Special to the Mirror by Paul Plante.
As a Viet Nam combat veteran, in many ways, I feel like an immigrant to this country, myself, despite the fact that I was actually born here.
In January of 1970, I was loaded on a plane at Bien Hoa airport in Viet Nam, for my journey to what then was called “the world,” and what a strange and hostile world it was to turn out to be.
I knew that I was in Viet Nam, of course, because a lot of smallish, brown-skinned people who called themselves Vietnamese, and had so for the last thousand years or better, told me they wanted me out of their country, because my kind did not belong there.
The same thing happened when I got off that plane back here, wherever “here” actually is.
We landed at some Air Force base out in California somewhere near San Francisco, where I had never been before, and the first thing I noticed was that when we got off the plane, there were buses waiting for us with ballistic chicken wire covering all the windows, just like the buses were in Viet Nam.