The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

48 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 7 was one of hundreds of U.S. Foreign Service officers who served in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s. While many of us were ordered to go, I went as a volunteer. Fresh from an assignment in Libya during the revolution there, I wanted another big adventure; I wanted to be in a war, and Vietnam was the only war we had. I also knew that another good perfor- mance in a difficult and dangerous place would keep pushing me up the State Department’s promotion lad- der. Yes, those motives were shallow, but that’s who I was at that time. The irony is that what I saw and did in Vietnam 35 years ago deepened my life more than any other experiences I’ve ever had. Like most FSOs in Vietnam, I was attached to CORDS, a countrywide command of American civilians and military, described back home as the “pacification program.” The acronym stood for Combined Opera- tions Rural Development Support; our standing joke was that the “R” had meant “Revolutionary,” until some Pentagon flack decided that term made us sound too much like the Viet Cong. The CORDS command structure alternated between civilian and military. I had the equivalent rank of major and worked for an Army lieutenant colonel, who in turn reported to the province senior adviser, a senior FSO. The military participants in the program were almost all Army, while the civilians came from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. We all dealt with the inevitable culture clashes, mostly with good humor (though I can still recall my spit-and-polish boss choking on his breakfast when a young USAID officer on my staff showed up for work in F O C U S O N W A R Z O N E D I P L O M A C Y A ND N OW I RAQ : A F ORMER FSO R EMEMBERS V IETNAM T HE P ROVINCIAL R ECONSTRUCTION T EAMS NOW IN I RAQ ARE A NEW INCARNATION OF THE C OMBINED O PERATIONS R URAL D EVELOPMENT S UPPORT PROGRAM . B Y J OHN G RAHAM I John Graham, a Foreign Service officer from 1965 to 1980, served in Liberia, Libya, South Vietnam, Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. mission to the United Nations. He is now president of the Giraffe Heroes Project, a global nonprofit rallying people to take on pub- lic problems and giving them the tools to succeed (www.giraffe.org ). He is the author of Stick Your Neck Out: A Street-Smart Guide to Making a Difference in Your Community and Beyond (Berrett Koehler, 2006) and of a recently completed memoir, Sit Down, Young Stranger. Versions of this article have appeared in the Washington Post and at www.truthout.org. Relevant documents and diaries can be found in the John Graham Collection of The Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University (www.vietnam.ttu.edu ).