Chickens, Chickens, Chickens

Green coconut milk—you can't beat its fresh, tangy coolness on a hot tropical day. The memory still lingers of my host nimbly climbing the tree in front of his house and cutting down two coconuts to share as we discussed chickens. Chickens? Yes, chickens—the common bond between a Vietnamese peasant and a young American volunteer.

In 1965, I was fresh out of college with two degrees in agriculture, ready to take on the world. I promptly signed up for two years in Vietnam with International Voluntary Services, the organization used as a model by President John F. Kennedy for the Peace Corps.

Vietnamese names are all monosyllabic, so naturally I became Mr. Bob. Their closest term for poultry specialist translates as "chicken engineer," so everywhere I went I was introduced as Mr. Bob, the chicken engineer. This sounds just as funny in Vietnamese as it does in English, so introductions were always filled with merriment and laughter. Taken in good humor, this tag helped as people weren't likely to forget me.

I was ready for the next two questions that always followed an introduction: "How old are you?" and "How much money do you make?" The Vietnamese I met were all convinced that every American was fabulously wealthy. All Americans have cars, don't they? Almost. Few besides government officials and Americans had cars in Vietnam. Even ten-speed bicycles and electric coffeepots were considered luxury items.

The Vietnamese wanted to learn how we did it, or at least have some of the magic rub off on them. Several confided in me that their ideal was to have a Japanese wife, Chinese food, a French house—and an American income. They were usually disappointed, even incredulous, when I told them I was making eighty dollars a month. That was about the same amount a Vietnamese professional with a college degree was making. This was a lot more than the average peasant earned, but it just didn't sound fabulously wealthy, and it wasn't. Even the Vietnamese hired at the airbase to do KP duty were making more than that.

This was rapidly becoming a sore point. Vietnamese professionals, especially those who could speak English, could earn three times as much working for Americans. But their country needed them where they were. Furthermore, it was scandalous that prostitutes and bartenders were suddenly getting rich. Everywhere I went, I heard the complaint that the traditional order of respect—God, king, teacher—was being turned on its head and becoming prostitute, restaurant owner, and cyclo driver.

However, the worst complaints were about the children. The US military started a policy of giving candy to the children they met. Soldiers would throw candy from their convoys as they passed through towns. It didn't take long to hear horror stories of children being pushed under the wheels of moving vehicles as they jostled for the candy. The soldiers began passing out money, cigarettes, and trinkets. One soldier confided in me that he felt so sorry for the kids that he gave away his entire paycheck every month.

When I first arrived in Phan Rang, there wasn't a beggar in sight. But it didn't take long before I couldn't go anywhere without being besieged by a mob of forty or fifty children, all shouting, "Hey, you, suh lem!" (This was their pronunciation for Salem cigarettes.) Very soon children were getting more money than their parents were earning and becoming openly defiant of them. Many left home. Hippies in Vietnam? In Vietnam they were called cowboys. This in a society where family was everything. Every home had a shrine to honor the family's ancestors. Nothing was worse than dishonoring them.

At least Phan Rang didn't have peanut girls. In downtown Saigon, there was a little waif on every corner selling bags of peanuts, and these girls raked in the money from the GIs. If you looked, it wasn't hard to spot their adult handler, usually watching two or three girls. This was big business!

One day, as I drove from Nha Trang to Phan Rang with a load of furniture for my new house, the first convoy of American combat soldiers was on their way to Phan Rang. Families lined the road, cheering and waving American and South Vietnamese flags. Vietnam had experienced warfare of one kind or another since the thirties. People hoped that the Americans would bring a quick end to this one, but the war only got bigger and anti-American sentiment grew with it. Within six months, people were throwing rocks at my front door, so we moved to another house inside the compound of the Catholic high school.

Vietnamese aren't ones to let feelings stand in the way of business, and chickens were business. Eggs were selling for seven cents each. I quickly compiled a list of seventy people asking for my help in getting American chickens. The local Vietnamese chickens were small and scrawny, and their eggs were half the size of the ones laid by American chickens. They weren't very different from the wild jungle fowl that chickens had been domesticated from. I occasionally saw some of these jungle fowl on my trips around the province.

The main reason eggs were so expensive was that 70 percent of the chickens died each year. About half of the deaths were due to disease and about half to poor nutrition, poor management, or predation by dogs and rats. Yes, rats eat chickens.

In traditional village agriculture around the world, chickens are simply allowed to run loose and fend for themselves. With this method, you're lucky to get five or six eggs from a chicken and two or three extra birds to sell or to eat each year. But this way of keeping chickens doesn't cost anything in terms of money or labor. Keeping the chickens in a pen, house, or cages increases production tenfold, but now you have to provide a complete feed, which isn't cheap, and have a source of clean water. As I traveled around the province visiting each facility, I found a wide variety of methods of keeping chickens. Most farmers had houses or pens for their chickens, but they didn't have a source of feed, so I developed a recipe for chicken feed using rice, dried fish, and pigweed. It was a hard sell to convince farmers to use this new feed, but the ones who didn't weren't very successful.

I had originally been promised inexpensive baby chicks from the Vietnamese Animal Husbandry Service in Saigon, but when I went to get them I was told the program was having problems and the chicks weren't available. I was able to find another source, and then we were in business. Most of the people I was working with wanted ten or twenty chicks, which I sold at cost. I had business in Saigon about once a month, and every time I went I brought...