The Foreign Service Journal, June 2013

the Foreign Service journal | JUNE 2013 41 FEATURE T he presence in our country of well over a million Americans of Vietnam- ese, Cambodian and Lao origin owes much to the determination of a single Foreign Service officer. Shep Low- man made it his life’s work to seek resettlement in the United States and elsewhere for the Indochinese who were our allies during the long, brutal war in Vietnam. A longtime director of the State Department’s Office of Asian Refugees in the Bureau for Refugee Programs (now the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration), Shep later served as the bureau’s deputy assistant secretary. And he continued his work long after his official career had ended. The success of those former refugees is his epitaph. Shep died peacefully at his home in Fairfax, Va., on the evening of March 2, leaving his family, his many friends and his abundant admirers in deep mourning (see In Memory, p. 66). His loss deprives us of a major humanitarian and a man of great decency and warmth. I worked for Shep twice, succeeded him in another job after our retirements, and traveled with him to the Balkans during the Kosovo crisis. He was at once mentor, inspiration and friend. He was an unlikely leader, though, at least initially. I first met him in 1970 at the apartment of my then-boss, Cal Mehlert, above the Eden Gallery in downtown Saigon (after which the Eden Center in Falls Church, Va., is named). He was visiting, as I recall, and seemed dispirited. Notwithstanding his Harvard law education and sharp mind, he made a lackluster impression. Four years later, in 1974, Shep returned to South Vietnam, this time as chief of the internal unit of the embassy’s very large polit- ical section. That fall, I became his deputy. Together, we came to know many of the country’s politicians and other leaders. The Fall of Saigon Months before the April 1975 evacuation of Saigon, it had become clear that the U.S. Congress was unwilling to allocate the resources that would have allowed South Vietnam to continue its struggle against the North Vietnamese. President Nguyen VanThieu’s decision to pull back his forces from the north had provoked a debacle, and the fall of Saigon was not far off. Ambassador GrahamMartin gave our unit a major role in the evacuation, with particular responsibility for the Vietnamese who had been on our side. Our first job was to make lists of the categories of people who would be most at risk in a communist takeover, an effort that proved of dubious utility as the clock wound down and disorder increased. But we were able to evacuate many Vietnamese families of Americans. Shep worked almost around the clock, and we both left Saigon by helicopter from the embassy roof on the last day. Shepard C. Lowman (1926-2013) AnAppreciation Countless Indochinese-Americans will remember FSO Shepard Lowman for enabling their admission to the United States. His country should remember him, as well, for embodying our finest inclinations. By Lacy Wr i ght Lacy Wright, a Foreign Service officer for 30 years, now works as director of the INL section at Embassy Vientiane.