10 JUNE 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LETTERS A Postscript on Vietnam The April-May 2025 FSJ was a knockout. The juxtaposition of the “here and now” in Vietnam with the “back then” illustrates why the Foreign Service is a valuable national asset. I would like to add to Ken Quinn’s recollection of the 1968 Tet Offensive a note about the presence of the only Foreign Service officer inside the chancery in Saigon: Allan Wendt. Wendt, who would end his career as the first U.S. ambassador to the newly independent Republic of Slovenia, was the embassy duty officer and performed heroically, with a pistol in hand, calmly keeping telephone communications open to the U.S. military. He also helped carry a wounded Marine Security Guard up to the roof to be evacuated to safety when the helicopter finally arrived. His hair-raising firstperson account can be found on pages 37-43 in his ADST oral history: https:// bit.ly/Allan-Wendt. A postscript to Quinn’s marvelous account is that the senior official, George “Jake” Jacobson, was an Army colonel who had first served in Vietnam in 1954. After the Paris Accords were signed in 1973, he came back to the embassy to run field operations for agricultural activities in South Vietnam. He was one of the last embassy officers to leave Saigon, on the same helicopter with the then U.S. ambassador in 1975. Larry Butler U.S. Ambassador, retired Topsham, Maine The FSJ’s Vital Mission I would like to congratulate The Foreign Service Journal for its outstanding AprilMay 2025 edition featuring the evolution of U.S.-Vietnam relations. As a boy living a sterling example of how successful the Journal continues to be in fulfilling its vital mission. Joseph L. Novak FSO, retired Washington, D.C. A Memory Preserved In a brief note in the April 1948 edition of the American Foreign Service Journal, News From the Department reports on “Staff Corps Employees Killed in Saigon.” The two—Mrs. Jeanne R. Skewes, age 32, and Lydia Ruth James, age 30—died on March 7, 1948, while driving a jeep bearing an American flag at dusk on the outskirts of Saigon. French authorities discovered their bullet-riddled bodies and the burnedout jeep. Mrs. Skewes was a recent entrant into the Foreign Service, having previously worked for the Office of War Information before it was folded into State. She was charged with managing an informational library. Ms. James worked as a secretary in the consulate general. A former member of the Women’s Army Corps, she reportedly joined the Foreign Service out of a “sense of adventure.” French authorities surmised that the Americans inadvertently strayed outside the French security zone and were ambushed and machine-gunned by anti-French, pro-Communist Viet Minh guerrillas. Whether the killings were deliberate, or a case of mistaken identity, remains unclear. Consul General John Hamlin promised an investigation. A May 29, 1948, press report in The Evening Star speaks of an arrest and a claim that the in the Philippines, I vividly remember the end of the war in April 1975, including the arrival of thousands of refugees at Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Base. It was a fraught era in many respects, but I enjoyed looking back and reading the articles on the slow and steady building of ties with Vietnam over the past five decades. Ambassador Nguyen Quoc Dzung’s piece, for instance, thoughtfully underscored the point that diplomacy conducted in the spirit of reconciliation and cooperation can truly work wonders. I would also like to thank the Journal for its coverage of the ongoing fullfledged attack on the federal workforce by the Trump administration. The articles on the dismantling of USAID and the U.S. Agency for Global Media in the April-May edition were, of course, heartrending in the extreme. I strongly believe that these two agencies will be fully restored in the future when saner heads prevail. In the meantime, the harrowing impact of this situation on our displaced colleagues and the deleterious effects of eliminating the critical programs that they so honorably administered must continue to be at the forefront of all our minds. We’re living in a tumultuous period, and, now more than ever, the Journal is needed as a forum focused on subjects of importance to the Foreign Service community. The insider’s perspective it provides is invaluable as well as indispensable. The April-May edition is
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