The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

96 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Bruce Beardsley retired from the Foreign Service in 2000 following a 31-year career. He served in Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Denmark, Malaysia, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Mexico and Kosovo. Since then he has accepted several short-term assignments in the Balkans with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and participated in more than 30 training exercises in Germany to help prepare soldiers bound for Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo. He lives in southwest Florida. Photos are courtesy of Bruce Beardsley. Vietnam: Endings and Beginnings BY BRUCE A . BEARDS L EY REFLECTIONS T he end of one national adven- ture ushers in the beginning of another. Thus it was for Vietnam, and for me. April 1975. The little news from Vietnam available at Embassy Kabul was grim. I had arrived in Afghanistan four months earlier, and almost immediately the steady beat of the North Vietnamese Army’s march on Saigon could be heard. Provincial capitals, whole provinces, major cities—they all fell to the onslaught. I had served in Vietnam for 21/2 years, first in the Army (1965-1966) and later, after language training, as a junior FSO in one of the provinces (1970-1972). With each day’s news my thoughts returned to the green jungles and rice paddies I had known, and especially to the Vietnamese friends and colleagues still there. Were they alive? What were they doing? How had it come to this? As the ineptitude of the embassy’s response andWashington’s dither- ing became apparent, I was evenmore distraught. What could I, or anyone, do? Then, out of the blue, a message: I was to take the next flight east to assist with the evacuation fromVietnam. Unfortunately, the next flight to NewDelhi, the first step of the journey, would not depart for two days. In the interim, I put my office in order and tried to relearn a fewwords of Vietnamese. Flights and time zones blurred: Delhi, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Guam and, finally, Wake Island. Wake was to receive and shelter the human overflow fromGuam, and ultimately the island housed some 12,000 evacuees. Reception arrangements were already underway. The U.S. Immigra- tion Service had a small team in place, and a pair of U.S. Agency for International Development evacuees had been sent there, while the U.S. Air Force shouldered the bulk of the logistical responsibilities. The USAID guys moved on shortly after my arrival, so I was left with the title “Civil Coordinator” and no staff, no job descrip- tion and little guidance. The strongest ray of encouragement was the willingness with which the Vietnamese evacuees pitched in to run the camp. Once the basics of food, shelter andmedical treatment were organized, I increasingly devotedmy time to unique or intractable problems. Many of those involved families who had left Vietnam together, but had become separated along the way. Another group wanted to return to Vietnam—typically they had been ship or aircraft crewmem- bers with no choice about departing. We also had several hundred with relatives in countries other than the United States. I’ll never forget one person with whom I spent many hours. A very nice fellow, he had been a ranger captain and aide to a Having been given initial incoming processing, Vietnamese evacuees line up for resettlement processing by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service) on Wake Island in May 1975.