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acknowledgments on completing this memoir I want to express my sincerest gratitude to the United States of America for admitting my family and me after we escaped from our native country in 1979. The United States was generous in providing us the opportunity to grow from desperate “boat people” to a well-established family of twenty-eight U.S. citizens. I have been privileged to see my children graduate from universities and become professionals in various fields in our new country. As for individuals, my sincere and profound gratitude goes to Ken Fermoyle for his willingness to learn and comprehend the complexities of Vietnam. I found in Ken not just a friend and colleague but an intellectual brother. Our thought processes became so closely attuned that it sometimes seemed he could sense exactly what I was thinking and express my thoughts with great clarity and accuracy. Thirty-nine years after the night in 1969 when Frank Scotton offered to help me escape arrest, we finally reunited. Since then he checked my account against maps for geographic accuracy and worked with me to edit my original manuscript for publication. When the manuscript was substantially complete, Frank Scotton, a friend for decades since our earliest meeting in Vietnam, came to visit me and offered to help by reviewing what was already written. Frank worked closely with Ken and me for almost three years, going over every sentence to assure accuracy as to description of events, locations, and personalities. Frank, beginning as a USIS field operations officer , subsequently special assistant to Ambassador Colby, and finally as a USIS assistant director, had traveled almost every corner of Vietnam and, amazingly, was familiar with most of the places where I operated beginning in 1945. Finally, it was Frank who successfully introduced my manuscript to the Texas Tech University Press. Many thanks, Frank. For almost twenty years in Vietnam, among the many Americans I worked with, John Paul Vann is the one whom I remember above all. I am aware of his personal problems, but on the battlefield his character symbolized the best of tens of thousands of other Americans who served in Vietnam during the war: patriotic, dedicated and self-confident in their missions. John and I first met in early 1960 when I was commander of the Civil Guard and Self-Defense Forces in the Northern Delta provinces while he was advisor to the Seventh Infantry Division. Although there was no line connection between us (I was under the central command in Saigon, not under the Seventh Division), John became interested in policies and strategies that I xxii acknowledgments was implementing at the time. We developed a close relationship and often rode through, or flew over, provinces to visit and observe the Civil Guard under my direction . We had long talks about the war and the Viet Cong insurgency, then in its early stages. From these talks and his action, I soon realized that Vann was a man of exceptional courage who had proved himself in combat during the Korean War. For his part, John became interested in my counterinsurgency theory and practices. He did not always fully agree with my ideas, but he respected my efforts just as I respected what he was striving to accomplish. We were close friends by the time he left Vietnam after his first tour of duty. When he returned as a civilian with United States Operations Mission (USOM), I was province chief in Kien Hoa. John visited me regularly and took time to tour the province extensively. He observed how I was putting into practice the programs I had begun to develop earlier in the Northern Delta provinces. His seminal paper titled Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam was based in part on what he gleaned from those observations and our discussions. In late 1965 when I was appointed head of the national pacification cadres program (called the Directorate of Revolutionary Cadres by Americans and Rural Development Cadres by the Vietnamese), Vann was assigned as my advisor. He strongly supported me and we worked together closely, but we failed to convince the powers that be to put our unorthodox strategies into practice. In the end, we both lost. I resigned from the program, and Vann moved to other endeavors. Something I learned from John Vann, above all else, was a lesson I consider basic for non-Americans who deal with Americans: “Most responsible Americans will accept ideas and concepts if you can prove them in both theory...

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