Another item that I ran across in addition the the Curfew Pass mentioned in my last post, was an “appreciation” gift. In Vietnam, one of my primary duties was to work with the Vietnamese military to establish a country-wide VHF radio network. Actually that isn’t what we were really working on, but that was supposedly our mission. I spent a lot of time in the Presidential Palace in Saigon working with a communication group headed by an ARVIN Colonel by the name of Phói (I think that was his real name, but the American pronunciation sounded like Lung and he always insisted that I call him by that name and even spell it as “Lung”.) Col. Lung went to college in California (Stanford) and returned to Vietnam in the early sixties, just about the time the war with the North was gaining momentum. 
I could not have picked a nicer (and more knowledgeable) guy to work with. While the project never achieved the magnitude originally intended, it was by all accounts a success and given a different set of circumstances, I’m pretty sure all the original objectives would have been met.
Col. Lung was aware of who I really worked for and the sensitivity of the program we were implementing. Before I left Vietnam, he presented me with a plaque that displayed the American and Vietnamese flags crossed above an inscription that read
Jimmy
Thank you for doing you know what,
for you know who, you know where, you know when.
Col. Lung
I thought that was very clever, but at the bottom was the graphic shown above… a subtle reminder that we should never take ourselves too seriously.
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