“Every night Walter Cronkite would give the body count. We would see these horrific stories of children running from their burning huts, and the world looked like it was on fire. The soldiers in their body bags, and they would give this body count, and it’s just horrible. I just felt awful.”
—Mary Beth Tinker

Ten years before the end of the war, the kids in Iowa took the lead in the calls for peace.

Responding to a campaign for a Christmas Truce, on December 16, 1965, 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker, her 15-year-old brother, John, and their younger siblings and a friend donned black armbands at their public schools in Des Moines. They knew they stood in violation of the principal’s policy against protest. Within minutes, the school suspended them.

The first Iowan soldier had died in Vietnam in 1962. Petty Officer Gerald Norton, 23 years old, had been lost with 20 other soldiers in a downed helicopter during a search and rescue mission south of Tam Ky. Among the 115,000 Iowans in the war, 869 would not return.

  The Tinkers wore black, in the meantime, as they returned to school. They took their case to court. Four years later, as the young students endured their share of hate mail, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their First Amendment rights in a landmark 7–2 decision, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. Writing for the majority, Justice Abe Fortas set forth a clear precedent: “It can hardly be argued, that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

  Over a half-century later, the Iowans’ resistance, and the Supreme Court’s mandate, could not be more timely for any administration that seeks to shut down dissent in schools in an era of unrelenting global conflict and genocide: “They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved,” as Fortas added.

Taking office in that same year of 1969, Governor of Iowa Robert Ray, who had also attended Des Moines schools, would add his own imprint on Iowa’s unique role in the Vietnam War and its aftermath on the heartland’s soil. Ray served as governor for 24 years. A Republican, he refused to follow other states and never called out the National Guard on university campus protests around the Vietnam War.

Ray led initiatives to increase funding for schools, recognize collective bargaining rights for state employees, and launch early recycling programs, and he signed an executive order that the “state government should be open to people for employment and appointment to public positions regardless of their race, color, or creed.”

  In 1975, however, as he took over the chair of the National Governors Association, Ray assumed a larger role in global relief efforts, including those for refugees and immigrants fleeing the fallout of the war in Vietnam and Laos. Unable to find any other state to accommodate fleeing members of the ethnic Tai Dam minority, Ray accepted Republican President Gerald Ford’s call for assistance. Despite a Des Moines Register poll that showed 51 percent against resettlement of refugees in Iowa, Ray established his farm state as the only one in the union to contract with “the federal government as a public, non-profit organization that provides resettlement services for 90 or 120 days.”

Ray invoked Iowa’s tradition of serving as a state of refuge, dating back to the founding of Pella, Iowa, so named in honor of the ancient Jordanian city of Pella, the City of Refuge, for Dutch refugees fleeing religious persecution in 1847. The town of Elkader, in the northern part of the state, had been established in 1846 in the name of Algerian Islamic resistance fighter Abd el-Kader, who earned international acclaim for his role in defending Christian refugees in Syria in 1860.

  Remarkably, Ray insisted on keeping the Tai Dam communities together. In a later congressional hearing, Ray explained why Iowa accepted thousands of refugees: “We felt the Tai Dam’s cultural heritage and social structure could be preserved if they were resettled in one area. Otherwise, they faced dispersal to all parts of the United States with little chance of maintaining their identity.”

Over the next several years, thousands of refugees and other immigrants from Vietnam arrived in Iowa. Among the first to arrive, on July 4, 1975, Thu T. Nguyen and his pregnant wife, Phuong X. Ngo, and their three children landed at the Quad Cities Airport, supported by various nonprofit and religious organizations, including the Friends of Children of Vietnam, Lutheran World Relief, and area churches. Nguyen had served in the South Vietnam Army.

Ray’s critical role as a defender of the rights of refugees brought him to Capitol Hill numerous times. The Iowa governor also made visits to refugee camps in Cambodia. In his capacity as a Republican governor, he rounded up party support for the Refugee Act of 1980, a landmark measure in American history that provided a formal system for resettlement of refugees with a “well-founded fear of persecution.”

  “I saw that we really only had two choices,” Ray had testified in Congress on May 29, 1979. “We could either turn our backs as countless others suffered and died, or we could extend a hand to help, and in so doing prevent tragic loss of innocent lives. Actually, I saw only one real choice. I wrote President Carter January 17, informing him that Iowa would resettle an additional 1,500 refugees during this year.”

Away from the political theatrics, the Republican governor in Iowa brought a ground-level view. “These people have become productive, contributing members of our society, paying taxes and earning their own way,” Ray added at a U.S. House committee in 1979. “A survey recently conducted indicated that over one-third of the families are purchasing their own homes. There has been little need for welfare assistance and all seeking work are gainfully employed.”

A generation after the Tinker kids in Des Moines, Charles Truong grew up in Davenport, Iowa, attending the local schools, the son of Vietnamese immigrants. His father spent six years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam. “Coming from a collectivist Vietnamese culture and growing up in Iowa showed me the importance of mutual aid, community care, and cultural humility,” Truong told me. “It was like the perfect storm that instilled the values that I carry with me today.”

That very federal law that Iowa Republican Governor Robert Ray helped to pass, which has assisted millions of fleeing refugees, is now at risk. In February, a federal judge in Seattle blocked President Trump’s executive order, signed within hours of his presidency, to suspend the decades-old refugee policy.

Jeff Biggers is an American Book Award–winning historian, journalist, novelist, and playwright. Author of 10 books, most recently Disturbing the Bones, a novel coauthored with filmmaker Andrew Davis, his work has appeared on National Public Radio and Public Radio International, and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, Salon, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Brick magazine (Toronto) and Il Giornale (Italy). As a playwright and performer of monologues, he appears at theatres, festivals, conferences, and schools. Based in the United States and Italy, Biggers has worked as a writer, performer, and educator across the United States, Europe, India, and Mexico.