General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What happened after the US ran from Vietnam? n/t [View all]pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)The "collaborators" included some 400,000 Vietnamese Roman Catholics who fled the North due to religious persecution there. The issue of who supported whom is not all black and white. The people in Vietnam supported one side or the other for a lot of different reasons.
My Vietnamese roommate in Army training served as an ARVN officer probably because he was from one of the Catholic families that migrated to the South.
Two of my Vietnamese brothers-in-law were conscripted by force by the VC. One was a famous opera singer who was sent to entertain VC and NVA troops in redoubts along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The other, the sweetest guy in the world, who wanted nothing to do with killing, was a VC grunt only briefly before he deserted the VC and returned home.
My wife's father was in charge of Saigon electrical utilities during the war, but they believed he was secretly VC. I have no idea if it's true, but I was told that at Tet '68 he had the power shut down in Cholon so the VC could infiltrate through there into the city.
Vietnamese communities in the U.S. were largely pro-South because those were the refugees we accepted. When I visited a Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver, B.C., it was a different story. Canada was neutral during the war, but a lot of Canadians crossed the border to enlist in U.S. forces. I was visiting Canadian vet friends, along with expatriate U.S. vet friends there. Canada also took in many immigrants from North Vietnam. So the Vietnamese song I sang that was always greeted with delight in Vietnamese restaurants in the U.S. elicited only frowns in the Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver.