
But as a person who has always been a student of politics, the economy, and global affairs, I had followed closely over the years the unfolding situations around the world.
I’ve been thinking about a lot of that as I prepare for the present trip to Vietnam. It is now a country of close to seventy million people.
Well over 40 percent of the population is under the age of fifteen, and the lack of medical supplies, medicine, and modern medical equipment is a major, major problem.
My involvement in Vietnam really began almost two years ago. Dr. Randy Robinson from Denver had contacted me to see if we could donate some medical goods to his organization Face the Challenge. Randy solicits the volunteer help of doctors who, like himself, specialize in craniofacial reconstruction. The assembled team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses go into a country and perform the facial restructuring necessary, and then they do the skin grafts needed to complete the job. They have performed hundreds of hair-lip and cleft-palate procedures on kids in South America and China, as well as in Vietnam.
Project C.U.R.E. was excited to donate some needed supplies, but this year we decided to get a little more involved and agreed to come alongside Dr. Robinson’s group in a significant way. In July we sent an ocean-going cargo container on ahead of our visit. The container included nearly $300,000 worth of medical supplies, equipment, and hospital items.
On September 15, the entire team involved in the Vietnam project for 1996 met at the Robinsons’ home to finalize and review all the plans. A Vietnamese woman named Binh Rybacki, whom I had not met in Colorado, came that night to brief everyone on Vietnamese customs and to teach us some necessary language phrases. Binh had been rescued off the US embassy roof as Saigon fell to the Communists. She had subsequently gone back and set up orphanages. She presently cares for 758 children and calls them her “children of peace.”
All the other team members left Denver International Airport on October 4, but I had to attend trustee board meetings for Colorado Christian University on Friday and Saturday. I also had some precommitted obligations at Cherry Hills Community Church the first part of the week, helping in their annual missions festival. So, it was impossible for me to leave until October 10.
Thursday, October 10–Saturday, October 12
My flight, United 1125, left Thursday morning, October 10, for Hong Kong via San Francisco. I arrived in Hong Kong at 5:30 p.m. on Friday after only a one-hour delay in San Francisco. I found my way to the Regal Hotel on Sa Po Road in Hong Kong and got a good night’s sleep. By 4:30 this afternoon (Saturday, October 12), I will arrive in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Next Week: Old Saigon