Telling the story of Vietnam

Robert S McKelvey a former US Marine who served in Vietnam and later worked in refugee camps. There he interviewed people whose stories he collected and whose accounts were published in his books.


“A Gift of Barbed Wire” is a penetrating look at the lives of South Vietnamese officials and their families left behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. After his service as a Marine in Vietnam, Robert went on to practice psychiatry and, through his work in refugee camps and U.S. social service organizations, met South Vietnamese men from all walks of life who had been imprisoned in re-education camps immediately after the war. Robert's interviews with these former political prisoners, their wives, and their children reveal the devastating, long-term impact of their incarceration.

From the early years in French colonial Vietnam through the Vietnam War, from postwar ordeals of re-education camps, social ostracism, and poverty to eventual emigration to the United States, this collection of narratives provides broad and highly personal accounts of individuals and families evolving against the backdrop of war and vast social change.

Some of the people interviewed for the book eventually reached the United States as boat people fleeing Vietnam in unsafe vessels; others arrived, after rigorous screening, through U.S. Government-sponsored programs. But even in the safety of the United States they had to begin anew, devoting all their remaining energies to survival.

“While crediting the courage and resilience of these families, Robert holds a critical mirror up to our culture, exploring the nature of our responsibility to our allies as well as the attitudes that obscured the reality of war as "a grinding, brutal interplay of complex forces that often develops a sustaining energy and momentum of its own, driving us in directions that we neither anticipated nor desired."

A review in Library Journal stated, “While television accounts of war and civil strife tend to devote substantial time to the plight of the helpless civilian, published accounts largely concentrate on the military and political aspects of the fighting, relegating the civil sector to token treatment. McKelvey, a former Marine Corps officer who served in Vietnam, offers an account of one largely forgotten aspect of the non-military side of that war the children born out of liaisons between American servicemen and Vietnamese women. Now adults, they have spent their lives caught between two societies whose racial and cultural practices have left many of them emotionally shattered.Robert, a child psychiatrist at the Oregon Health Sciences University, provides a psychological overview as he narrates the extraordinary problems these folks faced as children and adults. He covers the Amerasian experience in both Vietnam and the United States and concludes with an emotional chapter on a few attempts to locate American fathers.”

In another review Marlene Chamberlain commented, “Of all the mistakes made during the U.S. experience in Vietnam, one of the most shameful was the treatment after the war of the Amerasian children who were products of soldiers' liaisons with Vietnamese women. Already abandoned by their American fathers, most were also abandoned by their mothers at the end of the war. McKelvey eloquently profiles many of those now grown children and their battles to survive in a country that didn't want them. Many Amerasians and their families were banished to "economic development zones" to eke out an existence by farming. Most were teased and tormented so much that few finished school, locking them even further in poverty. Their stories are mostly of heartbreak and loss, toiling hard in an impoverished country, and discrimination. McKelvey sees the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 as too little, too late. Nonetheless, he profiles those who did make it to the U.S. By contrast, they seem luckier than those who were not granted sanctuary here”.

Robert S. McKelvey is professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. 

The Dust of Life: America's Children Abandoned in Vietnam - was published October 1999.

A Gift of Barbed Wire America's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam
$34.95 Hardcover. Published: August 2002. ISBN: 9780295982243