Assignment: Vietnam;

              ASSIGNMENT: Vietnam
by Keagle W. Davis and Thomas S. Lacy
In April, eighteen Touche, Ross men left for Saigon,
South Vietnam, on what is probably one of the most
unusual engagements ever undertaken by a public ac-counting
firm; it may also be one of the largest single
engagements our firm has ever handled.
Our client in Saigon is RMK-BRJ, a joint venture
which is constructing a massive network of military
installations in South Vietnam at a cost which may
exceed one billion dollars. Touche, Ross was engaged
as a subcontractor to provide a staff of trained ac-countants
and auditors to assist the venture in certain
accounting areas.
The RMK-BRJ consortium is composed of four U.S.
construction companies: Raymond International, Inc. of
Delaware; Morrison-Knudsen International Company,
Inc. (the sponsoring partner) of Boise, Idaho; Brown &
Root, Inc. of Houston, Texas; and J. A. Jones Con-struction
Company of Charlotte, North Carolina. RMK-BRJ
is the outgrowth of the Raymond-Morrison-Knudsen
International joint venture which initially started work in
Vietnam in 1962 on this cost-plus-fixed-fee job under
Navy contract NBy-44105 as part of the Military As-sistance
Program to the Republic of Vietnam Armed
Forces. When the war was escalated in 1965, the scope
of the contract increased accordingly, and Brown &
Root and J. A. Jones were added to the joint venture
to provide additional management capabilities.
The Largest Construction Pact in History
The contract, which started out as a $16,500,000
four-airfield project, has grown into the largest con-struction
pact in history. RMK-BRJ has undertaken ap-proximately
1,500 separate projects in South Vietnam
at over 40 construction sites ranging from Quang Tri,
Hue, and Da Nang in the north to Bac Lieu and Vinh
Chau in the south. Work also has been done on An
Thoi and Con Son Islands off the South Vietnamese
coast in the South China Sea.
With a peak labor force of over 40,000 Vietnamese,
4,200 Americans, and 5,500 Filipinos, Koreans, and
other nationalities, RMK-BRJ has put in place as much
as $70,000,000 of construction work in a single month
2 THE QUARTERLY