War of Hearts and Minds: An American Memoir

By James Jouppi

Under the best of conditions, the Peace Corps experience is somewhat like being parachuted into a human drama unfolding in a different culture. The volunteer may struggle mightily to be understood, but his attempts can be for naught if he misunderstands the framework of his role. Unfortunately, in spite of Peace Corps training, the only way a Peace Corps volunteer can understand the framework of his or her Peace Corps role is to live inside it, or even, as in the case of author James Jouppi, return to the site where he was stationed without the trappings of Peace Corps.

In August of 1971, Jouppi arrived in Thailand as part of Peace Corps Thailand Group 38, a civil engineering group slated to work in the most communist-sensitive and most poverty-stricken areas of Thailand for Thailands Community Development Department. In War of Hearts and Minds, he documents the challenges of working inside the Peace Corps system, both prior to his work areas being designated red and after that time as well, before moving on to his attempts to work outside the Peace Corps system.

Augmented with maps, photographs, and letters, War of Hearts and Minds offers a compelling look into both the politics of Nixon-era America and that of staunchly anti-communist Thailand as Thailand fought a shadow war adjoining the one that was raging in Vietnam and Laos. In his final chapters, Jouppi follows threads from Thailand as they unfold in American culture before providing insights for possible strategies in the future which could bring the goal of worldwide peace and justice closer to frution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462042364

James Jouppi

James Jouppi is the son of automotive analyst Arvid Jouppi. He grew up in Michigan and New York. After graduating from Cornell with a degree in civil engineering, he joined the Peace Corps in 1971. Jouppi currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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Copyright © 2011 by James Jouppi.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-4235-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5453-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-4236-4 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 10/10/2011

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Timeline

Summer of 1971, New York City

Timeline (continued)

A Time When Things Were Never

Quite as They Seemed

Arriving Fully Loaded

Peace Corps Thailand Group 38

Sept. 1971, Changed by a

Watergate Experience

Nov. 1971, Sent to Nakohn Panome

Peace Corps Co-workers Boone

and Winston

Goke Dtong Village

Dec. 1971-April 1972,

Teo and My First Year Projects

1969-1971, Santee’s Peace Corps

Per Diem Reports

Timeline (continued)

Nov., Dec. 1972, Planning

Thai Funded Projects

Timeline (continued)

Jan.-April 1973, Nong Bua,

the Project Beyond the Tripwire

Prudence

March 1973,

The Plow Demonstration

April 1973, Completing the Project

and Smashing a Cobra

Working Conditions Elsewhere

1966, Louis Lomax’s Thailand

Bargirls

Becoming a Peace Corps Pariah

June 1973-Sept. 1973,

Thai Language Lessons from Noy

August 1973, A Trip to the Grome

Sept. 1973, The Home Leave

Oct., Nov. 1973, Courting a

High Class Woman

Nov. 1973, The Irrigation Project

1970-1973, Winston Taking Territory

The Country Team

Kraengji in Sakohn Nakohn

Timeline (continued)

Nov. 1973, A Plan to Train

New Volunteers

Transition to Group 46

Nov. 1973, (Almost) Crossing the Line to Teach English

Nov. 1973, Begging Me Just to Leave

Mike and Sunee

Nov. 1973, Noy Asks Me to Give Up

Nov.-Dec., 1973

Winston Changes His Plan

Dec. 1973, Allowing Winston

To Have His Way

Dec. 1973, A Plan to Meditate

Dec. 1973-March 1974, The Letters

Winter of 1974, Denver

March 1974, The Ice Goes Out,

the River Opens Up

April 1974, Placing Telephone Calls

to Thailand

April 1974, A Meeting at the

Brown Palace

April, May, 1974, A Plan to

Work for Sanure

May 1974, Everything

Is Already Settled

May 17, 1974, Play Things

May, June 1974, Learning More

About Two-headed Birds

Timeline (continued)

July, August 1974,

The Gideon Connection

Timeline (continued)

1974-1977, America,

Land of Conflict Diffusion

1977-1979, Church Life and

Writing in Colorado

1979-1983, Michigan and Georgia

Timeline (continued)

1985, Thailand

1986, Fort Rucker

1987, Minnesota

1987, The Devastating Critique

1988, Dr. Wyatt Never Opened

My Package

1991, Tom Hanks Didn’t Really Care

1994, Wisdom Hunting in California

1996, Smoking or Non

Timeline (continued)

Tarnishing Peace Corps’ Image

Just An All American Boy

Researching the Movie

1990-2001, Déjà vu in Grand Rapids

Gone With the Wind

Glossary

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Preface

In this memoir, I describe events which were unfolding during a War of Hearts and Minds campaign in Thailand, a War of Hearts and Minds campaign which occurred simultaneously with what, in America, is often called the Vietnam or Watergate era.

This is not a fictional memoir or a product of imagination. The perceptions described herein are my honest perceptions, sometimes in real time as events occurred and sometimes later upon reflection. Dates and place names, with only a few exceptions, are recounted as accurately as possible. In many cases, the names of individuals have been changed, but it’s still very possible that individuals might read these pages and, after identifying themselves, believe that the feelings and attitudes I’ve assigned to them are in error. These individuals may take offense or even feel their privacy is being impinged upon as I attempt to express, on a very human level, the ethos of various subcultures which were being influenced, in various ways, by the Vietnam War.

Be that as it may, I consider the individuals I write about to be gifts God gave to me, myself to have been God’s gift to them, and this memoir to be a gift God gave me to share. I also believe each man and woman alive, whenever and wherever they live, is faced with his or her personal War of Hearts and Minds, and I hope that some of these individuals might find the information provided herein beneficial.

I would like to thank my editor, Michelle Campbell, who provided expert guidance in changing words to make ambiguous meanings clear, while, for the most part, withholding judgment insofar as content. As just one example of Michelle’s advice, it was her idea that the above three paragraphs might better fit as a preface than on the title page. As with most of her suggestions, I found myself in agreement.

While whatever degree of professionalism this writing project has is largely due to Michelle, and, of course, iUniverse, my publisher, whose editors provided thorough critiques of early versions, I am, of course, responsible for those mistakes which must remain, as well as for the content of this memoir.

Introduction

I was looking for Teo’s girlfriend in one of the bars along the Mekong. I wanted to know Teo’s address. I wanted to tell her I was a Christian. She was married by this time, but I still thought she might care. Becoming a Christian, after all, is a pretty big deal—something one wants to share.

I couldn’t find Teo at the bar, but I stayed a while just talking to two military policemen, one black, one white. They were telling me how villages within the Civic Action Zone which accepted medical aid were now being decimated by Communist insurgents right after the Air Force’s Civic Action medical teams departed.

I didn’t believe them, but I thought I should let them talk. After all, they were doing their job, and, if they thought their job was to try to scare me, I had no problem with that. My job? I didn’t have one. I was unemployed.

We’ve been seeing you around, the black guy said after they’d softened me up with insider information. We thought you were watching us.

Why, I asked, would I be watching you?

Everyone over here is being watched, he said with a bit of disgust, as if I were being unmercifully naïve.

In spite of his paranoia, I thought we’d had a friendly conversation, them giving me the Air Force MP take on life, and me giving them the ex-Peace Corps volunteer take on life in our military town. As we parted on the street, he asked me where I was from.

I live in Goke Dtong, I told him, just north of town.

No! he said. I mean where are you from in the States?

I hadn’t been playing games with him in the bar. I’d been being very honest when I’d told him my reason for being around, and, since my business had nothing to do with his, and, since I’d never been in the Air Force, I was clearly outside of his jurisdiction. I hadn’t told him that directly, but I thought he might have deduced that from what I’d told him.

Still, he was only doing his job, and, if he felt his job was to know where it was that I’d lived in the States before I’d been in Peace Corps so he could understand me better, I had no problem with that, but I didn’t believe that New York City or Colorado, the last two places I’d lived in the States, were really where I was from.

Well, I told him, my parents live in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. I was being as truthful as possible. Grosse Pointe, in fact, was my Peace Corps home of record.

Oh, he sneered. Grosse Pointe! I’m from Detroit. I can’t walk down the streets of your town without being glared at. Listen, let me give you a word of advice. Go home now before you lose the privileges your parents gave you. I know what I’m talking about. They’ve already sent eight boxes home with my name on them.

What do you mean? I asked. What do you mean they’ve already sent eight boxes home with your name on them?

I mean, he said a bit louder, they’ve already sent eight boxes home with my name on them! If you don’t go home now, we’ll probably find you in a garbage can one morning. Is that what you want to happen?

I was glad that all the GIs weren’t like these two MPs. I’d never really liked the MPs, even as a volunteer. They seemed to believe they should have the right to tell me to get off the streets after midnight, which, of course, they didn’t, and one had even stopped me from pedaling a pedicab around in front of the Shindig even though I had the driver’s permission. This guy had gone further than that. He’d had the audacity to tell me I didn’t belong in Nakohn Panome. The truth was I had a lot more friends in that town than he did, and he couldn’t even talk to my friends, because he didn’t speak the language.

I started looking for Mike, an enlisted airman (GI) I’d known before. I figured he’d be out of the Air Force by now, and I knew he’d understand why I had to come back. I asked around and was told he’d been seen at a certain bungalow, but he wasn’t there, and the GI who lived there, a big white guy, said he didn’t know where Mike was staying.

Just like with the MPs, I told Mike’s friend a little about myself, and, as with them, my introduction inspired him to regale me with a story which seemed more to do with the culture of violence he was part of than it did with what, to me, had always seemed like a relatively peaceful town. There was, however, a difference in his story. He didn’t threaten me personally. Instead, he told me of a plan he and his buddies had hatched to deal with their superiors at the Air Base.

We’ve already paid pedicab drivers twenty-five dollars a head to eliminate a few, he said. They’re going to be beheaded, but we’ll be gone by the time it happens, and, anyway, they won’t be able to pin the executions on any one of us as individuals because we’ve all contributed to the pool.

I changed the subject to politics in the States. I’d been out of touch for a while, and thought he might have some updated information.

Has Nixon been impeached yet? I asked him.

Impeached? he laughed disdainfully. Of course, he’s been impeached! They’ve already indicted two thirds of the Senate!

These weren’t laid back GIs like the ones I’d known as a volunteer. This may have been because the mood of Americans in general had changed, but it also may have been due to the fact that I’d had no regular contact with GIs since my first GI friends had gone home, and I was meeting these GIs under far different circumstances than when I’d first arrived as a volunteer. In fact, by this time, the only GI in town I even knew was Mike, and I’d met Mike by accident because he was with Sunee just before I’d terminated from Peace Corps. I had my project duffel bag with project ideas with me. I wanted to brainstorm a little with Mike. He was a thoughtful guy, and, if I were able to find him, I knew he’d have some good advice.

I’d only had the customary toke of a joint to prove to Mike’s friend that I wasn’t a narc or something, but a toke was all it took to make me paranoid, more so when I got to the bottom of the steps outside and saw a group of eight very angry young Thais walking towards me.

What’s going on? I asked them.

As if to answer my question, one of them started screaming at a black GI who was standing next to a balcony above us. You come with your filthy money! he screamed in Thai, and you take our women! Look at me! This is where I live, but I don’t have money, food to eat, or even a place to live! You know nothing of our country! You can’t even understand me, and yet you take our women with your filthy money!

The GI on the balcony was another big guy. I was pretty skinny again by this time, so most GIs seemed big. In any case, he was just standing there dumbfounded, obviously not comprehending the words his tormenter was saying.

I slumped to the ground and sat there. Over and over the guy was screaming the very same things. I didn’t know what to do until one of the Thais spoke to me.

Translate, he said. Translate what he’s saying.

I got back up to my feet.

They say they don’t have money for food or housing, I told the big GI. They say you’re taking their woman with your money. They say you don’t even have the decency to learn their language so they can talk to you about it. They’ve got a point, I said, if you look at it from their point of view.

Yea, the GI said, I know, but I just got here. I want to learn their language and their culture, but it’s going to take some time.

He went back inside, apparently to be with some bargirl who’d brought him home, and I started talking to the Thais about what I’d intended to talk about with Mike. I opened my duffel bag up and pulled out my two ashtrays: the one I’d bought in Mexico with a scorpion encased in its bottom and the one I’d purchased for three baht (fifteen cents) in Nakohn Panome’s market. My idea was to use local scorpions encased by clear pepper sauce dishes in the bottom of the ashtrays and sell them.

Or maybe just put some kernels of glutinous rice on the bottom with a message in Thai, I told them. Or how about this? How about writing down what you want to say about what’s going on in this town in the bottom of an ashtray, and then selling the ashtrays at the market.

Dang, the fellow who’d been doing the screaming, laughed and agreed this would be a good idea were it not for the consequences when the wrong person read the message, and then he told me a little about himself.

I rent a room right next door, he said. "and I’m actually from a pretty wealthy family. My father sends me money, but I also get money from GIs by driving a taxi. My sister’s here now too. She works as a mea chow." I didn’t ask him if his sister was the woman who was with the GI he’d been screaming at just a moment before.

I left the young men and walked a few more blocks where I passed an Air Force shuttle bus parked on the street. The door of the bus was open. A young man sat on the bus’s steps. Another man sat in the driver’s seat, and one or two more sat behind him. They beckoned for me to join them for some late night conversation, so I clambered onto the bus. They shared their joint with me, and we became a bit acquainted.

I told them how I’d been in Peace Corps and how, after going home, I’d returned because of things that had happened in my absence. I can’t remember all I told them, but I was probably talking too much. That is, I probably shouldn’t have been being so open with perfect strangers. In any case, that’s how I was, and, just as with the GIs and Dang and his friends, these pedicab drivers also wanted to up the ante.

We may be pedicab drivers, the man in the driver’s seat told me, but that’s just a cover for our real job. We’re really spies. We work for the Base Commander. I really think you should meet him, He’s not as old as you might think. He’s just about your age, and he even smokes marijuana. You might like him, and he might be able to help you. We can take you to see him tomorrow. Let’s make an appointment now.

He gave me the name of a local restaurant and a time when he thought we should meet.

No, I said, I don’t think I can do that. People have been lying to me lately, and you might be lying too. If you want to take me to see the Commander, you should come to my house tomorrow. I’ll be at home all day.

Where do you live? the man in the driver’s seat asked.

I live in Goke Dtong, I told him, just north of town.

Let one of us take you there, he suggested.

I can’t allow you to do that, I told him. "It’s a ten baht fare to Goke Dtong, and I don’t have ten baht to pay you. It’s better that I walk.

Oh, no! he said, We can’t let you walk! We’re friends now! Let one of us take you home for free!

One of the men on the bus directed me to his pedicab, one of several clustered around the bus, and asked me to direct him.

I live in Goke Dtong, I told him. It’s north of town, past the Salaglang, past the hospital, and even past Nong Saeng."

He peddled for about five minutes before he asked me again where I was going.

How far, he asked, do we have to go to reach your house?

I already told you, I said, I live in the Village of Goke Dtong.

After we’d passed through Nong Saeng, the Vietnamese settlement on the north end of town, the street lights ended, and another driver passed from the other direction.

Fau! my driver yelled out. "Fau! Fau!"

Fau is the Thai word for guard. My wife Phoorita has informed me that, although she’s never heard fau used this way herself, my driver may have been extending some sort of colloquial greeting. I know, at least, that Phoorita herself uses fau a bit differently than I use the word guard in English. Just as one example, when Phoorita admonishes me for spending so much time with my writing, she does so using fau by saying, as nearly as I can translate what she’s saying, that I’m guarding my computer. Even so, I can say with some certainty that I’d never before heard fau used as a greeting, and, when my driver called out "Fau! Fau!," My paranoia returned, and I told him I preferred to walk the rest of the way home by myself, which is what I did.

Under the best of conditions, the Peace Corps experience is somewhat akin to being parachuted into a human drama unfolding in a different culture. The volunteer may struggle mightily to be understood, but his attempts can be for naught if he misunderstands the framework of his role. Unfortunately, the only way to really understand the framework of one’s Peace Corps role is to live one’s life inside it, or even, as I felt the need to do, return to live in the culture without the trappings of being a Peace Corps volunteer.

Aside from the relationship the volunteer has with the foreign actors of his personal Peace Corps play, he also has relationships with other volunteers, and how these relationships unfold depends on many factors. It can help, at times, for a junior volunteer to have the support of more senior volunteers who’ve been in-country a little longer, but, somewhat like older siblings, these senior volunteers can have a predilection to believe they understand the nuances of a foreign culture a whole lot better than a volunteer who comes later even when, and often because, these volunteers have gained experience by not taking too many chances or being active enough to ruffle anyone’s feathers.

In Nakohn Panome Province of Thailand, the province where I was stationed, four volunteers were sent to work for the Community Development Department in 1969, and two more were sent in 1970. I arrived by myself in 1971, and, since no more volunteers were sent for the next three years, there was no Peace Corps presence by the summer of 1974.

In 1977, I took a trip to Minnesota to visit Boone, my Peace Corps mentor. Boone had taken a double extension with Peace Corps which means he stayed on two years beyond the standard two year tour. He terminated from Peace Corps in 1973, and I terminated myself in December of that year, after two years and change. When I told Boone the story about the pedicab drivers on the bus, he had to laugh.

Wasn’t that how it was? he reminisced. We were always meeting pedicab drivers who were telling us they were spies.

It seemed strange that Boone would say that. I hadn’t known him to hang out and talk to pedicab drivers. I was the one who did that, and, in all my conversations with pedicab drivers, I’d never encountered any who’d claimed to be spies until that night in 1974 when I was already out of Peace Corps.

In fact, the Nakohn Panome I was experiencing in 1974 was different from the Nakohn Panome Boone had experienced as a volunteer whether he realized it or not. Americans, even Boone himself who knew me, may have believed I was crazy, but I had reason to believe that America, or at least the American Peace Corps, was responsible for that perception and that Peace Corps officials were sticking their collective heads in the sand in order to avoid exposure to what Peace Corps’ policies had wrought.

In fact, I once thought that, because of what happened in 1974, there probably were no more volunteers sent to Nakohn Panome again for quite some time, but it turns out that Ed Wall, a Land Development volunteer, was sent there just two years later. According to his posting on the Peace Corps Online website, Ed, from Thailand Group 54, was seeking to get in touch with his Peace Corps buddies. I hadn’t been Mr. Wall’s buddy. Mr. Wall didn’t even know me, but I sent him an e-mail introducing myself. He didn’t respond.

Another time, during the summer of 2005, I read a posting by Leonard, an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who’d served in Udon in the mid-1960s. Udon, like Nakohn Panome, was a Vietnam era military town, and, in his posting, Leonard described, in capital letters, a situation where the Central Intelligence Agency had been intercepting his mail and monitoring his movements. He said that that the CIA had been operating out of the Udon Air Base, that they’d tried to recruit him through a Lao operative. He said that, after he’d rejected their offer, they’d tried to f—k [him] over by spreading rumors and stories and that they’d been very effective. He said he wanted to know if other volunteers had had the experience he’d had and that he wanted to talk.

I’d never experienced anything like that. What I’d experienced as a volunteer had been too subtle for me to suspect, at the time, that my behavior was being monitored at all. So had Leonard really seen first hand what had been so frustratingly invisible to me? Had Leonard had a relationship with a flesh and blood person whom he knew to be CIA? Had Leonard been invited to join the CIA team?

I wanted to enter Leonard’s discussion. I wanted to know why, if Leonard felt he’d been being harassed by the CIA in Thailand, he hadn’t informed the Peace Corps officials in Bangkok. I wanted to know why, if what he wrote was true, Peace Corps hadn’t had his back. I posted a comment. I tried to draw out others by mentioning the George Bush connection to the movie Volunteers, a 1985 satire about Peace Corps Thailand volunteers who, after arriving in Thailand, learn that they are actually working for the CIA and asking what others might know.

There the discussion ended. No one had a comment about the movie. No one had a comment about CIA activity in Thailand. Leonard didn’t post again, so I sent him an e-mail directly. He didn’t respond.

In 2008, I learned that a man named Stanley Meisler was doing research for an authoritative Peace Corps 50th anniversary history book. I wanted Mr. Meisler to have access to my many years of research so I sent him several bound volumes I’ve written over the years. I also thought the American public should understand the relationship between the CIA and Peace Corps, whatever that relationship is and has been, and, when I spoke with Mr. Meisler on the phone, he said he wanted to understand it better himself. Before I sent Mr. Meisler my materials, I checked an old Peace Corps alumni directory to see if Leonard had really been a volunteer in Thailand. After ascertaining that he had, I found his current address and phone number, and I wrote that on a copy of his posting which I included in the package I sent to Mr. Meisler.

If Leonard wouldn’t talk to me, I thought he might talk to Mr. Meisler. Mr. Meisler, after all, was fully credentialed to put everything out in the open. He’d served as Deputy Director of Peace Corps’ Office of Evaluation and Research in the 1960s, and now, in his role as documentarian for Peace Corps’ first fifty years, he had the right and even the responsibility to understand what had been going on with Peace Corps during the Nixon years.

In September of 2008, Mr. Meisler e-mailed to say that he’d read a good deal of this memoir I write today, then, of course, in very rough form. He wrote that the material is more like a personal, moving, cross-cultural love story, of course, than an account of life & work in the Peace Corps.

In this, he seemed to be separating the professional from the personal as professional people are apt to do, even in, perhaps especially in, those cases where the personal and professional merge to be one. Still, I wondered what Mr. Meisler’s conclusions would be insofar as the connection between Peace Corps and the CIA, especially during the Nixon era. I wasn’t to learn his verdict until I read the next to final chapter of When the World Calls: the Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years (by Stanley Meisler, Beacon Press, 2011), entitled Diplomatic Troubles. In this chapter, Meisler describes the tension between American embassies overseas and Peace Corps which has, from its inception, been given a mandate to act independently of the U.S. government team in order that it not be used as a tool for American foreign policy. He quotes Sergeant Shriver, Peace Corps’ first director, as follows: We don’t say there is anything wrong with the official American community, but we do say to our Volunteers that the more they work with Americans and the more they enter into American life, the more difficult and less effective their job will be.

Meisler also provides examples from Tanzania and Cameroon in which Peace Corps country directors have battled American ambassadors for Peace Corps independence overseas.

A few words about the Central Intelligence Agency: Meisler writes, on page 206 of When the World Calls, from the beginning, it was clear the Peace Corps would be dogged by suspicions and accusations that many of its volunteers were disguised agents of the CIA. This came from Communist propagandists and nationalist hotheads. Even American expatriates in the capitals liked to gossip and point fingers of suspicion.

In refuting these allegations, Meisler quotes Fidel Castro himself as having said that he’s never seen a linkage between Peace Corps and the CIA. Less convincing, at least to me, is the CIA’s own denial. In 1996, Meisler writes, John M. Deutch, the CIA director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that there never had been a case of the CIA using a Volunteer as an agent.

When writing about this issue from Peace Corps’ point of view, Meisler notes that the Peace Corps has set down several policies to allay suspicions. Since the beginning, the Peace Corps refused to accept any former CIA employees as a Volunteer. Former employees of other U. S. intelligence operations, like army or navy intelligence, were eligible, but only ten years or more after their service there had ended.

As examples of the diligence Peace Corps has used in keeping the Wall of Separation between Peace Corps and the CIA intact, Meisler provides case studies from Tanzania where a Peace Corps staffer was berated by Peace Corps Director Jack Hood Vaughn for going fishing with a CIA station chief and from Bolivia where the entire Peace Corps contingent was withdrawn just based on suspicions by the Bolivian government that volunteers were providing security sensitive information to the American Embassy, which the CIA would later have access to.

The most embarrassing cross-pollination of the Peace Corps and the CIA, Meisler writes, came in a way that Shriver and President Kennedy least expected. Edward Lee Howard, a volunteer in Columbia in the early 1970s, joined the CIA in 1981.

According to Meisler’s account, Howard was a very bad apple, but a talented very bad apple, who rose rapidly in the CIA but failed a lie detector test in 1983, trying to hide some drug use and petty theft in his younger years. Instead of posting him to Moscow, the CIA fired him.’’ The concluding paragraph of Meisler’s Diplomatic Troubles" chapter describes the demise of Howard as follows:

Howard, infuriated over the firing, decided to sell secrets of the CIA operation in Moscow to agents of the Soviet Union. According to one CIA agent, Howard wiped out Moscow station with his betrayal. The CIA traced its problems to Howard, and FBI agents descended on his home in New Mexico. But Howard slipped out of the FBI trap in 1985 and showed up a year later in Moscow. The former Peace Corps Volunteer and former CIA employee died there in 2002.

By concluding that the case of Edward Lee Howard, a man who’d apparently abided by the five year rule before joining the CIA, was the most embarrassing cross-pollination between Peace Corps and the CIA, Meisler implies, without saying so directly, that it’s virtually impossible for volunteers to have knowingly exchanged information and strategy with CIA agents while still in Peace Corps.

Stanley Meisler didn’t mention the suspicions I have, based on circumstances included in this memoir, nor did he mention conversations he may have had with other ex-volunteers who felt they were being undermined by proxies of the CIA, not knowing, at the time, who they were dealing with, nor did he mention information he may have gleaned from talking to Leonard.

My hope was that Mr. Meisler would follow through. He didn’t do it. Instead, he used anecdotal evidence to shore up the position Peace Corps people have had from the very beginning: that being that there is and never has been any connection whatsoever between Peace Corps and the CIA, except, of course, as is necessary for volunteer safety.

And so my story, the story I tell in this memoir, is one which goes beyond the reach of writers like Stanley Meisler, but I also put forth the premise, one which Mr. Meisler would surely agree with, that any organization, whether the CIA, Peace Corps, or even the Salvation Army, remains beyond reproach only at the cost of rotting from its core and that there is a time when secrets should be unsealed for future generations.

I’m not even saying that Stanley Meisler’s book is not an excellent historical treatment of Peace Corps written from the administrative perspective. In fact, His treatment of Peace Corps history, from an administrative perspective, may well be more insightful than anything previously published. Unfortunately, Stanley Meisler, like Peace Corps historians before him, seems to have the delusion that Peace Corps administrators who lived in Washington and capital cities around the world could know what was going on with volunteers like me any better than volunteers like me knew what was going on in their administrative offices in Washington and capital cities around the world. In fact, Peace Corps has never been a regimented military-like organization, and, what with its volunteers flung far and wide in areas where local politics can be sensitive and difficult to understand, Peace Corps administrators sometimes don’t have time to become involved with what is going on in individual situations beyond taking the position that, as guests in a foreign country, Peace Corps volunteers should respect all customs of the foreign country in which they are stationed. I should probably add that, by Meisler’s own account, the Peace Corps evaluation unit he’d been part of lost most of it’s influence after he left it, especially after Joseph Blatchford became President Nixon’s Peace Corps Chief in 1969 (see When the World Calls, pp. 68,58).

I’ve written this story many times, always updating it to the present. While I write from personal experience, I’ve also done a good deal of research. It was difficult reading books about historical Thailand, because, while reading, I was coming to the conclusion that everything one wanted in historical Thailand was something which had to be given, as a concession, by someone of a higher status, and that this person had to be bribed. It’s one thing to read about such a system dispassionately and quite another to do so while also writing about it. For example, I remember that, at one point, during my 1997 vacation to Thailand, I was editing an early version of this memoir and also reading some books I’d picked up in Bangkok about the formation of the Thai nation. As I read, it seemed that the system I was writing about, though very corrupt, was very normal in a historical context, and this made me very angry. In fact, according to my wife, the attitude I developed with my writing combined with my reading pretty much ruined that vacation.

I’ve also read Peace Corps memoirs, two by Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Thailand. The first one I read, in 2009, was written by A.A. Maytree, actually the pen name of Michael Schmicker, a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) volunteer in Thailand from 1969 until 1972. While the experiences Schmicker describes in his Land of Smiles (iUniverse, 2009) were different from mine, they were also somewhat connected. In fact, according to Schmicker, after a year-and-a-half in Peace Corps, he was offered a job as the Dispatch News reporter for Thailand and Laos, and I might have met him in that capacity had he not elected, instead, to extend his Peace Corps tour in Bangkok. As it happened, I met John, who was given the Dispatch News job which Schmicker rejected, and John enters my story in various places.

After reading Schmicker’s memoir, I was also inspired to read a few books both by and about people he mentions. I was particularly influenced by A Very Personal War: the Story of Cornelius Hawkridge (by James Hamilton-Patterson, Hodder and Stoughton, 1971), a book about a Defense Department fact finder who had come to the conclusion that the Vietnam War was not a war against Communists so much as it was a black hole where corruption was running rampant. According to Hamilton-Patterson’s account, there’d already, by 1971, been threats on Hawkridge’s life. In fact, when he gave his account to Hamilton-Patterson, Hawkridge was walking with a limp after being forced off the road by a truck in a very suspicious accident which had taken the life of his wife in Washington State in 1969. (The circumstances surrounding the accident are described in chapters 6 and 7 of A Very Personal War.)

Schmicker also touches on the career of Sterling Seagrave, an editor at the Bangkok Post who was his mentor for a sideline journalism career. After many years in Thailand, Seagrave moved to France where he’s written many books about Southeast Asia, covering, among other things, the drug trade and the growing dominance of ex-patriot Chinese in the region. Just as an aside, between parenthesis on page 172 of Lords of the Rim: the Invisible Empire of the Overseas Chinese (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, by Peggy and Sterling Seagrave, 1985 edition), Seagrave, or perhaps his wife Peggy, writes as follows: (It is now generally accepted that no serious Communist threat to Thailand ever existed, but was exaggerated to justify the agendas of [Police General] Phao and the CIA.)

While authors like Seagrave and Hamilton-Patterson write as if the gross corruption involved in fighting the Vietnam War had undermined the war against an expansionist Communist system to the extent that the corruption itself was the dominant feature of the war, other authors treat the corruption as if it were merely background static, and these authors write books which focus on the fighting war. I’ve quoted portions of one such book, Thailand, the War That Is, the War That Will Be (by Louis Lomax, Random House, 1967), extensively in his memoir, and that’s for two reasons. Firstly, Lomax made an effort to talk to Peace Corps volunteers in Thailand, and, secondly, he focused on the area where I served.

Only recently, after this memoir was substantially completed, did I acquire books I hadn’t previously known existed such as Thailand, Another Vietnam (by Daniel Wit, Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1968) and two books which were written after the Communist threat in Thailand had ended: Making Revolution: the Insurgency of the Communist Party of Thailand in Structural Perspective (by Tom Marks, White Lotus, Bangkok, 1994) which was written by an American who graduated from West Point and served as an intelligence officer and foreign correspondent before becoming a consultant specializing in political risk and The Struggle for Thailand: Counter-insurgency 1965-1985 (by General Saiyud Kerdphol, S. Research Center Co., Ltd., Bangkok, 1986) which was written by a Thai who participated in the establishment of the Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC) in Thailand in 1966.

After reading portions of these more recent acquisitions and comparing them with books I’d read before, I came to realize that what the more military oriented authors refer to as American assistance for Thai government community development projects was not assistance for Thailand’s Community Development Department, a Thai government department which exists to this day, so much as assistance for Thailand’s Accelerated Rural Development Department, a phenomenon of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Suffice it to say at this point, Thailand’s national Community Development Department program, put into effect in 1960, was designed to bring about the partnership of the Thai government and the people at the local level while the ARD program, launched in 1964 with the signing of an agreement between the Thai government and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission to Thailand (USOM), was designed to negate the threat of the CPT (Communist Party of Thailand). In fact, before a province could be designated as an ARD province, it had to first be designated as a province threatened by Communist insurgency as so designated by Thailand’s National Security Council. Marks explains the history of ARD in a chapter of his book entitled Government Response to the CPT.

I mention the difference between Thailand’s Community Development Department and the Vietnam era Accelerated Rural Development Department in Thailand at the outset, because the observations I make in this memoir come from my own perspective, and, since I worked for the Community Development Department, these observations are probably quite different than they would be had I been a USAID or ARD employee and part of America’s counter-insurgency team.

Even so, especially from General Saiyud’s book, I gained a greater appreciation that I was very near to the historical center of a Communist insurgency which, according the incident report in The Struggle for Thailand: Counter-insurgency 1965-1985, was claiming the lives of hundreds of Thai government personnel a year. In fact, Saiyud, who became Chief of Staff of the Royal Thai Armed Forces in 1976 and Supreme Commander in 1981, writes, in the preface of his book, that the outbreak of armed attacks on government units was launched with an assault on security forces at Na Bua village in Nakohn Panom’s That Panome District on August 7th of 1965, a day he says the Communists referred to as Gun-Firing Day. He also says, in a 1968 speech before a USOM audience (his book being largely made up of transcripts of speeches he’d once made), that Communist terrorists in Pla Baak District had been forced to abandon a formerly secure area and shift south to the remote mountains of Na Kae Distinct.

These are places I write about. This is the setting for this memoir, but I write from outside his military perspective. In fact, I appreciated how clueless I’d been when reading an article which was recently posted on the Internet entitled Nakohn Panom Royal Thai Air Force Base in the Vietnam War: A Security Police Sentry Dog Handler’s Perspective by Phil Carroll which contains the following quote from a former officer in the 56th Security Police Squadron. Most of the time it seems we were in some form of higher alert due the threat level. Just North of NKP city was a known Communist Terrorist crossing point.

I lived just north of NKP city, so I saw the flares and searchlights which were being used by the Air Force. Occasionally, they’d light up the sky so bright at night I could have gone outside and read a book, but my neighbors and I didn’t have a clue what was going on. As Andy, a recent Peace Corps Community Development Department volunteer in Thailand, told me, Peace Corps wanted to keep us stupid. In that sense, things probably haven’t changed that much in forty years, but, more to the point, the place I write about in this memoir was a place where few understood what was going on politically, a place where those who knew what was going on militarily weren’t about to share their information with people like me.

While the Peace Corps Thailand program was erroneously described as being the very first country program in a recent Peace Corps 50th anniversary documentary, it was initiated in 1962 which made it, if not the first, at least one of the first Peace Corps programs. Still, there was a predecessor to Peace Corps, that being IVS (International Voluntary Services; dissolved in 2002) which was founded by pacifists of Quaker, Brethren, and Mennonite persuasions. IVS was active in Laos and Vietnam before and during the early years of Peace Corps, and, while IVS never had a program in Thailand itself, its history provides some insight as to why we were supposed to be working for Thailand’s Community Development Department, cumbersome though its bureaucracy was, instead of for ARD or USAID (United States Agency for International Development) as part of America’s counterinsurgency team.

In an article entitled A Visit to Laos (published on July 23rd of 1970 for The New York Review of Books), Naom Chomsky describes an IVS operation in Laos which had existed for fifteen years, and which, after the 1962 Geneva Agreements on Laos, been offered a USAID contract. The reason for this contract, according to Chomsky, was that the American government, which previously had supported mostly urban programs in Laos, had made the decision to channel more funds to the countryside and do this through an American-controlled apparatus so as to reduce corruption. Chomsky writes, in part, as follows:

Vientiane [the capital of Laos] is a place of rumor and suspicion… .

Parts of the nominally Government-controlled areas are actually run by the CIA, and no one seems sure where the CIA ends and the civilian aid program, USAID, begins…

The plan [an impact program involving helping villagers to build whatever they might need] required the presence of Americans in the villages, and IVS filled the breach. As one volunteer puts it, IVS became a private agency recruiting young, relatively idealistic Americans to engage in politically motivated counter-insurgency programs in Laos.

In later years [the late 1960s] IVS workers were the only Americans in many rural areas. Some were disturbed by the American Government connection. They felt that they were serving in effect as propaganda agents for the US and the RLG [Royal Lao Government] by virtue of their control of USAID commodities, and that they were inadvertently giving military information to the American Government. Even in some urban centers there has been dissatisfaction among volunteers with USAID policy, which is administered in some cases by retired military officers.

Since late 1969, IVS workers have been withdrawn to provincial capitals for security reasons (several had been killed), and the scale of the operation was also reduced. Many of the volunteers then joined USAID. In many areas where IVSers formerly worked there is now no American or RLG presence.

Whether IVS efforts actually help the RLG is open to question; some feel that IVS activities simply reinforce the RLGs image of incompetence and corruption by showing that the rural assistance program must be implemented by Americans. Nevertheless, the IVS can hardly serve as anything other than an instrument of American foreign policy in Laos.

The American involvement is enormous. The Gross National Product of Laos is estimated at about $150 million a year. In the fiscal year ending in June, 1969, USAID spent about $52 million. In addition, $92 was spent on direct military assistance.

By August of 1971, when I arrived in Thailand, the IVS program in Laos had ceased to exist, and IVS was being forced out of Vietnam as well. Hugh Manke, the last IVS Director for Vietnam, put it this way. The main reason (for shutting down the IVS operation in Vietnam) is that IVS is regarded as a political liability to the American government. The volunteers in Vietnam have often seen the gross injustices and inadequacies of American policies in Vietnam and feel the necessity of speaking out. We constantly find the interest of the Vietnamese people and the interests of the United States government conflict. (from US Voluntary Unit Leaving Vietnam, by Gloria Emerson, special to the New York Times; Aug. 4, 1971)

According to Emerson, American officials were saying that the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture, which had been sponsoring IVS in South Vietnam, came to the conclusion that that IVS volunteers were no longer technically oriented. Also, according to Emerson, many of the young antiwar Americans serving in IVS were unhappy that their projects were funded by USAID, and many believed that both the Saigon government and the US Embassy were eager to see them leave before the South Vietnamese presidential election in October (of 1971). IVS is a potential threat—I suppose they see an IVSer getting up in the middle of the elections and saying, ‘It’s all a charade,’ Menke told Emerson. (ibid.)

Of course, this wasn’t Peace Corps. This was IVS. I knew nothing about the history of IVS when I was a volunteer with Peace Corps, but, after reading about the IVS experience in Vietnam and Laos, it became more clear why Peace Corps would have wanted to maintain at least the perception of a separation between itself and USAID. After all, if the Thais had perceived that Peace Corps was funded by USAID, they might well have believed that Peace Corps was a CIA lackey in Thailand.

And Peace Corps may have accomplished that to a great degree. At least I’ve heard, and heard even recently, that the Peace Corp program in Thailand is considered to be one of the most successful Peace Corps programs in the world. While that information makes me feel a bit perverse for even wanting to put this memoir into print, it also gives me hope to think that the Thailand Peace Corps program has thrived while using volunteers, like myself, who never bought into the system, or, perhaps more aptly, who never bought into the system of working around the system while pretending the system they were working around was really working.

As a final note to this introduction, I’d like to bring attention to the work of author Paul Chappell whose first book, entitled Will War Ever End? A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21st Century, was published in 2009. I learned of Chappel, a West Pointe graduate and a veteran of the Iraq War, when reading an interview in the April, 2011 issue of The Sun by Leslee Goodman entitled Fighting With Another Purpose, Chappel Describes His Strategies For Peace. Paul Chappel is apparently working on his peace project full time, going out and influencing people while I just sit here writing words which people may never even read. I’d like to wish him well.

Jim Jouppi, Grand Rapids, Michigan September 5, 2011

Timeline

(Note that italicized entries concern events which occurred in Thailand. Italicized words in later chapters are defined in the glossary at the end.)

Dec 1, 1942 Founding of CPT (Communist Party of Thailand)

1954 According to the Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference, endorsed by every nation at the Conference except the United States, Vietnam is divided into two zones as a cease fire accord to separate French troops from those of Ho Chi Minh. According the Final Declaration, this is a provisional military demarcation line that should not in any was be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.

April 1954-1957 Daniel Ellsberg serves as a lieutenant in the United States Marines. (Wikipedia).

1959 Ellsberg begins working for the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization whose entire focus is the military aspects of the Cold War.

1960 Thailand initiates a national community development program designed to bring about a closer partnership between the Thai government and Thai citizens at the local level.

March 1, 1961 President Kennedy signs Executive Order 10924, creating Peace Corps.

Fall of 1961 Daniel Ellsberg, as part of a high level Pentagon task force, visits the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Vietnam with a go anywhere, see anything kind of clearance. (Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, by Daniel Ellsberg, Penguin Books, 2002, p. 3)

Jan. 1962 Peace Corps Thailand Group 1 arrives in Thailand.

1964 Ellsberg joins the Department of Defense as a special assistant to John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

1964 Thailand’s Accelerated Rural Development Program (ARD) is launched with the signing of an agreement between the Thai government and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission to Thailand (USOM) for the purpose of negating the threat of the CPT (Communist Party of Thailand).

July 30 and 31, 1964 CIA owned Nastys (purchased from Norway) shell two of North Vietnam’s coastal islands. (Secrets, p. 13)

Aug. 2, 1964 In order to demonstrate America’s rejection of North Vietnam’s claims of limits of American freedom of the seas and to provoke North Vietnam to turn on coast defense radar so that American destroyers can plot their defenses in preparation for possible air or sea attacks, the United States sends the Maddox, a patrol boat commanded by Captain John J. Herrick, within eight miles of the North Vietnamese mainland and within four miles of their islands. (Secrets, p.13)

Aug. 2, 1964 North Vietnamese P1 boats chase the Maddox back into International Waters and fire torpedoes, all of which miss the Maddox. The Maddox is successful in driving them off. (Secrets, p. 13)

Aug. 2, 1964 After being told of the daylight attack on the Maddox, President Johnson discusses the results of the July 31 covert attacks on North Vietnams’ islands and approves the more covert raids by CIA Nastys for the nights of August 3 and August 5. (Secrets, p. 16)

10:42 AM Aug 4, 1964 (Washington time) Captain John J. Herrick begins sending urgent cables to the Pentagon indicating he is under attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats. A steady stream of combat updates lasts for two hours, then tapers off for another hour and suddenly stops. (Secrets, p. 7-9)

6 PM (approximately) Aug. 4, 1964 Captain Herrick sends a cable indicating that all but his first torpedo report should be considered doubtful because of a suspicion that his sonar man was not hearing missiles but rather the Maddox’s own propeller beat. (Much later, after being shown evidence from the Maddox’s log, Herrick is convinced that his long-held conviction that at least the first torpedo report had been valid was unfounded.) (Secrets, p. 10)

11:37 PM Aug. 4, 1964 Johnson informs the American public on national television that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, have attacked U.S. warships on routine patrol in International Waters. He calls this a deliberate pattern of naked aggression, and says that evidence for the second attack, like the first, was unequivocal and that it had been unprovoked. He says that the United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, was responding in order to deter North Vietnam and to keep the war from growing wider. (Ellsberg, Secrets, p. 12)

Aug. 7, 1964 Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing all necessary measures to repel attacks against U.S. forces and all steps necessary for the defense of U.S. allies in Southeast Asia.

Aug. 7, 1965 Thai Communist insurgents launch an assault on security forces at Na Bua village in Nakohn Panome’s That Panome District. This is later referred to as Gun-Firing Day.

Oct. 1966 Near the end of the flight home after a fact-finding mission to Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara summons Daniel Ellsberg to the rear of the plane to help him settle an argument he’s been having with presidential assistant Bob Komer. Ellsberg’s account of what then happened is as follows.

McNamara: Dan, you’re the one who can settle this. Komer here is saying that we’ve made a lot of progress in pacification. I say that things are worse than they were a year ago. What do you say?

Ellsberg: Well, Mr. Secretary, I’m most impressed with how much the same things are as they were a year ago. They were pretty bad then, but I wouldn’t say it was worse now, just about the same.

McNamara (triumphantly): "That proves what I’m saying! We’ve put more than a hundred thousand troops into the country over the last year, and there’s been no improvement. Things aren’t any better at all. That means the underlying situation is really worse! Isn’t that right?"

Ten minutes later, once on the ground, McNamara strides over to the mikes and says to the crowd of reporters, Gentlemen, I’ve just come back from Vietnam, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that we’re showing great progress in every dimension of our effort. I’m very encouraged by everything I’ve seen and heard on my trip…

(Secrets, pp. 140, 141)

July 1967 Ellsberg resigns from his position with the Department of Defense and returns to the Rand Corporation.

Mid 1967 Secretary of Defense McNamara commissions a report officially entitled History of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam 1945-68, since known as The Pentagon Papers—a massive top-secret history of the United States role in Indochina. The work takes a year and a half. The result is approximately 3,000 pages of narrative history and more than 4,000 pages of appended documents—an estimated total of 2.5 million words in 47 volumes. The report reveals that once the basic objective of policy was set, the internal debate on Vietnam from 1950 until mid-1967 dealt almost entirely with how to reach those objectives rather than with the basic direction of policy. The study relates that American governments from the Truman Administration onward felt it necessary to take action to prevent Communist control over all of Vietnam. As a rationale for policy, the domino theory—that if South Vietnam fell, other countries would inevitably follow—is repeated in endless variations for nearly two decades. (The Pentagon Papers, Bantam Books, July, 1971, p. xix)

The {Pentagon Papers] study… was formally open-ended, and work continued into early 1969. Its authors and supervisors decided to end it with Johnson’s speech of March 31, 1968 in which he announced he would not seek re-election. A three page Epilogue at the end of the study begins with the April 3, 1968 announcement by Hanoi that it would negotiate with the United States and goes on: The first step on what would undoubtedly be a long and tortuous road to peace apparently had been taken. In one dramatic action, President Johnson had for a time removed the issue of Vietnam from domestic political contention. (Secrets, pp. 226, 227)

Feb. 1968 McNamara resigns from the Johnson Administration to become President of the World Bank.

Nov. 1968 After his appointment by President–Elect Richard Nixon, to become the National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger asks Harold Rowen, President of Rand, for a study of Vietnam options to prepare for his first National Security Council meeting in January of 1969. Rowen asks Daniel Ellsberg to direct the study. (Secrets, p. 231)

Dec. 27, 1968 After going over Rand’s Options Study with Kissinger, Ellsberg talks to him about the of effect having clearances above top secret and of having access to information one hasn’t previously known existed. He tells Kissinger that much of this hidden information is inaccurate and misleading, but that having access to it can cause one to stop listening to and learning from those who don’t have such access. He tells him that dealing with a person who doesn’t have clearances can be a process of lying carefully to him about what one knows and warns him of how he’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than his own. According to Ellsberg, Kissinger listened to his long warning without interruption. (Secrets, pp. 237-239)

July 20, 1969 President Nixon makes an historic interplanetary telephone call to Neil Armstrong and Edwin Buzz Aldred, Apollo 11 astronauts, shortly after they landed on the moon. Because of what you have done, Nixon says, the heavens have become part of man’s world and, as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth.

It is a great honor, Armstrong replies, for us to be representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations. (Apollo 7 Mission Log)

Sept. 1969 Ellsberg reads the Pentagon Papers document in its entirety for the first time. In so doing, he learns that every president from Truman to Nixon had purposely misled the American public and Congress about what was going on in Vietnam. He comes to believe that the Vietnam War, for all intents