Fire in the Lake (30 page)

The subject of NLF organization was clearly of great interest to the U.S. government. At the same time it had a more general interest, for, under the circumstances — that is, the necessity to fight both a domestic enemy and a vast foreign power within a very small space — the success of the NLF rested heavily on its ability to mobilize the population into a disciplined and coherent force. As Pike himself showed most convincingly, the task of organization for the NLF involved not merely the creation of a command structure but the transformation of the life of the villages.

With such a fruitful subject in hand, Pike and his colleagues ought to have had some interesting insights into the whole problem of government and society in Vietnam. But their conclusions are curiously underdeveloped. Indeed, insofar as they draw any conclusions at all, they tend merely to support the claims of State Department propagandists that the NLF used foreign methods of organization in order to coerce a passive and generally apolitical peasantry. The same charge, however, might just as well be leveled against the GVN, and it begs the question of what made the NLF, by contrast to the GVN, such a powerful political and military force. The conclusion is inadequate; at the same time it is foregone by the nature of the materials used to reach it. Pike and his colleagues conducted their analyses in a void without reference to the nature of Vietnamese society or to the problems besetting it in the twentieth century. Thus their analyses are wholly misleading. In the absence of any information to the contrary, South Vietnam in their work appears to possess a stable, thriving traditional society and an adequate government. Against this background the NLF emerges as a sinister, disruptive force that has no local basis in legitimacy, and that quite possibly is the arm of a larger and more sinister power trying to impress similar methods of organization upon all nations throughout the world.

To look at the organization of the NLF within the context of Vietnamese society in the 1960’s is to charge the same group of facts presented by Pike and his colleagues with an entirely different meaning. It is to see that the NLF strategies constituted not an arbitrary system of domination but, in many respects, solutions to problems that neither the GVN nor the indigenous political groups had been able to solve.

One of the central problems, of course, was the disintegration of village society. The traditional Vietnamese village was in a special sense a collective enterprise. Though each family owned its own land, the village operated as a unit to a great degree. The village council was responsible for the upkeep of the local dike system, for the collection of taxes, for the management of communal lands, for the administration of charity and emergency relief, and for the arbitration of disputes. The family heads usually gave a certain proportion of their crop to the village council for storage in case of a general emergency and banded together in mutual-aid societies for the defraying of certain large, irregular expenses, such as house-building and the ceremonies of marriage and death. The extended families, a handful of which made up the village, also owned land whose produce would be used for the perpetuation of the rites and for the general welfare. This intensive form of cooperation among individuals within the extended family and the village existed in a particular social and psychological landscape radically different from that of, let us say, a New England township. Vietnamese villagers identified themselves not as individual “souls” but as members and dependents of the collectivity. A villager might have said with Paul Valéry, “Every man here feels that he is both son and father… and is aware of being held fast by the people around him and the dead below him and the people to come, like a brick in a brick wall. He holds. Every man here knows that he is nothing apart from this composite earth.”
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The disintegration of the traditional villages under the French regime brought disaster for the individual Vietnamese farmer. By the 1930’s the numbers of beggars, paupers, and prostitutes had increased to the point where even the French administration noticed it.
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The villages no longer provided any social welfare system, any sanction against glaring inequalities in the distribution of land, or any institution of cooperative work. The villagers lived at the mercy of the weather, their neighbors, merchants, and, most important, the nation-state. After the worldwide depression of the 1930’s the rice consumption of the poor peasants in the “rice bowl” of Cochin China dipped below subsistence level.
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In 1945 a million North Vietnamese peasants died because the French and Japanese administrations had neglected to fill the emergency rice granaries in the north and the war prevented any shipments of rice from the south. Even for those who did not suffer starvation or penury the psychological consequences of the breakdown of the village were severe, for the collectivity, that “brick wall,” had been the very
raison d’être
of individual existence. Without it, the individual descended into a kind of chaos, separated not only from society but, as it were, from his own soul. It was not so much anticolonialism as the need to re-establish some form of community that led the peasants of the north and the south to join the sects and the Viet Minh at the period of the Indochina war. Anticolonialism was, in fact, only a means to the end of this new community.

In the south after the war the Ngo family had in a confused manner attempted to revive the old collectivity. The attempt was doomed to failure, for the old authorities of the family had been quite superseded by the new economy and the new state. Working at cross-purposes to the Ngos, the American AID representatives had, during the Diem regime and later, made certain small attempts to reform the villages along new lines with farming cooperatives, self-help projects, and finally, in 1966, with the institution of village elections in the “secure” areas. But their efforts were largely abortive. The self-help projects fell away into inertia, the cooperatives disintegrated into factional feuds, and the elected village chiefs proved hardly more effective in solving village problems than their appointed predecessors. The villagers did not trust each other, much less the government above them. To organize them to work together involved not merely the demonstration of the economic feasibility of a project but the changing of their whole perspective on the functioning of society. The West had undermined the authority of the patriarch: but the program of the ancestors remained nonetheless as an invisible obstruction, preventing the villagers from organizing as equals and from accepting the authority of the government. The American AID representatives had success only when they worked with one villager at a time or when they worked in conjunction with the Hoa Hao or the Catholics, the only two non-Communist groups that by the mid-1960’s had extensive organization in the rural areas. The plight of the nonsectarian villagers was all the more pathetic by comparison. In 1967 one of the Mekong tributaries flooded through several provinces of the western Delta, destroying vast areas of paddy land and burying whole villages under layers of mud. Even before the river had subsided, the Hoa Hao leaders were demanding aid from the government, organizing rescue teams and doling out food to the stranded villagers. In the space of a few weeks they had organized a labor force from among the sect members in two provinces to rebuild the villages and dig new irrigation canals. Their villages slowly recovered, but the nonsectarian villagers in the area continued to suffer from disease and near starvation despite the American attempts to deliver aid from Saigon.

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.)
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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.”
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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.