Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  Within their limited areas the sects had for a time managed to solve some of the problems of the village. But the extent of their authority was limited, and they depended on foreign assistance for their very survival. The problems of the village were, finally, national problems, and the NLF alone among the southern political groups offered a solution on a national scale. Its methods were indeed “foreign”; they were derived from the Leninist tradition as elaborated by Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and finally, Ho Chi Minh. But they proved more successful in dealing with the particular, local situation than the equally foreign methods of the GVN.

  In most cases the NLF had to begin their work of organization by undermining and finally expelling government authority. Thus it is interesting to take a close look at the whole process of how the insurgents took over a village and established their control. The takeover of Ich Thien village provides a good case study, not because Ich Thien was a typical village but because politically there was every reason to suppose the NLF would not be successful there. It had no Viet Minh tradition and for three years it was one of the model settlements of the Diem regime. (And then the narrator of the story of Ich Thien is an NLF defector who had small love for the Front after its cadres fired him from his position as head of their administrative committee.)7

  Not many miles from the resort town of Dalat, Ich Thien village comprised one of the few successful land development centers the Diem regime had built for non-Catholics. In 1961, two hundred and twenty-five families from the coastal plains of the center had come to settle there in the highlands and to farm the land the government had cleared for cultivation. Allotted a small acreage, they were given enough money to tide them over until the first harvest and the rights to all the jungle land they could clear and till for their own use. After three years of good harvests, the farmers — most of them former landless laborers — had achieved a degree of prosperity they had never known before: they built substantial houses, bought buffaloes for the plowing, and new clothes for the women and children. To them the land development center had every virtue but one. As one farmer — I shall call him Mr. Buu — described the source of the trouble:

  An official from the Office of the General Commissioner for Land Development was… in full charge of the area.… The area chief (as he was called) could distribute money and materials to whichever family he wanted and refuse to give it to whoever he wanted. It was the area chief who ordered that family records and identification cards be made. He could refuse to give these extremely necessary papers to whichever family he disliked and that family would have no place to turn. The people’s fate lay in the hands of the area chief.

  The area chief… was a very wise man. Outwardly, he seemed very nice, gentle with everyone, but inwardly he was corrupted and siphoned off aid such as flour, penicillin and milk and so on.

  Besides growing rubber trees in the land they had been given, the villagers cleared more land to grow corn, potatoes, manioc, etc. They went to the jungle to gather firewood, bamboo shoots, and honey. The people were forced to sell all these products to the area chief at a very low price. The area chiefs in turn sold these products to the dealers at high prices. The people knew about this, but there was no way they could stop this exploitation.

  The other officials… were no better. They often caused trouble to the people, such as each time someone wanted to leave the Land Development Center, he had to obtain a certified statement of his absence. The absent person couldn’t receive his food money for the day he was absent… but he still had to sign the paper to certify that he had received his food money for that day so that the officials could pocket the money. And so the people couldn’t like these officials. They were afraid of them because their lives were directly related to the officials of the office of the General Commissioner for Land Development.”8

  Beginning in 1963 the NLF cadres began to come to the center occasionally at night to talk to the families in the hamlets nearest the forest. Before a year had passed, they were coming every two or three nights. From time to time the guerrilla units would surround one of the hamlets so that the cadres, with the help of their newly recruited supporters in the village, could hold a general meeting to explain Front policies. By the end of 1964 the GVN officials, including the area chief, no longer dared to spend the night at the center. The twenty government defense guards hid in their outpost every time the NLF appeared. Finally in February 1965 a large number of Front troops came to surround the entire center. The defense guards hid their weapons and fled. The next morning the guerrillas deployed themselves around the center, leaving only a few armed cadres inside. These cadres then called the people together and proclaimed the dissolution of the “illegal local government of Ich Thien village” and raised the Front flag on a pole.

  In Ich Thien village the Front had no need to employ violence against the government authorities. Its cadres had already prepared the way carefully, making friends among the villagers and gathering intelligence and explaining their policies — making the kind of contact with the villagers that the government officials had never bothered to make. But for the Front there was no question of “rooting out the infrastructure” of government. The GVN officials had never had any roots in the village.

  Once their military forces had taken control of the village, the Front cadres took steps to sever the last political and administrative ties the village had with the GVN. In the first week they collected the villagers’ government identification cards and classified all of the villagers according to the extent of their former contacts with the GVN officials. The hamlet and interfamily group chiefs were compelled to attend “re-education” courses for a period of a week to a month. At the same time they kept close watch over the villagers’ movements to and from the village.

  These security measures were, of course, much the same as those the GVN took. By themselves, however, they were of little use, for the Front did not maintain full military control of the area. After a few days the regular forces departed, leaving only a few guerrillas behind, who hid when the regular GVN forces appeared to make sweeps through the village. Militarily, in other words, the Front was in precisely the same situation as the GVN when it had controlled the village a month or so before. The difference was in the attitude of the villagers. When the GVN troops searched the village, they found nothing but an occasional empty combat trench. The villagers protected the Front cadres because, as Mr. Buu said simply, they trusted them. But Mr. Buu’s explanation was perhaps too simple.

  After the meeting at which they declared the “illegal government” dissolved, the Front cadres called another meeting and asked the villagers to choose a man who was “talented, virtuous, clean, and capable,” to act as chairman of an administrative committee to manage the affairs of the village. Under Front direction the villagers unanimously elected Mr. Buu and approved the appointment of Front cadres to a council to take charge of security, finance, education, and propaganda in the village. Not long afterwards they called yet another meeting to ask the villagers to join a series of associations: one association was for farmers, another for youth, a third for women, and a fourth for old people. Over the next two months the Farmers’ Association became an active force in the life of the village. Organized into cells of seven to nine people, the farmers took turns doing the farm labor that required a collective effort and helped each other to increase the harvest.

  At the same time the Front cadres gave great attention to political instruction. During the frequent association and hamlet meetings and in the course of the collective activities, they explained that the people of the village “belonged to the Very Poor Class and so they should stand up to lead the proletariat class to struggle against the governing capitalist class, which was the Americans, and their lackeys who called themselves Nationalists.”9 When Mr. Buu was asked whether the people of the village understood the doctrine of the class struggle, he replied that he did not know, but that since the cadres used appealing words and supported their arg
uments with concrete facts, the people liked to listen to them: they remembered how corrupt the area chief had been and they began to feel hatred for the class that oppressed both them and the landless peasants all over South Vietnam.

  The propaganda campaign and the activities of the Farmers’ Association bore tangible fruit when the Front cadres began to exact “contributions” in food from the villagers to feed their troops. Most of the villagers did not make the contributions with enthusiasm, but they at least understood, as few of their compatriots had ever understood of the government taxes, that there was a reason for the exactions. Moreover, they could not suspect favoritism or injustice in the collections. Thanks to the rotation of duties within the Farmers’ Association, most of the farmers knew exactly how much food each family produced, and they saw that the Front cadres levied it from each family in fair proportion.

  Within the space of three months the Front cadres had — despite the comings and goings of the government troops — managed to bind the villagers to them by a series of fairly strong ties. Rather than substitute one bureaucracy for another, they set up an organization that brought the villagers into a new relationship with government authority and with each other. Through their constant meetings, their private talks with the villagers, and their organization of collective work, they had established a network of personal contacts much more dense than the village had ever known. If only because they dared not break the balance of intelligence, the villagers protected both the Front cadres and each other from the government troops. To the extent that they kept this trust, they increasingly boxed themselves into a series of obligations, one of which led to another. They voted in the Front elections, worked on the Front’s projects, and made contributions to the upkeep of the Front troops. They might not have wholeheartedly supported the Front, but they were at least committed to it by occupation. Mr. Buu and others served on the administrative committee, and some of the young men helped the local guerrillas. Who then was a “member of the Front” and who was not?

  Certainly the government authorities could not make the distinction. After three months of running fruitless operations through the village, the Allied command sent out a group of helicopters to strafe one of the hamlets where, as it happened, there were no Front guerrillas. In twenty minutes the pilots managed to burn down thirty-five houses and kill nine of the villagers, including two children and three old people. When the Front organized a committee from among the villagers to go to district headquarters and demand reparations for the damages, the delegation was turned away by the district chief. Six months later a large force of government troops swept through the village and took all of the remaining families away with them to a government-controlled area. The GVN had removed the villagers in order to remove the NLF.

  The Front controlled Ich Thien village for only a few months, but there were many scores of villages in Vietnam where it maintained control for over a period of years. The development of these villages followed essentially the same lines that the cadres had drawn in Ich Thien village. The end product of this development was a complex, specialized organization capable both of defending itself and of supporting the weight of a regime at war.

  For the ordinary people of the village, Front control meant a gradual change in the patterns of daily life. Before the focus of life had been the family; now it was the hamlet and the village. In villages more secure than Ich Thien, every person over the age of seven would belong to a community organization and participate in community projects. Each household belonged to an interfamily group and a hamlet association; each individual belonged to a Liberation Association. Of these last, the Farmers’ Association continued to be the most important. Its members organized the collective work of digging irrigation ditches or constructing the village defenses. They also arbitrated land disputes and assessed taxes on rice crops. The Women’s Association took care of the Front soldiers who passed through the village and helped those families whose sons had joined the regular forces. Certain young women were specially trained to proselyte the young men of the village and the local GVN troops. Members of the Youth Association — many of whom would later join the Front forces — carried messages and acted as guides to the regular Front troops. Where the defense of the village or the hamlet was concerned, men, women, and children participated either by collecting intelligence on the local GVN troops or laying out primitive defenses such as punji sticks and nailed boards. Each hamlet had a squad or more of self-defense forces and each village an armed militia.10 In addition, the village would probably have a small factory or workshop for the production of Front uniforms, medicines, or small arms.

  The Front village was a cooperative agricultural center and military base. It was also a training camp for the new members of the revolution. In every village the cadres formed schools, classes for illiterates, and centers for the dissemination of news and propaganda. In most of them they would begin small theatrical and singing groups or bring in groups of entertainers from the outside to enliven the continual round of political education meetings. The secure Front village would usually possess its own mimeograph newspaper or information center to relay the news of the war and to bring the villagers into contact with the outside world. In these villages the Women’s Association would organize health education classes and set up small maternities and medical dispensaries. The youth groups would engage in sports programs and train their members to enter the regular guerrilla forces.

  The government of the villages remained in the hands of Front cadres — most of whom were, after 1964, members of the People’s Revolutionary Party. In the beginning, these cadres would retain strict control over the administrative committee and in particular over the security, finance, and propaganda sections. The government of the village was unquestionably authoritarian, but it worked in a very different manner from the government of the GVN villages. While the GVN village chiefs pursued their impossible task of ruling the villages as they were, the Front attempted to remake them so that they might rule themselves.

  As was the case in Ich Thien village, the first act of the cadres in taking over a village was usually to call a meeting and have the villagers elect one of their number as chairman of the administrative committee. These elections were not free, for the cadres chose the candidates. At the same time, the cadres took care to choose people whom the villagers respected. The cadres continued to control the committee and to initiate policy, but they would gradually train local men to take over the day-to-day work of administration. At first they would train farmers for the simple tasks of gathering villagers for a meeting or handing out propaganda leaflets. After a while they would turn over to them the more complicated tasks of collecting taxes, making speeches, recruiting new partisans, and administering the informal welfare program. As the villagers proved themselves competent to perform these tasks, the cadres retreated further and further into the background. For the NLF, the creation of a local administrative staff served an important function. It slowed, if it did not stop, the whole chain reaction of fear and hostility that the presence of any one bureaucrat would have set off in the village. The Front cadres were not the hereditary village chiefs, any more than were the Diemist officials, but they at least did not take on the position of supreme paternal authority. Partly concealed behind the administrative staff, they intervened in village affairs only indirectly — to initiate programs and policies, to direct the education and propaganda work, to see to village security, and to arbitrate disputes that could not be resolved by the villagers. By holding themselves above the relationship between the villagers and their “elected” officials, they could arbitrate between both parties while continuing to develop the Front organization in the village.

  The obvious question of whether or not the villagers “liked” the Front government is impossible to answer directly. The villagers under Front control were engaging in an extremely complicated process, the end of which they themselves could not visualize. More importantly, the question did
not pose itself to them in abstract terms. When asked whether they liked the Front, the low-level defectors and prisoners would usually reply in terms of whether or not the war had gone badly for them. Many peasants, for instance, objected to the Front taxes, which became increasingly high after the arrival of the American troops. Others objected to having their time taken by labor on the tunnel and fortifications. Still others objected to the Front government because of their concern that the GVN or the Americans would reoccupy the village, and a great many objected to having their houses bombed or shelled by the Americans. These same people, however, welcomed the Front when it appeared to be winning. Beyond them were the loyalists who looked upon the Front as the only true system. Because of this diversity of opinion, it is perhaps more useful to look at what internal changes the Front made in village life.