Re: Perot Honored for POW Efforts

Date: March 24, 2004

"Perot honored for POW efforts

DAVID KOENIG Associated Press

DALLAS - Marc Meisner remembers lying in a bed in the intensive care unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in 1989 and getting a call from Ross Perot.

The Texas billionaire offered to pay for second medical opinions on disabling injuries to the leg and hand of Meisner, an Army captain wounded in Panama.

"He said he just wanted to do for me what he would do for his own son if he were in my position," Meisner said.

The two kept in weekly contact throughout Meisner's recovery, and Perot bought a specially outfitted vehicle that Meisner could drive.

Meisner, who now works as a military intelligence analyst in Virginia, will be in Dallas on Thursday night when Perot is honored for his work to help wounded soldiers and prisoners of war.

Perot will receive an award from the Business Executives for National Security, a nonprofit group of pro-defense business leaders. Perot's son is on the group's board of directors. Organizers expect 1,500 people, including several members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the black-tie dinner.

Perot, 73, has mostly avoided the public spotlight since his second campaign for president in 1996, and he declined to answer questions about politics in an interview this week. He remains chairman of his computer-services company, which is run by his son, Ross Perot Jr.

Before the quixotic presidential campaigns and before his caricature formed on late-night television, Perot was known as a strongheaded and wildly successful businessman. Forbes magazine last month estimated his personal fortune at $3.8 billion, No. 124 on its list of wealthiest Americans.

Perot graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy but quit the Navy as soon as his hitch ended. He started Electronic Data Systems Corp. in 1962 with $1,000 and built it into a computer-services giant. Many of his early hires were military men.

Perot said a 1969 visit from Bonnie Singleton, the mother of a 3-year-old and the wife of a serviceman missing in Vietnam, changed his life.

"She told me, 'Mr. Perot, this little boy doesn't know whether he has a father or not. My husband Jerry was shot down, the Vietnamese won't admit they have him, and anything you can do we would really appreciate,'" Perot said.

"I was so touched looking at that little boy, we mounted a 90-day campaign" to learn the flier's whereabouts, Perot said. "About that time, they admitted they had Jerry Singleton."

Perot had contributed money and manpower to Richard Nixon's campaigns, and the Nixon administration asked him to lead an effort to humiliate North Vietnam over its treatment of American POWs.

Perot chartered two jets to fly medical supplies and the wives of POWs to Southeast Asia. They were not allowed into North Vietnam, but the trip attracted enormous press attention.

The POWs were released in 1973, as the United States pulled out of Vietnam. It's unclear what effect, if any, Perot's efforts had, but some of the men in the prison camps believe he saved their lives.

Dat "Max" Nguyen was a U.S.-trained fighter pilot in the South Vietnamese military who was shot down over the north in 1966 and held in the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton. Nguyen said he overheard a broadcast on a guard's radio that a Texas billionaire was sending planes with medical supplies to North Vietnam.

The news lifted the spirits of the POWs, whose captors only told them about anti-war rallies in the United States, Nguyen said.

After his release and trip to the United States - where he finally met Perot in Las Vegas - Nguyen said he returned to Vietnam and rejoined what soon became a doomed fight against the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies.

Nguyen said Perot organized the evacuation of 32 of his family members as Saigon fell. Perot gave him a job as an engineer at EDS, where he worked 22 years until retiring in 1999.

"He saved my family from certain death, and he helped us rebuild a happy and safe new life," Nguyen said. "He did so much for so many people."

In 1979, Perot financed a mission to rescue two EDS employees who were jailed during the revolution in Iran, a story that was retold in a book and TV movie, "On Wings of Eagles." The two men walked out after the shah's regime fell and mobs stormed the prison.

In recent years, Perot has pushed the Veterans Affairs Department to study neurological causes of Gulf War syndrome, a mysterious illness reported by many soldiers who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. He scoffed at officials who blamed the illnesses on stress - "as if they are wimps" - and has paid for additional research.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi said Perot also calls him periodically on behalf of individual veterans and helps some win benefits.

"Maybe they got turned down for benefits or need help getting into a VA hospital," Principi said. "It's a hardship case. They've contacted him, and he asks if there's anything I can do to help. Those kinds of calls."

Perot also has paid medical expenses for soldiers such as David Bell, a Marine who lost an eye and suffered skull damage during a training exercise. He taped a testimonial video for Thursday night's event.

The master of ceremonies at the gala will be retired Air Force Gen. Charles G. Boyd, president of the pro-defense business group hosting the event. Boyd was a POW in Vietnam from 1966 to 1973 who first met Perot at an event the businessman organized in San Francisco in 1973.

"The POWs love him without exception," Boyd said. "I've been impressed with his unbounded generosity in helping American servicemen. That story has never been told in any formal way for a national audience. That's why I want to do this.""