Prevention is better than cure

by Hoi B. Tran

      I came to United States of America (USA) as a political refugee from the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN) in May of 1975 after the Vietnamese communist invaders from the North blatantly violated the Paris Peace Agreement of 1973 and conquered the RVN by force. Before coming to the US as a refugee, I had been in the US four different times. In 1955 and 1958 for training with the US Air Force/Air Training Command. In 1968 and 1974 for training with Boeing Company. With my exposures to the USA’s culture in the past, to me the USA has clearly proven to be a very conscientious, humanitarian and generous country on this planet earth. A great majority of citizens in the US are very decent, honest and also humanitarian people. Just a few weeks prior to the anticipated collapse of the RVN, countless number of families living in the RVN were extremely worried trying to find a way to escape the brutal communist regime coming. I was very lucky to have met an US Air Force officer, a 7th Air Force’s Supervisor of Airlift at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. It was this Air Force officer who helped me and about two hundred other Vietnamese refugees to fly to a refugee camp on Guam Island in the Pacific for immigration process before sending us to Camp Pendleton, another refugee camp in Southern California in the US.

   After leaving Camp Pendleton with an official immigration I94 card, I decided to go to Washington State in June of 1975 with a hope to get a pilot job with Boeing Company. Boeing accepted my application and offered me a job flying Boeing 727 but I must go to Iraq along with other American pilots for 2 years to fly with Iraqi Airways. I liked the job offer but must refuse it because I did not want to go to Iraq. About a week later, I was lucky to get a job as a Vietnamese/English translator with Demonstration Project for Asian Americans (DPAA) in Seattle, Washington. I was very happy to be employed so I did not have to depend on public assistance! While working for DPAA, the Department of Emergency Services (DES) in Washington was assigned to sponsor Vietnamese refugees from Camp Pendleton in California. This was another great opportunity for me to apply for this job and I was promptly hired by the DES to organize the Vietnamese Service Center in Seattle. Washington was the first State that offered me a second chance to start rebuilding my life in the USA over 45 years ago. I tried hard to learn and adapt to American culture, to adjust to the new working environment to work so as not to disappoint my generous benefactor. I worked in Washington State until late 1978 and had to move to San Jose, California due to family reason. While in California I worked in the private sector until I decided to retire in 2003 at the age of 68.

   While working to rebuild my life in the US, I remembered one great event that truly cheered up my political emotion. It was back in 1983 when the US was under President Ronald W. Reagan Administration. I was so happy and confident seeing him tried to stop the spread of communism. It was President Reagan who called the Soviet Union and its allies the “evil empire”. In 1985, President Reagan began his second term and in his State of the Union speech he urged the Americans to stand up to the communist-ruled Soviet Union and added that the mission of America and all Americans must be to nourish and defend freedom and democracy. Additionally, it was President Reagan who challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall and this “Wall of Shame” was torn down in November 1989. In my personal opinion I strongly believed President Reagan’s foreign policy was the key leading to the end of the Cold War and also the dissolution of communism in 1991.

   There were two other events in the 1990s that worried me so much. The first one was the EB5 Visa program formed by US Congress in 1990 and this program would allow so many Vietnamese and Chinese communists to legally enter the US as foreign investors.

The second one happened in 1995 when our country decided to establish diplomatic relation with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, a devious, barbaric, immoral communist country. What really worried me was because my adopted country, the USA has proven to be a nation that seriously recognizes and respects the democracy and freedom of their citizens and, the great majority of American citizens are very decent and honest. It is because of the decency and honesty of my American compatriots and government  that causes me to worry when we have to live and work with those defrauding, immoral Vietnamese communists coming to our country. These people are very close relatives of very wealthy high ranking communist cadres in Viet Nam. These corrupt communist cadres crave, wish they could find a way to transfer their huge financial assets to a good foreign country for money laundering. And our EB5 investor program was exactly what they were looking for and they began sending their close relatives with their monies to our country. These treacherous Vietnamese communists are completely different than the nationalist Vietnamese refugees who came to the US after April 1975 and those unfortunate people who had to escape Viet Nam by boat to avoid living with the new communist regime.

   A large number of Chinese from the People’s Republic of China also scrambled for this US Golden Visa to immigrate to the US. According to Javier C. Hernandez of New York Times of April 27,2017: “Wealthy Chinese families, eager to move money out of China, have rushed to obtain green cards through the EB-5 program in recent years. In 2016, three-quarters of the roughly 10,000 investor visas issued went to Chinese citizens.”  On April 16, 2018, Andrew Miillier of the Trumpet Brief Website reported the following about Chinese in the US: “There are now 25,000 Chinese intelligence officers working for Beijing’s spy networks in the United States. This is according to a Chinese dissident with close ties to the Chinese government. Stealing American technology is a major way China plans to develop its military to a point where it could challenge the U.S.”  Anyone with some degree of dignity would have to wonder, why China and Viet Nam are so ungrateful to the US? The answer is very simple, because they are from a communist country. Just imagine, if the US did not lift the 21 years trade embargo on China in 1971 and the embargo against Viet Nam in 1994, could China and Viet Nam survive economically and become what they are today? The answer is quite clear, absolutely not!

   Being a living witness and also a victim of these treacherous, immoral and barbaric communists from Viet Nam I was extremely worried and scared to see these subhuman, bloodsuckers to come to my adopted country. These filthy worms would undoubtedly take advantage of our decent, honest culture to cheat and lie to stain our culture!!! They have stired up so many serious political, business problems not only in Orange County, Southern California but also in other Vietnamese communities in the US. This was what led me to this thinking because the majority of my American compatriots are so naive about socialism and communism!!! What scared me more was when I noticed that some of my American compatriots and some elected officials showed that they sympathyzed with socialism and communism. Since the USA was my great benefactor that opened the door to give me a second chance to rebuild my life and the USA is now my country, I don’t want my country’s good reputation getting tarnished by those traitorous, immoral communists from Viet Nam and China!!!

   As a senior citizen at the age of 85 now living in retirement, I wish I can exploit my frightful personal experience with those despicable communists in Viet Nam to convince my American compatriots not to believe them and to stay away from them. Fortunately, while I was feeling desperate not knowing how to dissuade my American compatriotes not to believe or sympathize with socialism or communism, a patriotic billionaire named Donald J. Trump was elected as the 45th President of the US in 2017. President Trump was not a politician but he proved to have knowledge about socialism and communism. On September 19, 2017 our new President adamantly announced in his speech at the 72nd United Nations General Assembly: “From the Soviet Union to Cuba, to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure”. His knowledge about socialism/communism along with what he had accomplished as a new President truly restored my confidence of my country in the fight to stop socialism/communism from spreading in the US. I am very happy that our country is now being led by a President who knows and understands about socialism and communism. Of course I will vote for this President again in 2020 so he can protect the US from becoming a socialist/communist country.

God Bless America