An Ex-Marine Returns to the Battlefield as a Humanitarian

Last year Robert Seiple returned to Vietnam for the first time since his tour of duty as a U.S. Marine combat pilot ended in 1968. Seiple went back last April as president of World Vision, a Monrovia-based Christian relief organization, to arrange for the agency’s return to Vietnam, 13 years after it had been expelled by the government.

During that visit, Seiple said he saw a nation that was poverty-stricken and in disrepair, largely because of almost unabated strife. He found the communist government’s bureaucracy cumbersome and unable to respond to the needs of its citizens. Vietnam was, he concluded, “worse off than it was 20 years ago.”

“Despair is beginning to set in,” he said after the trip. “This is a country that essentially won the war and is losing the peace.”

But earlier this month, Seiple returned from his second visit to Vietnam since the war, this time with hope for the nation’s future. Although conditions for the Vietnamese people remain dire, he said he saw ambitious reconstruction projects in the nation’s cities and sensed a shift in the attitude of its leadership.

“The change in the Vietnamese in the last 10 months has been dramatic,” he said. “I think someone passed the word that this global isolationism has got to end.”

Seiple attributed the change in part to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost with the West and loosening of state control, which has been reflected in varying degrees in communist governments worldwide.

Vietnamese officials welcomed the involvement of groups such as World Vision, Seiple said, adding that he senses a growing tolerance of religion by the government.

“There are still five evangelical pastors in jail, so the the situation is far from utopian,” he said. “(But) to an extent, the spirit of glasnost , a spirit of hope, is going through the world right now.”

Seiple’s current mission exemplifies what many view as a more conciliatory relationship between the United States and Vietnam. During his visit last month, he made sure that 25 tons of resin to be used in the manufacture of artificial limbs for Vietnam’s 60,000 amputees was delivered to Vietnam.

Combat Victims

Many of the prospective recipients of the prosthetic devices lost limbs in combat against American and South Vietnamese troops. Others include children maimed by land mines left in the Vietnamese countryside. Vietnam requested the aid.

Until recently, such humanitarian efforts by American organizations in Vietnam were rare. After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, most groups such as World Vision were expelled from the country. Tense relations between Washington and Hanoi precluded official U.S. aid and discouraged private assistance.

That changed in August, 1987, when Gen. John W. Vessey led a U.S. delegation to Hanoi that negotiated an unprecedented agreement.

The Vietnamese government agreed to accelerate its effort to account for the more than 1,700 servicemen still missing 16 years after the U.S. troops left the country. Vietnam also agreed to facilitate the emigration of Amerasians, children fathered by U.S. servicemen, and citizens who had assisted the South Vietnamese government and have since been incarcerated in “re-education” camps.

In return, the United States pledged to address Vietnam’s “urgent humanitarian concerns,” specifically assistance to those left maimed, widowed and orphaned by the war.

Because the United States does not have normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam, direct government aid is prohibited by law. Instead, then-President Reagan encouraged several humanitarian organizations to establish assistance programs for the Vietnamese.

World Vision, which had provided food and medical care to as many as 20,000 Vietnamese children a year between 1960 and 1975, was one of five organizations that began developing programs after the Vessey initiative.

“The marriage between (World Vision’s) expertise and the Vessey initiative is quite good,” said a U.S. official familiar with private humanitarian aid to Vietnam who asked not to be identified. “They are going back into Vietnam in a major way and we encourage them. Anything we can do to help them we’ll do.”

Regaining a Foothold

Seiple said the initiative provided an opportunity for World Vision to regain a foothold in a nation that had been off-limits for 14 years.

“We think we have our foot in the door in a way that it will never be shut again,” Seiple said. He noted that World Vision’s purpose in reentering Vietnam was “to make the body whole. It’s a nice metaphor for what we’re doing.”

If the door to Vietnam is now open for private relief agencies, Larry Ward may have been the first to knock at it. Ward, who oversaw World Vision’s programs in Vietnam in the 1960s, before becoming president of Food For the Hungry, said he has made more than 40 trips to Vietnam since 1979, seeking greater access for humanitarian organizations.

Ward accompanied the first Vessey delegation in 1987 and served as an unofficial liaison between the Vietnamese government and agencies that wanted to develop or renew relief programs in the country. Now retired and living in Phoenix, Ward said he is pleased with the progress made in Vietnam and praised the Hanoi government for its cooperation.

“I feel personally that the Vietnamese have done a very fine job,” Ward said. “(Government officials) always posture and they always want more, and yet I found when I got there, they were very grateful for what they received and put it to good use.”

World Vision provided $125,000 worth of aid to Vietnam last year and plans to spend $400,000 on programs in the nation in 1989, Seiple said. Almost all of the aid will be in the form of supplies and material--not cash--because of Vietnam’s spiraling inflation and wildly fluctuating currency exchange rates.

During his visit last month, Seiple spoke with Vietnamese officials about building a World Vision hospital in Da Nang at a cost of $80,000. The organization also plans to provide internships for Vietnamese surgeons to train at American hospitals.

Relocation Assistance

In addition to its medical-relief efforts, World Vision also will seek to assist in the relocation of Amerasian children who wish to go to the United States. Amerasians, many of whom are now in their 20s, must wait for years for permission to leave Vietnam.

While in Ho Chi Minh City last month, Seiple spoke with a 21-year-old woman who had recently received approval to emigrate. For years, she told him, she had gone to the airport every day to see if her father had come to take her to the United States.

Living as virtual outcasts because of their American parentage, many of the estimated 30,000 Amerasians live on the streets and some have become involved with drugs and prostitution. Before traveling to America, they will spend six months in an orientation program in the Philippines, where groups such as World Vision hope to provide assistance.

“Some of these kids are pretty tough,” Seiple said. “They’re street kids and they have gotten by with their wits, and if someone were to come up to them and express love and compassion, they’d probably be fairly suspicious. . . . They’re the most pathetic victims of a war that produced nothing but victims.”

Although the Vietnam programs constitute a minuscule part of World Vision’s $54-million worldwide relief effort, Seiple said the venture is significant as a means of repairing the damage done to both nations during the war.

Nostalgic Feeling

As a former combatant, Seiple said his journeys to Vietnam have been especially meaningful. “When I go back I feel nostalgia, and I feel a great deal of sadness.”

He experienced one such nostalgic moment last month, when his flight touched down at the Da Nang civil airport, which had been a U.S. air base, out of which Seiple flew on more than 300 combat missions.

He visited his old hangar and swapped war stories with the airport’s director, Ho Vam Quy, who had flown Soviet MIG-17s in combat against the U.S. Air Force.

“We talked about how we both had sons who we hoped would never have to fight,” Seiple said. “I’ve found (veterans) tend to have stronger peace-loving tendencies than those who have never had to fight.”

During the past decade, the American public has expressed increasing appreciation for Vietnam veterans, many of whom have complained of being slighted for having fought in a losing cause. Seiple said he hopes humanitarian aid to Vietnam will help close the schism that divided America during the war.

“It seems obvious, even to a non-psychologist like myself, that there’s a deep psychological wound from Vietnam that has not been healed in this country,” he said. “If we take some of that pain and put it into a healthy resolve for reconciliation, I think some of that pain will disappear.

“This country has been very generous when it’s won wars. I think it will be generous again, even when it came in second.”

But Seiple said his concern for helping to repair the damage done to Vietnam during the war is in no way an effort to assuage his own conscience.

“Some people are driven by guilt,” he said. “I’m not. I’ve not felt guilty one day for going over there. I went out of a sense of duty and obligation to my country. I’ve gone back out of a sense of duty and obligation to my God.”