Fire in the Lake (76 page)

  
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 AG-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.
    (Halberstam, “Voices,” p. 48.)

11
. Paul Mus quotes this remark in the documentary film by Emile de Antonio,
The Year of the Pig.

12
. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File G-5, p. 24.

13
. Many of the NLF and GVN reports of violence by the other side seem to contain the kind of fantasy that Westerners usually connect with obscenity. One Front soldier, for instance, wrote that the “lackey troops,” trained by the Americans, had raped and beaten a pregnant woman until she aborted and had forced one of their men to eat a soup made of human heads. (Pike,
Viet Cong,
p. 438.) The first story is quite possibly true — such things did happen — but the second seems somewhat too elaborate to be the truth. The point is that some fantasies were executed, some remained pure fantasy.

14
. Paul Mus has compared the mental landscape of the Vietnamese to that of the physical world that encloses them. “The rivers have a seasonal exuberance and must be dammed; the dams that are built up also raise — through an inevitable physical effect — the river bed; they must therefore be made a bit higher. Pushed to the limit this picture becomes one of catastrophe. Perhaps the same may be said of Vietnamese formalism.” (John T. McAlister, Jr., and Paul Mus,
The Vietnamese and Their Revolution,
pp. 96–97.)

15
. Ibid., p. 119.

16
. Confucius,
The Analects of Confucius,
pp. 178–179.

17
. There was, of course, some variation in these phrases — “the U.S.-Diem clique,” for instance — but the abstraction remained the same.

18
. Michael Charles Conley,
The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam,
p. 350.

19
. Sir Robert Thompson,
No Exit from Vietnam,
p. 40.

20
. Stephen T. Hosmer, “Viet Cong Repression and Its Implications for the Future,” pp. 95, 108.

21
. Ibid., p. 76.

Organization: The Liberated Village, the NLF Command Structure, and the PRP

  
1
. Le Duan, “Under the Glorious Party Banner,” p. 25.

  
2
. Douglas Pike's
Viet Cong
is to date the only published American work on the NLF. Michael Charles Conley's
The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam
is a report written for the Department of the Army and the American University's Center for Research in Social Systems. The RAND Corporation has done a great deal of work on the NLF for the U.S. Air Force and other defense agencies.

  
3
. Pike,
Viet Cong,
pp. ix, 111.

  
4
. Paul Valéry, extract from
History and Politics No. 10.
Valéry here invents a discourse by a Chinese mandarin.

  
5
. See Virginia Thompson,
French Indochina,
for a discussion of the economic and social conditions of Vietnam in the 1930's.

  
6
. Robert L. Sansom,
The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam,
pp. 35–39.