Sara Taber ’76 remembered by American Scholar magazine

Sara Mansfield Taber ’76, who passed away in February this year, was remembered by The American Scholar in its Summer 2026 edition with a posthumous piece, “Any Way You Can,” and an editor’s note, “Remembering Sara” by Sudip Bose.

Over the course of the past decade, Taber published several pieces in the Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine. “Any Way You Can” tells the story of her parents’ experiences in wartime Vietnam.

In 1973, when I was a sophomore in college, my parents moved to Vietnam. My father was in the CIA and had been posted to Saigon as part of the U.S. mission to drive out the North Vietnamese forces threatening to overtake the South Vietnamese government. He and two other CIA officials were to create and oversee a “black ops” radio station designed to spread propaganda that would disillusion the North Vietnamese and convert them and the Viet Cong guerrillas to democracy. My mother, designated a U.S. embassy “trailing spouse,” was a physical therapist. She provided health care to napalm victims and others wounded in the war. She also spent her days coordinating the social service efforts of the embassy wives.

Vietnam, as I learned when I visited my parents, was a place of many sensations. It was the aromas of fish sauce, coconut, and freshly baked baguettes. It was the roar of motorbikes, the rumble of army trucks, the screeches of hurtling cars. It was grim-faced, beautiful women hurrying in silky, pastel áo dàis and grim-faced men clustered at sandbagged street corners in green khaki and carrying loaded guns. It was skin sweaty and sticky from the oppressive, unrelenting heat. And it was daily meals of rice and fresh fish eaten to a soundtrack of intermittent, belly-clutching blasts from Vietcong explosives and grenades. It was a place steeped in sorrow, where the hardened Vietnamese people did whatever was required to survive and forge viable lives.

My parents were trying to do good. As a clandestine CIA operative, my father aimed to help people under repressive regimes achieve democracy, per the American creed as a superpower of the era. (This whole dynamic and mythology, in some part nobly motivated, was, of course, soon to be disrobed as arrogant and vastly flawed in both conception and execution.) And my mother was trying to help the injured, the sick, the disabled, the displaced, the traumatized, and the impoverished.

As the Scholar editor’s note honoring Taber recounts, this story was originally from a longer piece focused on Taber’s work leading writing workshops and mentoring Afghan girls and women starting in 2021, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The extract about her parents’ time in Vietnam “is a remarkable account,” Bose says, “as well as a glimpse into the rich and sensitive mind of a most accomplished woman, one whom we will dearly miss.”

Taber’s obituary celebrates her “intensity and passion and work ethic that seems to have spanned many lifetimes, several careers, and countless countries.”

Sara’s childhood, which was spent all over the world, particularly in Asia, led to a lifelong interest in learning about people’s lives in far flung places and cultures. Her first book Dusk on the Campo: a Journey in Patagonia, is a poetic account of the lives and philosophies of the sheep-farming families whom she and Peter (her future husband) met when they spent several years as field biologists studying whales in Patagonia in the late 70’s and early 80’s. While Peter was happy wandering along the cliffs peering out at right whale mothers and calves, Sara was fascinated by the kind and hospitable people they met in that desolate and isolated landscape. She set out each day to interview them and eventually turned her copious notes into her first book.

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Sara always had at least three entire books completed that she hadn’t published yet, as well as about fifty essays on topics ranging from healthcare and social programs in the US versus countries in Europe, to “How to End War” based on her intensive study of ancient Classical texts, to how her mother forced her to eat lumpy Cream of Wheat as an eight-year-old.

She always dove into every project with a breath-taking thoroughness, and she took on other people’s projects and problems with a matching dedication.

Share your memories of Sara Taber ’76 on her Alumni Farewells page.