Mr. Bob the Chicken Engineer

                                       Towards understanding the real Viet Nam

                                                                              by

                                                                Robert C Hargreaves                          
                                                                 

We hope you will enjoy this free excerpt from the book:

            Prologue

     Before World War II the Soviet Union (Russia) was the only communist government in the world.  Then during the war Russia conquered most of Eastern Europe and turned them into Soviet satellites.  After the war Russia blockaded Berlin and tried to take it from the Western Allies.  Then between 1945 and 1960 dozens of communist led “wars of liberation” sprang up around the world supported by the Soviet Union.  Soviet leader Khrushchev pounded the podium at the United Nations in 1956 and shouted “We will bury you!”  By 1965 when the U.S. sent combat soldiers to Viet Nam almost half of the people in the world were living under communist regimes, none of them elected.  The Soviet Union and the U.S. each had 20,000 nuclear warheads armed and aimed at each other.  Anti-communist fervor in the U.S. was even crazier than the anti-Islamic fervor now sweeping the U.S.   

        This was called the Cold War because it was a conflict without shooting at each other.  We didn’t dare shoot at each other, that would be the end of the world.  President Reagan coined the acronym MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction.  But that didn’t mean there wasn’t any shooting.  In most cases both sides sent in weapons and advisors and let the local people do the shooting.  We won some, they won some.  The Korean War was the only conflict in which both sides sent in outside troops, the U.S. and the United Nations on one side and China on the other.  That ended in a stalemate.  We tend to lose sight of the fact that Russia and China were our real enemies in Viet Nam.  The Vietnamese were just proxies.  If Russia and China hadn’t been involved our government would never have sent weapons or foreign aid, much less American troops. 

     The Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union the following year.  We won the Cold War.  There weren’t any victory parades, but that was the end of communist wars of liberation.  The nuclear weapons were put away.  Viet Nam, facing the loss of Soviet aid, sent the Russian advisors home, restored private property rights and once again permitted private enterprise.  They turned to the U.S. for help and were surprised when they didn’t get any, at least not government help.  They did attract a lot of attention from private U.S. companies once the U.S. ended its embargo. There are so many Americans living and working in Hanoi now that they have their own American club, proudly flying the stars and stripes.

     What is often overlooked is that our greatest weapon against the communists was not our military might but our political and economic strength.  People have been streaming into this country since its very beginning.  The rest of the world wants what we have.  The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had to build armed barriers to keep people from leaving.  The Iron Curtain was an admission of failure. 

     At the beginning of the cold war we used this promise to great advantage.  The Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe was a huge success in defeating communism.  At the time, Greece was facing a shooting war with communist rebels.  France and Italy were on the verge of revolution. The Marshall Plan succeeded where armies could never have.

     The U.S. extended foreign aid programs around the world in response to the communist threat.  Like our military response, we won some and lost some. 

     Without foreign aid Viet Nam would have been lost before we even started.  The new government the French left behind in South Viet Nam in 1954 had no training or experience in governing.  The French took everything portable with them, even their typewriters.  Experts predicted the South would fall to the North in less than a year.

     That we were able to last 20 years in Viet Nam suggests that the U.S. and South Viet Nam were at least doing some things right.  Americans tend to dissect everything that goes wrong to the nth degree and overlook what is going right.  Looking at both would be a more balanced approach. 

     Even with the perennial problem of corruption most of our foreign aid in Viet Nam was quite successful, particularly in education.  When the French left in 1954 there was only one public high school in all of Viet Nam, in Hanoi.  Most educated Vietnamese had been trained in military academies in France, and they were trained to fight a war for the French, not to run a country.

     The U.S. sent thousands of promising Vietnamese to American universities.  We built elementary schools, high schools and colleges all across South Viet Nam.  The Vietnamese responded enthusiastically.  Education is highly regarded in Viet Nam and the new graduates were soon teaching in the schools themselves.

     The Viet Cong demonstrated their fear that the schools threatened their control by repeatedly blowing up classrooms in the villages.

     Thinking back, it was nothing short of miraculous that so much could be accomplished in the twelve years before combat troops were sent. 

     As part of the foreign aid the State Department contracted with International Voluntary Services, the predecessor to the Peace Corps, to send idealistic young men and women to assist in our development efforts.  The author was one of these volunteers.

Chapter 1.  Chickens, Chickens, Chickens

     Green coconut milk. You can’t beat its fresh tangy coolness on a hot tropical day.  The memory still lingers of my host nimbly climbing the tree in front of his house and cutting down two coconuts to share as we discussed chickens.  Chickens? Yes, chickens, the common bond between a Vietnamese peasant and a young American volunteer. 

In 1965 I was fresh out of college with two degrees in agriculture, ready to take on the world.  I promptly signed up for two years in Viet Nam with International Voluntary Services, the organization used as a model by President Kennedy for the Peace Corps.

       Vietnamese names are all single syllable, so naturally I became Mr. Bob.  Their closest term for poultry specialist actually translates as “chicken engineer”, so everywhere I was being introduced as Mr. Bob the chicken engineer.  This sounds just as funny in Vietnamese as it does in English, so introductions were always filled with merriment and laughter.  Taken in good humor this actually helped – they weren’t likely to forget me. 

       And I was ready for the next two questions that always followed an introduction: “How old are you?” and “How much money do you make?”  The Vietnamese I met were all convinced that every American was fabulously wealthy.  All Americans have cars, don’t they?  Almost.  Few besides government officials and Americans had cars in Viet Nam.  Even 10-speed bicycles and electric coffee pots were considered luxury items. 

     They were looking to learn how we did it, or at least have some of it rub off on them.  Several confided in me that their ideal was to have a Japanese wife, Chinese food, a French house – and an American income.  They were usually disappointed, even incredulous, when I told them I was making $80 a month.  That was about the same as a Vietnamese professional with a college degree was making, and a lot more than the average peasant, but it just didn’t sound fabulously wealthy.  And it wasn’t.  Even the Vietnamese hired at the airbase to do KP duty were making more than that. 

     This was rapidly becoming a sore point.  Vietnamese professionals, especially those that could speak English, could earn three times as much working for the Americans.  But their country needed them where they were.  And it was scandalous that prostitutes and bartenders were suddenly getting rich.  Everywhere I heard the complaint that the traditional order of respect – God, King, teacher – was being turned on its head and becoming prostitute, restaurant owner and cyclo driver.

     But the worst complaints were about the children.  The U.S. military started a policy of giving away candy to the children they met.  They were even throwing candy from their convoys as they passed through town.  It didn’t take long to hear horror stories of children being pushed under the wheels of the moving vehicles as they jostled for the candy.  And the soldiers started passing out money, cigarettes, trinkets.  One soldier confided in me that he felt so sorry for the kids that he gave away his entire paycheck every month.

     When I first arrived in Phan Rang there wasn’t a beggar in sight.  But it didn’t take long before I couldn’t go anywhere without being besieged by a mob of 40 or 50 children, all shouting “Hey you suh lem!” (Suh lem being their pronunciation of Salem cigarettes.)  Very soon children were getting more money than their parents were earning and becoming openly defiant of their parents.  Many left home altogether.  Hippies in Viet Nam?  In Viet Nam they were called cowboys.  This in a society where family was everything.  Every home had a shrine to honor the ancestors.  Nothing was worse than dishonoring the ancestors.

     At least Phan Rang didn’t have peanut girls.  In downtown Saigon there was a little waif on every corner selling bags of peanuts, and they were really raking in the money from the GIs.  If you looked, it wasn’t hard to spot their adult handler, usually watching two or three girls.  This was big business!

     By chance I was driving from Nha Trang to Phan Rang with a load of furniture for my new house when the first convoy of American combat soldiers was on their way to Phan Rang.  Vietnamese families lined the road, cheering and waving American and South Vietnamese flags.  Viet Nam had experienced warfare of one kind or another since the thirties and their hope was that the Americans would bring a quick end to this one. But the war only got bigger and anti-American sentiment grew with it. Within six months people were throwing rocks at my front door, and we moved to another house inside the compound of the Catholic high school.

       Vietnamese aren’t ones to let feelings stand in the way of business.  And chickens were business.  Eggs were selling for seven cents each.  I very quickly compiled a list of 70 people asking for my help in getting American chickens.  The local Vietnamese chickens were small, scrawny, and their eggs were half the size of the ones laid by American chickens.  They weren’t very different from the wild jungle fowl that chickens had been domesticated from.  I occasionally saw some of these jungle fowl on my trips around the province.

       The main reason eggs were so expensive was that 70 per cent of the chickens died each year.  About half of this was from disease and the other half from poor nutrition, poor management and predation by dogs and rats.  Yes, rats eat chickens.

         In traditional village agriculture around the world, chickens are simply allowed to run loose and fend for themselves.  With this method you’re lucky to get two or three extra chickens to sell or eat each year and maybe five or six eggs.  But it doesn’t cost anything in the way of money or labor.  Keeping the chickens in a pen, house or cages increases production tenfold, but now you have to provide a complete feed, which isn’t cheap, and a source of clean water.  As I travelled around the province visiting each facility, I found a wide variety of methods of keeping chickens.  Most had houses or pens for their chickens, but they didn’t have a source of feed, so I developed a recipe for chicken feed using rice, dried fish and pigweed.  It was a hard sell to convince them to use this new feed, and the ones that didn’t weren’t very successful.

       I had originally been promised inexpensive baby chicks from the Vietnamese Animal Husbandry Service in Saigon, but when I went to get them I was told they were having problems and didn’t have any chicks available.  I was able to find another source and we were in business.  Most of the people I was working with were asking for 10 or 20 chicks, which I sold at cost.  I had other business in Saigon about once a month, and every time I went I brought back four or five hundred baby chicks. 

       The place where I got my chicks was actually north of Saigon, in the iron triangle, a center of VC activity.  But my guardian angel was doing a great job and I never had any difficulty.  One month I couldn’t make it to Saigon, so I asked another IVSer to go get the chicks for me and put them on the plane.  He ran into a traffic jam and was stuck for several hours.  When the traffic started up again, his jeep wouldn’t start.  There he was all alone out in the countryside.  Then a motorcycle came up behind and as it passed began shooting at him!  They counted six bullet holes in the jeep and he got a flesh wound in the arm.  Several U.S. Army trucks passed but didn’t stop.  Finally a South Vietnamese Army jeep stopped and gave him a ride back to Saigon.  I never asked how he did it, but I got my baby chicks!

       Getting the chicks was just the beginning.  I started a vaccination program, tried to ensure adequate feed and water, and did a lot of troubleshooting.  Some of the flocks got sticktight fleas, a kind of flea that didn’t jump off but stayed on the head, bright red from the blood they engorged.  One person put his chickens in a fenced area with a planting of bananas and the chickens ate the banana plants – the plants all fell over.  At one village the villagers insisted I take them to the next village that had some featherless chickens.  They thought that was great – you didn’t have to pluck them!  I had some experience with featherless chickens at U.C. Davis and knew they weren’t that great – they ate more feed and got sunburned.  But I couldn’t convince them and they bought some.  When I visited again they informed me that the chickens I had sold them had all died.  But the new featherless chickens were still healthy.  I couldn’t get them to see that their chickens had probably recovered from whatever made them lose their feathers and then brought the disease to the American chickens.

       For my first Thanksgiving in Viet Nam IVS gave a canned ham to all the volunteers.  I should have been thankful, but I wanted a turkey.  Hey, I’m a chicken engineer!  But there were no turkeys to be found in Viet Nam, not even in the military PX.  At least not fresh ones – they did have canned turkey, and canned pumpkin, canned sweet potatoes – I had the fixings for a real Thanksgiving.  I even got white potatoes for the mashed potatoes and gravy.  White potatoes don’t do well in the tropics and Dalat, in the mountains just west of Phan Rang, was the only place in Viet Nam that grew white potatoes.  They were tiny, only two inches across, but hey, it worked.  All that was too much to eat by myself.  Besides, what’s Thanksgiving without a big gathering of family and friends?  So I invited all the Vietnamese specialists I was working with and put on the spread.

       I ran into trouble on the pumpkin pies.  I couldn’t find the spices I needed and it was too late to go back to the PX in Saigon.  No one in the market place could help me.  The proprietors of the small restaurant where I ate for ten dollars a month never heard of them.  This is the Far East, right?  Isn’t this where spices come from?  There were names for all of the spices I was looking for in my English-Vietnamese dictionary, so they should be in Viet Nam.  Then someone reminded me the Vietnamese have a word for snow.  Panic!  I finally learned the spices I was looking for were in the Chinese medicine shop, right in with the ground tiger bones, bear bile and cow placentas.  And the nutmeg was a whole seed I had to grind myself.  Next problem – where to bake the pies?  The Vietnamese cooked on charcoal and didn’t use ovens.  I didn’t have an oven.  I finally arranged to use the ovens in the military advisors compound, just in time for my dinner. 

     I made four pies, lime meringue, apple, and two pumpkin.  I made an extra pumpkin pie to make sure I had some left over for myself.  The dinner was a big success, except for the pumpkin pies.  None of my guests had ever seen or heard of a pumpkin pie before.  What’s a pumpkin?  Well, it’s a kind of squash.  The only squash they knew was related to the zucchini.  Here was something brown and squishy.  No one would even try it.  The lime meringue and apple pies quickly disappeared.  Now I had two whole pumpkin pies to myself.  Delicious.

     I was determined to have a real turkey for my next Thanksgiving, even if I had to raise it myself.  I discovered two old kerosene incubators in storage at Nha Ho.  They came complete with old rat’s nests and a twelve inch green and red lizard.  I never could get the incubators to work right – they didn’t have a thermostat and the temperature fluctuated too much.  My Montgomery Wards catalog had a small electric incubator for $300, but I didn’t have $300.  They also had thermostats for two dollars so I ordered one and tried building my own incubator.  The thermostat was a simple device made up of a gas filled metal wafer and a reverse switch, one that turned the electricity off when pushed.  The wafer expanded with heat and pushed the button off.  As it cooled down it contracted and the electricity came on again.  A long screw adjusted the temperature by moving the wafer closer to or further away from the switch.  I used an ordinary light bulb as the heat source. 

     So now I tried it out and got a nice hatch of baby chicks.  I put the chicks out in their new home with a light bulb to keep them warm.  The next morning they were all dead, attacked by huge red ants.  The next time around I built a platform for them and put the legs in bowls of water to keep the ants out.  This time I successfully raised them up.  I never did get my turkey – I couldn’t find any hatching eggs.  But my incubator was a big hit with the people I was helping to raise chickens.  I built four more and loaned them out.  Now I really was a chicken engineer.

 Chapter Two.  The Thap Cham Pig Company

      My first two months in Viet Nam were spent in language study with three Vietnamese English teachers on summer vacation.  In September I arrived in Phan Rang, a small province capitol of 15,000 on the central coast.  Phan Rang’s one claim to fame was its’ nuoc mam, a fish sauce used by the Vietnamese as a condiment on nearly everything they ate.  Nuoc mam was made by filling huge barrels with layers of fish interspersed with layers of salt.  The barrels would then be filled with water.  Once a day the liquid was drained from the barrel and poured back in the top for 6 months.  The result was a concentrated pungent overpowering fish flavor.

     There was only one telephone in town at the post office and it was usually out of order.  The only entertainment was a movie theater that showed Chinese movies with French, English or Vietnamese subtitles.  You never knew in advance which it would be.  The trains had stopped running several years earlier because of Viet Cong activity.  The small airport opened in the morning four times a week for the arrival of the 10 passenger Air America shuttle flight that flew from Saigon to Da Nang and back – one day  in one direction and one day back twice a week.  As soon as the plane left the resident flock of goats would wander back across the runway.

     When I first arrived in Phan Rang the only other American in town was Larry Laverentz, the USAID (US Agency for International Development) representative.  This gradually expanded to a small American community consisting of three USAID officials, one USIS (US Information Service) official, several American doctors and nurses who rotated in and out on a monthly basis to volunteer at the local hospital, myself and three other IVS volunteers.  A navy SEAL, known to the rest of us as “the spook”, kept to himself and was seldom seen.  A military advisor (MACV) compound of 100 American soldiers was just outside of Phan Rang, and they showed American movies once a week.  I could also eat there whenever I got tired of rice and nuoc mam.

     The USAID office had a radio transmitter for regular communication with Nha Trang and the rest of the world. Nearly all my own communication with the outside world was through the shuttle flight.  I averaged about one trip a month to Saigon for supplies and I usually brought back four or five hundred baby chicks in the back of the plane as well.  My Vietnamese friends kept telling me “Don’t go to Saigon!  It’s dangerous!”  True enough, but how else was I going to get the vaccines and antibiotics I was using?  Most of the fighting in Viet Nam took place around Saigon and in the north around the DMZ.  The shuttle flight arrived in Saigon just after dark and the sky was always lit up with fireworks – curving red trajectories of tracer bullets, searchlights waving back and forth, repeated bursts of flares.  In comparison Phan Rang was just a quiet backwater.

     This all changed with the American buildup and the arrival of combat troops.  In a short time there were more Americans than Vietnamese in Phan Rang! At least it seemed that way.   The first I knew of it was the sudden appearance of a long chain link fence around the airport and much of the surrounding countryside in preparation for a new airbase for B52s and 7,000 airmen.  It was also to be the headquarters for the 101^st Airborne Division.  Thirty miles to the north a huge new naval base was planned for Cam Ranh Bay.

     The Vietnamese were quick to dream up plans to cash in on the new American presence.  Dozens of crude booths were built in front of the entrance to the new airbase as soon as the fence appeared, selling

souveniers, beer and soda.  Vietnamese questioned every American they could find about the possibility of employment.  And a small delegation of Vietnamese villagers appeared at my door asking for assistance in obtaining a contract with the airbase for garbage to feed their pigs.  While others were dreaming of sales and jobs, these people were dreaming of garbage.  Mountains of beautiful, edible garbage.

     I promised to do what I could.  The only ones at the new airbase site were the ones that built the fence, a company of Army Engineers.  Not much garbage there, but it was a beginning.  As an American I had no difficulty getting in and was directed to a large tent where the commander was sitting behind a large desk.  He was quite open to the idea and asked to see the villagers.  A meeting was arranged and the details were worked out to everyone’s satisfaction.  The only thing left was to get a security clearance from the Vietnamese government.  This proved to be more difficult than I thought.  A month went by and nothing was happening.  The villagers kept telling me they were unable to get an appointment to see the district security official.  I suspected it had something to do with the amount of money being asked for under the table but I didn’t ask.  The entire Vietnamese government was corrupt from top to bottom, with the possible exception of the technical services.

     Everyone from Province Chief up was a military officer, and they paid for their position according to how much graft they could generate.  The generals in Saigon were raking in millions a month.  Most of it was coming from good old Uncle Sucker.  As just one example, the U.S. was paying the salaries of the entire South Vietnamese Army.  It was common practice to have more soldiers on paper than were really there and pocketing the difference.  And we wondered why the South Vietnamese Army was reluctant to actually enter into combat.

     Back to the garbage.  I finally took the pig company delegation myself and was able to get an immediate audience.  Being an American had some clout.  Within three days they had their clearance and were ready to roll. 

      Charley Foxtrot this is gate one.  Over.  Charley Foxtrot this is gate one.  Over.  He’s probably asleep.  Give him a minute.  Charley Foxtrot, this is gate one.  Over.  Gate one, what the hell is it this time?  Do you know what time it is?  Over.  Roger, Charley.  Sorry about that, sir.  It’s those gooks with the oxcart again, sir.  This time they have an American civvy with them.  He says they have a permit to pick up garbage at the 462d Engineers.  Over.  Gate one, do they have papers?  Over.  Yes, sir, but they’re in gook.  Over.  Gate one, what does Pablo have to say about them?  Over.  Sir, he says they seem to be in order.  Over.  Gate one, do you have anyone to spare for detail?  Over.  Yes, sir, Over.  Well, send him after the gooks to make sure they go where they say.  Over and out.  Yes, sir, over and out.

     I had notified the Captain when the garbage pickup would start, but no one told me about the new guard unit at the gate.  The base was expanding rapidly and the engineers weren’t the only ones there anymore.  When the oxcart arrived at the gate the villagers were refused entry, so the next morning I waited at the gate until the oxcart arrived.  It took the oxcart three hours to travel the two miles from Thap Cham village, so I didn’t bother following it.  The cart finally arrived at the gate around

5 A.M.  The two villagers on the cart didn’t speak English.  None of the villagers spoke English.  I had to do all the talking and finally got them in.  They had their garbage, three 50 gallon drums full a day.

     The Thap Cham Pig Company scheduled a dinner in celebration of their newfound garbage.  Vietnamese dinners are huge.  They pile on the food until you’re stuffed, and then bring out more.  You pick at that, then they bring out more.  The most elaborate ones have seven courses.  Fortunately for me this one was only three.  But their beginning course featured raw fish salad, a no-no for Americans because of the danger of hepatitis.  This seemed to be a specialty of the region, because I was often offered this.  I always tried some out of politeness.  I never did get sick.  Another IVSer teaching English at the local Catholic high school wasn’t so lucky.  He was extremely cautious, never eating anything that wasn’t cooked.  He wouldn’t even drink anything with ice in it because the water in the ice wasn’t boiled.  He came down with hepatitis in less than a month and was sick off and on for the better part of a year.  But I survived the raw fish salad.  The next main dish was stewed chicken, feet, head and all.  The Vietnamese had a custom of serving the head to the guest of honor.  They were delighted to learn that Americans didn’t like chicken heads because that meant they could serve the head to someone else without offending the Americans.  The last dish was, what else, heaping platters of pork.  All the main dishes were accompanied by rice and veggies.  In Viet Nam it is not considered a meal without rice.  Instead of “Let’s eat!”  They would always say “Go eat rice”.

     After the dinner they took me out to show the truck they had just bought – an old, dilapidated but serviceable delivery truck.  When I enquired what it was for, they replied it was for the garbage I was going to get them from the rest of the airbase! 

       Before I could even enquire about it a big pile of trash from the airbase started piling up on an empty lot at the edge of town.  Someone else had already gotten the contract for the rest of the airbase and was dumping the inedible part.  Paper was blowing everywhere.  It didn’t take long to find out who it was, one of the customers for my baby chicks, Mr. An.  By American standards he was middle class, but in Phan Rang he was a rich man.  He was getting more garbage than he could feed to his 100 pigs, so he tried feeding the excess to ducks.  The ducks went swimming in it, got covered with garbage and lost all their feathers!

      I went to the airbase commandant to see what I could salvage of the matter.  The airbase was still under construction and there was bound to be even more when it was finished.  Maybe we could split the contract.  In the meantime the Thap Cham oxcart was still picking up its three drums of garbage.  The commandant was very sympathetic.  Mr. An’s eight trucks were doing a very erratic job of picking up the garbage and he would be glad to find someone else- anyone else – to do the job.  But Mr. An had gotten his contract through the regional Air Force Command in Nha Trang, 60 miles away.  I would have to talk to them about it.

       Before the American buildup Nha Trang was a quiet seaside resort famous for its restaurant on the point overlooking the bay.  For three dollars you could choose a live lobster out of their aquariums and they would cook it for you on the spot.  It was rumored that the Viet Cong frequented the restaurant after hours.  After the war ended this rumor was verified as true.  On the surface Nha Trang hadn’t changed much.  It still fronted on a ten block long beachfront park.  The large statue of

Buddha and even larger Catholic cathedral still overlooked the town.  You could still charter a boat and go snorkeling among the coral reefs.  But now the bay was filled with hundreds of ships carrying everything from napalm to vegetable oil.  Every harbor in South Viet Nam was filled to overflowing with cargo ships.  They were backed up so much it took an average of six months to unload them.  Nha Trang was bustling with the sailors that came with them as well as the new American military presence.

      Nha Trang already had an airbase that the U.S. Air Force took over.  And it had the garbage to go with it.  I was introduced to the Vietnamese Army captain who had the Nha Trang garbage contract.  Ostensibly he was in charge of the Nha Trang train station, but the trains hadn’t run in years and the railyard was filled with hundreds of pigs and mountains of garbage.  He was quite inventive and had also built a Rube Goldberg apparatus out of pipes and spare parts to make peanut oil.  But the Americans were now giving away tons of vegetable oil and the market for peanut oil dried up.  He made a few adjustments to his machinery and started making soy sauce out of peanuts. 

      The Vietnamese captain in charge of the railroad station in Phan Rang wasn’t as ambitious.  I was helping him raise 100 chickens, but otherwise he seemed quite content to let the world and the war pass him by.  The jungle was rapidly reclaiming everything at the railroad station except the house he was living in.

     I went to see the Colonel in charge of the Nha Trang airbase.  He told me the regional Air Force Command had moved to Cam Ranh Bay, halfway between Nha Trang and Phan Rang.  He didn’t have anything to do with Phan Rang and I would have to see the people at Cam Ranh Bay.

      I drove back to Phan Rang the next day and stopped at Cam Ranh Bay to see what I could accomplish.  Cam Ranh Bay is one of the world’s largest natural harbors and could easily accommodate all the new cargo ships in one place.  But the bay was just a deserted pile of sand and mangroves in the middle of nowhere, as far from the cities of South Viet Nam as you could get.  The only road in the area was Highway One, a highway in name only.  For most of its distance it was only one lane.  Whenever two vehicles met, both vehicles had to go off on the side of the road to pass.  And the new truck traffic had already filled it with ruts and potholes.  The French had built it to go from Hanoi to Saigon and beyond, but much of it was now controlled by the Viet Cong.  In this area you couldn’t travel much farther than Nha Trang to the North and Phan Rang to the South.  Evidently the new naval base at Cam Ranh Bay was primarily to provision the new airbase at Phan Rang.  Like Phan Rang airbase, the naval base was still under construction.  The only approach was over a rickety pontoon bridge.  Row after row of newly constructed warehouses were already half buried under drifting sand.

      I was shown in to see the commandant, but he was distracted by the news that another warehouse had been emptied the night before.  People were driving forklifts into the warehouses at night and stealing a whole warehouse full at a time!  The base was surrounded by ocean on three sides and miles of sand dunes on the fourth, so it had to be an inside job.  But where were they putting it and how were they disposing of it?  The commandant listened politely to my tale and then told me he didn’t have the Authority  to dispose of garbage at Phan Rang – I would have to ask his superiors in Saigon!  Oh, well, at least it was a nice drive and I got a lobster dinner out of it.

     The USAID office in Phan Rang had just successfully completed a contract with the U.S. military in Saigon for vegetables from the Phan Rang Agricultural Cooperative, so I asked them to see what they could find out about garbage with their contacts.  They agreed, but it would be at least a month before they went back to Saigon.

       In the meantime I was busy with other projects with chickens, cowpeas and grapes.  I was also working with the Nha Ho Agricultural Experiment Station and the Vietnamese Voluntary Service.  The voluntary service was a group of Vietnamese college students that volunteered to work with poor people in the countryside.  Most of them were from the big city and didn’t know much about agriculture, but they made up for their lack with lots of enthusiasm.  And they were quick learners. When their jeep was in the shop they invited me and my vehicle to participate in their activities.  The Vietnamese Animal Husbandry Service was involved in a national campaign to vaccinate all the cows and water buffaloes for Rinderpest, a disease unknown in the U.S.  I was invited to participate whenever they were short of vehicles. 

      I hadn’t been neglecting the Thap Cham pig company.  Thap Cham was on the way to the Nha Ho experiment station and I stopped in frequently to see how things were going.  They asked for my assistance in getting them some more 50 gallon oil drums that they could use to cook their garbage.  The U.S. military was disposing of tons of them, but they weren’t giving any to the Vietnamese for fear the Viet Cong would get them.  I finally managed to get some from the agricultural cooperative. 

     Then Nha Ho had an outbreak of erysipelas in their pigs and I started a vaccination program.  Initially I went to the Vietnamese Animal Husbandry Service in Saigon for the vaccines, but I changed my mind when I saw the vaccines pulled from the shelf at room temperature.  Apparently there was no Vietnamese term for “keep refrigerated” (at least I couldn’t find any) and they insisted anything that didn’t have to be frozen could be kept at room temperature.  I was able to obtain properly refrigerated vaccines at the French Pasteur Institute and carried them back to Phan Rang in an ice chest.  I managed to obtain an antique syringe with reusable needles and was soon busy vaccinating pigs. 

     After the vaccination session at Thap Cham we were relaxing over sliced green mangoes dipped in nuoc mam when they asked me if I could get them some gold pigs.  Gold pigs?  I had no idea what a gold pig was, but after asking around I learned that was their name for the Duroc. Americans call them red pigs.  The Americans had been introducing white pigs because of their superior growth rate,  but they sunburned easily in the tropical sun.  Durocs didn’t have this problem.

      As luck would have it, the people in Saigon I was getting baby chicks from also raised pigs, and yes, they had gold pigs.  They wanted fifty dollars for a 100 pound pig.  In Phan Rang a baby Vietnamese pig sold for ten dollars and a baby white “American” pig sold for twenty.  But the price was no obstacle.  The pig company quickly agreed to buy a pair.  Nha Ho said they wanted a pair as well, but they didn’t have any money in their budget for it.  I suggested they sell some of their own pigs, but they said they weren’t allowed to sell anything at the experiment station.  So I arranged for them to give me some pigs in trade and I sold them.  Then Mr. An said he wanted a pair.  I ended up with orders for ten pigs.  Now I had the problem of getting them from Saigon to Phan Rang.  By now the runways had been completed at the new airbase. The rest of the base was still under construction, but I was able to arrange transportation on a military flight. I wonder what the soldiers thought of sharing space with ten pigs.

     USAID came back with bad news.  Their contacts in Saigon said that garbage was a local matter and I would have to take it up with the Phan Rang air base commander once again.  Back to square one.  Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.  And I had just gotten into a tiff with the airbase commander over the spraying of Nha Ho experiment station.  On one of my frequent visits to Nha Ho I was met by an excited crowd insisting I go immediately to the back of the farm where it butted up against a remote corner of the airbase.  When I got there I could see a large C130 transport plane flying back and forth along the fence line spraying some kind of liquid.  Three days later most of the plants at the station turned yellow.  Only the crops closest to the fence actually died, but all the rest of the experiments were ruined as well.  Later in the week by I ran across the commander in the USAID office.  When I told him what had happened he denied any spraying had taken place.  The USAID people were upset because they had an agreement that any spraying would be cleared with them first.  I insisted that I had seen it with my own eyes and that crop damage had taken place.  He ended the conversation by saying “Send us a bill” and walked out.  How can you put a price tag on agricultural experiments?

      It turned out that I didn’t have to deal with the base commander after all.  By now the civilian contractor in charge of building the airbase, Brown and Root, had a contract for base maintenance as well, which included collecting garbage and disposing of it.  They were the ones I would have to see.

     Brown and Root is now a division of Haliburton doing contract work in Iraq.  In Viet Nam they had a cushy cost plus 10 per cent arrangement in which they were guaranteed a 10 per cent profit over and above all expenses.  This certainly didn’t encourage them to cut costs.  A friend of mine working for Brown and Root in Nha Trang told me of an incident where they received 50 vehicles and hired local drivers to deliver them to Phan Rang.  Only two ever arrived at their destination!  Brown and Root didn’t care – ordering more vehicles just meant more profits!

     I was already aware of the huge new landfill that had been built in the hills to accommodate all the trash and garbage that was now being generated by the airbase.  A black plume of smoke every afternoon signaled its presence. Much of the smoke came from burning large numbers of napalm bomb crates.  I was quick to obtain a permit to salvage what I could of the 2×4’s in the crates.  I borrowed a truck from the cooperative, got a crew together from Nha Ho and used the lumber to build chicken houses.

     By now the airbase was becoming a city and it was easy to get lost.  There were no street signs or numbers.  I finally found the Brown and Root office and tracked down the person in charge of garbage.  He listened patiently to my story and then asked how much the Thap Cham pig company would be willing to pay for the garbage.  I was stunned.  Here I thought they would be glad to get rid of it.  I told him I would have to go back and ask the people in Thap Cham.  When I presented this to them they were more receptive to the idea than I was.  Perhaps by now they realized that this was getting bigger than they thought.  They didn’t have the manpower or vehicles for the garbage now being generated.  If they paid for it, maybe they could get it delivered.  But they didn’t come up with an offer – all they would say is how much did Brown and Root want for it.  Vietnamese haggle over prices every day, and they saw this as a beginning gambit of bargaining.

     When I went back to Brown and Root, the person I had talked to was no longer there, and the one that took his place wasn’t in.  I tried several more times, but by then my two years was up and I was kept busy tying up all the loose ends.  I never did manage to nail down a contract.  I asked USAID to pursue it for me, but I didn’t ever hear any more about it.  As far as I know, all that ever came of it was a lesson in government bureaucracy.

Continued….

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Mr. Bob the Chicken Engineer

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