The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

24 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Staying, Looking Back I stayed in Vietnam for another 31/2 years, even though the tour of duty was only 18 months. The embassy, and Amb. Bunker himself, kept asking me to extend, and why not? I enjoyed my work and found the country fascinating, despite the war all around us. During my last year there, I served as commercial attaché, with my own office by the river. In practice I became a general- purpose trouble-shooter for the embassy, dealing with such issues as corruption in the port of Da Nang and finding a way to enable the U.S. military to recover brass shell casings from battlefields. (They were being scavenged by enterprising Viet- namese and exported to China via Hong Kong.) I believed at the time that we were on the right track in Viet- nam. Pacification was working. The South Vietnamese economy was developing nicely. Militarily, we were beginning to prevail in the conflict—particularly after Creighton Abrams replaced Wil- liamWestmoreland. The South Vietnamese military was begin- ning to hold its own and even win some major engagements. Unfortunately, however, it was too late. Congress had turned irrevocably against the war in spite of all the evidence that the situation was turning in our favor. Should the U.S. have entered the conflict in the first place? Given our reluctance to see it through, presumably not. Ameri- cans have little patience for indecisiveness and stalemate. The U.S. fought the war with serious limitations—such as not invading the North and eschewing strategic bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong until December 1972, just a few months before we withdrew our troops. This restraint stemmed from our fear of escalation, of bringing in China and the Soviet Union, whose intentions we misread. Yet there are historians who contend today that fighting the war in South Vietnam bought time for other countries in the region to achieve a degree of stability and prosperity. Was it worth 58,000 American lives? No, given the outcome. Was it a necessary war? Again, no, but historians will doubtless continue to study and debate the matter. Looking back, I recall that just about every FSO tapped to go to Vietnam went willingly and some even enthusiastically. Many served with distinction. The war was controversial, of course, and there was substantial opposition to it at home. With rare exceptions, the American press tended to report only bad news. Yet for a career FSO committed to serve anywhere in the world, Vietnam was the place to be. At the time, there was no greater calling. n