The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

52 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 15-year requirement. They had great difficulty in understanding why what looked to them exactly like U.S. government employment legally was not. Even though they were making more money in Vietnam, they felt they were letting down their extended families, who were counting on them to achieve legal residence in the United States and then seek immigrant visa status for their parents and siblings. Looking Back By October 1970, when I departed Vietnam, about 350,000 U.S. troops remained in the country. Embassy Saigon was busier than ever. And though I never again served in Asia, my involvement with Vietnamwas not yet over. Here are three vignettes I recall vividly frommy later Foreign Service career. Washington, D.C., 1982: I attend the National War College, whose curriculum includes, for the first time since 1975, a two- week segment on Vietnam. The move came at the insistence of several faculty members who said it was past time for study of the war’s lessons. The NWC staff who had argued for further delay were proven right when the heated discussion destroyed the camarade- rie carefully cultivated among the student body over the previous months. Not the least of the surprises was the astonishment among military students when their State Department colleagues noted that between 1966 and 1975, a higher percentage of Foreign Service officers thanmilitary officers served in South Vietnam. (Admit- tedly, large troop deployments were also garrisoning in Germany, Italy and South Korea, among other overseas duty stations.) Brussels, 1995: The U.S. ambassador to Belgium, where I was serving, receives a group of five newMarine security guards, one of whom is clearly of Vietnamese origin. In the ensuing chat, the Marine reveals that as a 6-month-old child, he had arrived in the United States with his refugee parents, who fled via boat after the fall of Saigon. With heartfelt emotion he exclaims, “I am very proud to be a U.S. Marine.” Quantico, Virginia, 2010: I hear a retired general assert that we talk about lessons learned, but they are only lessons observed. They do not become lessons learned until we apply them. n