 I was starting my 25th year of life and in those days Saigon was a very tense city. Just before I arrived at a bar or in the restaurant in the city center of Saigon I had been bombed and the 30 or 40 killed. This was the characteristic of the Vietnam War. The front was nowhere and was everywhere. For us, this was a situation which was very tight because we had always to show that we were Swiss and we were Red Cross and for a long time this was a very strong argument for us. The main mandate of us was to visit six prisoners of war camps spread all over South Vietnam, the biggest being on the Phu Quoc Island off the coast of Cambodia. We had 35,000 prisoners of war, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese prisoners and we visited these camps every three to four months and made reports, made recommendations and tried to improve the living conditions of these prisoners. We went to each camp, we spoke with the prisoners and told them, you see, we have tried to do what we could. How do you perceive our action? They said amazingly, you know, for us, the material factors the improvements you obtained were not so important but you were the only, only institutions and the only individuals which came from outside to be in contact with us. We were occasionally asked to organize relief organizations when populations were, for instance, bombed out of the jungle when they were staying in temporary locations. We wrote their relief together with the South Vietnamese Red Cross. So I believe also the Vietnam War was a very good example for an institution like the ICRC to do something or to do whatever could be done under very adverse conditions. In our case, what was the biggest challenge which was also the biggest killing factor were these bombings on civilian zones in the South and North Vietnam. The new weapons which were tested Agent Orange was used to defoliate the jungle but there were many other new weapons used. We knew because we were overflying these zones sometimes the following morning they looked like lunar landscape and we said, you know, all these people who have died down there this is not normal, this should not occur, we should do something but we were blocked. I believe that if anything happens they know that we would be active on both sides according on the basis of the same criteria. I believe that Vietnam, given the geopolitical context of Southeast Asia with an expanding big nation there has come to realize that the neutrality we were always fighting for is not a fiction.