The Kleven Brothers - Real Pioneers in Viet Nam

6 March 2010:

I just received news this morning that Mike Kleven in Saigon is near death. Most of you probably don't know Mike but he's part of the unfolding history of the development of Viet Nam, post-1975. I remember in the summer of 1989 returning from Viet Nam on a Thai Airways flight. Across the aisle from me was a guy wearing a black ball cap with a white "X" on the front. I guessed correctly that he was a Viet Nam veteran and I struck up a conversation with him. We ended up conversing all the way back to the United States for the next 14 hours. The vet was Greg Kleven and we would be seeing a lot of each other for the next ten years. That day in 1989 he was determined to go back to the Bay Area, pack up his stuff and go back to Saigon as soon he could and start working. He followed through and did it. Shortly after that his brother Mike, also a Viet Nam vet, joined him in Saigon and soon the brother team was busy establishing an English language school in Saigon. In my frequent trips during this period I always tried to link up with the brothers to see how they were progressing and trying to live on an economy which at that early period, was just emerging from absolute poverty. My trips to Viet Nam increased and I sent a lot of people to Mike and Greg's doorstep. They remained my primary contacts and we shared a lot of in-country information not available (then) in Viet Nam. You can only imagine the hardships. Even fax machines, which by today's standards is antique technology, didn't exist. There was one telephone for every 800 people in a municipal district. By 1989, it had gotten better - now there was one telephone for about every 500 people.

Greg and Mike soon set up shop in District 3 in Saigon and they got down to business with work schedules that would kill the average individual. I visited them a few times in their new digs (American convicts live in luxury by comparison!) and they harped about being Americans living in a foreign, and sometimes hostile environment. More than a few times they were visited by corrupt cops and party lackies who were looking for hand-outs. Any American was assumed to be rich. If they only knew the truth of the Klevens. A local cop came by one night and tried to shake them down for ten US dollars for not flying the national flag on a holiday. But they loved it, and they loved what they were doing.

It would be a few years before the onslaught of other Americans, NGO teams of do-gooders, and the parade of newly arrived Americans who showed up after Clinton's visit and the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Viet Nam. Make no mistake about it - the Klevens preceeded them all and were real pioneers, years before it became the fashionable thing to say you 'had been to Viet Nam!' And we can't forget the other element in this story: they were Viet Nam veterans who firmly believed in going back to assist the people of Viet Nam after such a tragic post-1975 relationship with that burgeoning country. That was always their bottom-line. They did it on basically nothing with no back-up - just their hard work.