Engineer Memoirs
always been grateful to General Anthis. His magnanimous support for my effort
was one more proof of the great value of the personal relationships established at
the National War College.
At about this time an officer arrived in Saigon to join my staff who had been our
headquarters commandant in Paris when I was the secretary of the general staff
there. Colonel Jack Hertzog was the most outstanding can-do officer I have ever
known. He was the kind of an officer who would complain to me if I had not
assigned him an "impossible task" that day. In Paris he had accomplished difficult
tasks like getting a new roof for our headquarters when there was no money for
one. He also produced an air conditioner on 24-hour notice over a 4th of July
holiday when General Norstad thought that General De Gaulle should have one in
his office.
Hertzog found a burned-out building in Saigon and somehow or other got the
Army Corps of Engineers to send him lumber, plumbing and electrical supplies.
In about a month I had a more modem office than General Paul D. Harkins who
commanded MACV. Hertzog even had the walls covered with silk wallpaper. I
was nervous about this because General Alden K. Sibley had been reprimanded for
having the bathroom in his St. Louis office covered with silk wallpaper. But
Hertzog was very careful not to get me implicated and always covered his own
tracks. When the office was ready for occupancy, complete with a large kidney
shaped desk, I joked with Hertzog that a comer of my office looked rather bare.
I told him it needed some " j u n k " to spruce it up. The next day, Hertzog brought
in a beautiful 10-foot model of a Chinese junk. He had taken me literally. From
then on I never joked with Hertzog about sprucing up my office.
As soon as we moved into our new office building we went into high gear and
developed about 30 to 40 experiments. These were of two types: how to assist the
Vietnamese nation-building concept and how to help counterinsurgency operations.
In the first category we dug deep wells for water supply, helped establish pig
farms, dug large ponds for growing fish, helped fishermen get boats and nets, and
implemented a half dozen other such projects. Most of the money for these
endeavors came from charitable organizations in the United States and Europe.
Germany contributed the largest share of the money for these nation-building
projects.
Another one of our projects was to stimulate ways of improving rice production.
The Japanese had, in the days before World War II, experimented with ways of
getting more rice per square meter of rice paddy. They tried different spacings of
rice seedlings, different types of fertilizers, and different planting schedules. As
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