What happens when youthful idealism encounters the grinding reality of civil war? During the late 1960s and early 1970s, religious and secular aid agencies brought in recently graduated 'community development' workers to ease the dislocations experienced by refugees during the Việt Nam War. This diary recounts, day by day, two years (1970-1972) spent in Quảng Ngãi Province. It narrates how the 'war for hearts and minds' played out for an ordinary American trying his unheroic best to ameliorate the wretched conditions under which refugees sought education and a semblance of normalcy for themselves and their children. The work was beset with failing vehicles, typhoons, hostile neighbors and rising danger of warfare-but also kindly and generous Vietnamese, courageous colleagues, bewitching landscapes, and occasional successes.