Do-Gooders with a Difference

Youthful protest over Viet Nam has ranged from mobbing Cabinet officers to burning draft cards. Yet for many young Americans who are profoundly repelled by the prospect of fighting the war, the alternative has been to serve the cause of peace in Viet Nam. That, at least, is the philosophy followed by the 250 members of International Voluntary Services (I.V.S.), a private Peace Corps whose members--including many unabashed Vietniks--are among the most dedicated workers for social and economic progress in that unhappy land.

Founded in 1953 (eight years before the Peace Corps), l.V.S. currently counts 135 staffers in Viet Nam, stationed from Danang to the Delta, as well as 96 members in Laos. Of that number, 24 are girls and 25 are conscientious objectors for whom l.V.S. service takes the place of duty in the armed forces. Others are young men who--rejected by the armed forces--joined l.V.S. in order to serve in Viet Nam in some worthwhile capacity. With an average age of 241 and college backgrounds ranging from etymology to economics, the I.V.S.ers are do-gooders with a difference: though all are teachers in a sense, they are also skilled laborers who feel that their callused hands and total independence of the U.S. Government are the most telling arguments for America's ultimate aims in Viet Nam.

Out of the Clouds. Covering the booby-trapped countryside in every kind of conveyance from Lambrettas to Land Rovers, they dig sewers and teach hygiene, plant crops and harvest friendship, build schools and instruct Vietnamese in carpentry or masonry in the process. Often they have to overcome U.S. red tape and age-old Vietnamese traditions along the way. One I.V.S.er, 28-year-old Paul Lukitsch of Milwaukee, discovered a U.S. AID-provided wheat thresher that the Vietnamese, ignorant of its workings, had not even uncrated. After "liberating" the machine, Lukitsch modified it for rice harvesting in the Delta, and reduced the threshing time of 1,000 bundles of rice from two days to 2 1/2 hours. "We now have an unbelievable list of farmers who want to use it," he says proudly.

Even the l.V.S. girls are busier with handiwork than homework. Blonde, leggy Sondra Williams, 27, a Texas Tech graduate who was an NBC secretary and served two years in the Philippines with the Peace Corps before joining l.V.S., teaches sewing and cooking at Ban Me Thuot, 160 miles northeast of Saigon, once made a crash landing in a Communist-held paddyfield when the helicopter in which she was bumming a lift lost power. "I don't think any of us over here have our head in the clouds," she says. "Maybe before we came we did."

Strength & Stamina. Despite firsthand exposure to Viet Cong terrorism, many I.V.S.ers retain their distaste for the war. "We're nothing more than sugar-coating for the genocide that's going on here," argues David Gitelson, 25, a U.C.L.A. graduate and ex-G.I. now stationed in the Delta. A lanky loner who lopes around in sandals and faded Levi's, Gitelson carries his worldly possessions with him in a wheat sack, is known to the Vietnamese as "my ngheo"--the poor American. U.S. officials consider him the most effective American of all the thousands involved in Delta pacification. Says one: "All he has is strength, stamina and awkwardness. I wish we had more like him."

Another in the same mold is Jay Worrall, 23, a Virginia-born physics grad from Earlham College who marched on London's Trafalgar Square with Folk Singer Joan Baez in a 1965 antiwar demonstration. Last week Worrall, in striped shirt and sweat-stained Levi's, was humming a different tune as he sweated in the dust of Phu Cuong, twelve miles northwest of Saigon, building homes for Vietnamese refugees. An adept at the ancient art of cumshaw and cajolery, Worrall overcomes the perennial shortages of materials by canvassing battlefields in a borrowed "deuce-and-a-half" (2 1/2-ton army truck) and scavenging useful debris like 105-mm. ammo boxes, which he pounds into A-frames for his buildings.

Ability to Hurt. Though the Saigon government contributes $150,000 a year to support I.V.S., its basic funding--about $1.5 million annually--comes from the U.S. AID. From this, the two-year volunteers receive $80 a month--less than the salary of an Army private--plus a small clothing and vacation allowance. After negotiations with the Asia Foundation for $2,000 to build a summer school and buy books for the Vietnamese, l.V.S.ers voted down the grant when it was disclosed that the foundation had received funds from CIA.

Pragmatism, in the volunteers' eyes, is still second to idealism.

Considering that l.V.S.ers operate mainly in Red-infested provinces, they have been singularly fortunate in losing only two lives at Communist hands so far. One I.V.S.er, Peter Hunting, 24, was murdered from ambush by the Viet Cong in 1965. Another, Fred Cheydleur, 20, a Quaker from Philadelphia, was gunned down last week by Red guerrillas in the Laotian jungle. An expert logger, stonemason and mechanic, Cheydleur was a muscular (5 ft. 11 in., 195 lbs.), compulsively hard-working youth who became a pacifist, according to one of his teachers, "when he discovered his own ability to hurt other boys all too easily." Said Radio Moscow of Cheydleur's death: "An agent of the American CIA has been executed in Laos."

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