i was born in vietnam vietnamese is my

A Consular Report of Birth (CRBA) is evidence of United States citizenship, issued to a child born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent or parents who meet the requirements for transmitting citizenship under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). A CRBA documents the birth of a United States citizen in a foreign country. A baby born to parents where one parent is a foreigner and the other is a Vietnamese citizen must be registered within 60 days from the date of birth at the local provincial or municipal Justice Service where the Vietnamese mother or father resides. The following documents are needed to register a birth: Completed birth certificate application 1. Vietnamese oversea who is not yet lost their Vietnamese citizenship and not having a Vietnamese valid passport in accordance with Vietnamese Law prior to July 1st 2009, if they desire to retain Vietnamese citizenship. 2. Registration to retain Vietnamese citizenship is implemented until July 1 st 2014. Later than this due date, persons Hi all, We have a problem that we are hoping all the knowledgeable folks on this forum can help. I am sponsoring my wifes green card. I am a US citizen and she is a Canadian citizen. She was born in Vietnam, but left when she was only 5 days old. She never got a birth certificate from Vietnam. We Whenever someone asks me, "What is your ethnicity?" my answer is, "I am Vietnamese." Technically speaking, I am Vietnamese-American meaning I am ethnically Vietnamese, but I was born and raised in the United States. membuat poster tentang pelestarian hewan dan tumbuhan. Love it or leave it. Have you heard someone say this? Or have you said it? Anyone who has heard these five words knows what it means, because it almost always refers to America. Anyone who has heard this sentence knows it is a loaded gun, pointed at them. As for those who say this sentence, do you mean it with gentleness, with empathy, with sarcasm, with satire, with any kind of humor that is not ill humored? Or is the sentence always said with very clear menace? I ask out of genuine curiosity, because I have never said this sentence myself, in reference to any country or place. I have never said “love it or leave it” to my son, and I hope I never will, because that is not the kind of love I want to feel, for him or for my country, whichever country that might be. The country in which I am writing these words is France, which is not my country but which colonized Vietnam, where I was born, for two-thirds of a century. French rule ended only 17 years before my birth. My parents and their parents never knew anything but French colonialism. Perhaps because of this history, part of me loves France, a love that is due, in some measure, to having been mentally colonized by France. Aware of my colonization, I do not love France the way many Americans love France, the ones who dream of the Eiffel Tower, of sipping coffee at Les Deux Magots, of eating a fine meal in Provence. This is a romantic love, set to accordion music or Édith Piaf, which I feel only fleetingly. I cannot help but see colonialism’s legacies, visible throughout Paris if one wishes to see them the people of African and Arab origins who are here because France was there in their countries of birth. Romanticizing their existence, oftentimes at the margins of French society, would be difficult, which is why Americans rarely talk about them as part of the fantasy of Paris. The fantasy is tempting, especially because of my Vietnamese history. Most of the French of Vietnamese origins I know are content, even if they are aware of their colonized history. Why wouldn’t they be? A Moroccan friend in Paris points to the skin I share with these French of Vietnamese ancestry and says, “You are white here.” But I am not white in America, or not yet. I was made in America but born in Vietnam, and my origins are inseparable from three wars the one the Vietnamese fought against the French; the one the Vietnamese fought against each other; and the one the fought in Vietnam. Many Americans consider the war to be a noble, if possibly flawed, example of American good intentions. And while there is some truth to that, it was also simply a continuation of French colonization, a war that was racist and imperialist at its roots and in its practices. As such, this war was just one manifestation of a centuries-long expansion of the American empire that began from its own colonial birth and ran through the frontier, the American West, Mexico, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and now the Middle East. One war might be a mistake. A long series of wars is a pattern. Indians were the original terrorists in the American imagination. The genocide committed against them by white settlers is Thanksgiving’s ugly side, not quite remembered but not really forgotten, even in France, where images of a half-naked Native American in a feathered headdress can also be found. Centuries later, the latent memory of genocide — or the celebration of conquest — would surface when American GIs called hostile Vietnamese territory “Indian country.” Now Muslims are the new gooks while terrorists are the new communists, since communists are no longer very threatening and every society needs an Other to define its boundaries and funnel its fears. The Nguyen family, in the early 1980s in San Jose, Calif., where his parents owned the New Saigon Mini Market Photographs Courtesy Viet Thanh Nguyen Many Americans do not like to hear these things. An American veteran of the war, an enlisted man, wrote me in rage after reading an essay of mine on the scars that Vietnamese refugees carried. Americans had sacrificed themselves for my country, my family, me, he said. I should be grateful. When I wrote him back and said he was the only one hurt by his rage, he wrote back with an even angrier letter. Another American veteran, a former officer, now a dentist and doctor, read my novel The Sympathizer and sent me a letter more measured in tone but with a message just as blunt. You seem to love the communists so much, he said. Why don’t you go back to Vietnam? And take your son with you. I was weary and did not write back to him. I should have. I would have pointed out that he must not have finished my novel, since the last quarter indicts communism’s failures in Vietnam. Perhaps he never made it past being offended by the first quarter of the novel, which condemns America’s war in Vietnam. Perhaps he never made it to the middle of the novel, by which point I was also satirizing the failures of the government under which I was born, the Republic of Vietnam, the south. I made such criticisms not because I hated all the countries that I have known but because I love them. My love for my countries is difficult because their histories, like those of all countries, are complicated. Every country believes in its own best self and from these visions has built beautiful cultures, France included. And yet every country is also soiled in the blood of conquest and violence, Vietnam included. If we love our countries, we owe it to them not just to flatter them but to tell the truth about them in all their beauty and their brutality, America included. If I had written that letter, I would have asked this dentist and doctor why he had to threaten my son, who was born in America. His citizenship is natural, which is as good as the citizenship of the dentist, the doctor and the veteran. And yet even my son is told to love it or leave it. Is such a telling American? Yes. And no. “Love it or leave it” is completely American and yet un-American at the same time, just like me. Unlike my son, I had to become naturalized. Did I love America at the time of my naturalization? It is hard to say, because I had never said “I love you” to anyone, my parents included, much less a country. But I still wanted to swear my oath of citizenship to America as an adolescent. At the same time, I wanted to keep my Vietnamese name. I had tried various American names on for size. All felt unnatural. Only the name my parents gave me felt natural, possibly because my father never ceased telling me, “You are 100% Vietnamese.” By keeping my name, I could be made into an American but not forget that I was born in Vietnam. Paradoxically, I also believed that by keeping my name, I was making a commitment to America. Not the America of those who say “love it or leave it,” but to my America, to an America that I would force to say my name, rather than to an America that would force a name on me. Naming my own son was then a challenge. I wanted an American name for him that expressed the complexities of our America. I chose Ellison, after the great writer Ralph Waldo Ellison, himself named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great philosopher. My son’s genealogy would be black and white, literary and philosophical, African American and American. This genealogy gestures at the greatness of America and the horror of it as well, the democracy as well as the slavery. Some Americans like to believe that the greatness has succeeded the horror, but to me, the greatness and the horror exist simultaneously, as they have from the very beginning of our American history and perhaps to its end. A name like Ellison compresses the beauty and the brutality of America into seven letters, a summation of despair and hope. Nguyen with his mother in Vietnam, before they left for the Photographs Courtesy Viet Thanh Nguyen This is a heavy burden to lay on one’s son, although it is no heavier than the burden placed on me by my parents. My first name is that of the Vietnamese people, whose patriotic mythology says we have suffered for centuries to be independent and free. And yet today Vietnam, while being independent, is hardly free. I could never go back to Vietnam for good, because I could never be a writer there and say the things I say without being sent to prison. So I choose the freedom of America, even at a time when “love it or leave it” is no longer just rhetorical. The current Administration is threatening even naturalized citizens with denaturalization and deportation. Perhaps it is not so far-fetched to imagine that one day someone like me, born in Vietnam, might be sent back to Vietnam, despite having made more out of myself than many native-born Americans. If so, I would not take my son with me. Vietnam is not his country. America is his country, and perhaps he will know for it a love that will be less complicated and more intuitive than mine. He will also — I hope — know a father’s love that is less complicated than mine. I never said “I love you” when I was growing up because my parents never said “I love you” to me. That does not mean they did not love me. They loved me so much that they worked themselves to exhaustion in their new America. I hardly ever got to see them. When I did, they were too tired to be joyful. Still, no matter how weary they were, they always made dinner, even if dinner was often just boiled organ meat. I grew up on intestine, tongue, tripe, liver, gizzard and heart. But I was never hungry. The memory of that visceral love, expressed in sacrifice, is in the marrow of my bones. A word or a tone can make me feel the deepness of that love, as happened to me when I overheard a conversation one day in my neighborhood drugstore in Los Angeles. The man next to me was Asian, not handsome, plainly dressed. He spoke southern Vietnamese on his cell phone. “Con oi, Ba day. Con an com chua?” He looked a little rough, perhaps working class. But when he spoke to his child in Vietnamese, his voice was very tender. What he said cannot be translated. It can only be felt. Literally, he said, “Hello, child. This is your father. Have you eaten rice yet?” That means nothing in English, but in Vietnamese it means everything. “Con oi, Ba day. Con an com chua?” This is how hosts greet guests who come to the home, by asking them if they have eaten. This was how parents, who would never say “I love you,” told their children they loved them. I grew up with these customs, these emotions, these intimacies, and when I heard this man say this to his child, I almost cried. This is how I know that I am still Vietnamese, because my history is in my blood and my culture is my umbilical cord. Even if my Vietnamese is imperfect, which it is, I am still connected to Vietnam and to Vietnamese refugees worldwide. And yet, when I was growing up, some Vietnamese Americans would tell me I was not really Vietnamese because I did not speak perfect Vietnamese. Such a statement is a cousin of “love it or leave it.” But there should be many ways of being Vietnamese, just as there are many ways of being French, many ways of being American. For me, as long as I feel Vietnamese, as long as Vietnamese things move me, I am still Vietnamese. That is how I feel the love of country for Vietnam, which is one of my countries, and that is how I feel my Vietnamese self. In claiming that defiant Vietnamese self, one that disregards anyone else’s definition, I claim my American self too. Against all those who say “love it or leave it,” who offer only one way to be American, I insist on the America that allows me to be Vietnamese and is enriched by the love of others. So it is that every day I ask my son if he has eaten yet and every day I tell my son I love him. This is how love of country and love of family do not differ. I want to create a family where I will never say “love it or leave it” to my son, just as I want a country that will never say the same to anyone. Most Americans will not feel what I feel when they hear the Vietnamese language, but they feel the love of country in their own ways. Perhaps they feel that deep, emotional love when they see the flag or hear the national anthem. I admit that those symbols mean little to me, because they divide as much as unify. Too many people, from the highest office in the land down, have used those symbols to essentially tell all Americans to love it or leave it. Being immune to the flag and the anthem does not make me less American than those who love those symbols. Is it not more important that I love the substance behind those symbols rather than the symbols themselves? The principles. Democracy, equality, justice, hope, peace and especially freedom, the freedom to write and to think whatever I want, even if my freedoms and the beauty of those principles have all been nurtured by the blood of genocide, slavery, conquest, colonization, imperial war, forever war. All of that is America, our beautiful and brutal America. Nguyen as a child in Ban Me Thuot, circa 1974 Photographs Courtesy Viet Thanh Nguyen I did not understand the contradiction that was our America during my youth in San Jose, Calif., in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then I only wanted to be American in the simplest way possible, partly in resistance against my father’s demand that I be 100% Vietnamese. My father felt that deep love for his country because he had lost it when we fled Vietnam as refugees in 1975. If my parents held on to their Vietnamese identity and culture fiercely, it was only because they wanted their country back, a sentiment that many Americans would surely understand. Then the re-established relations with Vietnam in 1994, and my parents took the first opportunity to go home. They went twice, without me, to visit a country that was just emerging from postwar poverty and desperation. Whatever they saw in their homeland, it affected my father deeply. After the second trip, my parents never again returned to Vietnam. Instead, over the next Thanksgiving dinner, my father said, “We’re Americans now.” At last, my father had claimed America. I should have been elated, and part of me was as we sat before our exotic meal of turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, which my brother had bought from a supermarket because no one in my family knew how to cook these specialties that we ate only once a year. But if I also felt uneasy, it was because I could not help but wonder Which America was it? This appears in the November 26, 2018 issue of TIME. Contact us at letters I just moved to Texas and I am trying to obtain my driver'sHello. I just moved to Texas and I am trying to obtain my driver's license. I was born in France, my birth certificate is French, but we moved here when I was a child and I have citizenship through na… read moreEric Y., satisfied customersI am ***** *****. I need to travel to Denmark & I am aHi, I am ***** *****. I need to travel to Denmark & I am a green card holder but I don't know my country of citizenship/nationality. Born in 1989 a Thailand refugee camp, my Vietnamese quickly immigra… read moreGuillermo SenmartinImmigration AttorneyJuris Doctor78,450 satisfied customersMy relative is from Vietnam and married. Both he and his wifemy relative is from Vietnam and married. Both he and his wife are US citizens. His nephew entered the country on a student visa in 6/2013. He recently adopted his son in the US and got adoption paperw… read moreJen Marie, AttorneyJuris Doctor13,808 satisfied customersNEW BORN Passport - American and Vietnamese couple have a childNEW BORN Passport - American and Vietnamese couple have a child born in China husband has working visa for China china hospital has issued official certificate of birth. Vietnam will give passport b… read moreGuillermo SenmartinImmigration AttorneyJuris Doctor78,450 satisfied customersI am applying for medicare. The SS service responde with askingI am applying for medicare. The SS service responde with asking me to bring in proof of citizenship, and proof of Birthdate. I was born in Shanghai China, March 11 1949. I have a birth certificate. Bu… read moreJudith satisfied customersMy father is 91, born in Scotland, came to the US as a child,My father is 91, born in Scotland, came to the US as a child, parents became citizens when he was 16. He was told he automatically became a citizen. He served in two wars in the Air Force, worked for … read moreJudith satisfied customersHello again, my question involves my son. He as I mentionedHello again, my question involves my son. He as I mentioned before was born in Ghana. I was told that I need to go to the embassy there in Ghana with my son and his papers to get him recognized as a G… read moreGeorgetown LawyerPrincipal AttorneyPost-Doctoral Degree11,193 satisfied customersI lost my birth certificate. I was born in Vietnam during theI lost my birth certificate. I was born in Vietnam during the War, but am now a US Citizen, how do I retrieve a Vietnamese birth certificate, presumably when records were lost during that war.… read moreExpert MarkJuris Doctor19,885 satisfied customersIm a Vietnamese who lived in the US with my family for 16I'm a Vietnamese who lived in the US with my family for 16 years, we are us citizens now. but I've lost my birth certificate which I was born in Vietnam. How do I get a new one?… read moreJudith satisfied customersMy mother in law was born in Italy, was 3 mos old when cameMy mother in law was born in Italy, was 3 mos old when came to Us w/ Army father & Italian mother. She has been married, divorced, has 2 sons, worked, filed taxes...ect.. She is 63 now. A few years ag… read moreGuillermo SenmartinImmigration AttorneyJuris Doctor78,450 satisfied customers DISCLAIMER Answers from Experts on JustAnswer are not substitutes for the advice of an attorney. 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This site is not for emergency questions which should be directed immediately by telephone or in-person to qualified professionals. Please carefully read the Terms of Service. Most Read Contributor Vietnam, September 2022 To print this article, all you need is to be registered or login on Consider a person born in Vietnam Anna. Both of Anna's parents Roy & Jade live in Vietnam but were not born here. They are not Vietnamese citizens, and they have no Vietnamese blood. For clarity, let's assume that both parents were born in the US and both are still American citizens. Is it possible for Anna to become a Vietnamese citizen based on the fact that she was born in Vietnam [and even though her parents Roy and Jade are American]? As her parents are both foreign nationals Anna cannot be a Vietnamese citizen by birth. It is not relevant that she was born in Vietnam nor that her parents both had permanent residence in Vietnam at the time. According to the Law on Nationality1, a person can have Vietnamese nationality at birth but only if they fall within one of the following cases The nationality of a child born to two parents who have Vietnamese nationality is entitled to Vietnamese nationality. This is so, even if the child is born outside of Vietnam, but its parents are both Vietnamese citizens. The child is a Vietnamese citizen by birth2 regardless of any other conditions. A child with one parent who is a Vietnamese citizen3 and the other parent is stateless, is entitled to Vietnamese nationality. If the mother is a Vietnamese citizen but the father is unknown, the child is entitled to Vietnamese nationality. There is no requirement regarding place of birth or the need to know the identity of both parents. If one parent is a Vietnamese citizen and the other parent is a foreign citizen, the child can still be a Vietnamese national, but this must be agreed in writing by the parents before the child's birth is registered. If the parents can't agree on the child's nationality, the child is able to take Vietnamese nationality4. Only if both parents agree on foreign nationality is the child unable to take Vietnamese citizenship. The nationality of a child when both parents are stateless5 or in the case that the mother is stateless and the father is unknown, can be Vietnamese if at least one parent has permanent residence in Vietnam and the child was born within the territory of Vietnam. Finally, both an abandoned infant, and a child who is found in Vietnam whose parents are unknown, are entitled to Vietnamese nationality. In case one or both parents are later found, and if one or both parents are foreign nationals, the child is no longer entitled to Vietnamese nationality. However, this only applies if the child is under the age of 15 6. That is, if such child has reached full 15, she will retain Vietnamese nationality even if it is learned that she has a parent who is a foreign national. So, Vietnamese law does not permit a child born in Vietnam, whose parents are foreign nationals, to be a Vietnamese national by reason of birth. Without special circumstances as discussed, Anna cannot hold Vietnamese nationality. However, if Roy and Jade are living in Vietnam when Anna is born, and if Anna is born in Vietnam, and if her parents wish Anna to take Vietnamese nationality, then either Roy or Jade can him/herself apply for Vietnamese citizenship for him/herself, but must meet the following conditions7 Firstly, having the full capacity to perform civil acts with a record of obeying the Constitution and law and; respecting the traditions, customs, and practices of Vietnam. In addition, to be naturalized, an applicant should understand Vietnamese suffciently to integrate into the community, must have resided in Vietnam for 5 years or more by the time he/she applies for naturalization, and is capable of making her livelihood in Vietnam. But, if Roy or Jade fall into a case of special merit or if he or she has benefited Vietnam, he or she may receive Vietnamese citizenship as a special act without fulfilling these conditions. Secondly, a person who applies for Vietnamese nationality must take Vietnamese names. They must also renounce their foreign nationality, but some exceptions may be made. If Roy or Jade meets the conditions, he or she will be granted Vietnamese citizenship. Anna will also be entitled to Vietnamese citizenship as she has a mother or father who is a Vietnamese citizen8. So, as you can see, the rules on citizenship are quite clear. Footnotes 1. Law on Nationality no. 24/2008/QH 12 dated 13 November 2008 of the National Assembly of Vietnam as amended, supplemented in 2014, see Article 2. Ibid, Article 15 3. Ibid, Article 4. Ibid, Article 5. Ibid, article 17 6. Ibid, article 18 7. Ibid, article 19 8. Ibid, article The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances. POPULAR ARTICLES ON Government, Public Sector from Vietnam Twin Conditions For Bail Under The PMLAMetalegal Advocates The stringent twin conditions for grant of bail to persons arrested under the offence of money laundering are always in debate with frequent changes in jurisprudence around them. Copies of Vietnamese Birth Certificates According to Vietnamese law, one can obtain copies of Birth Certificate by filing an application with the provincial Justice Department, providing all information related to the birth date of birth, place of birth, parents’ names…. If the child’s parents registered the birth with local authorities, the Justice Department staff will check their birth registration book and issue copies of the birth certificate. If the parents did not register the birth with local authorities, the parents can ask for a late registration of birth or re-registration of birth. The procedure for this process differs depending upon the province. Applicants should check with the Justice Department of the birth province for specific information. For example, in Hanoi, applicants must submit a confirmation from the local ward People’s Committee stating that they have never been issued a Birth Certificate and provide all available forms of identification to prove their date of birth. In some provinces, applicants may be asked to submit statements from two witnesses in the same village who knew about the birth. If the applicant is not in Vietnam, he/she may ask relatives or friends in Vietnam to submit application on his/her behalf. Each provincial Justice Department has its own requirements. Some provinces ask for a notarized Power of Attorney from an applicant to assign a person in Vietnam to obtain the Birth Certificate. Again, check with the provincial Justice Department for specific information. CNN — Staff Sgt. Ken Wallingford had only days left to serve in the US Army when he found himself trapped – and seconds away from being burned alive. He’d spent the previous night hiding in a bunker with another soldier at a base that had been overrun by the North Vietnamese forces and was already nursing 17 shrapnel wounds when he realized his position had been spotted. His life flashed before his eyes, frame by frame, like an old 8mm film. “We started smelling gasoline on top of the bunker that we were in and knew a Molotov cocktail was coming next,” he recalled. He didn’t wait for that to happen. Instead he scrambled out of a porthole and found himself face-to-face with the North Vietnamese. “The enemy descended upon us, took our weapons and anything visible, my wallet, the money,” Wallingford said. He knew worse was to come. That was Friday, April 7, 1972. A day that Wallingford recalled as clearly as if it were yesterday, as he recounted it to CNN at a recent reunion for surviving Vietnam War POWs in California. At the time of his capture, Wallingford had been tantalizingly close to freedom and home, with just six more days to go before his expected discharge. Instead, he would spend the next 10 months shackled in a bamboo enclosure measuring 5 feet by 6 feet, too small for the 5-foot-11 American even to stand in. His new home was a Viet Cong “tiger Elsewhere on the base, Capt. Mark Smith was engaged in a firefight and about to be shot by the bullet that would save his life. The small-arms fire that hit him in the left shin knocked him off his feet – and out of the firing line of the rocket-propelled grenade heading his way. “The RPG that was headed to my chest hit the tree behind me instead,” he said. The blast left him unconscious, but alive. “When I came to, I thought I was crippled. My worst nightmare. I couldn’t move. “Well, then I started shaking my shoulder. And I finally realized there were three Vietnamese standing on my back. And that was why I couldn’t move,” Smith said. Smith had been fighting in Vietnam since 1966, and “didn’t like the communists at all…” But he was now at their mercy, and about to join Wallingford in chains in the jungle. The base where the pair had been captured – Loc Ninh – was in South Vietnam. As the North Vietnamese wanted to keep their prisoners in a more secure area, they marched the pair off – with five other American prisoners – along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an elaborate network of paths and roads the North Vietnamese forces used to infiltrate weapons and troops into the South throughout the war. The trail extended beyond Vietnam into neighboring Laos and Cambodia, non-parties to the conflict, where the North thought its military movements would be less vulnerable to US air attacks. After three days of marching, they arrived at a camp deep in the Cambodian jungle. “There were five tiger cages in a circle. And they were roughly five foot high by six foot wide in size,” each with a small wooden door, Wallingford recalled. “They put me in one cage by myself and put a 10-foot chain around one of my ankles and locked the other into the cage itself. “That chain never came off. Unless I either went to the bathroom, or to bathe, which was about every seven to 10 days,” Wallingford said. Yet it was Smith – the commander of the US and South Vietnamese troops at Loc Ninh – who was destined to endure an even worse punishment. His cage was a “hell hole” in the ground, about the size of the tiger cages above, but with four earthen walls. “It was a terrible place. My mosquito net rotted. My hammock rotted. And you didn’t want to get on the floor. I was worried about snakes coming,” Smith recalled. Smith said that in the jungle, the North Vietnamese fighters could leave the fear, the intimidation, the torture, up to nature. “All they had to do is punch a couple holes in your mosquito net, and not give you a needle and thread to sew it up. Or just take your mosquito net away,” Smith said, pausing for a split second, the word “malaria” silently hanging, before adding, “Then you Smith did not know it at the time, but he did in fact catch malaria. On his eventual return to the US, Army doctors found two types of the disease in his body. By all odds, he should have never made it home. Meanwhile, above in his tiger cage, Wallingford too was worried about the snakes. Early in his captivity he saw a king cobra, a snake whose venom can kill a human in 30 to 45 minutes, nearby. It was the first of many. “Over that next 10, 11 months, there were some of the most venomous snakes in that camp, and I thought I was going to die from a snake bite, versus anything else,” he said. The horrors Smith and Wallingford endured over those months have only brought them closer. Despite the distance between them – Wallingford lives in Texas, Smith in Thailand – today, they say, they are “like The “50th Anniversary Homecoming Celebration for the Vietnam POWs” at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda last week was only the second time they and other POWs from their camp and others had reunited since their release in 1973, yet even now, as Wallingford said, “We’d do anything for each The now 77-year-old Smith, who was Wallingford’s superior officer in Vietnam and is two years older, said captivity had thrust them into familial roles. “His nickname was ‘the kid,’” he said, nodding to Wallingford with a laugh, and adding that he, despite the small age gap, was the uncle or fatherly figure. As a longtime veteran of combat in Vietnam, Smith also had battlefield wisdom to impart to his brothers in arms. But Smith admitted, while sat with Wallingford at the California banquet, that he never thought he would be captured. “That only happened to losers,” he joked. Back in 1972, the laughs were few and far between, but for the two men – indeed, for many American POWs being held in the jungles of Cambodia, or in the Hanoi Hilton, the notorious camp in North Vietnam’s capital, relief would eventually come. When it did, it was in the form of a soon-to-be disgraced US president and a plane originally designed to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union the B-52. The 37th president of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon, remains a deeply controversial historical figure. He’s most remembered for the Watergate political scandal, which involved the cover-up of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee during his 1972 reelection campaign and led to his resignation two years later. But for Smith and Wallingford, and many other POWs, the big Nixon event of ’72 was something else entirely – something for which they still love him. That December, as efforts to get North Vietnam to agree to a peace deal stalled, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II in a bid to bomb it into submission. Over a period of 12 days beginning December 18, more than 200 US Air Force B-52 bombers flew 730 sorties and dropped over 20,000 tons of bombs on Hanoi and nearby Haiphong. Historians debate the exact role those bombings – among the most intense in history – played in ending the war. Some insist they were pivotal; others argue the sheer scale of the destruction and civilian death toll was wholly unnecessary and the war would likely have ended without them. But what can’t be disputed is that soon after those bombings took place, early in 1973, North Vietnam did finally agree to a peace deal. For Smith and Wallingford, the hero of the piece seems clear Nixon. “He had the stones to go to Hanoi and bomb them for 12 days, which ended the war,” Wallingford said. “And so that’s why the POWs love him dearly… because he was responsible, and the only one that ended the war, and got us Smith, too, is emphatic “The doors at the prisons, the cell doors, the chain around my leg were blown off by B-52 bombers over Hanoi and Word of the peace deal reached the camp in Cambodia on January 27, 1973, via a transistor radio held by a guard. Over the next two weeks, the POWs were fed and cleaned and made ready for release. On February 12, Wallingford and Smith – and two dozen others from small camps in Cambodia – were on a truck back to Loc Ninh, the base where they had been captured, because it had the closest airstrip. Five American UH-1 helicopters flew in. Thirty minutes later, the truck carrying the American POWs started its engine. But it was still not the end of their ordeal, not yet. “Our truck starts up, we think they’re gonna take us across the airstrip to the Americans,” Wallingford said. Instead, “they take us back to where they’ve been holding us for two North Vietnamese prisoners being held by the South, and to be exchanged for the Americans and other POWs held by the North, had refused to go back, stalling the deal, Wallingford recalled. “They the North Vietnamese said we don’t get our guys, you don’t get the A torturous eight-hour negotiation ensued before the deal eventually went ahead At this point in his recollection, Wallingford’s voice chokes up a bit. “Even today, 50 years plus later, it’s still an emotional experience,” he said. “When I think about it, I should have been One of Smith’s most memorable moments of the war period, however, came after he had returned to the US and was being interviewed by the media about his imprisonment. A reporter asked him why he had joined the Army. He told the story of being a vulnerable teen in a bus station in Cincinnati, Ohio, one night. Older men had been hassling him when he heard a voice say, “Leave him The teenaged Smith turned around to see a man in uniform. “And he took me and bought me a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup,” Smith recalled. “I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘I’m a paratrooper at the 101st Airborne And I said, ‘I think I know now what I want to A day after that TV interview aired, someone in the Army facility where Smith was staying told him he had a phone call and handed him a telephone. The caller said he was the man from the Cincinnati bus station. “He said it was the greatest day of his life when I came off that airplane and said that I had joined the US Army because of a paratrooper corporal in the Cincinnati, Ohio, bus station,” Smith said. “I was always touched by that. And I didn’t tell the story for effect. I told the story because they asked me how I got in the Army. “And he was the reason. I saw those jump boots and all that, and I said, ‘I think I want to be what you “And I

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