Scope and Contents

One linear foot of reports dealing primarily with topics on counterinsurgency and pacification document Vincent Puritano's service working with the United States State Department in Vietnam during the 1960s.

The collection also includes approximately two linear feet of documents, periodicals, maps, and books donated to the archive by Mr. Puritano's widow. The materials come from Puritano’s work with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Vietnam in the early 1960’s where he was the Program Officer for the Office of Provincial Operations. The documents include reports, correspondence, and memos written by Puritano concerning budget expenditures, province operations, cadre development, and administration of the USAID program in Vietnam. The collection includes program budgets and annual reports, operations and organization manuals, and various instructional handbooks.

Items of note in the collection are a series of transcripts of debriefs of various parties working for AID to include senior administrators, province representatives, nurses, etc. The collection also includes an original hand colored copy of a report titled The Village Campaign or Vietnam Sociology of a War by Lieutenant Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau. The material is dated from 1950 through 1969 with the bulk of the material dating from 1960 through 1965.

Biographical / Historical

Born in 1930 in Troy, New York, Vincent Puritano went to work for the United States Department of State in 1964 and served for twenty (20) years. After training, he served as a Foreign Service Officer and traveled throughout Vietnam while being assigned to State Department HQs in Saigon. After Vietnam, he served in multiple assignments with the Department of Defense and the CIA before retiring in 1984 and again in 2004.