Frank Wilson: The Long View from Saigon

Former diplomat Frank Wilson. His first posting, to Saigon in 1973, began with a Khmer Rouge rocket landing outside his hotel in Phnom Penh. Photo: Carla Teng-Westergaard/AMC.

Frank Wilson was shaving when the rocket landed.

It was late 1973. The young New Zealand diplomat had flown into Phnom Penh the evening before to meet his new ambassador. The Khmer Rouge held the Cambodian countryside, and the only way into the capital was by air. The insurgents fired rockets into the city almost at random. "You never knew where they had to come down," Wilson says.

This one came down about 100 metres from his hotel. The blast sent his razor skidding across his neck.

"It wasn't huge danger," he says now, with the understatement of a career diplomat. "But it was a bit of a surprise for me."

He cleaned himself up and went down to breakfast. Waiting for him was Sir Leonard Thornton, New Zealand's ambassador to both South Vietnam and Cambodia. Thornton was one of the country's most distinguished post-war soldiers and a former Chief of Defence Staff, and he had the stature and access to match. He looked up from the table.

"Wilson," he said, "did you hear a slight noise this morning?"

That was Wilson's welcome to Indochina.

An Unfashionable Calling

The popular image of diplomacy is champagne receptions and polished conversation. Wilson laughs at it. "There's a certain amount of that goes on," he says, "but people do actually quite a lot of hard work."

He adds that every posting has its own style, priorities and objectives. Saigon was one of the very few where an ongoing war was the main focus.

His own path started in the 1960s, in an Asian studies course at Victoria University of Wellington that turned a loose interest into a lasting one. New Zealand then offered little serious study of Asian politics, economics or culture, so he looked overseas. The leading Western centres were Michigan State, the Sorbonne, and London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He chose SOAS, and the war in Indochina was fuelling political interest in the region as he studied there.

It was an unusual choice. In the Cold War era, Southeast Asia was not where ambitious young diplomats hoped to be posted. Most of his peers studied European history and languages and aimed for the prestigious desks in London, Washington or Paris. Southeast Asia was associated with war, coups, and poverty. Even Singapore, Wilson recalls, was showing only early "signs of life."

But Wilson saw something else. For a student of politics, the region was, in his words, "almost the centre of the world in terms of diplomatic and military" affairs.

He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1971. There he found a mentor in Paul Edmonds, a former New Zealand ambassador to Vietnam, who confirmed his instinct that Southeast Asia was where a young diplomat could learn the most. For two or three years he worked in Wellington on other files. Then came the summons every junior officer knows: a meeting with someone senior, where your future is presented to you.

"They said, 'Oh, we're sending you to Saigon,'" he recalls. "It was a complete surprise."

It was an uncomfortable one, too. Like many young New Zealanders of his generation, Wilson had opposed American involvement in Vietnam, and New Zealand's part in it.

A Small Nation in a Large War

New Zealand's role in the war was limited and bitterly debated at home. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage records that around 3,500 New Zealand service personnel served in South Vietnam between June 1964 and December 1972, with the force peaking at 543 in 1968; 37 died on active service and 187 were wounded.

The same government history says no treaty compelled New Zealand to fight; the main motive was the need to be seen cooperating with its major ally, the United States. Officials and politicians in Wellington privately doubted whether South Vietnam could be successfully defended.

Wilson's memory matches the record. New Zealand's commitment, he says, came less from events on the ground than from "the relationship with the United States."

Members of Royal New Zealand Artillery carry out a fire mission. M2A2 Howitzer, Vietnam, c. late 1960s. Photo: Wikimedia

By the time he arrived, the soldiers had gone. New Zealand's combat forces had been withdrawn by the end of 1971, and in December 1972 Norman Kirk's newly elected Labour government pulled out the two remaining army training teams. In the same early weeks, the Kirk government also announced diplomatic recognition of communist China. Wilson notes that New Zealand, like many others, was opening a new front of engagement with Asia even as it closed its military one.

What remained in Vietnam was civilian work: aid, education and medicine. The centrepiece was a surgical team in Quy Nhơn, on the central coast. According to the government's official history, this civilian team operated from the Binh Dinh provincial hospital from April 1963 until March 1975, treating civilian war casualties and accident victims and helping train Vietnamese nursing staff. Wilson remembers 10 or 12 New Zealand doctors working there at any one time. They were supported by an embassy of just five New Zealanders.

His job covered the aid programme, which extended into Cambodia, as well as political, economic and military reporting back to Wellington. In practice, that meant watching a country move steadily towards its final battle.

A "Decent Interval"

How that period is remembered depends on who is doing the remembering.

For Washington, the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 brought the long American combat role to an end. President Richard Nixon called it "peace with honor." Wilson, who spent the following years watching the agreement unravel, says Nixon used the phrase "without any sense of irony."

Critics have long argued that the deal was mainly a way out for the United States. Wilson recalls Henry Kissinger, Nixon's chief negotiator, speaking of a "decent interval" between American withdrawal and a communist victory. In Wilson's telling, Kissinger estimated that interval at perhaps ten years. "In fact," Wilson says, "it turned out to be two."

The government of South Vietnam under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu saw the accords as a dangerous concession. They allowed a ceasefire in place, which meant northern forces already inside the South did not have to leave. Wilson contrasts this with Korea, where the armies separated along a line.

In Vietnam, communist units stayed in the Mekong Delta, the central provinces and the highlands, and were reinforced from the North. Thiệu resisted strongly but could not prevent it. Wilson describes 1973 as quiet on the surface, with constant skirmishes underneath "as both sides prepared for the showdown."

In Vietnam today, the conflict is known as the War of Resistance against America. New Zealand's own official teaching resources note that Vietnamese refer to it as the American War. For Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, the 1975 offensive completed a decades-long struggle for independence and reunification that began against French colonial rule. The 30th of April is still celebrated in Vietnam as Reunification Day. For many South Vietnamese, however, and especially for the hundreds of thousands who later fled overseas, the same date marks the loss of their country and the start of exile.

Life in Saigon kept a strange normality almost to the end. By 1974 Thornton had been succeeded as ambassador by Norm Farrell, a courtly diplomat of the old school who had spent much of his career in Europe. On New Year's Day 1975, as Wilson later recounted to North & South, the embassy played cricket against the Australians at Saigon's National Stadium in blazing heat. Farrell stood as umpire in full whites, counting the balls and giving the signals. There was tennis on Sunday mornings, restaurants, and parties.

That New Year's Day was practically the last time such normality was possible. Within four months, Saigon had fallen.

(L–R) Sergeant Val Petterson, New Zealand Army; Sergeant Richard D. Green, U.S. Army; Corporal Eric Watkins, Australian Army; and Inspector Do Van Que of the Saigon Municipal Police. Joint Jeep patrols operated throughout the Vietnamese capital to protect Allied personnel and maintain constant vigilance against Viet Cong activity. Photo: Wikimedia

Too Busy to Be Afraid

In March 1975 the North Vietnamese major offensive broke through in the Central Highlands, and South Vietnamese defences collapsed faster than almost anyone had predicted. As panic spread, thousands of South Vietnamese turned to the foreign governments that had backed their country, seeking visas and seats on the military flights leaving Tan Son Nhut air base. Farrell put Wilson in charge of the evacuation.

Processing those requests became his everyday life. As North & South reported, crowds of applicants gathered at his office door each morning, and interviewing them took all day. The curfew fell too early for him to get home, so he slept in a bed at the back of his office in the embassy, a former French villa. Each morning he changed into a safari suit and sat at a desk by the door to hear the next asylum request. He grew used to people telling him that a refusal would be their "death warrant."

When asked, was he scared? "Basically, we're too busy," Wilson says. "At that age, too, you sort of feel bulletproof."

The requests were not always straightforward as well. A young woman from a well-known Vietnamese family Wilson knew asked his advice, and he urged her to leave. Her mother, she replied, had suggested that if the two of them married, she could go to New Zealand, and she offered him US$5,000 to go along with it. Wilson turned her down gently.

South Vietnamese “safe-conduct pass” (Giấy Thông-Hành) issued during the Vietnam War. The pass was part of the Chiêu Hồi (“Open Arms”) programme, a psychological-warfare initiative designed to encourage Viet Cong and North Vietnamese personnel to defect or surrender to the South Vietnamese government and its allies. Photo: Wikimedia

Like other Western governments, Wellington's first priority was its own citizens. New Zealand estimated it had about 30 nationals left in Saigon and wanted all of them out. A cable from Frank Corner, then New Zealand's Secretary of Foreign Affairs, later obtained by North & South under the Official Information Act, acknowledged that evacuating Vietnamese refugees was desirable, but instructed that New Zealanders take first call on the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) flights.

Communication with home was a daily struggle. Saigon's telephone network was a mix of separate American, military, civilian, and postal systems, and Wilson says none of them worked very well. The embassy shared a radio link with the Australians and the British. The link to Wellington was by telex, and getting a line depended on the persistence of the embassy's communicator, Marie Johnson. Wilson calls her "a tower of strength." She would keep trying until the connection came through, and then hope it held.

The foreign community debated what would happen when the war reached the capital. Any Western face, Wilson says, might become a target, either deliberately or in the chaos. That had happened in Phnom Penh. In Saigon, he notes, the North Vietnamese army proved "quite well-disciplined." The bigger fear was local score-settling and looting, and that largely did not happen.

The RNZAF ran ancient Second World War-era transport planes from Singapore, a five-hour flight each way. They brought supplies for the medical team and the embassy, and carried people out. By the end, they were coming almost every second day.

RNZAF Bristol 170 Freighter at Qui Nhon, South Vietnam, 1969. Photo: Wikimedia

Wilson's composure was put to harder use than he lets on. He recounted getting several people onto those planes by talking his way through South Vietnamese checkpoints to the New Zealand outpost at Tan Son Nhut.

One escape was especially audacious. A Vietnamese man married to a New Zealander was trying to avoid South Vietnam's newly introduced compulsory conscription. He built a box shaped like a coffin, climbed inside, and Wilson drove it through the airport gates. Guards, with a collapsing city on their minds, waved the car through.

Wilson opened the box, shook the man's hand and watched him board a Bristol Freighter. Then he drove back to work.

The final New Zealand flight from Saigon, on April 21, had been expected to carry eight passengers and instead carried 33. Not everyone who hoped to leave could be taken, and many Vietnamese with ties to New Zealand remained behind. The official timeline records that in April 1975 New Zealand's ambassador was evacuated from Saigon by 41 Squadron RNZAF, on the last flight out of Vietnam.

Wilson wanted to stay, he tells the Asia Media Centre. "I wanted to stay on, to see what was going to happen," he says. Instead he received a written order to leave within 24 hours, and flew out on an Australian Hercules.

Only a few Western missions remained. The French stayed, and the Belgians followed their lead. So did the Japanese, by accident. "The Japanese are very, very deliberate," Wilson says, "and by the time they decided to evacuate, it was too late."

He is glad now that he left. A Belgian friend who stayed was held under house arrest for six months before he could get out, even though Belgium had sent no forces to Vietnam. "I think if we had stayed," Wilson says, "we'd been given a pretty hard time."

A young Frank Wilson. Saigon was his first posting, and it set the course for the career that followed. Photo: Supplied.

A Career Shaped by Saigon

Saigon set the course of everything that followed. After Vietnam, Wilson was posted to Vienna, then to Moscow as the embassy's chargé d'affaires. There, in the final years of the Soviet old guard, he met Leonid Brezhnev at a diplomatic reception a day before the Soviet leader's death. Wilson believes he was the last foreigner to shake his hand.

Along the way he met Marina, a fellow diplomat, at an office party in Wellington. She joined him in Moscow, where they married. Postings to Chile, Thailand, and Hong Kong followed, with long stretches in Wellington looking after New Zealand's relations with Southeast Asia, before the couple retired in the early 2000s.

Through it all, he kept returning to the region. He travelled often to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, and has watched cities change almost beyond recognition. Jakarta was once difficult to get around, with appalling infrastructure. On regular visits to his son, who lives there, he has seen it become "totally unrecognisable."

When he gives talks on Saigon 50 years on, his last slide shows Ho Chi Minh City's modern skyline of high-rises and smart buildings. Then he asks the audience a question.

"If you were coming from Mars and you saw this picture, and you'd been told there was a war between the communists and the capitalists, who would you say won the war?"

He leaves the answer to the audience. He does say that some things have not changed. The way people speak to one another, their habits and their manners, is what he calls the culture, and he believes it has changed little. The old differences between Vietnam's north, south and centre, with their distinct accents and outlooks, endure.

The "Near North"

The idea that has stayed with Wilson throughout his career is that Southeast Asia is not the Far East but New Zealand's near north.

"It wasn't the far north," he says. "It was the near north."

That view took hold in Wellington in the 1950s and 1960s, only two decades after Japan had threatened the Pacific. It was based on security, not trade, and on what Wilson describes as "a sense of exposure, of danger." The Australians felt it more strongly, he says, but New Zealand felt it too. The country joined SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), and by the 1960s had embassies in Bangkok, Jakarta, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Manila. Aid followed through the Colombo Plan. Under that scheme, Wilson notes, New Zealand trained around 300 Vietnamese engineers.

Meanwhile Britain was withdrawing from the region and turning towards Europe. When Wilson joined the ministry, the main diplomatic effort was securing Protocol 18, New Zealand's special trade arrangement with the European Economic Community. Wellington fought "a very strong rearguard action" to keep its European links while building new ones, on the principle of not keeping all its eggs in one basket.

The shift was gradual. It was not, Wilson says, "a blinding light in the middle of the night." That is why he disputes the common view that New Zealand only discovered Asia in the 1990s. When the Asia New Zealand Foundation was set up in 1994, championed by long-time advocates Philip Burdon and Sir Don McKinnon, he says it gave structure to what was "effectively soft power." Diplomats had been doing that work bilaterally for decades through scholarships and exchanges.

He would like to see more young New Zealanders equipped for that work. There was a time, he recalls, when Japanese, Indonesian, and Chinese were widely taught in New Zealand schools, and he regrets that fewer students now study languages of any kind. "It seems a great pity," he says.

Wilson still believes Southeast Asia is New Zealand's "near north." The work of engaging with it, he says, is up to us. Photo: Carla Teng-Westergaard/AMC.

Must Work Harder

Looking ahead, Wilson, who turns 80 in two months, prefers to talk about principles rather than politics. He is candid about one popular label, though. "I wouldn't say we're a middle power," he says. "We're a very small power."

He recalls that in the 1950s and 1960s, New Zealand's place among the victorious Allies gave it a status in Southeast Asia "way out of kilter" with its size. Its prime ministers were treated as equals of their Australian and even American counterparts. That memory has "faded with time," but a reservoir of goodwill remains, partly, he says, because "we don't cause concern."

For a small country, he believes, that goodwill is an asset to build on, not to take for granted. The effort to stay connected has to come from New Zealand's side. "We're the ones who have to make our way," he says.

He also sees how far New Zealand has come since Saigon, when there was no rule book and no experience of an evacuation like it. Watching the 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan, he told North & South, he was struck by how much better organised it was. "Maybe we did learn a little bit from that," he said.

His prescription is the lesson he first learned as a young diplomat in Saigon. New Zealand is most effective when it works alongside others: through ASEAN, APEC, through regional organisations, and through the coalitions of like-minded countries that form around shared goals.

"We can't do it on our own," he says. "We've got to do it with others."

-Asia Media Centre

The opinions and recollections in this article are Frank Wilson's own, shared in a personal capacity.