Command Sgt. Maj. Thinh Huynh, the senior enlisted advisor of 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, holds a static line while conducting pre-jump training during Operation Devil Storm at Green Ramp, Fort Bragg, N.C., July 17, 2018. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Alleea Oliver)

Lately, I’ve been writing about refugees: Vietnamese, Iraqi, Syrian, etc. A reader sent me a letter, related to the issue — and related to an item I had way back in July.

Robert D. Ray, governor of Iowa from 1969 to 1983, died. I noted something in an obit published in the New York Times:

Beginning in 1975, Mr. Ray volunteered to accept several thousand refugees from Southeast Asia, people from different backgrounds who were displaced by the Vietnammonths back, right before I started school. During my last year there, our command sergeant major, the highest-ranking man in a 700-man battalion, was Thinh Huynh.”

Here is an article about Thinh Huynh, of the 82nd Airborne, from the DoD itself. The article begins, “Full of fear and anxiety, a 10-year-old Vietnamese boy sailed across the South China Sea for 10 days, in 1986, with the expectation that a better life awaited him across the ocean.” Huynh himself is quoted as saying, “If it was not for America, I probably would be dead long ago.”

Back to Kevin Petersen’s letter:

He came with only his mother and his sister. His father, a military officer of the Republic of Vietnam, was imprisoned for eight years in a reeducation camp. I’m not sure