Getting Back to Business in Vietnam : Profile: An American who grew up as the U.S. military’s unofficial interpreter and mascot in Vietnam is back as a business consultant. He says the country has a lot of potential.

It’s 1962. The first U.S. military advisers have arrived in the village of Tui Hua in the central coastal region of Da Nang to set up a “strategic defense hamlet,” teaching villagers how to defend themselves from the Viet Cong. But who is that interpreter clambering out of the Army Jeep?

It’s a blue-eyed, blond, 9-year-old kid, as all-American as the Beaver Falls, Pa., hometown he shares with Joe Namath. This son of missionaries is toted around as the military’s unofficial interpreter and mascot. He spouts Vietnamese, charming the villagers.

Fast forward to October, 1990. An official of Vietnam’s State Committee for Cooperation and Investment is facing off against an American businessman. The official, who has recently been plagued with problems with foreign investors, sits ramrod straight, his face weary, his demeanor stern.

Suddenly, the blue-eyed blond switches from English to a stream of Vietnamese. The official breaks up in laughter; the meeting’s tone has changed.

For nearly 30 years, Donald Lemon has been breaking bread--and breaking the ice--with the Vietnamese. America may be the land of his birth, but Vietnam is the home of his youth.

Now, as Indochina representative for Credit Lyonnais Securities (Asia) Ltd., the brokerage arm of France’s largest bank, Lemon is one of the most noticeable Americans in Vietnam, bridging both lands as he advises French and Hong Kong clients on investment opportunities. Because he only gives advice and does not actually engage in commercial transactions, such consulting is permitted under the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam.

“We have lots of clients who want to come here, but they don’t know what to do,” said Lemon, 37, clad in blue jeans as he lounged in the bar of the Saigon Floating Hotel. “They’re very happy to have a blue-eyed gwai lo (foreigner) who can come in and understand a little about what is here.”

Lemon, who lives in Hong Kong, primarily scouts out Vietnamese companies for potential foreign investors. To do that, he helps the Vietnamese make reasonable presentations, including developing information they aren’t always accustomed to keeping: a corporate history, financial data, depreciation, value of equipment and land. In a socialist economy, where no clear land values exist, that isn’t always easy.

His familiarity with Vietnam is immediately apparent when he eschews the hotel’s restaurants filled with foreigners. Instead, he jumps into a pedicab, rattles off directions in Vietnamese and heads to a back-alley, open-air eatery serving Vietnamese shrimp pancakes. No other foreigners are in sight.

Although a growing number of consultants are positioning themselves as “Vietnam experts” in anticipation of the embargo’s end, Lemon possesses the bona fides. Along with his missionary parents, he moved to Vietnam in 1958, at age 5, and stayed 12 years--until college. He lived in Da Nang, Nha Trong, Da Lat and Saigon. He went to a boarding school in the highland city of Da Lat with other foreign children but absorbed language and culture from his Vietnamese playmates.

He grew up with the war. While other kids his age were back home playing baseball, Lemon spent three terrified weeks wondering whether his parents were dead or alive in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. They turned out to be fine, but five other parents of his boarding school classmates were killed, people who had become like aunts and uncles to him. He was 15 at the time.

War became part of his landscape. One day, he was playing tennis in Saigon when a “satchel charge,” or briefcase filled with explosives, exploded 200 yards from him. It hardly fazed him.

“By that time, you got so used to these kinds of things that I remember very distinctly being perturbed because I missed my first serve,” Lemon said with a laugh.

He polished his resume after he returned to the United States in 1970 for college. He earned an undergraduate degree in speech and theater from Wheaton College in Illinois, an MBA from the University of Chicago and a law degree from John Marshall Law School.

Along the way, he tried to share his experiences in Vietnam with other Americans, many of whom he found uninformed. For one college project, he presented a program on Vietnamese literature, melding his own creative writing, poetry from Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese mythology.

“It was just to kind of say, ‘This is a group of people who live and breathe and feel, not some gooks and statistics you see on TV,’ ” Lemon recalled.

Not everyone was receptive. In one school extemporaneous debating competition, where Lemon coincidentally drew the topic of Vietnam, one judge accused him of lying about his background and refused to believe that Lemon had lived there.

“I had a lot of information that wasn’t accepted because it wasn’t politically correct. I was making statements like, ‘This is a guerrilla war, and it should be fought in a guerrilla fashion,’ and he said, ‘You don’t know what this is about; this is a revolution.’

“And I said, ‘No, this is not a revolution, because most of the people in the country actually don’t care either way.’ For the Vietnamese, the bamboo is the symbol of their country, and they bend the way the wind blows. But they don’t break.”

Lemon says he did not oppose the war, only the way the U.S. military conducted it. When he got his draft notice, he opted for an educational deferment.

He still opposes U.S. policies toward Vietnam. “I feel that you can have a much stronger influence when you have a dialogue that is open and economics that can go to work than by an isolationist type of thing where you’re trying to bring someone to their knees,” he said.

Today, Lemon is aiming to serve the same middleman’s role in business as he did in education. He and his wife, who have three children, returned to Asia in 1985. After five years at the brokerage Fred S. James, Lemon decided to study Chinese in Hong Kong and join a small management consulting firm specializing in business development in China.

But when Vietnam launched its policy of doi moi, or renovation, in December, 1986, and began making overtures to the West the following year, Lemon decided to take a look. He wrote to the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce requesting a visit. In September, 1987, he returned for the first time in 17 years. He was one of the first American businessmen to go back.

His first impression: the bomb craters visible from the plane over Hanoi. “A strange feeling.”

His second impression: a group of Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce people greeting him at Hanoi’s airport and welcoming him to Vietnam in good English. “Very surprising.”

They had investigated his background to the level of knowing about an unpublished paper on Vietnam-China trade that he had written at the University of Chicago. Based on his experience in China, he expected to sit in his hotel room for days while a schedule was arranged, but they immediately pulled out a detailed itinerary granting him meetings with companies in each of the 13 industries he had requested.

He had seven meetings a day, so well-coordinated that they alternated between serving him coffee, tea and soda. After five days each in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Lemon had seen virtually every major company in the country. He was overwhelmed by the efficiency and the interest.

“The first thing they would say is, ‘We’ve had 200 years of good history with the United States, and 10 years of bad, so what’s the problem?’ ” Lemon said.

“I felt the Vietnamese showed a lot more initiative, a lot more interest and desire for foreign contact than I’d experienced in three years in China,” said Lemon, who deliberately used as little Vietnamese as possible during that first trip. It’s a strategy he selectively uses today--sometimes at his client’s request--to listen to what the Vietnamese discuss in front of him without their realizing that they are being understood.

Lemon says Vietnam still presents fundamental problems for foreign investors. But he retains his early belief in the country’s potential. He advises against construction investments, believing that the market is overheated. He recommends agricultural production, consumer goods and basic products, such as pharmaceuticals.

“On a really crass level,” Lemon said, “there’s no place for this economy to go but up. If you simply dropped money in here, basic economics would say it would have to go somewhere, and in most cases it would go up.”