Community Corner

University Park Resident Proudly Served His Country

Local resident Bob Headley recalls his service in the Vietnam War.

Bob Headley is a kind man of easy humor. He’s lived in University Park with his wife Anne since 1965. He has his PhD in the Celtic language and is the author of a Cambodian-to-English dictionary.  He’s also a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Although he was born in a small town in Virginia, Headley grew up in Baltimore, where he had a high school Spanish teacher that got him interested in languages. He spent two years at junior college before moving on to the University of Florida where he studied anthropology.

It was while in college in Florida that Headley met a missionary recently returned from Vietnam. The missionary gave Headley a small pamphlet that displayed words in four languages; English, French, Vietnamese, and Jaral, a language spoken in a mountain village in Vietnam.

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This pamphlet was Headley’s first exposure to Vietnamese.

“It piqued something in me,” he said.

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After graduation, he began his career working for the Department of Defense as a computer programmer.  It soon became clear to both Headley and the department that he was not cut out for that work. Lucky for him, the department was starting up a Vietnamese language class, and they agreed that Headley should enroll.

“I couldn’t believe my luck,” said Headley, who still recalled the missionary’s stories of Vietnam and had hoped to travel there someday himself.

Headley spent 1959 through 1961 learning Vietnamese through the Department of Defense. He enlisted in the Army in 1961.

“The handwriting was on the wall,” Headley said. “I’d gotten a notice to come in for a physical. I found out if I were drafted I would have no choice what I did, but if I enlisted I still had a choice.”

So, on his 23rd birthday Headley found himself on his first airplane ride bound for basic training. “If that’s not a rotten way to spend your birthday, I don’t know what is,” he said.

Headley was told there were a few spaces left in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), and since he was already familiar with the written Vietnamese language, that is where he decided to go.

He began training to be a CIC agent, taking classes in interrogation techniques and investigative photography. He learned how to maintain a chain of evidence; how to conduct surveillance; how to photograph someone he was following; and how to create a microdot, a tiny negative that you could not see with the naked eye. Microdots could be easily sent through the mail, but had to be viewed with a microscope.

He was originally stationed in the U.S., but assigned to Vietnam in 1962.

In Vietnam, Headley did security work as a Vietnamese Language Translator. What they were really hoping to intercept were intelligence documents, how a unit was organize, or Viet Cong strategies. What they usually intercepted were Viet Cong propaganda documents.

“They were so boring,” said Headley. “All about the great revolution and its goals.”

In addition to translating, Headley also worked in surveillance. On one particular assignment Headley was part of a team doing surveillance on someone in an airport in Saigon. Headley’s assignment was to “pick up” the target once he got off of his plane, follow and photograph him until the next agent, who was waiting outside the airport in a car, could pick up the target.

“He got off the plane into a sea of people,” said Headley, but he was able to follow him until the next agent picked him up.

Headley appeared in one of the photos taken by the agent waiting in the car.

“You see all of these short Vietnamese people, and then you see me,” laughed Headley, who said he was clearly the tallest person in the airport. “I stuck out like a sore thumb.”

Headley says he enjoyed his service in Vietnam. He rarely left Saigon, which he remembers as a beautiful city, and he was never in combat.

“The people were wonderful and the city was beautiful,” he said. “I had a chance to come into contact with another culture, and I’d never even been out of the country before.”

He also got the opportunity to meet many other linguists working in minority languages, and he was also exposed to the Cambodian language, which he went on to study after his discharge.

After Headley was discharged in 1963, he returned to his job at the Department of Defense where he continued working as a linguist, and also met his wife of 46 years, Anne.

Headley met his wife at the National Security Agency where they were both waiting to get clearance.

They married less than a year later and moved to an apartment in Riverdale, and then to University Park, where they raised their two daughters, Amy and Sarah.

Headley went on to get his master’s degree in anthropology and linguistics and his PhD in the Celtic language with the help of the GI Bill.

Headley is proud of his service, and maintains that he was very lucky to have been stationed in Saigon for his whole tour. Both he and his wife feel that it is important that the country continue offering benefits to veterans.

“It’s important that we keep up veterans' benefits,” said Mrs. Headley. “They give up years of their lives, delay their lives,” she said.

“I think Americans have really learned to express appreciation [for veterans],” she said. “You can oppose the war, but support the troops,” she said, adding that people in the country had not always felt that way.

Although Headley is technically retired, he is working on a new edition of his Cambodian-to-English dictionary. He and his wife still live in their first home in University Park, which they purchased in 1965 for $21,000.


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