Battlefield Korea

Good Morning Vietnam

Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Lisa Kowalski worked in the US Army’s Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC) at the US Embassy in the People’s Republic of Vietnam. She had been assigned there about a year ago, after a stint at the US Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia.

After the previous administration had announced a military “pivot” to the Pacific, the US had expanded its military training opportunities and exchange programs with several of the countries that the US had traditionally excluded, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar. This included sales of equipment and training opportunities in countries that had previously been less than friendly with the United States. The new president had kept up this policy, which was applying pressure in a roundabout way to the Chinese.

Lisa was the perfect person for a role at the ODC. She was energetic and outgoing, the consummate salesperson. She loved her job, even though it was a bit complicated to explain quickly what she did every day. As a key player in playing out the China containment policy, her office was coordinating several naval port calls that should start to take place at the end of 2017 and into 2018, along with a potential US naval exercise with the Vietnamese navy. She had a way of getting even the most reserved people to talk to her, even though many men in the culture there naturally treated her with some disregard as a woman; she didn’t let it bother her, and somehow, at the end of the day, everyone was practically her friend.

One of Kowalski’s primary goals in Vietnam was to establish a series of Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) opportunities. These exercises were designed to benefit the host countries while also helping the United States behind the scenes. What would typically happen is a group of military members would come in and demonstrate equipment that would be available for sale, as well as do training of possible scenarios that the host country would be interested in. Covertly, while they were training the foreign militaries, they would also be assessing where some of the country’s weak spots were in terms of defense.

After nine months, Lisa had broken through the different layers of bureaucracy in Vietnam, and had gained approval for the first of what she hoped would be several JCETs in her host county. The first JCET would take place in the end of August, and would bring in a US Special Forces (SF) group and a Navy SEAL team as well. The Army SF team would provide training on counterinsurgency operations, while the SEALs would provide training on how to raid and secure an oil platform. The Vietnamese were very interested in these demonstrations as these were two very real scenarios that the Vietnamese continued to train for, in case hostilities with China should ever resume. Ever since Vietnam had discovered a series of oil and natural gas deposits in the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea, tensions had been high. China continued to lay out new territorial claims, and it was possibly only a matter of time before they followed through on certain threats.

The main person who Lisa had to convince to approve the JCET had been a hard nut to crack, but really it was more out of general stubbornness and being set in his ways that he had ever turned down the invitation. Once he was fully aware of the opportunity, he was actually very excited about the upcoming JCET, even if he never managed to publicly crack a smile. Lisa didn’t care; she was used to working with crusty people. It was almost like a contest for her to see how quickly she could get someone over to her side.

While LTC Kowalski was coordinating Vietnam’s JCET, her counterparts at the US Embassies in Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar were doing the same. Several JCETs would all be happening around the same time, which meant the Army Special Forces battalion and SEAL team stationed in Okinawa, Japan would be very busy in the end of August and into September.