Anecdotes of a Vagabond

About the Book

This dramatic memoir, enhanced with multiple images of Southeast Asian faces, covers the author’s professional career in the Foreign Service, and with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the International Catholic Migration Commission.

The initial portion covers turbulence in three Southeast Asian nations: Thailand, Laos, and wartime Vietnam.  Conversant in the languages of all three countries, the author plunges the reader deeply into the local scene.

The book next treats major refugee crises in which the author was involved during the last quarter of the 20th Century.  They include Indochinese asylum seekers scattered around the Southeast Asian littoral, Somali fleeing the Ogaden, and Afghans crowding into Pakistan and Iran.

During the author’s residence in ten countries, he visited some eighty others.  Descriptions of a few of these official missions will hopefully induce the reader to consult his atlas for exotic locations like Colomancagua in Honduras, Bassikounou in Mauritania, and Mannar in Sri Lanka.

The book concludes with a perspective, lightened with the humor that pervades the narrative, on the controversial American involvement in Vietnam.

About the Author

The author embarked on a 44-year career, all but ten abroad, as an Army Officer in Korea and Japan. He next spent almost a quarter-century in the Foreign Service, principally in Southeast Asia. His first assignment to Vietnam was as Vice Consul in Saigon. Subsequently, he was Principal Officer of the Hue Consulate; Province Senior Advisor, Binh Long; Associate Director, Region II (Nhatrang) of the Agency for International Development; and Consul General at Can Tho. Finally he spent a decade with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, mainly in Geneva but initially in Somalia; and four years with a Geneva-based international non-governmental organization.