The Exile Army Was Real
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The Exile Army Was Real
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The most famous photograph of the fall of Saigon has been captioned incorrectly for fifty years. The photographer spent the rest of his life trying to fix it, and nobody listened.
Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer gets read as a clever spy novel about identity and double lives. It's that, but also a record of almost every institutional detail in it is documented history, and the parts that sound most invented are the parts that happened.
This week: the emergency legal workaround that let roughly 300,000 Southeast Asians into a country with no refugee law on the books, the sponsorship rule that split families at the camp gates, the typhoon that Hollywood remembers as a production delay, and the exile army that raised money in California strip malls to restart the war. And that, according to the FBI's own declassified files, was behind the murders of five Vietnamese-American journalists on American soil. Nobody was ever arrested.