In an announcement released today, the US Embassy said that Senator Jim Webb will pay a visit to Vietnam this week.

The four other countries on this visit are Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.

The senator from Virginia, who serves as chair of the Senate Foreign Relation’s subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs, will stop in Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City, where he will meet government officials, business leaders, and friends from his decades of close involvement in US-Vietnam relations.

Senator Webb, who can speak Vietnamese, has enjoyed a continuous personal involvement in Asian and Pacific affairs that long predates his time in the Senate.

In addition to his more recent visits as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Webb has worked and travelled throughout this vast region, from Micronesia to Burma, for nearly four decades, as a Marine Corps officer, a defense planner, a journalist, a novelist, a Department of Defense executive, and as a business consultant.

Webb served as an infantry Marine in Vietnam, and later as Assistant Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy in the Pentagon. He also served as an Asia-Pacific regional military planner in Guam, has written extensively on local, national and international issues in Japan, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, and in the 1990’s worked as a consultant for companies wishing to do business in Vietnam. He has served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since joining the US Senate in January 2007.

In addition to Webb’s public service, he has enjoyed a long career as a writer. He has authored nine books. He has worked extensively as a screenwriter and producer in Hollywood, taught literature at the Naval Academy as their first visiting writer, has travelled worldwide as a journalist, and earned an Emmy Award for his PBS coverage of the US Marines in Beirut.

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