A response to the Bolsa Grande (Originally Camp Pendleton) 40th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon Event

If this is what the leadership of the youth has to offer then we'd be better off dying off.

Saturday's 40th anniversary of Black April event at Bolsa Grande - famously originally to be held at Camp Pendleton - was by all notable and measureable accounts a disaster. The organizers clearly had no sense of history or decorum or how else would they have been able to make such a wantonly offensive display to common sensibility. It is to the point where I wonder if they might not have been better off if they had just openly solicited money from the Communists to bring shame and disgrace upon the Vietnamese community. If anyone were to seek a more present example of Vietnamese-American servility, one would have been hard-pressed to find a better example than the travesty that was on show last night.

From the ill-considered, gauche, deplorable presentation of "entertainment", to the fundamental lack of understanding that Black April is a day of MOURNING, the organizers most of all demonstrated that as far as their loyalties lie, they lie firstmost with not offending their generous American benefactors, even if that means weathering open disgrace and spitting upon the suffering of their forebearers.

A fundamental lack of respect for the very essence of being Vietnamese-American was so prominently on display that the Communists probably could not have invented better slander if they tried. The constant and unending invocations of docility and servility to American leadership, the open and patently offensive dismissal of an entire swathe of Vietnamese-American religious existance. If this is the freedom that Vietnamese-Americans fought so hard to achieve - this freedom to be serving dogs - then it is fundamentally unchanged from the "freedom" offered to the Vietnamese currently living in Vietnam.

What the event on Saturday panned out to be was - in fact - a celebration of 40 years of Vietnamese-American failure. Failure to achieve anything. Failure to teach their children even the smallest bit of their history, and most of all a failure to pick their friends as anyone tuning in to such a broadcast would have observed a gauche and tasteless offense to a day marked in infamy: the prancing about of know-nothing second generations so fundamentally divorced from the death of a nation that they saw fit to bill the event as a party.

Fie and shame upon them! Decrepit dog-people that foist their capacity to bow and heel on command as credentials to savage our history. Fie and shame! They are unworthy of the legacy to which they are heirs. They are better off swearing off their heritage entirely than to bring such disgrace to the community. I come from a bloodline of militant murderers, jungle-killers and anti-western terrorists. My name and lineage is soaked in the blood of people who would invite the soiling influence of foreigners onto Vietnamese soil and yesterday I saw to the wounded spectacle of a limping, lame debaucherous circus of wanton and feckless greed.

Fie upon them! They are not all of us! There are still those for whom the promise of a free Vietnam - a truly free Vietnam, free of the pedagogy, the stench, the jack-heeled boots of a thousand marauding foreigners  - for whom that promise still lingers about their heart. That one day we will be free. Even as we wish such from captivity.

We have not all forgotten where our true loyalties lie.

-Lê Duy Việt