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Peterson will be prone to blunder
Letter To The Editor
Goldsboro News-Argus
Goldsboro, North Carolina
February 27, 1997
To the Editor:
I disagree with your Feb. 19 editorial praising President Clinton's choice of former prisoner of war Pete Peterson to be U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam which remains a defiant, thuggish, communist dictatorship where advocates for freedom of religion and democracy are systematically arrested and sentenced to long jail terms. Vietnam is also involved in a potentially volatile territorial struggle with China.
My concerns about Peterson, a former Air Force fighter pilot who was held POW for 6 1/2 years in North Vietnam, have nothing to do with whether he is a patriot or was a good Air Force officer. Peterson has no diplomatic experience. He has no experience with the Vietnamese other than suffering the brutality of their "re-education" sessions.
Peterson says he was tortured on a daily basis until released in 1973 and has firsthand knowledge of the "murder" of at least two U.S. POWs - Air Force Maj. Edwin Atterbury and Navy Lt. James Connell. Peterson became the last American to see Atterbury alive when he witnessed Vietnamese guards dragging Atterbury behind a jeep after an escape attempt.
Former Kinston resident, Ret. U.S. Navy Captain Eugene B. McDaniel wrote in his book Scars & Stripes about his own mental state after being tortured for several days: "I felt myself sliding then. I was being beaten, whipped, falling to the point of nothingness. Death would be welcome. I wanted the pain to stop . . . I was bleeding, wracked with fever, my mind numbed by the electric shock, in and out of nightmarish hallucinations. Suddenly I was not a Navy flyer at all; I was not a patriot at this point, and being an American meant nothing in the reality of the moment. I was simply a human being sliding further and further toward death, and there was nothing at all to reach out for anymore, within or without."
The Vietnamese officer who ordered that torture session with McDaniel and many other POWs was nicknamed "Rabbit." McDaniel said Rabbit, now identified as Col. Nguyen Minh Y and working in Hanoi for Vietnam's General Political Department, was a master psychologist who often boasted that the Vietnamese would always control the POWs "even if they returned to the United States."
In 1965, Vietnam's Prime Minister, Vo Van Kiet, then a secret committee member of the Viet Cong National Liberation Front Central Committee, ordered executed three American heroes - Capt. Rocky Versace, Sgts. Kenneth Roraback and Harold Bennett. The three were U.S. Army prisoners of the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. Their remains have never been returned.
Peterson will be required to deal with Col. Y and Prime Minster Kiet. Would not Peterson's duty demand he call for a war crimes tribunal as the U.S. is doing in Bosnia?
After having been tortured and witnessing the murder of other POWs, how can Peterson not be bitter? He will be prone to blunder and is obviously not qualified to hold such a critical diplomatic post. After all, a diplomatic blunder helped ignite the Gulf War when a U.S. diplomat in Iraq understated the U.S. position on Saddam Hussein's military buildup on the Kuwaiti border, by feebly commenting "we have no opinion."
Clinton's choice of Peterson is meant to appear noble. Unfortunately, the national security of the United States will be jeopardized by sending a former target of communist indoctrination back into the tiger pit.
Peterson's former interrogators certainly know more about Peterson and his weaknesses than he knows about them or himself.
Ted Sampley
Vietnam vet and veterans' activist
919-527-0442 or 919-559-2021
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