It is important to place this article in historical context. The United States had been heavily involved in the Vietnam war since 1964-1965, but by 1971 troops were being withdrawn from combat operations - though the bombing of North Vietnam did not peak until late 1972. In only 3 more years, Saigon was surrendered. But Tom was long gone by then, back in the United States, writing his memoirs.
TOM BOYD COMING HOME
Bangkok - November 29, 1971 Tom Boyd is a building man, a tall Lincolnesque American who has spent 20 years in half a dozen third world countries, mostly as an agent of U.S. foreign aid. Boyd is a symbol of much of what is noble about American foreign assistance to poor countries. But also of much of what is tragic.
Boyd is sixty, a native of northeastern Texas, who was boss in construction gangs in Arkansas by the time he was 20. Due to retire next July, he already has his bags packed, hoping the hassle over foreign aid appropriations will evict him early from his crumbling, yellow-stucco office in this American air-base-cum-market town of northeastern Thailand. Tom Boyd is tired.
Boyd is one of four AID employees in Ubon. His job is to advise local officials on building country roads. "It's kind of like the county highway department back home," he says. And every week he treks over the two provinces to which he is assigned, writing poetry in large legible hand on long yellow paper to absorb the endless hours in his jeep.
Boyd's poetry is sour. It often mocks the anti-Communist crusade and slams the military. Despises bureaucrats. Gives no pedestals to presidents. Sympathizes only with women and children. Boyd builds better bridges than poetry. But both are stolid and together. Poetry keeps him sane, Boyd says.
"They say I've got it out for the military," Boyd apologizes, "That just isn't so."
Boyd sometimes wins little victories. Recently, he was able to persuade the Air Force not to post pictures of Thai girls reported to have venereal disease on the bulletin board outside the base post office. "They don't post pictures of G.I.'s who get VD. And what if somebody were to slip a picture of the governor's daughter up there? Where would we all be then?"
But the tragedy of Tom Boyd's life is that more often than not he loses. From 1960-67, at the peak of his career, he served in Vietnam. He supervised the modernization of Tan Son Nhut Airport, when it was intended for commercial use. He saw to the building of a water supply system to Saigon from war zone D, before war zone D was unsafe for Americans. The only official American at Tan Son Nhut in the early sixties, Boyd became Ambassador Nolting's representative in one of the early intramural wars in Vietnam. "They (the Air Force) used to land their jets. I'd go out and tell them how glad we were to see them and that they had one hour to refuel, eat lunch and be on their way," he remembers.
"One time this full bird colonel got off. I gave him a ride into town, told him it was not the Ambassador's policy to allow American jets in the country. He went red. You know what he said? He said, 'Then we'll move that ambassador.' I didn't believe they could. But that is exactly what they did."
During the 1963 Saigon coup d'etat, Boyd overheard the last conversation between Ambassador Lodge and President Diem. "And it wasn't all in the Pentagon papers, either," Boyd recalls. (He'll tell you about it in the memoirs he plans to write when he retires to Houston.)
That conversation made Boyd an even stauncher dove. He tried to thwart military subordination of AID's local assistance programs. Westmoreland's command won. Tom Boyd was exiled to the outback of Thailand. His career has idled here ever since.
However, Boyd, like AID in Thailand, is far from free to ignore the military and their priorities. In fact, the Accelerated Rural Development Program of which Boyd is a part, is basically counter-insurgency as much a part of the American region-wide effort to defeat Communism as Ubon Air Base, from where Air Force jets scream off daily, voicing their litany of destruction and death for Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Boyd, whether he fully realizes it or not, is something other than the benevolent road builder.
ARD began in 1965, operating in Ubon and five other provinces of Thailand buffering Laos. It has subsequently been expanded to include 26 provinces, almost all of which are thought to suffer an "insurgency threat."
Road-building has always been a big part of ARD because roads permit police and government officials more access to the countryside and promote tighter links between rural farmers and the overall economy. By the end of 1970 ARD had built 3,328 miles of road. About 210 of these miles are in Ubon and Si Sa Ket provinces, the provinces in which Boyd works. Two million dollars worth of road-building equipment has been ordered and soon will be provided by the U.S. government for work in these two provinces. The U.S. has also provided Boyd and his predecessor.
Currently the major road building project in the two provinces is in Si Sa Ket, which shares a border with both Laos and Cambodia. ARD is helping to build a road paralleling the border in the southern section of the province. With the road has come border patrol police and, just as important, if not more so, 'the spooks.' American intelligence authorities have set up a guard center, near the southernmost town of Namyin.
Indication of where American priorities in the area lie for the future is not hard to come by. Boyd is the only "straight" AID employee in the four-man roster. One other is an adviser to the border patrol police, principally a light mobile counter-guerrilla force. Another is a liaison officer for CIA operation in Laos. The fourth runs the communication center at Namyin. When Boyd goes home, moreover, he won't be replaced.
Boyd does not believe in a Communist threat in northeastern Thailand. "I've always said that I could put all the Communists in this area in the back of a pickup truck. That doesn't mean that you can't find people to shoot at you if you go stirring things up. But you can find them in Louisiana or Arkansas too. There are plenty of bandits, moonshiners, and people cutting illegal timber. You go messing with them and they "shoot you. That's all."
What Boyd does believe in is roads. "I know progress when I see it. When you build a road you kind of air a place out. One of the first things that happens is one of those little buses starts down there. And the people all come out to watch it go by. I remember, I did it myself when I was a boy, when Austin was ten thousand miles away and Washington fifty million."
Boyd knows about the military uses that are made of the roads and he accepts counter-insurgency "because it's the only way we'd ever get the dollars from Washington and baht from Bangkok." But what he sees are teachers and doctors coming down his roads, and boys who have learned to drive tractors. Roads transcend the short sighted politics of today. They set in motion change that wakes up the people. To Tom Boyd, roads are revolutionary. "And Bangkok had better wake up," he says in his more optimistic moments.
But it is hard to be convinced by Boyd, even to believe he himself is always convinced. Roads are tentacles of power as much as articles of progress.
"You know," Tom Boyd said, stroking his silver Hemingway beard and looking over the pool of scrapers and bulldozers at the provincial workshop. "The Thais are some of the cleverest people I've ever worked with. If we pulled out tomorrow, they'd make out all right. Their economy would have some setbacks but they need that. I don't agree with a lot of Americans that the Thai has just got his hand out. He's got his hand out because we've got our pocket book open."
But then Tom Boyd is tired. Tom Boyd has had enough. Tom Boyd is going home.
I don't know if cousin Tom got around to writing his memoirs. He died in 1995, in Georgetown, Texas. From comments made by his daughter, Barbara Moore, I suspect he did not.
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