The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

56 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL the self-help projects—carried out with government-provided materials but using local labor—brought visible physical improvements. Accelerated agricultural and livestock develop- ment programs improved farm incomes, often for the poorest villagers. In fact, for the first time since the insurgency began seriously in 1959, South Vietnam produced a rice surplus for export in 1963. Rural Affairs also had the flexibility to fund and provide advisers for a surrender program called Chieu Hoi. This program filled a gap in the initial counterinsurgency approach and began attracting defections from the insurgency. Notable among the Rural Affairs provincial representatives were two Foreign Service officers on their first overseas assignment, Richard Holbrooke and Vladimir Lehovich. They were the expeditionary diplomats of that time and the precursors of much greater State civilian involvement in what was to become the Civil Operations and A strategic hamlet school constructed by local self-help groups in 1963. Courtesy of Rufus Phillips The U.S.-supported coup against President Diemon Nov. 1, 1963, brought progress to a crashing halt.