TV Reviews : Vietnam Drama Honors Montagnards

The anguishing years in Vietnam have left moral residues that don’t easily wash away into history. In “Vestige of Honor,” a CBS movie airing Sunday at 9 p.m., the matter is what vestiges do we have left to honor our promises to the Montagnard tribespeople from the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

U.S. Special Forces trained their men and they served our cause zealously. But when Saigon fell, we abandoned the Montagnards to the horrible retributions of the victors.

In the movie, the real-life character of Maine real estate developer Don Scott (played by Michael Gross) learns 15 years later of the few surviving tribespeople in a displaced-persons camp in Thailand. One is his loyal translator.

So Scott returns to Southeast Asia--and begins a headlong, head-first assault on the brick wall of bureaucracy. At one point he even recruits the help of a concocted hard-drinking, high-living character (Gerald McRaney), a now-bitter but once-heroic Special Forces captain who swore to protect the brave tribesmen.

There’s a lot of turmoil along the way. In the end, the 213 tribesmen are permitted to leave the camp and Southeast Asia and resettle in North Carolina, sponsored by some former Green Berets and church agencies.

You can never tell in these fact-based, almost-true, close-to-actual docu-type dramas just what is real and what isn’t. But, even though this story suffers from TV-style histrionics, at least it has dilemmas at its heart.

The movie ends as if everybody is living happily ever after--but there might be a more intriguing resolve to come.

Scott, whose multinational company has a long-term contract with Laos for hotel and tourist projects, said Friday from his home in Brunswick, Me., that he has been to Hanoi twice already to bang into new walls.

He’s trying to open the way for “several hundred” of the Montagnards’ family members to emigrate to North Carolina.