in various posts.
Tomorrow marks the 41st anniversary (October 1st 1979) of my arrival at Ton Son Nhut to negotiate with the Vietnamese to establish the Orderly Departure Program to move migrants and refugees out of Vietnam on charter planes (and the scheduled weekly Air France flight).
Because Air France only went in once a week it was critical to get everything done in one week.
Arriving on Thursday I checked in and had my first scheduled meeting on Friday at 9:00.
All of our requests/demands were met within an hour. They agreed to everything.
I asked the NV General, "I am kind of surprised how accommodating your team has been and i appreciate it and it will save lives but I have to say I expected some personal tension after such a long war with someone from the US (I represented a UN agency).
He looked at me and said "The US government made an agreement with their friends in the south. They kept their word. They sacrificed 65,000 young men and billions of dollars to keep their word. Who wouldn't want to be friends with a country like that?" (For context the PRC, their former "friends and allies" had invaded Vietnam in the north to "teach them a lesson" after they had invaded Cambodia and defeated the Khmer Rouge.
I have lots of stories from my trips to Vietnam which transpired over a relatively short period of time, but things were crazy.
Here is one story. Vietnam had announced that they were now issuing tourist visas and welcoming tourists, which created great rounds of laughter among the expats in Thailand who traveled to Vietnam in the early days because getting a visa even when you were an NGO and trying to go there to give them medicine could take months. The economy was in collapse, there were no stores open, only one restaurant in Saigon and electricity only ran a few hours a day. There were no places for tourists to go.
One travel agent in Switzerland (where everything is "by the book" ) went to the Vietnamese Embassy in Geneva and miracles of miracles got a visa. The miracles continued when he contacted Vietnamese Intourist (government agency) and made bookings for the only hotel open at the time.
Unbelievably when he arrived there was an Intourist Guide to meet him when the Air France flight landed. He asked to change money at the money exchange, and this is really hard to believe as nothing worked during those early times, there was someone at Than So Nhut currency exchange to change his dollars into dong. He may have been the only one in history to exchange at that CE kiosk because the official rate was something like 15 Dong to the dollar and the street rate was like 200 Dong to the dollar.
He exchanged all of his dollars into Dong which he had carefully calculated would just cover his weekly expenses as the hotel was $ 50 a night. He got to the hotel and started to check in and when they asked for $ 350 for the weekly hotel bill he produced about 6,000 Dong or about $ 30 dollars at the street rate. When he told the counter people that he exchanged all of his dollars at the official rate the staff immediately raced around and grabbed his luggage and shoved him in the taxi to return to the airport before Air France took off.
Unfortunately he was too late and in Ho Chi Minh city with no dollars. They ended up having him spend a night with the AF manager, one with the Counsular head and so on, he returned the next Thursday. The AF manager told me that no matter how many times he tried to explain it the Swiss guy never understood that the "official" exchange rate was window dressing and the entire country including the government worked on the unofficial street rate.
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