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Title: Blue Dragon - Reckoning in the South China Sea
Author: R. Thomas Collins
ISBN: 1-928928-05-6
Description:
In April 1975, as Saigon fell to Communist forces, a North Vietnamese patrol boat came upon a drilling ship in the South China Sea and at gun point ordered the roughnecks to stop drilling for oil and depart. As a result, Mobil Oil was forced to abandoned offshore acreage that eventually would become one of the most valuable oil fields in Asia. Eventually the Russians who worked with the Vietnamese wore out their welcome and in 1989 the Vietnamese wanted Mobil to come back and help Vietnam in its competition with China to secure the rights to the oil of the South China Sea. But the post-war trade embargo the U.S. imposed on the Communists in Vietnam blocked the way. The U.S. still had lingering questions about POW/MIA’s, and the distrust bred by war between the Americans and Vietnamese had to be resolved first. Blue Dragon – Reckoning in the South China Sea is the true account of the four year effort by Mobil to return to Vietnam. Written by a member of the Mobil team working on the initiative, Blue Dragon is a behind the scenes account of a politically sensitive oil project that many believed would be a key to the political balance of power in the South East Asia. The author tells how the Mobil exploration team navigated among the U.S., Russian and Vietnamese governments, with U.S. veterans groups, with competitors and also within Mobil itself to secure the oil acreage the Vietnamese hoped would help their country gain its economic independence and which the Mobil Oil team hoped could save their company.
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Excerpt from Chapter One:
The Trip
“Missed the first time?” a lawyer named Connie had quipped when she heard I was on my way to Hanoi. About my age, Connie was a parochial school graduate. She had a usually charming but sharp wit. Her older brother had been an Army officer in Vietnam. “Since you got out of it the first time, figured you could go now and make up?”
There was a snap to her remark that bit just a might too close. Going to Asia was no longer new. Frequent trips to Singapore and Indonesia has taken care of that. I knew I was in for more than 30 hours of flying at least, with stops in L.A. and Tokyo before I’d come to rest in the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore.
But going to Vietnam wasn’t just another trip. The closer it came time to go, the edgier I got. I didn’t sleep well for days. The night before I left, I wandered around the house like a cat. I was 46 years old, and during the past 30 years I had never considered Vietnam in any other context than the war.
Nothing about Vietnam had ever been simple. Now, under these circumstances, Vietnam would no longer be a proper noun for an experience, or adjective to describe a war or era, or a shorthand slogan for a series of ideas and thoughts. Vietnam was a drilling prospect.
***
On the United Airlines flight from L.A. to Tokyo, the man in front of me in Seat IB was John Denver, the singer. He was in his middle years now. His tanned face was lined and his hair wasn’t quite as blond as I had thought. He had blue jeans and a western style shirt, a cowboy hat with feathers belted around the crown. He wore turquoise and silver jewelry, and took to gold half glasses for reading. He was a pleasant person who, when walking around the cabin, introduced himself and spoke easily with any passenger who appeared interested in exchanging a few words. He’d traveled with some of this crew before.
“Hello, Mr. Duetschendorf,” said one of the flight attendants, in a strong German accent, using Denver’s real name. “Here you are again.”
Things had changed for John Denver. He was on his way to Singapore to start his first Asian concert tour, traveling with his band and roadies, who were seated in business and economy class. One of the stops on his tour would be Vietnam. Denver had changed before takeoff into an exercise outfit made from the latest synthetic polished fabric and custom exercise shoes, and was sipping gin on the rocks.
The first time I saw Denver was in 1970, in a photo on the cover of a record album of a young folk singer adopting the pose of poetic angst common to the time. My roommate had purchased the record album in that summer. At the time, perhaps 350 Americans were being killed each week. President Nixon had told the country weeks before that American troops had invaded Cambodia to destroy Viet Cong stores. An Ohio National Guard unit weeks before had fired into a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State University and killed a handful of students.
The singer in the photo was seated in a green field, wearing a vest and a blond Dutch boy haircut. A leather strap hung around his neck from which a pendant was suspended that read: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”
In the twenty years between the time of that album cover and 1990 when I got the E&P job, Vietnam had been relegated to the whims of memory. Any emotions or thoughts I had about the subject – the war, not the country – were of the ordinary variety. I could claim no special insight, or knowledge, or credentials on the subject different from any other guy of my time who never wore a uniform.
During the Vietnam era, 27 million Americans reached draft age, of whom nine million would serve in uniform. Of those, some three million Americans wore U.S. armed forces uniforms in the Vietnam combat theater during the war. I was one of 18 million who did not. My absence from those in uniform was the result of a random set of circumstances which would appear later to be low farce – except that for more than five years I worried about my situation with such intensity that it seemed at times to overwhelm everything.
Now, all this time later, in 1994, I remained as conflicted about the war as others, at times having opinions that at other times seemed wrong or stupid. Other times I felt lucky the Army passed me up, at other times guilty for not having served. Sometimes I was envious of those who served in Vietnam and had experienced the central conflict of our time and survived. Basically, though, I thanked my lucky stars. Who’s kidding whom? For a guy my age to have conflicted emotions about the Vietnam War was a luxury. Given what others had faced, what I had was gravy.
