[Buffalo Head]

In the late 1970’s my seat mate on a flight between Malaysia and Japan was a British gentleman who was involved in the installation of modern telecommunications is S.E. Asia. He relayed that the Vietnamese despised the Russians and just considered them “Americans without money”.

[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!