Arlington war memorial

    Arlington war memorial

                  To honor South Vietnamese and American brothers-in-arms....
Xin click vào link dưới đây:

     http://youtu.be/WNYBnLuiSYc  

 

Xin chuyển đến Qúy Vị, Qúy NT và CH...Lễ Kỷ Niệm Ngày Quân Lực 19-6 tại Dallas / Fort Worth..Và Lễ Khởi Công Xây Dựng Tượng Đài Chiến Sĩ Việt-Mỹ,
tại Veterans Park, Arlington, Texas..

Xin mời Qúy Vị theo dỏi bài viết của The Dallas Morning News,
video clip và hình ảnh..để tường và chung vui...

   

BMH

Washington, D.C

 

Arlington war memorial to honor South Vietnamese
and American brothers-in-arms.

By MARC RAMIREZ, staff writer

The Dallas Morning News

June 22, 2013

ARLINGTON — The paratroopers were the bravest of the brave. Spilling onto the front lines of the Vietnam War, they were targets before they even hit the ground.

Platoon leader Thong “Tom” Bui followed orders, leading his fellow South Vietnamese soldiers into some of the war’s heaviest fighting, and the casualties were high.

Sometimes he doesn’t know how he came out of it alive. But he did, finding new life in the U.S. and an engineering career.

Now the Cedar Hill retiree is helping to honor the sacrifice of those who weren’t as fortunate, part of a group whose efforts to build a memorial honoring the efforts of South Vietnamese soldiers will see fruition with a groundbreaking Saturday at Arlington’s Veterans Park.

When completed, it will be the rarest of Vietnam War memorials: one depicting both an American and a South Vietnamese soldier. One such tribute exists in Westminster, Calif., another in Houston.

For those who fought together, the bond is crucial and unbreakable and worth memorializing for future generations. While the local Vietnamese community is largely funding the project — expected to cost between $400,000 and $500,000 — the effort has the backing of American vets, too.

“I personally believe we have an obligation to honor the efforts to commemorate the valiant achievements of our former comrades in arms,” retired Marine Lt. Gen. Richard Carey wrote in a letter to Arlington city officials last summer.

Another supporter is Vietnam vet Jay Kimbrough, a longtime associate of Gov. Rick Perry who last fall voiced his displeasure when the image of a South Vietnamese soldier was scratched from a planned memorial at the Texas Capitol.

“I support having a Vietnamese figure in the monument because I served side by side with them,” Kimbrough said.

The 10-foot-high granite piece will show an American soldier — or more specifically a covan, an adviser to South Vietnamese forces — standing alongside a Vietnamese soldier seated in thought.

“We were a band of brothers, those who fought together,” said Dallas’ Mark Austin Byrd, the project’s sculptor and a Vietnam vet himself. “It’s very appropriate that both be represented.”

The covan, Byrd said, was a dangerous role for Americans — embedded with a Vietnamese unit and sharing American weapons systems knowledge and tactical expertise.

Bui remembers serving with such men. “Every division had a couple of advisers who stayed with us and supported us with airplanes,” he said. “But we were very limited in our English. It was hard to communicate.”

They learned to do so with gestures or minimal language. “They would just point and say, ‘Shoot rocket’ or ‘Drop bomb’ and show it with their finger,” Bui said. “We say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

Bui’s unit saw no shortage of heavy action, including during the Tet offensive.

“Everything we did, the communists already know,” he said. “When the helicopters dropped us, they had a thousand rockets fired at our heads. I don’t know how I was so lucky.”

He’s now part of the Heroes of South Vietnam Memorial Foundation, the group behind the memorial effort, and one of about 72,000 Vietnamese who live in the Dallas-Arlington-Fort Worth area, as categorized by the U.S. census.

According to 2010 figures, that’s the second-largest Vietnamese population in the state, after the one in metropolitan Houston.

Texas has the second-most Vietnamese in the nation, with 211,000 — making the state a distant second to California, home to nearly three times that many.

The foundation committee members are largely retired and ready to see their countrymen recognized after decades spent rebuilding lives disrupted by the war. About 300,000 South Vietnamese were killed during the conflict that ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“When we came here, we had nothing,” said committee chairman Hung Dang, an Arlington family physician whose Army colonel father served decades in prison camps after the fall.

“Now we have jobs, we’re successful. It’s a good time for us to give back to the community. The will has been there, but the means were not there.”

Dang left Vietnam in 1980 among the waves of “boat people” fleeing the Vietnamese purge of those faithful to the defeated South. He lived with an aunt in Minnesota and became a doctor in 1997.

His committee counterparts are all retired engineers.

“Why?” said Peter Dao, who helps run Arlington-based Dallas Vietnamese Radio after a career with NASA, General Electric and Texas Instruments. “Because when we came here, we couldn’t speak English. But we could understand numbers.”

It’s still amazing to them that so many soldiers sacrificed in service to a nation not their own: Americans, Australians, Filipinos. “That’s why we have to build this monument,” Dang said. “Time doesn’t let us forget what they did for us.”

So far, the group has raised about $170,000. A fundraiser is planned next month.

“We’re doing it for the next generation,” said Duc “Duke” Mai, who worked as a civilian intelligence officer during the war. “So they can remember how we got here.”

The memorial’s somber Vietnamese soldier is inspired by Thuong Tiec, a monument that once graced the entrance to a military cemetery in Saigon.

Meaning “remembrance and sorrow,” Thuong Tiec showed a seated South Vietnamese soldier thinking about his fallen comrades, but was destroyed by the opposing forces after the war.

“We owe a debt to the American soldiers who fought for us, but also to those who fought for Vietnam,” Dang said.

“Without the sacrifice of both, we wouldn’t be in this country today. … They fought side by side, and we want to see that memorialized in time.”
Marc Ramirez, reporterThe Dallas Morning News