Fire in the Lake (34 page)

This young radio operator, a defector from the NLF, manages to convey a great deal of the difference in atmosphere between the two armies.
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The GVN operators knew how to tap out the Morse code, but they had very little sense of their own importance and the consequence of their actions on the lives of hundreds of men. They were irresponsible because they could not see the connection between their own welfare and that of their fellow soldiers.

The Front’s political training might be thought of as the verbal counterpart to the physical, or military, training, for it was “political” in the most extended sense of the word. Brought up within the small, enclosed world of the family, most of the young recruits found it natural to trust each other, to share their food and their complaints, to discuss and to compromise the interests of group action. On a broader scale, they had very little conception of “public property” or “public service.” Like the ARVN soldiers, they did not see why they should not intrigue against their superiors or steal food from the villagers. The Front cadres had to spell out everything in detail and show them little by little how their own actions related to the goals of the larger community.

An hour before any big operation, such as an attack on a GVN post, the battalion political officer would call a meeting of all the men and urge them to keep their spirit up and do their duty properly. If there was a larger scale operation, the Military Section of the province would send some men down to explain the importance of the operation to the men. For example, they would say that this particular operation was designed to destroy some enemy setups, and politically to liberate the people in that area. They would mention the advantages and disadvantages of the VC, but of course the advantages always outweighed the disadvantages. They talked about the duty and responsibilities of the Liberation fighters. They said that the people needed them badly this particular time, and that if any of the men were killed in action, they could be sure their sacrifice was not a waste, and that their families and the people would benefit from it. The group members and Party leaders were called upon to set an example for the others.
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In the regular squad, platoon, and company meetings, the unit leaders would review their activities in public and give the fighters a chance to question or criticize their performance. At the same time the Party cadres (there were usually three to each battalion, one to each company) would discuss the overall political and military situation and instruct the fighters in the general aims of the revolution. Because most of the soldiers had no previous experience of political discussion, the cadres would start off with simple slogans, songs, riddles, and jokes that illustrated such abstractions as “the class struggle” in terms the fighters could understand. In between meetings they would engage the men in friendly conversation and encourage them to question the points of doctrine and express their feelings about life in the army either directly or by writing poems, articles, or stories for the “wall newspaper.” Instead of lecturing the fighters, the cadre attempted to draw them out, to deal with their complaints in the open, and finally to coerce the stragglers by means of collective rather than authoritarian pressure.

This particular form of political education — that of a dialogue between the ranks — had an underlying force to it. The young recruits had little intellectual reason for observing the soldierly disciplines. They had at the same time a strong emotional bias against doing so, for, as they saw it, to cooperate with their superiors was to expose themselves to exploitation. By talking with the soldiers the cadres were not only educating them in their duties, but on some deeper level assuring them that they would not abandon them and (literally as well as figuratively) keep all the food for themselves. “Talking was the best we could do,” explained one of the squad leaders. “We would have a private talk with a man whose spirits were particularly low. I don’t know if the talks were any good, but we believed that the men might feel better if they could talk about their troubles.” The cadres did not expect to keep all of their men from defecting, but they felt — and correctly — that the constant pressure of their attention acted as some counterweight to the hunger and cold, to the jungle leeches and the bombing. As one defector testified, “The Front’s political cadres are very dangerous. Nothing can escape them. When they see a combatant looking sad, they don’t hesitate to comfort him.”
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Rather than simply asserting command over their soldiers, the cadres first established the legitimacy of their authority by gaining the fighters’ confidence and participation. To some degree their efforts amounted to an attempt to transfer the soldiers’ attachments from their real families to the great “family” of the Liberation.

Unlike the ARVN soldiers, who usually settled their families near their fixed bases or in an accessible town, the Front fighters rarely saw their families more than once or twice a year. Removed from their villages, they entered into a society entirely composed of their peers — a society isolated and thrown back upon itself by the external walls of danger. The cadres did not attack the soldiers’ filial ties directly; rather they played them down in a number of important ways. By performing the ceremonies of marriage and burial, by promising to support the crippled soldiers, to help the families of the dead and the wounded, and to pay special attention to those of the fighters’ families who lived in the Liberated areas, they relieved the soldiers of their most pressing economic worries. For many of the fighters a sense of obligation was the strongest attachment they had to their families. The transfer of responsibility thus helped them to rationalize the breach of filial piety that they had made in the very act of joining the NLF. “How can you help your families,” the cadres asked, “if the nation is in such trouble? The best thing you can do for your families is to fight for the Liberation.” In all of their talks with the fighters the cadres praised the “masculine” virtues of aggressiveness, courage, and comradeship as against the “feminine” qualities of sentimentality, cleverness, and guile. Given their solidarity and strength of purpose, the soldiers had, so the cadres said, the power to overcome all hardships, including that of long separation from their families.

As soon as the soldiers began to talk to each other more freely and to rely on each other in combat, they naturally began to look upon their fellows as a source of security and affection. And they began to regard themselves as an elite: in contrast to the GVN soldiers who were “lazy,” “ill-trained,” and “corrupt,” they were virile, disciplined, and capable of sacrifice. At the beginning they interpreted all their privations as a sign of the Front’s weakness and inability to succor them, but later on they began to look upon the same hardships as a continual proof of their strength and virtue. As American statistics showed, the more time they spent with the NLF, the higher their morale rose and the lower went their rate of defections.

Though in the light of hindsight much of the NLF training program must seem to be little more than a thoroughgoing civics course, there was one aspect of it that went beyond all the boundaries which Westerners customarily draw around the concept “education.” This was the institution of
khiem thao,
“criticism” or “self-criticism” (the words mean “to verify” and “to discuss”). Used previously by the Chinese Communists and the Viet Minh,
khiem thao
was a “truth game” in which every member of the organization from the lowliest soldier to the highest cadre had to participate. In the “criticism sessions,” held on a regular basis as a part of the daily activities, each NLF member had to admit his own failings and given his honest opinion about the conduct of all the other members of the group. Within the sessions he did not have to fear punishment for his own errors other than the most devastating one of concerted group criticism. Only if he refused to participate would he incur the final penalty of expulsion by the group.

Khiem thao
was a game in which the rules of life were suspended, but it was a game designed to reach back into life and change its players. When the NLF recruits came into the army or the administration, they arrived almost totally insulated from their fellow men by their masks of “politeness.” Suspicious of both their commanders and their peers, they remained
attentistes,
always watching for a sign of trouble, always on the point of defection. The
khiem thao
sessions forced them to participate, forced them to break down all the defenses which they had built up around them in childhood. For the newcomer “criticism” was a terrifying experience. “When they were being criticized,” reported one squad leader, “their manner was correct and humble, but when the
khiem thao
was over, some would leave the unit to go home or to rally to the GVN, while others would swear and then forget all about it. We lost a lost of men because of those criticism sessions. After all, every man has his self-respect, and when his short-comings were brought up publically, he was hurt.”
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But to the extent that
khiem thao
was painful, so it was perhaps necessary to the functioning of the entire organization. If the recruits could not strip themselves of their anxieties about each other and the power of the group, they could not begin to work together or to commit themselves to a common cause. Without a real psychological readjustment, their loyalties to any organization, other than that of their own families, would remain only surface deep. Given the newcomer’s ambivalence between fear of the group and desire to belong to it, the cadres had to strike a delicate balance in their disciplinary measures. As one Party manual warned:

The criticism must be made in a spirit of mutual, comradely affection, helping each other to reform. But criticism in a hostile spirit does harm, causes loss of face, goes too far, etc. Criticism of this kind really causes divisions and prejudices in the Party. It is not useful for helping each other to correct defects, in a spirit of compassion, to advance together.
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In practice the Party cadres attempted to restrain the low-level guerrilla fighters from discussing more than the details of the day-to-day work. (Burchett, for instance, observed several of these tactical
khiem thao
sessions going on in the intervals between the practice attacks on the GVN blockhouse.) Discussion of more profound and difficult matters was reserved for those who had already developed strong attachments to the Front — and was used primarily as a corrective. If a supply system broke down or a battalion performed badly in a fight, not only the top-ranking officers, but the entire group of cadres who bore some responsibility for the operation would meet for a period of perhaps two or three weeks to discuss their technical errors and the obstacles in their communication with each other. No one but the NLF cadres themselves know what went on at these sessions, and thus it is possible only to imagine the process in a rather distant and abstract manner.

Given a safe forum in which to express his own grievances, the cadre came to see that he did not depend directly on any one member of the group. He could put his case on the table with some assurance that it would be judged on its own merits rather than on a personal basis. When, as must frequently have happened, two members quarreled, the group would not dissolve itself until the matter was settled by mutual agreement. With some experience at
khiem thao
the cadre would grow less and less afraid to disagree with another member, for he would realize that by initiating a verbal conflict he did not risk his entire career in the Front, or indeed his life. By the same token, he would come to understand that when others criticized him for mishandling a situation, they were not doing it from motives other than that of desire to get the job done better the next time. The knowledge came as a revelation — though one perhaps gradually arrived at; and if he allowed it to, that revelation could change his life. What mattered now was not the maintenance of “face,” but the competence to deal with the “objective” problems that confronted the entire group.

By forcing the cadres into conflict and limiting the damage done by it, the
khiem thao
sessions opened up entirely new channels of communication within the NLF. From the outside it is impossible to match cause exactly with result. But it takes only a small stretch of the imagination to see that in melting down the whole hierarchical structure of relationships the
khiem thao
gave the NLF a strength that could be measured in battalions. If, for instance, a number of soldiers from one company died or deserted, the local Front commander would have an excellent chance of hearing about his losses and taking measures to deal with them. His counterpart in the ARVN, by contrast, rarely knew how many men he commanded. The ARVN company, battalion, and regimental commanders made it a general practice to conceal their losses in the hopes of disguising their own failures or of collecting the pay due to the missing men. (According to American analysts, most ARVN units remained at 70 to 80 percent of their reported strength for the duration of the war.) The ARVN generals thus courted military disaster when they committed anything but an overwhelming force into action.

The Front propaganda reports did not always reflect reality, but the reports they circulated among themselves were almost unique in their realism. Unlike either the Saigon officials or many members of the American mission, Front cadres were actually able to report bad news. So good was their intelligence and security system, indeed, that they were able to prevent much of the intrigue, corruption, graft, and blackmail which had effectively paralyzed the ARVN.

Q. How many party members were there in your company?

A. There were eight or nine of them.

Q. How did these men become party members?

A. They had excellent performance records, and were ready to sacrifice anything that was asked of them. They were virtuous and enthusiastic. They were the outstanding members of the unit.
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