Vietnam to Thieves’ Island

By Jim Collins

This book is full of anecdotes of people and events encountered over a lifetime of sailing in South East Asia, Australia, and the Middle East—treasure hunters, magicians, the American Mayor of Osaka, smugglers, a brave flier, and lone sailors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Nov 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543748598

Jim Collins

Jim Collins is a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick, and a Socratic advisor to leaders in the business and social sectors. Having invested more than a quarter-century in rigorous research, he has authored or coauthored six books that have sold in total more than 10 million copies worldwide. They include Good to Great, Built to Last, How the Mighty Fall, and Great by Choice. Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to his work in the business sector, Jim has a passion for learning and teaching in the social sectors, including education, healthcare, government, faith-based organizations, social ventures, and cause-driven nonprofits. In 2012 and 2013, he had the honor to serve a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 2017, Forbes selected Jim as one of the 100 Greatest Living Business Minds. Jim has been an avid rock climber for more than forty years and has completed single-day ascents of El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite Valley. Learn more about Jim and his concepts at his website, where you’ll find articles, videos, and useful tools. jimcollins.com

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CHAPTER 1

Into Vietnam,1965

My first brush with an American construction company was with Bechtel, which built New Zealand’s only oil refinery at Marsden Point in the North Island. I worked as an engineer with a local steel construction company called Whangarei Engineering and Construction, which fabricated much of the steelwork around the refinery, and I became friendly with the Bechtel personnel.

But the defining influence on my future was a Canadian colleague who persuaded me to join him on a voyage from Auckland to New York City on a ship called the University of the Seven Seas. My cabin was close to the engine room and on the same level, like the bilge. First-class passengers were forty feet above, and I never saw them. The first meal was the best, and those that followed were merely fodder. The German crew were diligent in their pursuit of unattached females. I spent a lot of time in a lifeboat with books from the ship’s library.

The ship stopped at Tahiti where the top tourist attraction was the communal toilet run by pickpockets who were in cahoots with squatting, squirting girls with magnificent suntanned derrieres. Half a dozen wallets were stolen, including mine. I would not be able to redeem my traveller’s cheques until I arrived in New York City. A slug of bourbon and soda was half the price of a beer, and I have never lost the taste for Jack Daniel’s Black.

An old Hollywood actor called Billy Shakespeare showed me beefcake photographs of himself and Errol Flynn in their prime. They were magnificent specimens. Billy reckoned that he was as good an actor as Flynn, but Flynn made it because he married the right woman. Crossing the equator introduced me to the competitiveness of the Jewish race in the slippery pole competition. It slowly dawned on me that the little, aggressive fellow was trying to beat me to death with a pillow. I reacted in time and managed to dislodge him.

Meanwhile, in Saigon, Vietnam, a young American, John B. Cone, worked as an engineer for Hydrotechnic Corporation, New York, which designed and supervised the construction of the Saigon Metropolitan Water Plant. It was the largest and most expensive water plant in the world, probably costing half a billion of today’s dollars. Bien Hoa was a town some thirty miles north of Saigon and was surrounded by US military camps. Cone decided to buy a bar in Bien Hoa, and on one fateful night put 120,000 piastres in his pocket. At the legal rate of VN$73.5 to US$1.00, it was only US$1,633. He jumped on a motorcycle driven by a fellow employee called Cuong. During the journey, they were intercepted. Cone was shot and killed, and the money was taken. The Vietcong got the blame, of course.

Hydrotechnic Corporation was devastated. Its staff could not believe their luck when a naïve Australian engineer walked in and took the job. Hydrotechnic was probably the foremost water plant designer in the world. An émigré, Ross Nebolsine, who was president, had various hydraulic patents to his name. He and his vice presidents took me to lunch and discussed the sexual peccadillos of Jack Kennedy. I could not believe the way these guys spoke about the recently assassinated president. I was staggered by the salary and benefits. At seventeen in Australia, I had flipped newspapers for three US$3 a week. In New Zealand, I had worked for US$25 a week. Hydrotechnic paid a tax-free US$800 a month plus housing and health.

In 1965, the universal long hauler was the Boeing 707, which flew from New York, via Los Angeles and Hawaii, to Saigon. The flight time was eighteen hours. Returning Vietnamese sang patriotic songs as the plane descended to Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The US military build-up was visibly apparent with the landing strip flanked with aircraft of all descriptions. Saigon was still a city dominated by French culture and cuisine. The Vietcong did not completely control the surrounding countryside, so it was still possible to drive from Saigon to Dalat, 180 miles into the highlands.

The Saigon Metropolitan Water Plant was in the early days of construction. It was comprised of a raw-water pump station on the Dong Nai River, forty miles north of Saigon, and the treatment plant complex at Thu Duc, twenty miles north of Saigon. The pump station, the treatment plant, and the distribution piping in Saigon were connected with a pipeline that was six feet in diameter. The project was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contractor for the pump station and treatment plant was Hawaiian Dredging, a subsidiary of the Dillingham Corporation. B56 Special Forces Group Airborne had long been established on the northern perimeter of the treatment plant. As a young engineer, I had a ball working with the old-time American construction personnel of Hawaiian Dredging on the treatment plant complex and the raw-water pump station.

People in Vietnam were classified into three categories. The Vietnamese were first country nationals. Americans were second country nationals. People from the rest of the world—Filipinos, Koreans, Australians, Germans, English, and so forth—were third country nationals (TCNs). TCNs were not allowed in the American PX or post exchange. I dressed up in a hybrid soldier’s uniform and shopped at the PX anyway. Once an Australian sergeant saw me and laughed. He said, What army do you come from, son?

One day I counted sixty-two Huey choppers passing over the pump station, which though very remote, was never threatened by the Vietcong. I suppose everybody needed water, and the Vietcong would inherit the water plant if they won the war.

My Vietnamese counterpart was a mild-mannered, US-trained engineer called Liem. He had driven a Citroen CV4 from Saigon to the treatment plant. The CV4 was a strange little French automobile with a horizontal gear shift, and it rolled around on a very soft suspension. One morning, poor Liem drove over a Vietcong mine, and he and his car were completely destroyed. A sobbing Vietnamese colleague dumped a charred leg bone on my desk and cried, Mr Liem! I went to the funeral, which was attended by a troupe of Buddhist wailers. Twenty minutes of listening to them affects you like no other of life’s experiences. I felt like jumping into the grave alongside the coffin. The wailers somehow wring out all emotions in your body. I have never been to another funeral since, not even to my father’s and mother’s.

I drove a Scout van that positioned my eyes about five feet above the road. One day, I drove the Scout down to the low, swampy northeast corner of the plant to check an overflow outfall structure. A cobra reared up in front of the Scout with its hood fully extended and looked me right in the eye. It was a really big boy. I frantically wound up the window and backed up furiously.

For a year, Hawaiian Dredging threw a monthly cocktail party on the top floor of the Caravelle Hotel. It was the highlight of the month, so everybody dressed up and enjoyed themselves. It was paid for out of the so-called Piastre Revolving Fund. After a while, the director of the Saigon Metropolitan Water Office, who controlled the fund, decreed no more cocktail parties. The participants would have cheerfully paid for it, but nobody got around to organizing it.

When the water plant was eventually finished, it was handed over to the Saigon Water Office, and the Hawaiian Dredging personnel returned to Hawaii.

My first import was my brother, Arthur Collins, nicknamed Hawk. He was working for peanuts as an electrician in the far north of Western Australia. I sent him an air ticket from Perth to Saigon. In those days, I fancied myself a creative résumé writer, and I wrote him up as a supervisor electrician able to speak a few aboriginal dialects. He immediately landed a job up country with Page Communications working on the Integrated Wideband Communication System, IWCS. Hawk spent a couple of years up country and then secured a job with the US Embassy in Saigon. He spent a total of nine years in Vietnam, married Oanh, his secretary, and flew to Bangkok on the last plane out just before Saigon was taken by the North Vietnamese Army.

After returning to Australia, he was contacted by his old boss, Les Boggs, who was in the States. He asked Hawk, Do you want a job with the US Embassy in Canberra?

Hawk finished up working a lifetime for Uncle Sam, who gave him a long-service medal and a nice pension.

His mother-in-law, Madame Dieppe, was remarkably prescient. Before the Vietnam War started, she moved her family from Hanoi to Saigon. Before the war ended, she moved the family to the United States. She was a tiny lady who was fluent in Vietnamese, French, and English. I met her only three times on three different continents: North America, Asia, and Australia.

CHAPTER 2

Boned Chicken and Nuoc Man

In 1968, the Puritans in the New York office of Hydrotechnic Corporation finally heard that my American boss was having a torrid affair with his lovely, petite, French-Vietnamese secretary. God knows they worked hard enough. They toted home volumes of files each night and arrived at about ten the next morning, thoroughly exhausted. Unfortunately, he had an American wife and two children back in the States. Finally, the outraged New York greybeards sacked him, and I inherited his job. Construction of the water plant was complete, and potable water flooded into Saigon. USAID lissued a contract for the maintenance, operation, and training (MOT), mainly to advise the Vietnamese on how to run the plant.

In those days, the Asian loss-of-face syndrome was a major social consideration, and a gwailo advisor was an utter contradiction because any advice from the gwailo meant a loss of face to the Asian. Gwailo is Cantonese slang for an American or European. It means ghost man.

The director of the SMWO was a tiny character with a physique like a Coke bottle and the cunning of a rattlesnake. He was my friend, Mr. Thuy (Twee), with whom I drank gallons of green tea.

At the completion of the contract, Hawaiian Dredging’s construction equipment reverted to the Saigon Metropolitan Water office, SMWO, which left it in a large yard where shortly the lush jungle engulfed it. The SMWO eventually decided to auction off this equipment. Mr. Thuy’s business cohorts extracted starter motors, injector pumps, and other essentials from the cranes and dozers and therefore knew exactly the knockdown price to bid, with the regulation kickback to the director. Meanwhile, pilfering from the plant was so intensive that it was soon operating on gravity alone from the intake at the Dong Nai River about twenty miles north. Miles of copper instrumentation tubing vanished. The four-inch bronze sluice gate stems were dismantled and disappeared into the night. The sluice gates were then operated by chain blocks.

This nation-wide ransacking of American projects was common throughout Vietnam. My brother worked on a project high on a mountain outside of Danang. Satellites were of the distant future, so the Integrated Wideband Communication System was set up on tall mountains around Vietnam, the intent being that General Westmoreland could phone from Pentagon East and immediately contact his subordinates to obtain essential info like body counts, figures on the conversion of hearts and minds, and so forth.

The IWCS buildings were enormous sheds, each containing four huge White generators with centrifugal oil filtration designed to run for twenty years without stopping. Page Communications completed the IWCS and handed it over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, to guard. Within months, the ARVN stripped the galvanized roofing, walls, and doors and flogged it on the black market. The intense tropical rain wiped out everything electrical in six months, and very soon the US military was back to carrier pigeons.

To comprehend this, one must understand the theory of comparative wealth. Suppose a bunch of well-heeled, intergalactic tourists landed on earth and saw that poor earthlings did not have golden toilet seats. The first thing you would do is rip off the lid and flog it, and then perch contentedly on the porcelain. It’s the same as someone stealing a dinghy and outboard towed by a million-dollar yacht because the dinghy represents a year’s pay to the stealer. If a Rolls Royce towed a gold bar on a piece of string, surely you would shake your head at such stupidity, cut the string, and run off with the ingot.

My monthly USAID report noted the ongoing stripping of the water plant, and soon I was called to mahogany row to report to my USAID superior, George Reasonover, whose Vietnamese girlfriend