The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2015 21 In total, some 1.5 million people from Indochina were resettled, approximately one million of them in the United States. Overall, the refugees have done well in their new lands. Today, those same refugees are helping—through all kinds of con- nections and expanding trade—forging new and peaceful ties between the United States and Vietnam. The View from Different Vantage Points Our coverage starts on Jan. 30, 1968, with the first strike of the Tet Offensive. Junior Officer Allan Wendt was on duty at Embassy Saigon that night, and he describes his experience inside the embassy during the attack, keeping up communications with the White House, the State Department and the U.S. military while rockets hit the building. The Tet Offensive was a landmark event that spelled the beginning of the end for the U.S. war effort. The American public and Congress turned against the war effort at that point even though, as Wendt saw it, “pacification was work- ing” and there were signs of progress. But it was too late. Kenneth Quinn takes us “FromWhitehouse to the White House,” from his Vietnam service in the provinces under Chargé Charles Whitehouse to a post inside the National Security Coun- cil with a front-row seat to the Washington policy process. He recounts how the diplomatic surge of the early 1970s allowed for extraordinary reporting from the provinces of Vietnam. Then, in “Mobilizing for South Vietnam’s Last Days,” we follow Parker Borg, who was serving as a seventh-floor staffer in 1975 when he and a few colleagues became concerned about a lack of evacuation planning from Embassy Saigon. The group began meeting in secret to plan. In “Saigon Sayonara,” Joe McBride gives us the ground-floor view from Saigon during the final days before the fall. He describes how, in the absence of leadership from a front office still in denial of the coming fall, FSOs took matters into their own hands to help get people out, by any means possible. Anne Phamwas one of the Vietnamese who was saved by these Americans. In “Finding My Heroes, Finding Myself,” she describes her journey from Vietnam to America, from refugee child to State Department official, and her search to find and thank the FSOs who helped her and her family escape and make new lives in the United States. In a look at the social impact of more than three million Amer- icans passing through a country of 26 million (think marriage and babies), Lange Schermerhorn describes consular work at Embassy Saigon during that tumultuous period in “Doing Social Work in Southeast Asia.” Taking the view from 1,000 feet, Viet- nam expert Rufus Phillips (who served in Vietnam as an Army officer, a CIA officer, a USAID official and consultant to the State Department) describes the counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam, drawing out the important lessons they offer policymakers today, especially in relation to U.S. assistance to weak and failing states threatened with extremism and disintegration. CSIS scholar Murray Hiebert then brings us to today’s Viet- nam and his take on howmuch has changed there. And finally, Parker Borg takes us on his 2015 journey to “The New Vietnam.” He returns to the towns in central Vietnamwhere he had lived and worked in the late 1960s and early 1970s to find a pervasive military presence alongside a friendly and entrepreneurial spirit in the towns and sprawling cities. In Reflections we revisit Wake Island in 1975. Bruce Beardsley served in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and again in the early-1970s, but was called out of Kabul in April 1975 to help out with the enormous task of refugee processing there. Learning from the Past The June 1975 Foreign Service Journal editorial called “Los- ing” begins: “The VietnamWar is over. …The end of Ameri- can involvement in Vietnam has been a cause for immediate concern first for practical and then for professional reasons. … The career Service left behind in Vietnam a record of dedication and sacrifice, and in many cases, of courageous reporting and responsible dissent. Yet as an institution, we also made mistakes. AFSA believes a post mortem of the Vietnam era will be useful to the nation, and that the career Service can contribute greatly to that process. We would welcome ideas on how that might best be done.” There is little to indicate that such an assessment was ever undertaken. Yet the Journal published a number of fascinating articles on Vietnam issues during those years and later. And in reaching out to prepare this issue, we discovered that there is much more remarkable material that Vietnam diplomatic veter- ans are inspired to share than we could accommodate, even in this expanded focus. So we have also created a “Vietnam Supplement” on the AFSA website (www.afsa.org/vietnam ) as a companion to the April Journal . There you will find photos and stories from AFSA members on their experiences in Vietnam, then and now, as well as previous FSJ articles on the subject. Taken all together, it could be considered a contribution to the reckoning AFSA sensibly proposed 40 years ago. Please help carry the conversation forward by sending letters in response to what you read here and your thoughts on lessons learned—or not learned—from Vietnam. n