[ThanhPhero]

It was more than "Americans without money." The Russian wives and civilians stole from the bases to barter on the local economy for basic things like food and utensils and they stole from the locals, and this was in the starving time when Viet Nam was arguably worse off than Haiti in a depression.

'Americans without money' was the first impression and derived mostly from the European aspect of the Russians' physiognomy and it stuck because it was a neat phrase and suited the Vietnamese sense of humor.
The Russians never were respected at all. A lady I know who is a recent arrival and who lived through that phase outside of Cam Ranh was shocked when my wife and I took her and her daughters out to dinner to welcome them to the community. She said that as poor immigrants to a rich society from a third world country she had expected to be treated the way the Vietnamese had treated the Russians. What delicious irony!

[Brad from Tennessee]

Thanks for unique insight on this portion of Vietnamese history. The Vietnam War and the support they were obliged to provide after Saigon fell drained the USSR, just as did Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and other “victories” around the world. With a stagnant, artificial economy the Soviets finally spent all their gold, looted from Eastern Europe after World War II, on this expansion. Just prior to the Afghanistan invasion, foreign policy experts were predicting that the Soviets would either have to invade Western Europe, and loot it, or strike south to the Persian Gulf oil fields to survive.