The Broken Beads

Book excerpt: This story, and a perusal of the accompanying chronology, reveals how a fierce and united people have achieved their freedom against superior forces. The author retired from the federal government, as a senior intelligence analyst, after thirty-six years of service. He served three years in the Army during the Korean War but was assigned to the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) in the District of Columbia area in late 1952. Shortly after his assignment, the agency was renamed the National Security Agency (NSA). After his enlistment was up, he converted to civilian service with the NSA. He was sent to Germany as an adviser to a military intelligence battalion (Army Security Agency), that was deployed along the East-West German border and then returned to the headquarters NSA. The writer has traveled extensively in Vietnam. He has visited places on the coast from just south of Hue to Vung Tau, the mountains around Kontum and Pleiku, the Saigon area including Ben Hoa Cholon, and in the Vietnamese delta, My Toe and all the way to the town of Ha Tien on the Vietnam/Cambodian border on the Gulf of Thailand. He met and conversed with many native Vietnamese, vacationed with a Vietnamese family (a girlfriend, her mother and a young son) in the old French beach vacation town of Vung Tau, and for a brief time taught English to some young Vietnamese monks who gave him a tour of their residence and introduced him to their ways of life. After returning to NSA he used his off duty time to volunteer in the attempt to get Vietnamese refugee families together. He assisted at one of the refugee camps and for a time sponsored one, three-generation, family providing them with a residence and trying to familiarize them with the American ways of life. He has obtained official correspondences from the Truman library concerning Vietnam, including a message from Ho Chi Minh.