I once worked for the San Diego police department. During the training period, I was riding along with a tough cop named Bill.

There was this one occasion we were dispatched to assist 2 social workers investigating a child-abuse case. We were to interview the suspect who was believed to be the child's father. A neighbor had called the police earlier and named him as the suspect.

When we arrived, the child's father, a man about 20 years old, answered the door. His eyes were unable to focus and he was in a daze probably induced by drug use. When we asked him where his wife and child were, he barked, "I don't know!", and stumbled back onto the sofa where he sat stone faced and oblivious to everything around him.

Later, we found the mother and the child in the bathroom hiding. She was also probably high, although to a lesser extent than her husband. In the bedroom, there was a stack of neatly folded woman's clothing, and this made me suspect they were about to leave the house.

The child was about 2 years old. He didn't have the chubbiness of most 2 year-olds, but there were no signs that he suffered from malnutrition either. The indications of abuse were in the form of burn marks on his hands, legs, left cheek, and neck. They looked like cigarette burns. The bottom of his feet also showed similar injuries. He cried softly while his body remained motionless and his eyes tightly shut. The only noise coming from his small partly open mouth was a faint whining.

The worker explained to Bill and me, "I think the kid has been abused many times. Look at those burn patterns-some are new and some have already become scars."

This diagnosis enraged us. I felt my heart pounding hard from the anger I felt. Bill was also very upset. And he is a cop that's so tough, he once almost lost two fingers trying to remove narcotics from the mouth of a drug pusher trying to swallow the evidence. While he continued maintaining his calm demeanor, this was the first time I saw traces of anger seep through his composure. I knew Bill was holding back a lot of his emotions.

We were distressed by the behavior of the father. If this were a one time occurrence, then drugs could be blamed for the crime. But with the evidence showing that the abuse had happened before, we both saw the father to be a sadistic monster.

With the mother also using drugs, we both felt the situation was hopeless. The child seemed doomed.

Though Bill and I were seething, we still treated the man with civility. We always addressed him as "sir", and when we put him in the back of the police car, I used my palm to keep his head from banging into the car's door frame(which I was very tempted to do).

That incident occurred after I had been in America for about 10 years. I know events like that are seldom, and the vast majority of American parents are good mothers and fathers who love their children, just like parents in general all over the world.

Yet, whenever I'm dispatched to the home of a young couple under criminal investigation or simply in need of help for their children, if the father and mother have the appearance of drug users, the memory of this incident comes back to me and arouses my suspicion.

If Americans harbor an unfavorable opinion about the South Vietnamese Army or Vietnamese males in general, I don't blame them. The media mostly ignores the subject of the male Vietnamese character, and whatever small amount that is presented is often quite negative. Even worldly journalists like yourself probably only see unfavorable portrayals of Vietnamese men.

The books and movies about the Vietnam war focus mainly on the Americans and Hanoi, often relegating the South Vietnamese Army to silent faceless participants. In movies like "Full Metal Jacket", the only South Vietnamese soldiers shown were pimps who prostituted Vietnamese women for American G.Is.. In documentaries, the image of a Vietnamese general summarily executing a Viet Cong terrorist is shown again and again like a broken record.

Even if you tried getting information from books written by the Vietnamese, such as the one by Ms. Lely Hayslip, your image of Vietnamese men would be just as poor. Her book and the movie on which it was based claimed that soldiers on both the North and the South had tortured and raped her when she was a girl.

Recently, the movie "The Scent of Green Papaya", nominated for an Academy Award, further perpetuated this sorry stereotype of Vietnamese men. In it, the male head of the family is shown wasting his days away, while his wife labors to support him. The character acts like a parasite, gambling money he has stolen from his wife.

These negative depictions are used to create the contrived melodrama that appeals to audiences who love buying into storylines involving extremes of good and evil. They are used to make the life of the prostitute in "Heaven and Earth" more poignant and shocking. Even the most thoughtful and open-minded person will leave this film with a very low opinion of Vietnamese men.

In this letter, I want to introduce you to a few real people I personally know. They all lead common lives, but they are truly representative of the character of the Vietnamese.

The first person was my high school teacher, Professor Luu. He currently lives in Orange County, and although I do not know what his present occupation is, I am sure he approaches it with the high-minded enthusiasm that he had as my teacher in 1954. He is no doubt continuing to contribute his time and money to the welfare of the community in which he lives.

In 1954, Vietnam was divided in two-the communist controlled the North, and those wanting to live in a democracy went South. My family was among the 1 million who made the exodus to the South. We all left everything we had behind and survived some very lean years as we settled in our new home. As a boy in the sixth grade, my most treasured possessions were a few good pairs of sandals, and I had to leave these behind for Uncle Ho. The two that were on my feet broke apart after a few months, and I had to use string to put them back together. This only prolonged their use an additional week and left me bare-footed while I walked to school.

So I devised a plan for getting money to buy a new pair. Because there was no way to work for the needed funds, my only source of revenue was from the allowance I received daily from my mother for transportation. I began to save some of it by walking whenever I could.

The resettlement village where I lived was located in the outlying western suburb of Saigon. Everyday, my mother gave me 4 piasters for the trip to and from school. To get there, I took a horse-carriage from home to the bus station at Chi Hoa. The fare for this ride was one piaster. The next trip involved taking the bus from Chi Hoa to Saigon and costed me another piaster. I would then walk the last mile to school. Going there and back took about three hours every day.

To save money, I skipped the horse-carriage and walked. And although I had to ride the bus to school, I sometimes walked all the way home. On such a day, I could save 3 of the 4 piasters. On my luckiest days, I could get an older student to give me a ride on his bicycle on my way home.

My education did not go smoothly. This was also true for my classmates, even the ones from well-to-do families. During the early years of our resettlement, there were shortages of just about everything, and school was often interrupted by constant political crises and social chaos.

It was during this time that Professor Luu became my benefactor. He acted as a private instructor for me and others students and got us through high school. He and his friends also tutored us for free in the summer months and set-up literary contest in 1955 to encourage us in our writing. The 2nd and 3rd place winners later became a renowned journalist and famous writer respectively.

I recall Mr. Luu and the other tutors were only in their early twenties. They possessed a spirit of altruism, and helped the community and the country greatly with many civic deeds.

I find it hard to believe that Mr. Luu would grow up to become like the scoundrel portrayed in The Scent of Green Papaya.

There are a couple of other people I want to tell you about: Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Phan.

Mr. Nguyen left Vietnam before 1950 to study abroad. He has 2 Phd's and is currently a professor at The University of California, San Diego. He has always felt a strong tie to Vietnam, and was deeply effected by news at the end of the 70s of Thai pirates preying on boat people. After reading the diaries written by the victims of atrocities perpetrated by the pirates on the island of Ko Kra, he became head of the Boat People SOS Committee. He labored for more than 10 years on this noble endeavor, using his influence, time, and money to provide as much help as he could.

During this time, Mr. Phan worked as a foreman at a ship-building yard. When his two fingers were crushed on this job, he stayed home and drew on his disability. When I called him after the accident, he surprised me by sounding very happy. He considered the injury a blessing because now he had a lot of free time to devote to the Boat People project. He could come to the office everyday to help write letters, make appeals, and do whatever else was needed.

The story of Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Phan, together with that of the refugees tormented by the pirates would fill many volumes. The news of their rescue effort was heard worldwide.

Another person I'd like to mention is my father, whom you had met a few times already. My father, Mr. Le Yen, came to Bloomington with us in 1975. He died and was buried there. Now, you live closer to his gravesite than I do. It is located in section 17, next to section 11, the resting place of Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson. The cemetery, Evergreen, is only a few miles from the offices of the Daily Pantagraph.

In 1954, my father was a successful businessman in the city of HaDong in Northern Vietnam. Shortly after the Geneva Convention, the communist party sent over their cadre to persuade my father to stay in the North. He secretly moved to the South with his family anyway. In 1975, he once again left behind all his material possessions, his house, and the life he had built after 20 difficult years of work to journey with his family on the open sea in a small boat.

My father was a man of exceptional foresight. He knew what communism would bring. He valued freedom and was willing to risk everything for it. He traded his two story house for a few pieces of canvas in a temporary resettlement camp. He put the lives of his family in great peril by taking them on a rickety old boat. He possessed an incredibly strong will.

Even though he could not keep up with world events(he barely had time to read the newspaper), he was nonetheless able to make very accurate predictions and political decisions. My father's knowledge of communsim was greater than that of the famous French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, the writer who refused the Nobel prize. Dear James Keeran,

Contrary to the previous letter where I cited a few famous Vietnamese, like the poet Nguyen Sa, the musician Pham Duy, or the novelist Vo Phien, in this letter I cite only common Vietnamese folks.

The purpose of this is to show that the average Vietnamese would behave similarly, if they were under the same circumstances.

During the summer of 1955, at Cau Kho school, Mr. Luu and his friends had gotten together and volunteered their time to help students with their schooling. Decades later, in Santa Ana and San Diego, I see scenes similar to those during Mr. Luu's time: Vietnamese students, both male and female, volunteering their time to teach young Vietnamese children how to read Vietnamese and other things about their culture.

In terms of political wisdom, my father represents only one of a million men like him with the same foreknowledge and focused will. Some of them were educated, others were not. Their lives spanned the entire economic and religious spectrum. Some of them escaped to a democratic country, while others did not. What they all had in common was foreseeing from the 1950s the true nature of communism, a tyrannical system of government whose evil took Jean Paul Sartre 40 years to recognize.

I am a little wordy in my letter. The characters I talk about above are so common they are lost in the multitude of people living in any community. You will never find them in a book or movie though. No director would think of making a movie about them, since there is nothing dramatic about what they do.

This 10-page letter written about the real people I have met in my life is probably among the most boring ever written.

What else can I do?

To understand the people of another country, it is necessary to study some typical characters that are representative of that nation.

You perhaps won't find it necessary to read this letter. Many Americans will find nothing new in it. But despite this, I felt an urge to write these things anyway, with the hope that to those readers whose friends and relatives were killed in the war will find my words comforting.

During the course of the 20 years of fighting, South Vietnam was attacked by communists from two fronts: the military and by the propaganda machine of the North. The U.S., by helping South Vietnam maintain its democracy was portrayed as a greedy imperialist by Hanoi. Even with America's history of being on the right side in two world wars, Korea, and later the Gulf war, they were seen as the invading power in Southeast Asia.

The South Vietnamese were equally denigrated by the North. Their campaign of misinformation led the North Vietnamese to view the entire Southern regime as awash in corruption. The South's army was said to be composed of mercenaries funded by American imperialist.

The events of 1975 have shown that this tactic of demonization is quite effective.

After the collapse of Saigon, one wonders whether the North Vietnamese would cease lying about the fallen enemy, or whether the world would ever try to know the truth and help the Army of the South reclaim its reputation.

This has not been the case. The South Vietnamese have suffered a fate similar to the citizens of Pompeii.

Pompeii was destroyed in a fiery volcano eruption and thousands perished. The entire city was covered in fire, ashes and volcanic mud. This was an act of God, but who would dare accuse him of committing so heinous an act without provocation. So the population of Pompeii was said to have lived sinfully and sentenced to death by an angry God.

In an attempt to find meaning in the senseless destruction of the city and its inhabitants, blame is placed on the shoulders of the victims (People who hold this view have no problem thinking this even with the knowledge that there were young children who died alongside their supposedly wicked elders. Is this God's justice?).

In the case of Pompeii, the destruction was attributed to a vengeful God. In the Vietnam debacle, the South and its army were blamed for the defeat. The treacherous communist would continue in the defamation of their enemy, even after winning the war, for fear that the identity of true imperialist in the war would be revealed. They don't want the world to know that the support and sympathy they enjoyed were the results of effective propaganda rather the righteousness of their cause.

Even worse, near the conclusion of the war, South Vietnam's foreign allies contributed to the slander of its army. Fearing they might look cowardly, the Americans government blamed the South for the loss as a last minute face-saving tactic before extricating themselves from this lengthy military entanglement.

So the relatives of U.S. soldiers who died in the war now suffer in two ways. In addition to losing loved ones, these mourners were also led to believe that the side they were fighting for didn't deserve their sacrifice.

• Chapter 8

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