The U.S. Department of State sent me to Hong Kong 1964-1966 . My second tour was as economic officer in Kabul, Afghanistan 1966-1968. During that tour I volunteered to serve in Viet-Nam. It seemed a good way to find out whether U.S. policy  was working. For the next three years (1969-71) I was absorbed with or in Indochina.

“Indochina” is a concept both geographical and cultural, denoting an area wedged between India and China. It includes Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet-Nam. The religions, languages and cultural practices of India and China compete in Indochina. Many centuries ago the Viet (Vietnamese) people migrated from South China into the Red River Delta area and then further South along the coast into areas inhabited  by Cambodians and others. The “higher” vocabulary of Vietnamese derives overwhelmingly from Chinese.  Hence my smattering of Mandarin and Cantonese from two years in Hong Kong helped me develop a working knowledge of the Southern Vietnamese dialect during a year’s intensive training. 

In 1964 I had taken a 4 1/2 month long crash course in  Chinese.  (Not too intelligently it was the Mandarin dialect, not much used at my destination, Hong Kong.) The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in Arlington, Virginia already had a few  students of Vietnamese with whom I shared the cramped language lab in the basement of Arlington Towers apartment building. By 1969 I joined hundreds taking FSI courses prior to going to Viet-Nam. Majors, Lt. Colonels and Colonels were in class with me and other civilians for about four months. Not long after that,  Agency for International Development (AID)  officer Jeff Millington and I then continued on in tandem for another eight months. 

We were all trained to go into the field as advisors to Vietnamese officials at village, district or regional levels. The U.S. Army people did just that. So did most civilians. In the end, however, I was sent to the Embassy in Saigon. Like the other civilians I had been taught a bit about firearms and guerrilla warfare. We even spent a week at Fort Bragg with the Special Forces.

Once in country, I was out among the people. I made Chinese and  Vietnamese friends. I joined a Rotary Club in Cholon, the Chinese suburb of Saigon. Our club had four official languages:  Chinese, Vietnamese, French and English. We published a weekly bulletin in all four languages, a feat  unique in worldwide Rotary. I revived my Cantonese with a young Chinese-Vietnamese soldier as tutor. I also studied and learned to speak the prestigious Hanoi (Northern) dialect with a young woman tutor who was studying for a law degree. Her refugee  mother and father were pharmacists. Most of the Vietnamese I met among soldiers, bureaucrats, novelists, journalists, artists and professional people were refugees from the Communist North. Those anti-Communist northerners, about half Catholic and half Buddhist, made up the ferocious backbone of Southern resistance to a Communist takeover. By and large, old-time Southerners, in my experience at least, lived up to their image of being easy going, live and let live. 

It was hard to be sanguine about the South’s chances to remain non-Communist. I often thought that in some ways we Americans, despite the noblest of motives, had backed the inevitable losers, no matter how just their cause. It seemed a rerun of the 17th Century French experience in Canada, beginning with Samuel Champlain. The French had almost arbitrarily allied themselves with less determined Hurons and had thereby made enemies of the ever victorious Iroquois. In South Viet-Nam, most Northerners (not all, by any means) came across as far tougher and willing to sacrifice for ideals than did most Southerners. Unfortunately for the Republic of Viet-Nam, there were a lot more Northerners in the Communist north than in the non-Communist south. 

We Americans were present in far too great numbers for the ultimate good of the South Vietnamese. Like the French colonizers before them, Americans in Viet-Nam tried to control too many things almost down to the traffic cop level. Rich Americans blew away impoverished Vietnamese males in competition for Vietnamese females. We were there to teach strategy and tactics, how to overcome guerrillas, how to plan a post-war economy and how to achieve democratic stability and self-reliance. We were supposed to set examples, to transfer skills, and we usually did. Often we even appeared to try harder to defeat the Communists than did  some of our Vietnamese allies.

Our cause was morally better than that of the Communists. Over a million Northerners had fled their homeland to escape totalitarian rule. I saw along one stretch of highway near American military headquarters fully 31 villages transplanted intact by refugees from the north. All were Catholic. Each village had its own priest. Each had marched or been shipped south in the mid-1950s in pursuit of freedom of worship.

Could the Hurons ever have stood off the Iroquois in North America?  I doubt it. In Viet-Nam might the South ever have beaten off Northern Communists heavily armed and egged on from without? Perhaps, had there been been four times as many anti-communist Northerners in the South. 

We were right to help. The poorest, simplest, most touching wedding ceremony I have ever attended was that of a Vietnamese woman secretary in the office of Embassy Commercial Attache. She was from Central Viet-Nam, near Hue,  and she married a Southern boy serving in ARVN: the Army of the Republic of VIet-Nam. They were very young and indescribably poor. Yet they distinctly declined to be Communists or to be under the thumb of Communists. They wanted their personal freedom and national self-determination. We Americans, in our well intentioned but not effective enough way, strove to help them stay free. 

All Vietnamese, then and now, deserve to be free. They are smart enough, tough enough and politically savvy enough to create from within themselves a new freedom by the year 2050, if not much earlier. In the 1970s, it proved neither in my power nor in that of several hundred thousand other Americans to assure a free Viet-Nam. 

-OOO-

for Asheville TRIBUNE