WESTMINSTER : Little Saigon Rally Supports Gulf Effort

By LYNN SMITH

Jan. 28, 1991 12 AM PT

About 100 flag-waving Vietnamese-Americans demonstrated in Westminster’s Little Saigon on Sunday, urging full support of U.S. policies in the Persian Gulf to avoid another Vietnam, a war they said the United States waged with “one hand tied behind its back.”

“We are not anti-Arab, but we are supporting a just cause,” said Phong Duc Tran, 64, vice president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California. “There is a dictator in the Middle East who is exploiting the Arab people for his own end. We understand this. We were subjected to the same thing.

“A lot of us died for nothing.”

Led by a few young men with bullhorns, the well-dressed crowd of former refugees, ex-military personnel, teachers and restaurant owners, chanted such slogans as “U.S.A. all the way,” and carried pictures of George Bush. Four-year-old Turner Tran-Quy-Viet carried a sign saying, “We G. Bush, We hate Mad Dog Huss Insein!”

Passing motorists honked their support for the hourlong noontime demonstration along Bolsa Avenue near Magnolia Street.

Henry Le, 38, a reserve U.S. Navy pilot in a flight jacket, said he was eagerly awaiting his call-up for the gulf. “It’s my duty to do it,” he said. “I want to do for this country what they did for us.”

He said he was ultimately pushed out of his homeland only because “political (people) did not have a clear picture. In the future if we run the war, it will be with professional people, not politicians.”

Phong Duc Tran, an engineering consultant, said his son Nick Tran, 24, is an Army reservist who may join the estimated 150 Vietnamese-Americans serving in the gulf, a prospect the father views with mixed feelings.

However, he said Sunday’s demonstrators, unlike most Americans, “worry more whether the end result is what we would like--not whether we die or not.”

He criticized most Americans on both sides of the issue, who he said were unable to explain their positions in depth.

He further called Gulf War protesters “too emotional.” Americans must be as determined as Iraqis to sacrifice lives, he said, because “the guy who is willing to die is going to win.”

Tran said the first priority of U.S.-led forces should be to “get rid of” Hussein. “I don’t care how we get rid of him. If blood is on our hands, so what? We would be doing the Arabs a favor.”

In the event Hussein is defeated, U.S. policy-makers must then be determined to “help the Arabs fulfill their desire. . . .”

“Give Palestine a chance like the Israelis had a chance,” he said. “And work for it.”