The Foreign Service Journal, March 2017

78 MARCH 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL his sister, Georgine Sargent; his four children, Walter Sargent III (and his wife, Sandra), Stuart Sargent, Kathleen Kogel (and her husband, Samuel) and Deborah Stitt; and grandchildren, nieces, nephews, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. Donations in Walter Sargent’s name may be made to Tidewell Hospice in Sarasota, Fla. n M. PatriciaWazer, 88, a retired Foreign Service officer, died peacefully on Sept. 30 at her home in Washington, D.C. Ms. Wazer was born on Aug. 4, 1928, the youngest of nine children, in Forest City, Pa. Because there was no possibil- ity of attending college for a poor girl in the mining country of Pennsylvania, she left immediately after high school to live with her older siblings in Hartford, Conn., where she was expected to be a secretary in a factory. Quickly realizing that such a life was not for her, she hopped on a cross-country bus, carrying all her possessions in a card- board suitcase, with a friend, Cecilia. After a fewmonths in San Francisco working as phone operators, Ms. Wazer and Cecilia saw an ad for postwar Department of Defense jobs in occupied Japan. They lied about their age (they were not yet 21) and were soon off on a troop ship to work as clerks in the U.S. hospitals. When they got off the ship, they were sent to different posts—Ms. Wazer ended up at Nagoya Air Base, where she spent the next several years clerking. In the early 1950s Nagoya became very busy as an evacua- tion base for Korean War casualties. While in Nagoya, she became friendly with a few State Department employees who convinced her to go back to college. After one semester at the University of Maryland, Ms. Wazer met a State Depart- ment recruiter on campus and decided she would work for State for a few years to try to earn the money to return to college. She received a few weeks of training and was off to work as a clerk in Calcutta. She credits the post-partition British for teaching her proper etiquette, how to formally eat, how to entertain and, sadly, how to smoke. After Calcutta she planned to go back to college, but they offered her Paris, and in her words, “How could a girl say no to Paris?” After Paris, she returned to Japan, serving as a vice consul. Frustrated that women were not allowed to learn Japanese, she secretly took private, early morning Japanese lessons before work. She was then assigned to Bucharest, where she was miserable serving in the oppressive environment of the communist country. She contemplated leaving the Foreign Service, and spent the next several months trying to get “PNG’d” (kicked out as persona non grata). Fortunately, a year later, U.S. Ambassa- dor to Japan Edwin Reischauer was look- ing for a woman to serve in Tokyo who spoke Japanese, and her friends helped get her called back to Japan. Ms. Wazer served for the next decade as protocol officer in Tokyo. Each time Washington tried to move her after the normal two-year posting, the current ambassador (Reischauer, Johnson, Meyer, then Ingersoll) would pull some strings to allow her to continue. She spent one of those years as protocol officer for Expo 1970, giving tours of the exhibit to visiting dignitaries, a young Prince Charles among them. Sadly, in 1972, she had to leave her beloved Japan. Assigned to Korea, she was cold and unhappy enough after eight months to volunteer to serve in a war zone. In 1973, she was assigned to Saigon. Her assignment there ended with burning passports, papers and money before leaving on a helicopter on April 30, 1975, in Operation Frequent Wind. Once she safely landed on the USS Midway , she dropped the final suitcase of visa and passport stamps into the ocean. The State Department awarded her the Meritorious Service Award in 1975. After a two-year stint recovering in warm Port-au-Prince in 1977, she returned to Southeast Asia to help establish the Orderly Departure Program to assist refugees resettle fromVietnam. From 1980 to 1984, Ms. Wazer served as consul general in Jakarta. In September 1984, she was assigned to Beirut. Her arrival was delayed by riots at the airport. As she was getting out of the car at the embassy, a suicide bomber detonated, killing at least 20 people. For her service during the ensuing chaos, Ms. Wazer received the State Department Superior Honor Award in 1985. That year she returned to Tokyo once more, to serve as consul general, the first woman to serve in this position in Japan. In 1989, she served as the principal officer at the U.S. consulate in Brisbane and, in 1992, she returned to the Orderly Depar- ture Program as program coordinator. Retirement in 1995 was only a minor pause. Ms. Wazer spent the next 20 years working as a consultant, taking assign- ments as acting consul general for a month or two in many Southeast Asian countries. Her last service was in 2011, where at the age of 83, she spent many night shifts on the phone using her fluent Japanese to help reunite families after the great Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Ms. Wazer is survived by her nieces, nephews and countless friends through- out the world. Donations in her name may be made to Capital Caring (www.capitalcaring. org) or the George Washington Hospital House Calls Program (go.gwu.edu/ discovery). n