On the last day of the trial of President Trump, the lead prosecutor for the House, Congressman Jamie Raskin, made an unexpected move. He announced that he wanted to call a witness. The gambit panicked the Senate — it could have precipitated a raft of witnesses — and the prosecution backed down. It happens, though, that there was a witness from whom we would have liked to hear.

This struck us part way through the trial, as we were surfing the news stories on the Web and paused at a wide-angle photograph of the crowd that had found perch on the Capitol front. The protesters were carrying all sorts of flags, most of them American. Suddenly, we noticed one flag waving high on a long pole — the yellow banner with three red stripes that is the flag of Free Vietnam.

It caused us to clap a hand over our mouth and just stare. Until that moment we had managed to miss this strand among the forgotten men and women of the Trump coalition. Who was flying that flag — and why? Was it just about Mr. Trump? Or about still nursing a grudge against Congress for voting, after our last GIs were already home, to cut off all military aid to our erstwhile ally and abandon them to the long night of communism?

It turns out, we soon discovered on the Web, that the Vietnamese standard was all over Capitol Hill on January 6 and, according to a dispatch of NBC News, is often flown by Vietnamese Americans in support of President Trump. “This flag to me is an anti-Communist flag,” wrote a Vietnamese American woman, Michelle Le, on a Facebook posting quoted by the National Broadcasting Company.

Ms. Le, according to NBC, was among those who carried a Free Vietnamese flag at the Capitol on January 6. “It’s a reminder of my roots and heritage. I had lived through Communism and I know the tyranny and the pain it had inflicted on many families.” What other politician than Mr. Trump had managed to embrace her noble cause? What a witness she would have made in the Senate.

It’s not our purpose here to put the gloss on the violence at the Capitol on January 6 — or, for that matter, on Mr. Trump. From the moment the violence broke out in Washington, we marked it as an unconscionable crime. We argued that Mr. Trump ought to take personal responsibility for it. We share the occasional discomfort of many who supported him, character flaws and all.

Yet we have never bought into the Democrats’ idea that President Trump’s followers — even half of them — are a basket of deplorables. We covered his future followers in peace and war — including in the industrial belt of America when the rust started to set in; in Vietnam; and in the aftermath of Vietnam, when some came home to be jeered or denounced — and we don’t mind saying we’ve developed an abiding respect for them.

They, in our view, outrank the congresses they’ve sent to Washington. That does not grant license to commit the kind of rioting, racist trash talk, and threats of murder heard from some as the riots swept into the Capitol. It does, though, make us hanker to hear from the thousands of other, more idealist Americans who came to protest peaceably that day. Including whoever was holding so high the yellow flag with the red stripes that Congress once betrayed. What a surprise witness he or she would have been.

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Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.