59. Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, vol. 2, pp. 950–951, cites Malcolm Browne.
60. Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, pp. 150–152 (“To the People's Executive Committees at All Levels,” October 1945). and pp. 180–184 (“Letter to Comrades in North Viet-Nam,” 1 March 1947).
61. Gerald C. Hickey, Village in Vietnam, p. 90.
62. Ibid., p. 185.
63. Conversation with Paul Mus.
64. The quotations come from RAND Corporation “Interviews Concerning the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.”
65. Phan Thi Dac, Situation de la personne au Viet-Nam, p. 143.
66. Of course, in a Vietnamese village the position of a village councilor was not entirely determined by birth. But the sense of stability is the same in a society so small that almost everyone knows everyone else.
67. By means of language the ego adopts extra-family members into the patriarchal clan: the wife becomes, familiarly, “my younger sister,” the schoolteacher “my master” (father).
68. Charles Gosselin, L'Empire d'Annam, p. 45.
69. Richard Solomon, “Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture.” Phan Thi Dac, Dr. Walter Sloate, and other anthropologists and psychologists working on Vietnam have indicated that Vietnamese behavior, at least from the point of view of comparison with that of the West, contains many of the elements Dr. Solomon describes with reference to the Chinese.
70. I Ching, p. 521. This is the image of PROVIDING NOURISHMENT.
71. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File FD2A, p. 6.
72. Phan Thi Dac, Situation de la personne, pp. 126–127.
73. Léopold Cadière, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viêtnamiens, vol. 2, P. 313.
74. Interviews,” RAND Corporation File FD2A, pp. 5–6.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., pp. 7–8.
77. Ibid., p. 8.
78. Ibid.
79. Halberstam, Ho, p. 110.
80. The strong sect villages — Catholic, Hoa Hao, or Cao Dai — would tend to organize and contain this form of behavior.
81. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File FD2A, p. 6.
82. Cadiére, Croyances, vol. 2, on the construction of Hue.
83. Fall, Two Vietnams, p. 236.
84. Pike, Viet Cong, p. 60. After the abortive coup of 1960, Diem said that the “hand of God had reached down” to protect him. Though Diem used the Catholic language, his idea is here not of mercy from an anthropomorphic God, but justification from an impersonal heaven.
85. I Ching, p. 501.
86. Scigliano, South Vietnam, pp. 114–115. In the first five years of the Diem regime, the United States spent 78 percent of its aid to Saigon on the development of the armed forces. To that sum the Department of Defense added eighty-five million dollars a year in direct military assistance — mostly military equipment. Of the remaining 22 percent of the aid budget, the United States spent 40 percent a year on transportation, and most of that on road-building. The Vietnamese officials hoped the roads would serve commerce, but the Americans gave priority to those roads which would serve strategic military interests. (The twenty-mile stretch of superhighway designed to carry heavy military traffic between Bien Hoa and Saigon cost more money than the United States provided for all labor, community development, social welfare, housing, health, and education projects in Vietnam during the entire period from 1954 to 1962.) The second most important percentage of the nonmilitary budget went for food and the third for public administration — that is, primarily for the building of the civil guard, the police, and other security services.
87. The RF and PF were known as the “Ruff-Puffs” to many Americans in Vietnam.
88. See McNamara memorandum on Taylor's cable to Kennedy in Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, p. 48.
89. Taylor and others used the phrases. See Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, pp. 146–147, and Ralph Stavins, “Kennedy's Private War.” The political recommendations, drawn up by State Department officials, appeared in the official “Taylor report.”
90. The quotation is from General Maxwell Taylor's report (3 November 1961) on his mission to South Vietnam, in Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, p. 147.
91. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 316. The minister of the interior spoke of the Strategic Hamlet program as the last chance for Vietnam to preserve her independence, indicating that the Vietnamese government had heard of the proposal to send American troops.
92. Bernard B. Fall, Viet-Nam Witness, pp. 197–198.
93. Ibid., p. 283. He cites Robert Scigliano in Asian Survey, January 1963.
94. Warner, Last Confucian, p. 116.
95. Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 61.
96. Halberstam, Making of a Quagmire, p. 41, cites Graham Greene in the New Republic, 16 May 1955.
97. These pageants took some pains to produce, as Diem in his role of emperor wished to see only people with clean hands and clean clothes. As one peasant reported his visit: “In early 1962 when he came to visit the agricultural center in Due Hue district, I don't know whether or not he realized that the people in several villages had spent almost two months preparing his walk way. Just imagine! Many people had to work day and night to cut all the bamboo trees in the villages to put on a ten-kilometer muddy road for the President to walk during his one-hour visit to the center.… At the time, all of the villagers disliked Ngo Dinh Diem, but no one dared say anything against him.” (“Interviews,” RAND Corporation File FD1A, p. 14.)
98. Halberstam, Making of a Quagmire, p. 46.
99. Duong Van Minh,' “Vietnam: A Question of Confidence,” p. 85.
100. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 193, describes Nhu's instigation of the RYM.
101. Halberstam, Making of a Quagmire, p. 205.
102. Though there were a number of Theravada bonzes in the Delta and in Saigon, they were never very active politically. Tri Quang and others never quite succeeded in recruiting them.
103. Georg W. Alsheimer, Vietnamesische Lehrjahre, p. 133.
104. Paul Mus, “The Buddhist Background to the Crises in Vietnamese Politics.” The foregoing comes essentially from this work.
105. Halberstam, Making of a Quagmire, p. 211.
106. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 199.
107. Halberstam, Making of a Quagmire, pp. 206–207.
108. Warner, Last Confucian, pp. 231–232.
109. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 189.
110. Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, p. 232.
111. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 210.
4: The National Liberation Front
Politics of the Earth
1. John T. McAlister, Jr., and Paul Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution, p. 90.
2. Ibid., p. 117. See further discussion of this below.
The Origins of the National Liberation Front
1. The figure of ninety thousand is the U.S. official estimate. Other sources differ somewhat. Bernard Fall gives the figure of eighty thousand in “Viet-Cong — The Unseen Enemy in Viet-Nam,” in The Viet-Nam Reader, ed. Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, p. 224. Other historians say one hundred thousand.
2. Gerald Hickey gives a description of the differences between Viet Minh and other villages in the period from 1955 to 1956 in “Accommodation and Coalition in South Vietnam,” pp. 38–39.
3. After the publication of the White Paper, I. F. Stone gave a convincing rebuttal of the U.S. argument that the NLF was supplied from the north and manned by northerners, using only the internal evidence of the paper. The “infiltrators” the paper spoke of were in fact the southern regroupees who after 1959 began to reinfiltrate the south to join their own liberation movement. I. F. Stone, “A Reply to the White Paper,” in Viet-Nam Reader, ed. Raskin and Fall, pp. 155–162.
In 1964 U.S. official estimates in Saigon were that the NLF obtained a maximum of 10 percent and perhaps only 2 percent of their weapons from the north. (Malcolm W. Browne, The New Face of War, p. 24.) Even this estimate may be
high, as most of the weapons suspected to have come from the north were Soviet or Czech, and these could have been bought anywhere by the NLF itself.
4. J. J. Zasloff, “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960,” p. 1.
5. Fall, “Viet-Cong,” in Viet-Nam Reader, ed. Raskin and Fall, p. 254.
6. Zasloff, “Origins of Insurgency,” pp. 11, 17. Douglas Pike points out that the Diem regime did not even have a physical presence in many parts of the countryside and thus hazards that the repression could not have been so great as the NLF leaders made out. The apparent contradiction is, however, resolved by the fact that the anti—Viet Minh campaign was not merely the work of the government but of various revanchiste political groups, and this particularly in the Viet Minh areas of the center. The NLF leaders naturally do not like to admit this any more than the Saigon government officials.
7. Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam Will Win!, p. 49.
8. Philippe Devillers, “The Struggle for the Unification of Vietnam,” p. 15. Quoted by Douglas Pike, Viet Cong, pp. 75–76.
9. Fall, “Viet-Cong,” in Viet-Nam Reader, ed. Raskin and Fall, p. 258.
10. Burchett, Vietnam Will Win!, p. 24, describes this process in more detail.
11. Pike, Viet Cong, p. 137.
12. Burchett, Vietnam Will Win!, p. 14.
A Natural Opposition
1. Wolf I. Ladejinsky, “Agrarian Reform in the Republic of Vietnam,” in Problems of Freedom, ed. Wesley R. Fishel, p. 155.
2. Edward G. Lansdale,' Two Steps to Get Us out of Vietnam,” p. 64.
3. Edward J. Mitchell, “Inequality and Insurgency.” The counterargument is brought by Robert L. Sansom in The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, pp. 230–232.
4. See Sansom, Economics of Insurgency, for this argument.
5. John T. McAlister, Jr., Vietnam: The Origins of Revolution, p. 70. In 1930 there were 6,300 landlords with over 125 acres in the south as opposed to 230 in the rest of Vietnam. Some of these southern landlords also belonged to the sects.
6. Sansom, Economics of Insurgency, pp. 29–30. The whole quotation is as follows:
In the past, the relationship between the landlord and his tenants was paternalistic. The landlord considered the tenant as an inferior member of his extended family. When the tenant's father died, it was the duty of the landlord to give money to the tenant for the funeral; if his wife was pregnant, the landlord gave money for the birth; if he was in financial ruin, the landlord gave assistance; therefore the tenant had to behave as an inferior member of the extended family. The landlord enjoyed great prestige vis-à-vis the tenant. For this reason a tenant who proposed to purchase land would have risked condemnation by the “father.”…
The landlord acted not only as owner and lessor of land but as an informal administrator, like the chief of a small state. All disputes between tenants were judged first by the landlord. Only if the landlord failed to resolve such a dispute did the parties go to the government — the village council. There was an unwritten code administered by the landlord; it applied first. For example, if there was a case between tenants involving violence or animosity, the landlord would come down to their houses with twenty or thirty armed followers to settle the dispute. Occasionally there were difficult cases. At such times the landlord would gather the eldest tenants and set up a committee, serve them a meal and obtain their advice. The landlord would enforce his own type of discipline, including corporal punishment for the men and detention for the women. Often the guilty party would be beaten with three, seven or ten strokes. The tenants considered their landlord as their protector and as a good father; they would not dare to ask to purchase land.
(From an interview on 18 August 1967 with Mr. Truong Binh Huy of Bac Lieu city. The respondent is a landlord describing the conditions in the 1930's.)
7. Ibid., p. 56.
8. Ibid., p. 58. See also Ladejinsky, “Agrarian Reform,” in Problems of Freedom, ed. Fishel, p. 164. The Diemist law was actually less radical than that promulgated but never implemented by the Bao Dai government during the war. Sansom, Economics of Insurgency, p. 57: “The major land reform decree issued by the Diem government was Ordinance 57 of October 22, 1956. It limited an owner's holding to 100 hectares for the family's cult or ancestor worship land, and additional 30 hectares if the farmer cultivated it himself. By February 28, 1957, under this law, 2,600 owners had declared themselves the owners of 1,075.000 hectares. From this amount approximately 740,000 hectares, roughly 30 percent of the rice land in South Vietnam, were available for redistribution. But by 1965, only 440,678 hectares had been expropriated and only 247,760 hectares redistributed to 115,912 farmers. This left approximately 818,000 tenants (87.5 percent) who did not benefit from Ordinance 57.”
9. Sansom, Economics of Insurgency, p. 59.
10. Samuel L. Popkin, “The Myth of the Village,” p. 57.
11. “Experiences in Turning XB Village in Kien Phong Province into a Combatant Village,” in Michael Charles Conley, The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam, p. 348ff. This NLF report gives a perfect example of this process.
12. Douglas Pike, Viet Cong, pp. 276–279.
The Approach; Children of the People
1. “Experiences in Turning XB Village in Kien Phong Province into a Combatant Village,” in Michael Charles Conley, The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam, p. 349.
2. Samuel L. Popkin, “The Myth of the Village.” See also RAND Corporation “Interviews Concerning the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.”
3. Q. How much contact did the local GVN officials have with the villagers?
A. They appeared when they came to collect taxes. They rarely met the people and talked to them.
Q. Did the GVN ever send people to the village to talk to the people the way the VC did?
A. The GVN have never done that.
Q. Were there any… units of ARVN passing through your village?
A. Yes.… They treated us correctly. They did not organize meetings and did not say anything.
(Nathan Leites, “The Viet Cong Style of Politics,” p. 252.)
4. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File AG-346, p. 22. This man is a defector, and in such an interview might be expected to say nothing against the GVN.
5. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File G-5, p. 4.
6. Conley, Communist Insurgent Infrastructure, p. 369. The soldiers' “Eight Points for Attention” also run in the same vein.
7. Leites, “Viet Cong Style,” p. 111.
8. Those Vietnamese-speaking Americans, such as Frank Scotton, who initiated the idea of the cadre programs, never expected it to reach such a size. They had begun one small program that worked while it remained small and filled with dedicated people.
9. Major Mei, Major Nguyen Be, and Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau were the principal instructors. (See next chapter for further discussion of the program.)
10. Ibid., File AG-346, p. 24.
11. Ibid., File AG-68, p. 11.
Rebellion
1. “Interviews Concerning the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,” RAND Corporation File AG-239, p. 13.
2. The story of the Gouré study is an excellent illustration of the importance the U.S. military attached to such social science reports.
When the U.S. Air Force first contemplated extensive bombing in the south, it commissioned Gouré to study the possible effects. Some months later, an air force general arrived to collect the results, but Gouré had hardly begun his research. The setting up of offices in Saigon and the preparation of interviews, data sheets, and control groups, after all, took quite some time. But the air force had not that amount of time to spare. The report finally appeared some months after the bombing had already begun.
It is, of course, possible that the general had anticipated the results — the RAND Corporation being three-quarters financed by the air force.
3. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File A
G-278, pp. 14–15.
4. The evidence, both direct and indirect, is too great to be dismissed as the error of a pollster in Vietnam. It crops up in all forms from the personal experience of the Front soldiers (“Each time my unit defeated the GVN forces, the people slaughtered pigs and cattle and prepared a big feast for us. But when we were defeated… they didn't like us one bit.” Nathan Leites, “The Viet Cong Style of Politics,” p. 3) to the instructions from NLF agencies (“We will educate these people and inculcate in them the idea that the Revolution will surely win the final victory so that they may become good people.” Ibid., p. 2). One of the most interesting accounts is from an NLF defector who said that he used to know when a village was hostile or frightened because the people, though they didn't dare ask the soldiers to leave, showed their dissatisfaction by beating or insulting their children. The displacement of anger was visible.
5. See Gerald C. Hickey's Village in Vietnam for an account of the stratagems used to avoid conflict when a dispute cropped up between two villagers.
6. David Halberstam, “Voices of the Vietcong,” p. 45.
7. Douglas Pike, Viet Cong, p. 122.
8. Joseph R. Starobin's Eyewitness in Indochina contains a fairly detailed account of one of these denunciation sessions. The technique was also used by Mao Tse-tung.
9. One recruit actually used — manipulated — the emotion of hatred to free himself from his new bonds of dependency on the NLF.
A. I didn't want to stay in the Front, so I had to build up my hatred in order to have enough determination to leave the Front.
Q. Why did you have to build up your hatred towards the Front in order to defect?
A. I thought if I didn't hate them, I would never be able to steal their weapons or kill some of them in order to escape. If I didn't hate them, I would always feel attached to them and I could never make up my mind to leave them.(Leites, “Viet Cong Style,” p. 187.)
10. One village youth leader testified:
After the Vietcong came, the people in our village worshiped less at the shrine and the pagoda than ever before. In the past the rich and the bourgeois used to tell us that the poor were simply those not blessed by heaven. But the Vietcong worked very hard to change this. They said the people were poor because they didn't have any land to till; heaven had nothing to do with economics. So the people listened and decided that if heaven did not affect their economic life they did not have to go to the shrine and pray for a better life, and they stopped going. They began to change their traditions and paid less attention to their ancestors' graves. They used to put their best food on the altars as offerings to the landowners and the rich people so these people would be well disposed toward them. But after the Front came, the people were no longer in constant fear of the rich and no longer offered them their best food.
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