War against Vietnam communist continues for pilot

NY Times:

...

“I have the duty to liberate my country!” shouted Ly Tong, wearing bright yellow prison pajamas, through a double screen of wire mesh at Bangkok’s central jail.

“The only thing that matters is, the Communists still control my country,” he shouted over the hubbub in the caged visiting area recently. “I’m a pilot. This is what I can do.”

His country is Vietnam and the Communists have controlled it since 1975, when they defeated the South Vietnamese Army, for which Mr. Tong fought, along with its American allies.

But time has moved on, and President Bush was just in Hanoi, shaking hands and praising the government’s great capitalist strides forward.

Mr. Tong, 62, who emigrated to America and became an American citizen in the 1980s, could only watch in frustration from his Thai jail cell.

The last time an American president was in Vietnam — Bill Clinton in 2000 — Mr. Tong went into action, doing what he could do as a pilot to turn back history.

Pretending he wanted a flying lesson, he commandeered a small plane in Thailand, flew to neighboring Vietnam and scattered thousands of leaflets over Ho Chi Minh City calling for a popular uprising.

He knew the airspace. He had been shot down nearby in a jet fighter and was captured in the final days of the war, spending five years in a re-education camp before he escaped and fled the country.

...

“My people are looking for leadership, that’s why I drop the leaflets,” he said in the jailhouse interview. “You know, the Soviet Union collapsed. All the Communist countries — Vietnam, China, North Korea — must collapse. We have to push them to make them surrender.”

He signed his leaflets “Global Alliance for the Total Uprising Against Communists.”

Mr. Tong was arrested as soon as he returned to Thailand, and spent nearly six years in jail for hijacking. That term has ended, but he has remained behind the wire mesh as he appeals an extradition order that would send him back to Vietnam, in handcuffs this time.

“How could you do this to a renowned freedom fighter?” he cried when a court approved his extradition order in September.

...

It begins in 1980 with his escape from the re-education camp in Vietnam and a journey through five countries, verified at the time by American diplomats, that was a virtuoso display of guts and ingenuity.

On his 17-month trek, he made his way by foot, bicycle, train and bus through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, breaking out of jails, threading his way through minefields, dodging security patrols and crawling through the jungle to avoid border posts. On his final leg, he swam across the Johore Strait from Malaysia to Singapore, where he hailed a taxi and presented himself at the American Embassy.

...

John Kerry should have to face up to this man and tell him how he is better off because the Democrats abandoned Vietnam. There is more to this remarkable story. He has previously hijacked a plane to dump leaflets on North Vietnam and then bailed out, He also dumped leaflets on Havana urging the overthrow of Castro's despotic regime. This guy is an anti communist hero and should not be put in jail for urging people to overthrow communist tyranny. The Thais are making a mistake by extraditing him.