<Begin Segment 19>

MN: So, now you are going to Vietnam, you're being shipped to Vietnam. What happened to your wife and children?

IH: They had an arrangement where they couldn't take the families to Vietnam because the war was going on. So they had a safe haven system where the families could be located closer to Vietnam. There was a safe haven in Bangkok, Taipei-Taiwan, or Manila, the Philippines. Well, we selected Bangkok, Thailand, I think that was a good choice. Because it's closer, for one thing, and I could visit more often. So the embassy there provided the housing, schooling, and there was a lot of facilities there. Because we were with the embassy, we could take advantage of those. So it was a quite good experience for the kids, schooling was good, international school was good. We lived in a nice apartment at first, swimming pool and all, then we had a house. We had servants. My wife had a pretty easy time of it as far as housework was concerned. And we enjoyed the Thais, the Thai people.

MN: Now how often were you able to go visit them, though?

IH: About every six weeks I could fly. I had to, because I was upcountry or in the central highlands, I'd have to take a, (local car) transportation down to Saigon and catch a regular international flight.

MN: So once you get to see your family, though, how many days were you able to be with them?

IH: Maybe three or four days.

MN: Now, when you were in Vietnam, what were your main responsibilities? What programs did you oversee?

IH: Well, originally we were all assigned as provincial advisors, advisors representing... in this case, we were all with the Agency for International Development, which is a branch of the State Department. Primarily the agency, AID, provides the foreign service assistance to developing countries throughout the world. So we treated Vietnam as a developing country, and development is usually in the areas of agriculture, public health, medicine, education. So I was assigned as an agricultural advisor because my experience with intensive agriculture in small scale agriculture. And that's what was going on in the province that I was sent. It was primarily a vegetable growing area. So I was able to work with a lot of provincial agricultural, Ministry of Agriculture people and farmers.

MN: Now you shared that you worked a lot with the Montagnards.

IH: Uh-huh.

MN: What were they like?

IH: Well, to Vietnamese, they would be considered primitive. They weren't economically developed like the Vietnamese. They lived in small villages and remote areas in hillsides, pretty self-sustaining. They had their own communities. We knew that to develop the country we had to work with them as well, because they needed a lot of help in food production. I know there was other people that worked with them in public health. They had a lot of issues in public health, education, schools, they needed teachers. They wanted to get them more integrated into the Vietnamese community. And so we did quite a bit with them. Small scale projects, poultry and pigs and small crops. We used to bring over, bring in seeds, vegetable seeds. We would experiment and see which ones worked well. So hopefully they'd learn things about crops and nutrition, of course.

MN: What program were you most proud of when you worked in Vietnam?

IH: What was that... it was probably the, probably in agriculture, and I think we built some small dams, irrigation dams, and they were providing irrigation for areas that needed water. Very, very successful because they were easy to build. Just took some money and some input, materials, cement and so forth. Also, I think we introduced some purebred livestock like pigs, that the breeds that they had there were no longer very good. They needed purebred stock to improve the livestock. Also, we brought in some chicks, baby chickens for their poultry production. That was interesting because there were little day-old chicks and they had to fly in from the U.S. and it was very difficult to make that transition from the U.S. to where we were at and still get those little chicks to survive and distributed.

But those were some of the... we helped with the introduction of some improved rice varieties. International Rice Research Institute developed some high-yielding rice varieties that were very successful there. So hopefully some of those benefits are still there.

MN: Now you were working for an agency that was part of the State Department.

IH: Right.

MN: At any time when you were there, were you part of intelligence gathering?

IH: No, that wasn't our job. But we did, we were questioned by... there were certain, shall we say, members of Central Intelligence Agency there that were trying to collect information. And I really objected to that because they really spoiled the purpose of our trips. 'Cause we weren't there to gather information, intelligence. Because as civilians, Americans, I don't know of any case where any of us were targeted for assassination, because the Viet Cong, they pretty much knew what we were trying to do. Then although a lot of what we did was psychological in nature, you try to win people over to the government side because it was a very political war, warfare. But still, they were around. They knew what we were doing and we could feel their presence. But as far as I know, our work was not contrary to what they were trying to do. There was a part of our program, what they called pacification, which was something else. That's more on the psychological side of things. Some of that was objectionable, I thought, some of the intelligence gathering and assassination of government officials and so forth. That to me was not something that we had anything to do with.

MN: Now you mentioned the Viet Cong, you mentioned that you felt their presence around. Was your life... did you ever feel like your life was threatened?

IH: Not directly, but I did get in situations where my life was in danger. During the Tet Offensive, the well-known Tet Offensive, my home was the site of a battle between the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese military. And my, the house that I was living, I had a detached kitchen that sat away from the house, and that was, an American pilot saw fit to drop a napalm bomb on it and burn the whole place down. And then, but I wasn't there at that time. Fortunately, I was on my way to Bangkok. So during my absence and after that fight, these Vietnamese troops, they ransacked the house and they took everything, literally. Mattresses, beds, anything that they can move, take away. Such is living in Vietnam. But I'd say the whole experience I learned a lot about the war, about the politics involved, the people that, major issues. I learned a great deal about what the North Vietnamese were trying to accomplish, the Viet Cong. Unfortunately, so many people were killed, suffered, innocent people. It was too bad.

MN: How many years were you in Vietnam?

IH: Seven years.

MN: Were you there when Saigon fell?

IH: No, I left the year before '74.

MN: And why did you leave?

IH: My assignment was up, I was to be assigned back to Washington, between assignments, waiting for my next assignment.

MN: And when you were in Vietnam, were you aware that there was a lot of antiwar protests going on in the States?

IH: Oh, yes.

MN: How did you feel about that?

IH: Well, I always felt that what we're doing was not directly trying to persuade the... I didn't think we took sides. We were there for development, and then we're not there to condemn the Viet Cong or try to kill the Viet Cong, we just started to help develop the country. And so I didn't have any great feelings of guilt or anything like that. I know that a lot of it was against the will of the people. And really, you talk to the people, most of 'em just really wanted to be left alone. They didn't care which way they went politically, 'cause that's what the war was all about.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.