THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL-MAY 2025 19 A career Foreign Service officer for almost 30 years, Ted Osius served as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam from 2014 to 2017. He wrote Nothing Is Impossible: America’s Reconciliation with Vietnam (Rutgers, 2022). Currently, he is president and CEO of the USASEAN Business Council, which supports private sector ties between Southeast Asia and the United States. This year the United States and Vietnam are celebrating a vital bilateral relationship forged patiently over the past 30 years from the ashes of war, one now known as a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. It is a remarkable story of diplomatic accomplishment involving respect, trust, and a joint effort to create a meaningful, powerful partnership. This effort benefits regional and global prosperity, stability, and security. As America’s eighth ambassador to Hanoi, Marc Knapper, often points out, however, 2025 isn’t only the 30th anniversary of normalized relations and the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, but also the 80th anniversary of Vietnam’s independence. From this perspective, the U.S.-Vietnamese relationship is even more compelling. Eighty Years Ago In 1945, as war with Japan was winding down in the Pacific, Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency—began training an elite force of 200 Việt Minh guerrillas. The OSS’s “Deer Team” knew something about two of the guerrillas, Hồ Chí Minh and his most famous general, Võ Nguyên Giáp. That year, when Henry Prunier of Worcester, Massachusetts, and six other Americans parachuted into Tan Trao village in northern Vietnam on a clandestine mission, Prunier taught the diminutive General Giáp how to throw a grenade. When I visited Tan Trao in March 2017, as the sixth U.S. ambassador to Hanoi, a guide showed us a massive banyan tree in the clearing at the heart of the Việt Minh’s jungle base. She said one of those long-ago Deer Team agents had parachuted into the tree and gotten tangled in its branches. Armed men emerged from the jungle, and he fired his revolver, thinking they might be some kind of pro-Japanese militia. They retreated, and at daybreak, the OSS agent, still stuck in his harness, woke from a fitful sleep to see a bamboo mat below on which someone had written two words in English: “Welcome friend.” Relieved, he called out to the Việt Minh, and they cut him down from the tree. Once in camp, he found out that the words that had lured him down had been written by the one person in the guerrilla band who knew some English: their leader and the future president of Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh. Hồ, Giáp, and the Việt Minh welcomed the Deer Team. Paul Hoagland, an OSS medic, treated Hồ for malaria and may have saved his life. After grenade lessons, Prunier instructed “Mr. Văn” (aka Giáp) in the use of American rifles, machine guns, bazookas, and other arms. (Prunier earned a bronze star for these exploits and returned to Vietnam in 1995 to meet Giáp, who demonstrated the grenade-lobbing technique Prunier had taught him.) COURTESY OF TED OSIUS Ambassador Ted Osius and his spouse, Clayton Bond, with their son and daughter wearing traditional Vietnamese clothing to celebrate Tết in Hanoi, February 2017.
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