"But I walked away. I just walked away. And there was a thousand of them like me. Two thousand. More, I heard, a lot more. In the back alleys of Saigon, in the little villages in the highlands and along the sea, trying to keep out of the way of the killing just like these people who took us in and didn't ask any questions" (Butler).After reading this excerpt from "Missing" I felt it was important to mention something. While this story is about finding love and a family in Vietnam, there are hundreds, possibly thousands of stories about Vietnam soldiers going AWOL without such happy endings. Some men ended up dealing drugs in Saigon, others were simply killed in the jungles. The best example of this is in the movie Deer Hunter, which I won't ruin because I think we're going to watch it. But I will just say that its a very powerful story and its the kind of thing that happened all the time.
And amazingly, Vietnam deserters who did manage to escape and live decent lives in Vietnam or America still aren't in the clear. In this article it talks about how the government is still, to this day, seeking out Vietnam deserters as a way to "warn current-day troops in Iraq against deserting." One man was arrested in Fort Worth in early 2006 after going AWOL in November of 1969. The article also discusses how Presidents Ford and Carter attempted to pardon these soldiers who deserted but the plans were essentially failures, as it shows in this article. The war is over, the cause is dead, can't we just learn our lesson and move on?
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