N&R columnist Lorraine Ahearn has been the voice of Greensboro’s Montagnard community for quite some time now. She stays on the beat this week with not one but two columns on Montagnards’ view of modern Vietnam, using President Bush’s visit there as a backdrop:

President Bush, the White House had announced, would this week become only the second U.S. president to visit since the American war ended in 1975 and the Communist regime took over the south.

Heads bowed, the Greensboro elders reflected on the leader of the free world’s arrival at a trade summit that in many ways symbolizes Hanoi’s entry into the global community.

For the Montagnards, a racial minority that allied with the United States and fought under U.S. command, would this be the hour? After 31 years of being driven from their mountain homeland, rounded up in “re-education” camps as American collaborators, watching their churches burn and their civil protests be brutally suppressed, would a light finally shine on a cruel, little-known footnote to America’s longest war?

In a word — no.

In today’s (as yet unposted) column, Ahearn continues:

In contrast to the red-carpet photo sessions that last weekend heralded Vietnam’s impending entry into the World Trade Organization, newly arrived refugees from the highlands give continued accounts of religious repression, denial of civil rights, torture and government-sponsored sterilization of Montagnard women.

So now you know what the U.S. fighting in Vietnam. It’s not pretty, and I give Ahearn credit for shedding light on a subject the media conveniently ignores. Given the ever-present analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, it’s something to think about as the Democrats continue to make noise about pulling out.