The Foreign Service Journal, September 2014

38 SEPTEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL This trend understandably caused considerable concern among senior State Department officials, including the new director of the Vietnam Training Center, Cliff Nelson, who himself had just returned from the war. He spoke to the assembled trainees and urged anyone who had any doubts about what we were doing in Vietnam to come see him right away. Based on the conversations I’d had with my colleagues, I assumed that there would be a long line at his door, but I was the only one there. When Nelson arrived, he looked at me and asked, “Who are you and what do you want?” I replied, “You just said that anyone with doubts should come to see you, and I wanted to be honest and tell you about mine.” This enraged him, and he went into a tirade, yelling that he could not understand why a “red-blooded American boy could not risk his life for his country.” As I sputtered out a few words, trying to tell him I was fully prepared to do just that, he yelled that he was throw- ing me out of the program and, if he could, out of the Foreign Service. Suddenly, my dream of a career in diplomacy was about to disappear before it had even begun. But the department was so desperate for employees to serve in Vietnam that it ordered the director to reinstate me. Soon thereafter, I left for Saigon and ended up staying in Vietnam for six years, an experience that shaped my Foreign Service career. Dinner with the Ambassador I spent my first two years in Vietnam as a district senior adviser in Sa Đéc province, where I headed a 10-member U.S. Army advisory team and commanded combat helicopter missions. I was there at the same time as a young naval officer named John Kerry, who was assigned to a brown-water Navy patrol boat base. At one point, a few officers from the field, including me, were asked to come to the embassy in Saigon to have dinner with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. It was a rare opportunity to interact with someone at such a high level. Over dinner, the ambassador asked us for assessments of how things were going in the countryside. One by one, my colleagues gave relatively upbeat accounts. As the most junior person present, I was the last to speak, and I could feel the pressure to repeat their assurances of suc- cess. But instead, I described the significant corruption that pervaded the South Vietnamese government and military hierarchy, and explained how it was undercutting our efforts to defeat the insurgent Viet Cong. Amb. Bunker’s face showed just how unhappy he was to hear what I had to say, but for good measure, he added: “That’s not what I hear from others.” Later in the evening, Deputy Chief of Mission Sam Berger pulled me aside and told me privately how glad he was that I said the things that I had, and Throughout the Vietnam War, many FSOs had difficulty getting their reporting telegrams approved and sent if they dared to express any doubts about U.S. policy. Kenneth Quinn, center, serving as President Gerald Ford’s interpreter at a meeting with a South Vietnamese government delegation at the White House in April 1975, a few weeks before the fall of Saigon. The White House