10 JULY-AUGUST 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LETTERS The Fruits of Our Labor I was most interested to read about Vietnam in the April-May 2025 FSJ, in particular the reference in the article, “Through the Visa Window,” about Vietnamese migrants to the U.S. The article refers to the Orderly Departure Program, which was set up in Bangkok 45 years ago, principally to try to encourage desperate South Vietnamese with some ties to the U.S. not to take to the boats to try to get to Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines because of rampant piracy and oceanic deaths. As a second-tour consular officer, I was sent to Bangkok to help set up the program, working with the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) representative who would be preprocessing applicants in Vietnam, based on lists prepared by the Vietnamese government (primarily Chinese citizens they wanted to get rid of) and lists the U.S. government prepared, containing names of people with relatives in the U.S. and former U.S. government employees. Initially there were no names that appeared on both lists, but over time there was some crossover. It is rewarding to see that this program went on for 20 years, and it is deeply pleasing to read decades later about the fruits of our labor and the faithfulness of U.S. citizen husbands in getting their spouses (often with multiple non-U.S.- related children) brought safely to the United States. I hope all those reunifications were happy and successful ones. Sue H. Patterson FSO, retired Antigua, Guatemala Moved by Vietnam Coverage As a former FSO in Vietnam from 1966 to 1970, I was emotionally moved and cherished your coverage of Vietnam from My neighborhood in McLean is turning as Chinese as the region in which Vietnam is situated. In blessed retirement, I watch with not a little trepidation as many of these houses are purchased (in cash) by the Chinese who made their fortunes off the liberal trading regime that I and many others enabled in the lead-up to China’s accession to the WTO. (We all got promoted for “single-handedly” bringing this about.) Let me be clear: I am a “hawk” when it comes to Xi Jinping’s regime. Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who died of a heart attack in Shanghai not too long ago—and whom all my Chinese neighbors quietly believe was allowed to die on orders from Chairman Xi—was Party Secretary in Liaoning Province when I was consul general in Shenyang from 2007 to 2010. Li was the kind of leader we could work with. I’m less sanguine about Xi. I am the product of training in that renegade province, Taiwan, where I was a college junior studying abroad in 1973 and a consular officer at the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) from 1987 to 1989. At the time, AIT was a mildewing and molding leftover from our heyday during the Chiang Kai-shek period. When I was assigned to Shenyang, everyone in the Foreign Service thought I was somehow being punished. I lasted three and one-half happy years during perhaps the apogee in U.S.-China relations. We did not have perfect access in that conservative part of China, but it wasn’t all that bad. And many of us went on to stellar careers in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Vietnam is a perfect example of what can be accomplished by steady and the 1968 Tet invasion until today in the April-May 2025 FSJ. I lived across from the embassy on Mac Din Chi at the time of the attack. I lived and worked in virtually every province of South Vietnam, developing the computerized hamlet evaluation report for 12,000 hamlets for MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam]. I worked in pacification under Bob Komer and ended my career as USAID industry chief, responsible for the War Reconstruction Program and the USAID Commercial Import Program. I left South Vietnam fluent in Vietnamese in December 1970 and returned to Vietnam in 2005 as co-founder of Vietnam Holding, creating an IPO in 2006 on the U.K. stock exchange. It still operates today. This should give you some background on why I loved the entire issue’s complimentary treatment of Vietnam and USAID from 1967 until today. John H. Hoey FSO, retired Sarasota, Florida Intentional Diplomacy in Vietnam As I sit on my front porch in McLean, Virginia, smoking a cigar from leaf grown and rolled in the Dominican Republic, and watching yet another McMansion replace the 1959 split-level house that preceded it, I read with special interest and pride the April-May 2025 issue of The Foreign Service Journal. I had the honor of working for or alongside most of the authors and the folks they mention. They were the best advertisement of the Foreign Service and the power of diplomacy vice military posturing one could imagine. Not that our military posture isn’t important—it’s just that diplomacy brings better returns.
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