Fire in the Lake (32 page)

As for the Front’s mass organizations and its demands for political conformity, an American might well find these oppressive — though not perhaps to the extent imagined, if he were fighting for the life of his country. But many of these same demands had been made upon the Vietnamese by the traditional village and family collective. One of the aims of the Front was to restore some of the old powers of the village council. The mature Liberation village would possess its own treasury and tax collection agency, a council for the arbitration of land and other disputes, and its organizations for social welfare and collective work. But the Front was not merely trying to restore the old villages. It was attempting to create a community of individuals rather than of families. In the Liberation Associations men, women, and children had to work with their peers. In the beginning the villagers often felt some anxiety about working with people who after all did not belong to their families — but under peaceful conditions these difficulties did not seem to last long. As a result of the system of rotation in the working groups, a large number of villagers finally had the opportunity to take on responsibility and learn basic management skills. At the same time they learned the bureaucratic — and democratic — concept of interchangeable parts; the idea that power resides not in the man himself but in the job he temporarily fills. The idea, or rather the sense of the idea, was an important one in that it led on one hand to the capacity to work with strangers and on the other to the basic and revolutionary notion of human equality. The cadres of the new generation might finally understand and accept the fact that they were not the “fathers” but the “children” and the “servants” of the collectivity.

The project of the Front was not merely to reorganize the village but to broaden the villagers’ horizons so that they, even if they remained confined to a certain place, took part in the life of the nation. The undertaking was a revolutionary one and it required — particularly in time of war — the kind of intervention in daily existence to which the villagers were not at all accustomed. While the GVN contented itself with broadcasting messages about the horrors of Communism and the wonders of “freedom,” the Front cadres took every opportunity to talk to the people about the political struggle and to make the connection between their own activities of building roads or hamlet defenses and the future of the country as a whole. Depending on the quality of the cadres involved, all of this talk and activity could confer a sense of excitement and importance to life within the village — or it could be a terrible bore. In either case, however, it was not a matter of empty words, for though the villagers remained where they were, they were not as far from the city as they once had been. The villages were not merely the agricultural bases but the cities for the NLF.

As an authoritarian and a revolutionary organization, the Front quite clearly depended to a great extent on the quality of its cadres. If a cadre spoke harshly to the villagers, if he concealed information, if he stole food and money, or otherwise acted like so many of the GVN officials, he might actually lose the village for the Front, for at the beginning the Front could offer nothing but hope — and a hope founded in the good behavior of its cadres. The problem of insuring that this would not happen was, however, an enormous one. It involved not
finding
competent men, but
creating
them out of a generation brought up within the traditions of the Confucian family. The behavior of the GVN officials was after all, quite “natural.” It simply did not fit within the new situation.

Looked at from a distance, the task of creating good cadres was identical to that of making the entire Front organization work — problems of organization being always and finally problems of men. The American counterinsurgents never fully appreciated that the NLF faced destruction at every turn from the same chain reaction of fear and hostility that sprang up between superior and inferior within the GVN. Had it not found some means of arresting this “natural” impulse, the Front too would have undergone the same process of disintegration: first atrophy in the channels of communication, then corruption, loss of initiative in the lower echelons, isolation from reality at the top, and finally a breaking up of the whole system. Certain symptoms of this disintegration did appear from time to time within parts of the Front organization, but the high command usually managed to suppress them. The organization as a whole remained intact even under the great pressure of the American war. Its main instrument of self-control was political education, but political education did not by itself suffice, for even among the best-indoctrinated there remained a potential for reversion to type. In addition, therefore, the Front created a series of organizational checks and balances. These may be thought of as control devices for the benefit of leadership but they may also be thought of as measures to assist the individual cadre and to insure justice for the people under his administration.

The basic unit of the Front was the cell. Every responsible member of the NLF from the highest Party cadres to the members of the Liberation Associations belonged to a cell composed of some three to ten people of the same rank and the same general occupation. Among the ranks of the cadres one member of a cell would also belong to a cell at the next highest level: one member of the village committee cell would also belong to the district committee cell, and so forth. Orders from above and reports from below were transmitted through that link member. In theory, the lower cell elected its representative to the higher cell but in practice the reverse seems generally to have been the case — and necessarily so in the beginning, as the higher body had actually to create the lower one. American scholars of the subject have tended merely to profess outrage at this “undemocratic” practice, neglecting the benefits the cell system conferred.

The cell, particularly among Party cadres, was an extremely close-knit group that met perhaps every week to review activities and to plan for the future. Ideally the cell acted as a substitute family — a group to which the cadres could come to speak freely of their problems and receive advice or reassurance from their comrades. Doubtless all cells did not function in such a harmonious manner, but the cell system did tend to encourage close working relationships and to alleviate some of the anxiety of the superior-inferior relationship. With the constant meetings, the link cadre would come to recognize the problems of the lower group much better than if he issued orders from afar. Similarly the lower group might come to understand the problems of the higher echelon and to trust its representative. Psychologically, the cell system tended to drive away the cadres’ concern for loss of “face” and to remove the sense of isolation and alienation that affected so many of the GVN officials and soldiers. Practically, it discouraged those abuses that so often resulted from that sense of alienation: the corruption, the dishonesty in reporting, and the refusal to take responsibility. If a cadre made an error in judgment, his colleagues would have a chance to take him to task for it as equals in the cell meeting without reporting him to the higher authorities. The danger, of course, remained that two or more cadres might combine to tyrannize the others, but that danger exists within any form of bureaucratic organization. Because the cell system shifted the emphasis of command and control from a hierarchical to a collective basis, it tended to reduce the threat of irreconcilable conflict and “splitting apart” so prevalent within the GVN. It also reduced the vulnerability of the organization as a whole. The death or defection of one cadre would not, for instance, bring with it the “confusion” that usually attended the death of a single, strong leader.
¹³
A man might die, but the system would nonetheless survive to reproduce itself.

The cell system existed at every level of the Front command. So too did the principle — if not in every case the fact — of collective leadership. At the head of the NLF was a central committee of sixty-four members, theoretically elected by a congress of delegates chosen at district level. The executive powers of this national organization were vested in a presidium, responsible for foreign and military affairs, and a secretariat, responsible for domestic civil and political affairs, each composed of seven or more members of the central committee. At the next level of the organization lay the inter-zone commands. (The inter-zones roughly corresponded to the GVN corps areas, only there were three of them: a) southern central Vietnam, the coastal plains below the DMZ; b) the Western Highlands; and c) Nam bo or the Mekong Delta area.) There was also a special zone for Saigon and the surrounding provinces. Below the inter-zone were the zone and finally the provincial headquarters. The zone commands seem to have been little more than communications centers. The inter-zone and provincial commands followed along much the same organizational lines as the central body: a legislative committee and an executive body responsible to it that directed the local military forces and coordinated their operations with the civilian agencies for finance, supply, communications, propaganda, and mass organization. Below province level the Front organization varied, depending on the amount of population under Front control. In certain areas, such as the highlands and the sect-controlled portion of the western Delta, it was an informal network of guerrilla units. In others, it was an elaborate administration with district and village committees whose organization paralleled that of the provincial body.
¹⁴

American diagrams of the NLF command structure tend to show a hierarchical organization in which the lines of authority run solidly from top to bottom — as was the case within the GVN. In fact, the operations of the Front presented an almost antithetical picture to that of the GVN, in part for the excellent reason that its supply of men, goods, and intelligence came from the bottom up rather than from the top down. The GVN combined an almost total lack of central planning with a highly centralized administration. The Front combined a complete central planning system with a highly decentralized administration.
¹⁵
At least until 1966, when the American armed forces began to depopulate the countryside and to drive the NLF to dependence on the North Vietnamese, the Front’s developed village, district, and provincial organizations were almost entirely self-sufficient. Each village, for instance, supported its own militia and its own intelligence, education, and welfare services, and its own public works projects. The village committees could survive in logistical isolation for long periods of time. This decentralization gave an enormous flexibility. It also enforced cooperation between the civil and military authorities and between the higher and lower levels of the bureaucracy. The provincial and national battalions depended on the district and village committees for intelligence, if not for some part of their supplies, and thus their commanders had to take directives from the civilians — even those in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy. Brought into the military councils, the village cadres could, for their part, coordinate all of the local government activities. They could prepare propaganda campaigns in conjunction with military operations and they could (unlike the GVN village and district chiefs) work with the peasants without fear that their efforts would be brought to naught by an ill-timed movement of troops. This system insured a degree of local influence over national affairs that did not begin to exist within the GVN. The NLF village leaders had to accept policy from above. But with their own militia, and their own local supply lines and intelligence services, they had a great deal more power vis-à-vis the central command than any GVN village council — appointed or elected.

The NLF leaders instructed their cadres in this distribution of power by the very style in which they lived. Even the highest of the Front cadres showed no outward sign of rank. The highest of them dressed in the black pajamas of the peasants and held titles no more impressive than that of “chairman,” “secretary,” or “cadre.” Unlike the regular North Vietnamese army, the People’s Liberation Army of the south conferred no permanent titles at all. An officer would be designated “commander of the
n
th battalion” or “the
n
th regiment,” never Colonel X or General Y. This anonymity served as a security precaution, but it also served to reinforce the idea that rank was not a ritual station gained by long tenure or ritual actions. Rank was a responsibility earned and held by continuing positive achievement.

In fact, all diagrams of the NLF tend to be confusing and to some degree deceptive, for in addition to its vertical chain of command the Front possessed a strong lateral element in the form of the People’s Revolutionary Party. PRP cadres participated in all of the Front organizations from the village level up, but their chain of command ran parallel to, and to some extent independently of, the NLF itself. To visualize the NLF it is necessary to imagine not a diagram but a three-dimensional cone with a core of denser material corresponding to the PRP. The role of the PRP was much the same as that of the Communist parties in China and the Soviet Union. Its function was to provide political education and “correct” political leadership at all levels of the bureaucracy. In the villages the Party cadres created and directed all of the Front organizations from their positions within the administrative committees. In the military units and in the district and provincial headquarters they acted as “generalists” amid specialists, coordinating the military, administrative, and logistical machinery so that it served the overall political aims of the Front. The Party cadres held veto power over all military activities and authority over all aspects of the political struggle. The Party, in sum, was the government of the NLF.

Government, as it were from the inside out rather than strictly from the top down, presented certain practical advantages to the NLF in its conduct of the political struggle and the guerrilla war. As most American analysts recognized, the presence of Party cadres at all levels of the command helped to prevent ideological splits and bureaucratic snafus in a struggle where all forms of communication had to be kept to the minimum. The Party was in fact the key to the ability of the NLF to provide centralized policy control with a decentralized administration. Less obvious to American analysts was the fact that government by the Party constituted a part of the solution to the problem of mandarinism that plagued the GVN. Within the GVN an official would look upon promotion as a movement upwards, a gain in power, wealth, and prestige. Because of the PRP, however, the NLF presented a very different picture even to its newest recruits. A guerrilla fighter could, he knew, rise upwards through the ranks to control more men, but he could not gain real power until he joined the Party. And to join the Party was to move not upwards but
inwards;
it was a promotion but it was also a demotion in the sense that it meant no rise in wealth or outward status, but, on the contrary, obedience to a discipline much more severe than that exacted from the ordinary NLF member. The Party cadre had to serve as an example of courage, discipline, and abstemiousness. He had, in other words, to descend to the status of a model “servant of the people.”