My Summer Vacation on the Cambodian Border

By Desmond Cormier

My Summer Vacation on the Cambodian Border is a memoir of the unlikely and extraordinary boyhood year of Desmond Cormier who lived in Saigon with his family during the escalation of the Vietnam war. From exotic excursions through the streets and markets of Old Saigon, to the dangerous and thrilling summer visits to the provinces along the Cambodian border, Cormier recalls this most memorable year of his life with straightforward clarity and delicately details the unfolding loss of a boyhood innocence, and its unusually rapid transitions towards adulthood, accelerated by the many life changing events, both in the Vietnamese country, and within Cormier's family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350936711

Book preview

IT’S A COLD NIGHT IN DIXIE

I remember vividly the day my path in life changed.  I was swinging on the thick manila hawser rope my father had hung from an upper limb of the big oak tree in our backyard.  We would pull it up to the roof of our house and swing down in a long dramatic swoop, missing earth, tree, and all other obstacles by mere inches.  The closer the better.  My family’s life was a lot like that swinging-on-a-rope experience, narrowly avoiding disasters by inches, a continuous exciting adventure.  I don’t know that my parents planned it that way, but that’s how it always seemed to turn out.  Ordinary living was just too boring, just like an ordinary rope swing was too mundane.  If we had no hardships to face, we created them.

That summer afternoon my brother, Richard, and I were at our station on the roof.  We saw a car turn into our driveway.  A man got out and made his way to the front door and knocked. Father answered the door.  The person knocking was with the State Department.  Unknown to us at that time Father had accepted a position with the State Department.

Strangers knocking at the front door was not all that unusual at our house.  Before he retired my father was a major working with the Army Ranger program at Fort Bragg. Soldiers practicing covert operations would stop by at all hours during maneuvers, in civilian clothes, honing their safe-house skills.  They were instructed to cautiously approach our house, knock, and then give the secret passphrase to whoever answered.  Richard and I particularly loved this.  Our older sister, Michelle, was less enthusiastic.  We’d let them in if they said the pass-phrase It’s a cold night in Dixie.  They would then walk through the living room and leave by the kitchen door.

Father had retired as a major from the army after 20 years of service.  He had joined the army in 1942 at the age of 19 to become part of the war effort.  Not as an ordinary soldier in the infantry though, he was recruited by the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA) to work behind the lines because of his fluency in French.  His was not the French learned in academia, but at home, growing up in the hard-scrabble mill town of Woonsocket, Rhode Island where his French-Canadian family had settled at the turn of the century.  During the war he parachuted into France to help organize the Resistance and disrupt the German supply lines prior to the D-Day invasion.  His actions earned him the US Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix De Guerre avec Palme.

Twenty years later he was stationed in Fort Bragg, training Army Rangers in counter insurgency. My father was passed up for promotion to colonel three times.  He realized that the rank of major was as high as he would go, so he decided to retire.  The knock on the front door gave him the opportunity to escape boring civilian life and start an exciting new career in the Foreign Service, with his Army benefits attached.  The offer was to be part of the USAID (US Agency for International Development) mission in South Vietnam.  He was to be a province representative, working with the Montagnard tribes in the Quang Duc highlands, close to an ancient jungle path that snaked north and south across the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia, connecting North and South Vietnam.  The French named it first, calling it La Piste de Ho Chi Minh.  In the states it came to be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  The job offered him autonomy, a steady income, and perhaps most importantly, a dramatic sense of purpose.

FAYETTEVILLE

Living in Fayetteville was a real eye-opener for me.  After living overseas, primarily in Army housing, and going to army schools, life in the Jim Crow south presented some truly perplexing situations.

Arriving in my new school in Fayetteville I felt that something was strange and different.  I couldn’t quite place it.  I ignored my feelings and just chalked it up to the usual transition of being in a new school with no friends to help smooth the way and sort things out.  Then it dawned on me.  All my fellow students were white.  Even though there were a lot of black people in town there were none at Alexander Graham Junior High in marked contrast to the integrated Army schools I had always attended. 

My school experience was re-enforced by my first trip to a movie theater downtown.  Richard and I had decided to go see the new James Bond movie Dr. No.  We spent a lot of time studying the poster on display at the Carolina Theatre.  Bond looked cool to me.  I think Richard was more drawn to the Honey Ryder character played by Ursula Andress.  The theater was air-conditioned, seated some 1100 patrons, and even had a balcony.  During our time overseas we did not have the opportunity to watch a movie from a balcony.  All the Army base theaters were small and had no balcony.  As we approached the ticket booth, we were delighted to see that not only was there a balcony, but it was colored too.  We had no idea what that meant, and it just added to the thrill of sitting way up in a balcony. 

We strolled up to the counter and politely asked for Two tickets for the balcony please.  We were met with a stern look from the middle aged, white southern lady.  Puzzled by her glare we asked again; she replied, this time in an angry voice, Boys you know you can’t go to the colored balcony. 

Richard and I looked at each other wondering what was wrong, confused as to why she had emphasized colored.  We were determined to sit in the balcony and politely asked again, Two tickets for the colored balcony please!  At this point, we were really committed to the colored balcony.  Black and white wouldn’t do.

Now she was really upset and said, If you keep asking about the balcony, I’m gonna hafta call the police!  In shock we replied, Why?  We didn’t do anything wrong!!  Face screwed up in anger she replied, The balcony is for da Negros, the colored folks! Looking around, the realization overwhelmed us – we had stepped into another world. I looked over at Richard.  I could see he had put it together just like I had at that very moment.  The signs over the bathroom, the water fountains, and other doors that said, Colored Only.  We quickly paid for our tickets and went into the theater, downstairs.

I had lived in the deep south of Georgia as young child – Fort Benning – and was too innocent to see the segregated world around me at the time.  Living in Fayetteville as an older child opened my eyes to the inequality of the racism present in America.  Moving to Vietnam would turn the tables on me and put me in a place where I was a minority, immersed in a culture vastly different from white America.  In Vietnam my American values were not wanted and the Vietnam War would reflect the rejection of Western values.

The year before our move to Vietnam, 1963, was full of change and chaos in the states.  The Civil Rights Movement blossomed in the South, highlighted by the March on Washington where Revered Martin Luther King gave his inspirational I Had a Dream speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  Over 200,000 people attended.

The response to the demands for equality, for jobs and freedom, were met by violence and resistance.  The National Guard was sent to the University of Alabama when George Wallace blocked two black students from registering.  In Birmingham, a bomb destroyed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing 4 girls.  The Federal government, led by President Kennedy, did their best to counter the violent resistance in the South.  In November of that year, tragedy struck. JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.  This terrible event had repercussions throughout the United States and the world, especially Vietnam.  Civil Rights were to become the signature issue of the following administration.  As to Vietnam – historians will endlessly debate the different outcomes we may have seen in Southeast Asia if JFK had continued his presidency. 

It was a complicated time, and a lot of good people, with the best intentions, were wrong about Vietnam. President Kennedy was worried about the Communist take-over of Southeast Asia.  He sent aid and military advisors to train the South Vietnamese Army.  Politically, he backed Vietnam’s Catholic President Diem.  Reacting to Diem’s harsh rule, the Viet Cong insurgency grew and became more popular with the South Vietnamese.  The Kennedy administration understood that the Vietnamese government led by Diem was not winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.  A military coup – secretly approved by the Kennedy administration – removed Diem and he was subsequently assassinated along with his brother.  This was late August of 1963.  A military junta took over, led by General Duong Van Minh.  Kennedy and his administration had to decide whether to escalate the US military presence or possibly lose Vietnam to the communist insurgency.  We know the issue was vigorously debated within the cabinet, but it was cut short by Kennedy’s death on the 22nd of November 1963.  The decision on how to proceed was passed to Lyndon Baines Johnson.

By January of 1964, just before our family got on the plane to Vietnam, the US had 16,300 troops in Vietnam, with 122 deaths of record.  My father was part of the State Department’s USAID mission to win over the support of the Vietnamese people. Now I realize the futility of this mission, but in 1963, as a 12-year-old, I was not aware that I was being dropped into the beginnings of a war that would needlessly take so many lives, mostly Vietnamese.

All of life turns on a dime as they say.  I would soon say goodbye to the few friends I had made, and in the best military family style we would once again pack our footlockers and put another posting in the rear-view mirror.

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TAKING A STEP

Sometimes lives change on one decision, but that decision might not be of your making.  The decision to go to Vietnam was made jointly by my parents.  They saw the three of us – Michelle, Richard, and me – as adaptable and endlessly resilient, and any protest on our part about the possible move did not enter the discussion.  That was normal for the time, especially in Army culture.  Mother had a lot to say about it, perhaps more than most Army wives.  She was English, born in Coonor, India, and raised in India.  She was self-reliant and independent.  She took a practical, no-nonsense approach to things – a good trait for an officer’s wife, especially in the case of my father given that he was a dreamer and a romantic under that tough-guy Army exterior.  She famously had strong opinions about everything, and he eventually, but reluctantly, usually came to agree with those opinions.

Father had retired after 20 years in in the army and was trying to establish himself with different private business ventures.  I realize now that these ventures were brilliant, but way ahead of the times.  He designed a duffle bag that had a zip