The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

26 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 1983 to the far north of Lebanon where I discovered Yasser Ara- fat reconstituting his PLO military forces outside Tripoli. After 9/11, I wondered whether we might have detected the plans of Osama bin Laden to strike the United States if we had had more FSOs able to travel through remote parts of South Asia and the Middle East, in the way we did in Vietnam. The Whitehouse Interlude With the departure of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were signed, Deputy Chief of Mis- sion Charles Whitehouse became chargé d’affaires and ushered in a spirit of openness and unvarnished reporting. This was reinforced by two Vietnam veterans, Tom Barnes and Frank Wisner, who arrived in Can Tho as the new consul general and deputy principal officer, respectively. They were followed by a flood of mid-level, language-trained FSOs, one in each of the 16 provinces in the Delta, augmented in many cases by Vietnam- ese-speaking USAID officers. Similar assignments followed in all 44 provinces of South Vietnam. This “diplomatic surge” produced an amazing body of reporting documenting the shaky security situation and warning of what was to come. Seldom has the Foreign Service fielded so many highly competent individuals in such a dangerous but criti- cally important environment. For my part, I continued to live and work in the provincial capital of Chau Doc, at the juncture of the Mekong River and Cambodian border. Now a vice consul, I had remark- able experiences during my 15 months there. Besides reporting on Pol Pot‘s Khmer Rouge, I used a plane and pilot for a week to map the extent of Viet Cong control of the entire Mekong Delta. I also burrowed into the dirt as bullets cracked over my head when a North Vietnamese Army unit, in a major ceasefire violation, ambushed an American cargo ship I was monitoring on the Mekong River. My Vietnam assignment came to an abrupt end in April 1974 when an Air America plane landed in Chau Doc with orders transferring me to the National Security Council staff. My move from obscurity to a job at the White House caused quite a stir in Saigon. Suddenly I had appointments at the embassy, including with Ambassador GrahamMartin and Tom Polgar, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station. While Amb. Martin was gracious to me (he even came to my wedding, which took place a few days before I departed the country), I found my one-on-one meeting with him somewhat disquieting. At times, he seemed to drift away in thought during our conversation. Leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling, he waxed philosophical about the vagaries of the policy process and the forces that were undermining him. The author with Kent Paxton, right, a USAID officer who was instrumental in shepherding the very first refugees arriving in the United States through the U.S. Air Force base outside of San Francisco. He used his own money to purchase tickets for families of FSOs, as there was no system in place to deal with them. Courtesy of Kenneth Quinn