Sergeant First Class Le Cuong is not hard to pick out of a crowd of Vietnamese. His big cigar, collegiate horn-rimmed glasses, highly manicured flat-top haircut and "Like, wow, man" vocabulary attest to his close association with his American co-workers.

The Skytroopers at the Tay Ninh basecamp who try to test Cuong with the current slang from the world more often than not get a comeback of, "Wow, man, who're you trying to kid," or something along that line.

Cuong, like so many of his country men, migrated south from Hanoi in 1954 after the Geneva Agreements. Cuong remembers his native Hanoi as "much smaller than Saigon but a romantic city with parks and the two big lakes in the center."

When Sergeant Cuong gets out of the army and away from duties as interpreter,  he wants to become a pharmacist and "do something good for people to remember me by."

When asked when he will DEROS, Cuong just smiles and rolls his eyes up toward the ceiling.