by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night PBS re-ran a Frontline episode from November 3, 2015 called “Terror in
Little Saigon,” which made it seem like gangs are roaming through the Viet
Namese-American communities at will. The story was actually an investigative
report, written and directed by Richard Rowley and narrated on screen by A. C.
Thompson, about Dam Phong Ngyuen, a Viet Namese immigrant journalist who ran a
Viet Namese-language newspaper called Tu Do in Houston, Texas in the late 1970’s and early
1980’s and was murdered by a man who came to the door of his house on August
24, 1982, just seven years after the Viet Namese War finally ended. The Houston
Police Department was never able to solve the case. Naturally Rowley and
Thompson worked from the conclusion that Dam Phong was murdered over something
he had published in Tu Do — which
meant they had to do something the Houston police hadn’t bothered to do “in the
day,” namely get a translator to render Tu Do’s articles into English so they could read them.
Phong was big on exposing corruption within the Viet Namese-American community
and had made some powerful enemies, but in the last issues of Tu Do he had come down particularly hard on a mysterious
group called “The Front,” composed of Viet Namese-American immigrants,
including many who’d served in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN), the
South Viet Namese army that were our supposed “allies” in the war. At first I
thought where this was going was that “The Front” was a scam, collecting money
from Viet Namese immigrants and promising them it would be used to stage a
counter-revolution that would wrest control of Viet Nam from the Communists
who’d won the war, and the people running it were raking in the bucks and
didn’t want their meal ticket torn up by a meddling journalist who would expose
their group as a con. Later, as the program wound on, it emerged that “The
Front” was led by people who thought they could really stage a
counter-revolution in Viet Nam, notably its leader, Hoang Co Minh, a Viet
Namese refugee and former ARVN commander whose application for U.S. citizenship
(which he submitted posing as a Japanese under the name “William Nakamura”) was
sponsored by no less a personage than Richard Armitage, later Colin Powell’s
assistant at the State Department during his unhappy tenure as Secretary of
State during George W. Bush’s first term and leaker of Valerie Plame’s identity
as an undercover CIA agent (you remember). Dam Phong reportedly traveled to
Thailand, where Hoang Co Minh and a group of Front fighters had assembled to do
guerrilla raids across the Viet Namese/Thai border.
Rowley and Thompson learn
that The Front not only had powerful friends in the U.S. government but also
maintained a hit squad of “K9,” composed largely of soldiers from the ARVN’s
SEAL team (trained, of course, by U.S. SEAL’s), whose job it was to eliminate
any enemies that might threaten the Front’s operations, including U.S.-based
journalists of Viet Namese heritage like Phong and Duong Trong Lam, who like
Phong was a Viet Namese-American journalist who’d started his own Viet Namese-language
newspaper and was getting too close to revealing the Front’s activities —
though a communiqué sent out after Lam’s murder by a group calling itself
VOECRN, “Viet Namese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the
Nation,” claimed responsibility. The documentary included a photo of a VOECRN
rally, held under the backdrop of a big banner reading, “COMMUNISM MUST GO.”
According to Thompson’s commentary on the show, however, “The local police had
Lam’s murder pegged as a personal dispute. They wrapped up their investigation
in a few weeks, charging his friend with the murder. But the whole thing fell
apart, and the judge threw it out of court before the trial even began.” The
show doesn’t come to the sort of satisfying conclusion audiences expect from a
mystery, real or fictional — Rowley and Thompson are clearly convinced The
Front ordered hits on Lam and Phong and sent their K-9 death squad to do it,
but they’re unable either to prove it themselves or to present convincing
enough evidence to get a police department with jurisdiction to reopen the
case. Thompson’s closing commentary states, “After all the new information I’ve
uncovered, I want to talk to the FBI, but they won’t do an interview or answer
my questions. Instead, they send a statement saying the cases were led by
experienced FBI professionals who collected evidence and conducted numerous
interviews. But they said despite those efforts, after 15 years of
investigation, Department of Justice and FBI officials concluded that thus far,
there is insufficient evidence to pursue prosecution.”
It’s a weird footnote to
the overall story of the Viet Nam War, especially for its suggestion that
nearly a decade after the U.S. withdrew in 1973 there were still people in the
U.S. government who were hoping for a way to get back in the game in Viet Nam
and at least clandestinely supporting a fringe group of would-be guerrillas
whom for some reason they thought could accomplish what 500,000 U.S. troops (at
the high point of our commitment in 1968) hadn’t, mainly to keep South Viet Nam
a nominally independent country (actually a U.S. dependency) and keep the North
Viet Namese army and their allies, the Viet Cong guerrilla group, from uniting
the whole country under Communist control. The fact that, just as the North won
the U.S. Civil War on the battleground but the South “won the peace,”
re-establishing African-Americans as a permanent servant class and taking away
their political and social rights (as President Trump and the Republicans in
Congress are seeking to do again, undoing the work of the Second Reconstruction
in the 1960’s the way segregationist Democrats in the South and corporate
Republicans in the North combined to undo the First Reconstruction after 1876),
the U.S. lost the Viet Nam war on the battlefield but “won the peace” by
turning Viet Nam into a giant sweatshop, a place to offshore manufacturing once
Chinese workers got better pay, just adds a level of irony to this grim tale of
politically well-connected revolutionary wanna-bes knocking off immigrant
journalists and entrepreneurs in the good ol’ U.S.A.!
