by Jill Hunting
The front yard sloped down to a pool of enormous proportions. Its impressive size belied the fact that it was really a cement pond. My grandparents had tried to tame the seeping lawn, first by planting water lilies and then turning the marsh into a goldfish pond. As a last resort, they created a brook-fed swimming pool.
I was only two when my family moved to Illinois, so I never knew my grandfather Popeye. In time I would learn that the aircraft-parts manufacturing company he founded and his liking for large swimming pools (he had been on the Yale swim team) were connecting points between Pete and the young woman who might have become my sister-in-law, had he lived.
Holly and I spent carefree days poolside and across the lane on the tennis court. Despite years of lessons I was not a good tennis player, but the poison ivy that encroached on the court from all sides was an incentive to keep the ball in bounds. My mother and her friends sat on blankets by the pool and played bridge in their swimsuits, while my grandmother watched the action from her rocking chair on the porch. She loved us from afar, whether we were just across the lane, down by the pool, or away in Oklahoma. She wrote letters to us faithfully and often tucked in an arrangement of pressed wildflowers glued onto paper. Nana was not physically demonstrative, but I knew by the way she greeted me after each long absence, taking my face in her hands, how glad she was to see me. Her hospitality was well worth our long pilgrimages from the Midwest. My mother drove the fifteen hundred miles herself. I can still see the set of her jaw, her head held high as she gripped the steering wheel of our station wagon, determined as a ship’s figurehead, bearing us back East to our roots.
Pete spent many of his college vacations at the farm. Although he complained of dim lighting and the lack of an available desk in Nana’s house, he studied or went to parties in New Haven or painted my uncle’s house. Uncle Jim was handsome and young looking, and the two of them occasionally double-dated.
Between Pete’s graduation and his departure for the IVS orientation in Washington, he drove to Highland Park, Illinois, to attend the wedding of a friend, and back again. In the interval, something shocking happened in Vietnam. A Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, burned himself alive in a busy intersection of Saigon to protest the repressive policies of the Catholic, U.S.-backed President Diem. David Halberstam of the New York Times was an eyewitness to this first of many public self-immolations. So far, U.S. military advisers, but not yet combat troops, had been committed to the conflict in Vietnam. Many Americans were unaware of how desperate the situation there was becoming. Some did not know where the country was. A neighbor of John Sommer’s in New Jersey wished him off, when he left to begin his IVS tour, with, “Have a good time in Africa.”1
When the horrific photograph of Thich Quang Duc in flames appeared in newspapers around the world, Americans took note, but without the foreknowledge that our country was venturing into a quagmire where it would remain for twelve years. In fact, many were thinking less about the future than about ancient history. The next day, June 12, the movie Cleopatra premiered in New York. It would gross more than any other movie of 1963, forty-eight million dollars, a little less than one-tenth the total amount of U.S. aid to South Vietnam that year.
Pete was up at six o’clock on the morning of June 20, 1963. “Kiss the sisses good-bye,” he wrote in his journal that night. He flew from Bradley Airport, near Hartford, to Washington, D.C., to begin a weeklong orientation program. On first impression, his IVS teammates seemed serious and dedicated, but uninteresting. Although he observed no “studied neuroses,” the group seemed to lack the “zest and feeling of self-potential” of the “rich and consuming personalities” with whom he had spent the past four years.
The orientation began with introductions and slideshows. A conference with A. Russell Stevenson, the executive director of IVS, followed. On the way to the meeting, Pete realized that all the buttons were falling off his sport coat. When he arrived at Dr. Stevenson’s office, he discovered that he had forgotten the expense receipts he was to submit for reimbursement.
Pete found the first lectures on Southeast Asian politics dull and was quick to compare them unfavorably with his Wesleyan classes. He felt frustrated by the lack of substance and was at a loss to know even what questions to ask. The session ended with Pete suggesting to one of the few women in the group, Anne Hensley, that they go out for a beer. The idea snowballed and soon all twenty-one of the new recruits were barhopping. “Bull sessions ensued.”
The next day’s lectures and discussions, about diseases, sexual relations, and health tips, were livelier. In a letter to his nursing-student girlfriend, Sue Patterson, Pete — who was an inveterate kidder and, on top of that, fresh out of college on an all-male campus — teased, “We’ve got some beautiful gorgeous girls along, and what’s more, Washington is full of secretaries that wear these tight, revealing things.” Although he had stepped back from their relationship, Pete would write to Sue for another year and a half.
The new recruits received copies of the “IVS Handbook,” a thin green binder with the title hand-scrawled on the cover. Inside were thirty-five mimeographed typewritten pages and maps of South Vietnam and Saigon. Chapters covered recreation, security, and Vietnamese customs, along with procedures for claiming expenses, shopping at the PX (or post exchange, a military store), and hiring domestic help.
The handbook also included an introduction to Vietnam’s modern history. The country had been divided at the seventeenth parallel, it stated, by agreement of the French and Communists at the Geneva Conference in July 1954. North of the demarcation line was a “monolithic dictatorship,” the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The “legitimate” government of South Vietnam was derived from a 1948 agreement between France and Bao Dai, the last emperor of Vietnam. Bao Dai had appointed Ngo Dinh Diem prime minister in June 1954, and a referendum the next year had “overwhelmingly” awarded Diem the presidency.
Pete had studied Asian history at Wesleyan. While the handbook’s slant on Vietnam’s history may not have matched the views of his skeptical college friends, Pete’s course notes and journal entries gave no indication of his political sympathies as he left for Asia.
Along with dividing Vietnam into North and South, the 1954 Geneva Accords stipulated that free elections would determine a single president and reunify the country by 1956. The United States endorsed but did not sign the agreement and sent a counterinsurgency team to Vietnam. Its mission was to undermine the popularity of the Vietminh, the insurgent nationalists who, during World War II, had successfully resisted Japanese occupation, with U.S. support. Subsequently, they had thrown off French colonial rule. The Vietminh and their leader, Ho Chi Minh, were heroes, especially among the rural Vietnamese, who far outnumbered the urban, French-educated and -trained populace. It is generally conceded that Ho Chi Minh would have won the election by a landslide. The free elections were never held.
After Diem, a celibate Catholic, was installed as president of South Vietnam, he named one of his five brothers, Ngo Dinh Nhu, head of the secret police. The Vietminh had killed one Ngo brother. Another, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was a Catholic archbishop.
Working behind the scenes in these years was an intelligence officer and former advertising executive whom Ambassador Richard Holbrooke — who arrived in Vietnam as a junior foreign service officer within weeks of Pete — has called “perhaps the most famous American operative in Southeast Asia,” Edward Lans-dale.2 Widely acknowledged as the model for Graham Greene’s “quiet American,” Colonel and later General Lansdale helped build support for and dismantle opposition to the Diem presidency. He advised Diem on political matters and defied American decision makers when they withheld support for the regime.3
Early IVSers knew Lansdale as an affable host at pig barbecues, to which he invited the volunteers as fellow members of Saigon’s small American community in the late 1950s. According to Don Luce, who first went to Vietnam as an IVS volunteer in 1958, Lansdale represented one wing of the U.S. counter-insurgency effort
— composed of those who believed that distributing plows and fertilizer was the way to succeed in Vietnam, rather than kicking down doors and terrorizing people. Luce declined Lansdale’s invitations, knowing of his CIA affiliation.4
The “IVS Handbook” portrayed the Diem government as effective in controlling challenges from several oppositional factions, including disaffected elements of the military. Diem, the handbook explained,
has looked primarily to the United States for foreign political and diplomatic support and for the military and economic assistance without which the present degree of stability could not have been achieved. Continued United States support for the government contributed to its ability to deal with rebellious elements and has probably helped to create public confidence in the viability of the regime.5
Before long, Pete and the other new members of the IVS team would see for themselves how effectively Diem and Nhu dealt with rebellious elements such as Buddhists and how much confidence the people placed in the regime.
Economic development was the key to defeating the northern Communists, the “IVS Handbook” stated. The government of South Vietnam was in a race with the North to earn the loyalty of the people. To win this race, it would have “to counter the impression of dynamic progress in the North so assiduously spread by the Communists.”6 The South would also have to offer the promise of economic advancement. Without help, the country could not become self-supporting. It could not “shoulder alone the cost of military and police needed to protect the people from Communist aggression and subversion.”7 In the long term, the country would need to be less dependent on foreign aid and develop a viable economy of its own. Until then, and to reach this goal, assistance from the United States was crucial for nation building. This is where the idealistic young men and women of IVS entered the picture.
The genesis of IVS was a meeting in 1953 of fourteen Americans from diverse backgrounds in religion, government, agriculture, and social services. The question that brought them together was how best to assist developing countries. The outcome of their meeting was the creation of a private, nonsectarian, nongovernmental organization (NGO) they named International Voluntary Services.
IVS’s charter stated that its aim was “to utilize the services of volunteers on an organized basis to combat hunger, poverty, disease, and illiteracy in the underdeveloped areas of the world, and thereby further the peace, happiness, and prosperity of the people.”8 One early volunteer, Ray Borton, told me that the first IVSers were typically individuals who wanted to help overseas but did not want to be missionaries.
The fledgling NGO sent its first volunteers to Egypt and Iraq to help with livestock and poultry improvement projects. In 1956 six agricultural workers went to two villages in South Vietnam to assist some 860,000 refugees from the North. Many of the refugees were Catholics who had moved south to flee the Communists, thereby providing a political base for Diem in what was a predominantly Buddhist culture. IVSers helped the transplanted families clear land for crops and obtain farm animals and seed. These early efforts were to become the model for future teams. Soon the Ministry of Agriculture asked for assistance in other regions. IVS responded by sending more volunteers.9
In 1962 IVS sent its first English teachers to Vietnam. The following year, more teachers were added, seven of whom were quickly diverted to a new hamlet education program. These seven, including Pete, taught English, helped identify hamlets likely to support a school and then helped to build the schools, and worked with the people to develop sustainable projects that could generate enough income to fund teachers’ salaries.
Also in 1962, President Diem adopted the Strategic Hamlet Program.10 Its fundamental purpose was to provide services and security for the rural population and to deprive the insurgents of support where it was strongest. The plan was modeled on a program Lansdale had developed in Malaysia. His protégé Rufus Phillips worked closely with Diem to establish the program in South Vietnam.11
Smaller than a village, a hamlet was considered “strategic” after it had met three criteria: its boundary had been fortified against Vietcong intrusions with fencing and a moat or mound between the fence and a command post or pillbox; it had elected a council of leaders and chief; and it had organized an armed self-defense unit capable of summoning the civil militia or army at any hour.
Having fulfilled these requirements, the people of a hamlet could choose a self-help project for which they would receive government funding. Projects might include building a school, a clinic, a church, or a well. The idea was that if the rural population could, with assistance, improve their lot and their children’s future, they would resist the Vietcong because they would have something to defend — if necessary, with their lives. The Vietcong, thus deprived of food and other means of support at the hamlet level, would be forced out of the jungle and into a conventional war — the kind of war that U.S. advisers best understood how to train and equip South Vietnamese forces to fight.
In 1961, the year before the Strategic Hamlet Program was adopted, Rufus Phillips had gone to South Vietnam to analyze how the USAID mission could support a program to undermine and help defeat the insurgents. After Phillips submitted his official report, he was appointed to develop the program.
The new program was administered by the Office of Rural Affairs. Although IVS operated outside the structure of the U.S. government, the NGO received a contract to work with Rural Affairs in Vietnam. Rufus Phillips’s associate, Bert Fraleigh, described how the relationship with IVS came about:
In our earlier study visit, Rufe and I had been very impressed by the work of the young men and women in International Voluntary Services (IVS), an American voluntary agency partially funded by USOM [the U.S. Operations Mission, the “field” arm of USAID] that was doing Peace Corps – like work (before there was a Peace Corps). All IVS activities were in rural areas of South Vietnam. Many of the IVS volunteers were Vietnamese language speakers with several years’ experience in the countryside. . . . I thought of deputizing some of them to be USOM Rural Affairs [provincial representatives], and [USOM acting director] Fippin agreed, so I called on their team chief, Don Luce. . . . He called me the next evening and said that he had clearance from his U.S. headquarters and that he could give me the names of ten prospective volunteers. . . .
It was heartwarming to talk with the IVS people and to observe their maturity, enthusiasm, intelligence, and knowledge of South Vietnam. . . . Although their IVS pay was only eighty dollars per month (about one-tenth of the salary for an American in USOM), they seemed much more interested in and motivated for the job ahead.12
When Pete arrived in Vietnam in 1963, the combined agriculture and education teams of IVS numbered sixty-nine men and women in twenty-eight locations. Don Luce was the in-country director, with the title of chief-of-party. An agriculture graduate from Vermont, Luce had gone to Vietnam with IVS in 1958. He had held the top post there since 1960. Some of the volunteers, including himself, were at first afraid they would not be able to handle the problems they encountered. On delivering one new recruit to his assignment, Luce was asked, “You aren’t leaving me here alone, are you?” Another asked a teammate as they left for Vietnam, “Aren’t any adults going with us?”13
If Pete questioned his ability to work effectively, he didn’t let on in his letters. Like many of his peers, he emulated the confident, jocular, energetic President John F. Kennedy, whose inaugural address inspired a generation with these words:
Let the word go forth that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. . . . To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. . . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.14
IVS found its volunteers in the rank
s of college students who took up Kennedy’s challenge. It drew likewise from young people whose families, like mine, valued honest labor and service to others. Agriculture graduates were sought because many of them had grown up on farms. Their experience would presumably be an asset in their work with Vietnamese farmers.
In these young volunteers, the Office of Rural Affairs also found the personnel it needed to build up Vietnam and carry out an agenda of weakening the Vietcong’s appeal among South Vietnam’s vast poor, uneducated, rural population.
Out of respect for the Vietnamese, or in some cases primarily because IVS required it, the volunteers learned their hosts’ language and shared their standard of living. “The communist principles were to live together, work together, and enjoy the results together. That’s also what IVS did,” said Dang Nguyen, one of the group’s Vietnamese interpreters in the early 1960s. Dang was once asked to mediate between a volunteer and his landlady, who wanted to raise the rent. He explained to her, “These IVS people are young, and fresh out of school. They are not making much money. They have come to Vietnam to help you and me, not to make money.” When she heard this, she was surprised and changed her mind about raising the rent.15
Early in 1961, when John Kennedy took office, the U.S. military presence in Vietnam was advisory; that is, American advisers worked with the South Vietnamese ostensibly in a training and support role. Lansdale sent a memo to Kennedy stressing that the situation was critical and required emergency action. The president called a high-level meeting to discuss the memo. Military aid was increased, as was the number of advisers. Still more advisers followed, until by mid-1962 the number had risen from the original seven hundred to twelve thousand.16 Although Congress would never formally declare war on Vietnam, the stakes increased steadily in the early 1960s. IVSers were eyewitnesses to U.S. foreign policy in the making.
