DAMN THE REFUGEES & FULL SPEED AHEAD

...I suspect the story would batloon quickly...

...Odds are, a tot of boatpeople are scanning the horizon right now, or have given up, after watching so many freighters calmly steam by, while thecrewmen lean over the rail until the captain shoos them back to work...

...I suppose it's a sign of our spiritual exhaustion that we haven't even thought to ask why we can't be bothered to pick them up...

...Navy would .pick up refugees at sea there would probably be a run for the boats...

...At any given moment we have literally hundreds of ships steaming about in the Pacific on training maneuvers of one kind or another...

...The refugees are particular people, and a great many of them literally worked for the ,Americans, or are wives, children and parents of those who did...

...Filipino and Japanese captains aren't happy about this brutal necessity, violating the oldest of the laws of se~aring, but shipowners have left them no choice...

...The inevitable result is that a .lot of the boatpeople don't make it...

...The general problem is simple enough: they're making omelets in Southeast Asia, and those who would rather escape than be broken have no place to go...

...Moral Responsibility Few debts have been so well-documented...

...In the beginning there were only a few hundred a month, then a .thousand or more, now as many as 4,500 a month, straining the refugee services of the United Nations, cramming the camps in Thailand, Maylasia, Singapore, Japan and the other countries of Southeast Asia...

...They starve, die of exposure, capsize and drown...

...The magazines of opinion all seem to be thinking of other things...

...Thousands of others have crossed into Thailand from Cambodia and Laos...

...Their only failure has been a tendency to focus on the plight of the refugees themselves, while ignoring the reasons at home for Washington's sluggish response...

...But that is general and abstract...

...It seems a hard fate for people who have suffered so much, and then risked everything for a life where they won't have to go into the omelet...

...On top of that, Cambodia and Vietnam could be expeoted to make an international fuss if the U.S...

...The United States is still ~he world's greatest naval power...

...Navy picking up refugees with all the publicity which would inevitably follow...

...That's a lot of people, but not more than the half million Cubans admitted as refugees since 1959, and it would be hard to 'argue that the UnRed States owes less to the Indochinese than ~t did to the Cubans...

...The other unwilling hosts have been putting pressure on us by tightening their borders, sometimes even pushing boatloads of refugees back out to sea...

...Other revolutions have been consolidated more cruel.ly, most notably in Cambodia...

...It's a pretty cold-blooded policy, when you think of it...

...When you :think of them out there, you can't help wishing somebody would go out and pick them up...

...But the process has been harsh enough in Vietnam all the same, and those who want to leave, and risk their lives to do so, deserve something better from us than the observation that life is hard...

...This singular fact can have only one explanation: the Navy has been explicitly ordered to steer well away, and for 18 months the White House, the Peutagon and the Navy have probably been wondering when some journalist was going to start asking questions...

...The Thais have been pressured into accepting them by promises from the United States and elsewhere that homes would eventually be found for them...

...The Carter Administration is finding it difficult to get congressional authorization for large numbers of additional refugees, and the boatpeople are only a part of the whole...

...If the U.S...

...The United States supported the reassertion of French sovereignty over Indochina in 1945, at a time when He Chi Minh was in almost complete control of the country...

...When the cause was all but hopeless, and Vietnam should have been left to itself, we were all meddlesome eagerness to stave off the nearinevitable...

...Just before the last American helicopter took off from the roof of the U.S...

...Hanoi, in fact, seems more sensitive to this point than we...

...Money and blood were not too much to wager on a long shot whose odds we were too headlong even to calculate...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ONLY THE PRESSREC~II,I-~ OUR OBLIGATIONS DAItlN THE REFUGEES &SPEED AHEAD We've been reading about the boatpeople for nearly a year and a half now, those Vietnamese and Cambodians who would rather risk the South China Sea in small fishing craft than stay where they are...

...Navy were cruising their waters on the lookout for refugees, and a lot of Americans would protest, not just those alarmed by an influx of nonwhites into the United States, but organized labor arguing it's tough enough for citizens to find jobs as it is, and perhaps people on the left claiming that anyone trying to escape the omelet must be a rightist reactionary and former war profiteer...

...There's no way of knowing how many reach safe harbor, but the survivors' stories have led observers to guess that maybe half of the total simply disappear...

...We know they're out there...

...This is not an argument that the wrong side won the war, only :that moral obligations incurred during the war did not end with the fighting...

...For awhile I wondered why they always seemed to be looking up into the camera, thin arms reaching up, until the obvious answer struck me: the photographer happened to be there when they were picked up at sea, and naturally he was looking down at them as they were helped up from their open boats...

...It's not hard to figure out what must have happened here...

...That's 4,500 a month, men, women and children of all ages...

...Embassy, Americanmilitary officers hadpromised thousands of Vietnamese in the Embassy compound they would not he forgotten...

...There must be government officials and Navy officers restive with the orders to steer clear of the problem, and once reporters nosed them out, and it became clear how much we could do, inactivity would be hard to explain away...

...But so far .it's been the old story where America and Vietnam are concerned...

...You often see their pictures on page four or five of the New York Times: desperate, emaciated people crowded together...

...Navy began picking up four or five thousand boatpeople a month the .rest would be dumped permanently in Thailand, which would doubtless close its borders unless the U.S...

...The New York Times and the Washington Post, to a lesser extent, probably because it does not have so many fuHtime correspondents in the Far East, have regularly published stories on the subject...

...Think back: in all those stories of harrowing voyages and last-minute rescues, do you remember a single boatload of refugees being picked up by the United States Navy...

...Can you guess what it is...

...The freighters which cross their paths often ignore their distress signats for fear they will never get rid of the refugees once they're aboard...

...The United States insisted on a "temporary" division of the country when the Frer~ negotiated their departure at Geneva in 1954, and Soigon's governments were heavily --in the end complotely---dependen,t on American support dur;ng .the following 21 years...

...I can't remember one...

...Commonweal: 549 The problem is notasmall one...

...At present there are at least I00,000, according to the Times stories of Henry Kamm, who won an exceptionally well-deserved Pulitzer Prize this spring for his persistence in reporting their plight...

...They were still standing in patient queues, luggage in their hands, when the Marines ran for the Embassy, bolted the doors behind them, and raced up the stairs for the final flight out of the country...

...Hanoi might not like it, but they would probably like it better, in the end, than having the U.S...

...THOMAS POWERS 1 September 1978: 5JO...

...The only real question in this matter is whether counsels of prudence ought to take precedence over compassion...

...And now, when a small effort might have a large result, we are tired, pre-occupied and indifferent...

...It seems strange, doesn't it...

...The Communists had no inalienable right to rule Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, but when we supported their opponents for so long, propping them up after they would have collapsed on their own, we acquired a certain moral responsibility for their fate, and an obligation to do for the losers what we might...

...The collapse of South Vietnam's economy and the imposition of North Vietnamese control inevitably meant hardship, and while thousands of military officers and governmem officials are still in "reeducation" camps three years after the end of the war, separated from their families and sometimes press-ganged into dangerous work like mine-cleating, the aftermath has been far gentler than the bloodbath predicted by Ford and Kissinger...

...An airlift was arranged with Castro to handle the departure of Cuban refugees, and Carter might propose the same to Hanoi...

...I'd been ~ooking at those pictures for 18 months before another question slowly nagged its way to the surface of my mind...

...There is no good reason why the Carter administration cannot change its approach even at this late d~te...

...The only motive lacking for such a shift in policy seems to be the absence of broad public feeling...

...Navy has sighted nary a one...

...Frank Snepp's book about the confused evacuation in April, 1975, Decent Interval, documents in detail the inadequacy of Ameri:an efforts to save those who had tcusted us...

...China has negotiated for the orderly departure of thousands of Chinese who used to be the backbone of South Vietnamese commercial life, while we have largely abandoned those who still choose us to the luck of the open sea...

...Oddly enough, it is the daily press which seems to be paying most attention to this situation...

...If word ever got back to Vietnam that .the U.S...

...Freighters of every registry from Panama to Liberia have either picked up boatpeople, or passed them by, but the U.S...

...Some determined questions about the American failure to do anything whatever for the refugees in the worst situation--those actually at sea in flimsy boats, ignored by freighters unhappy enough to spot them--might stir the administration to action...

...In the end a poticy of rescue and open admission might mean the acceptance of three or four hundred thousand Indochinese refugees, in addition to the estimated 175,000 already in the United States, most of whom escaped in 1975 when the American-backed governments of Cambodia and South Vietnam finally collapsed...

...There's no question .the Navy could pick up the best part of the boatpeople, if it put its heart into the effort, but there's also very little doubt that such a program would precipitate a bruising political struggle...

...went further and promised to take them as well...

...Nobody wants the refugees, and while the United States has been tentatively arranging to take in 5,000 now, 8,000 later on, 10,000 more down the road, we have been moving slowly from apparent fear we might have to accept .them all in the end...