Vol. 8, Nos.

1 & 2 $2

ORGANIZING FOR

REVOLUTION IN

V IETNAM

STUDY OF A

MEKONG DELTA PROVINCE

BY DAVID HUNT
 RADICAL
AMERICA
January-April,1974 Volume8 , Number1-2

INTRODUCTION 1

VILLAGERS AT WAR: THE NATIONAL

LIBERATION FRONT IN MY THO,1965-1967 3
Introduction: A Local Study of the NLF, 3; Village
Politics, 5; The Mechanics of a Protracted War,20; Bom­
bardment of the Countryside,37; "Generating" Refugees,
45; Postponement of the "General Insurrection and Of­
fensive," 58; "Rooting Out the Viet Cong Infrastructure,"
70; "Who Will We Work With, Who Will We Live With?,"
85; The "Fanatics" Stand Firm, 94; A Vanguard of Poor
Peasants,107; The Force of Hatred,131; Epilogue: From
Tet Offensive to "Rice War," 154; Appendix: Rand and
the NLF, 161; Footnotes, 171

CHRONOLOGY OF THE VIETNAM WAR 182

Editors: Frank Brodhead, Margery Davies, Linda Gordon, Jim

Green, Michael Hirsch, Allen Hunter, Jim Kaplan, Donna
Karl, Jim O'Brien, Wesley Profit, Paddy Quick, Becky
Tippens
Associate Editors: Paul Buhle, Ellen DuBois, Martin Glaber­
man, Ann Gordon, Dick Howard, Roger Keeran, Mark
Levitan, Mario Montano, Mark Naison, Brian Peterson,
Michael Schulman, Stan Weir

RADICAL AMERICA: Published bi-monthly at 5 Upland Road, Cam­

bridge, Massachusetts 02140. Subscription rates: $5 per year, $9 for two
years, $12 for three years; with pamphlets $10 per year. Free to prison­
ers. Bulk rates: 40% reduction from cover price for 5 or more copies.
Bookstores may order on a consignment basis.

Second Oass Postage paid at Boston, Massachusetts and additional mailing offices.
Introduction

Among American opponents of the Vietnam war, there

has been a tendency over the past decade to see the Viet­
namese people in terms of misleading images . Until the Tet
Offensive of 1 968, and to some extent after that time, the
predominant image was that of a long-suffering people be­
ing inexorably pounded into submission by an all-powerful
American war machine. After Tet, a sharply different image
partially replaced the first one. In the new view, the Na­
tional Liberation Front consisted of resistance fighters of
super-human proportions, enjoying the unwavering support
of the people and all but impervious to the effects of Amer­
ican technological warfare.
Both of these images were powerful ones, and in their
different ways they helped to give the anti-war protest a
continuing impetus over the years. But they were very far
from an adequate view of the war. As David Hunt's inten­
sive study of the resistance in one Mekong Delta province
shows, the NLF cadres were neither passive victims of
U. S. imperialism nor invincible heroes moving blithely
from one victory to the next. They were people with human
problems, and some of them defected from the NLF along
the way - but they managed to adapt to American terror­
bombing in a way that minimized physical and political
damage and kept the prospect of ultimate victory very much
alive.
Naturally the ideological response of American policy­
makers to the unexpectedly strong resistance they encoun­
tered in Vietnam was a racist one. That the Vietnamese
persevered after years of mass killings by U. S. forces was
explained by the extraordinarily hypocritical notion that
.. Asians value life cheaply. " The anti-war movement has
rightly seen and attacked the government's efforts to use
this kind of racism as a means of making the war seem ac­
ceptable to the American people. At the same time, oppo­
nents of the war, who have had no stake in the preservation
of stereotyped views of the Vietnamese, have often suc­
cumbed to them . Neither pity nor romanticization is a re­
sponse that allows for a genuine sense of solidarity. It is in
the belief that a close look at the Vietnamese resistance
will provide a better basis for such solidarity that we are
devoting this issue to David Hunt's article.
Our next issue will include several other articles - stud­
ies of the GI and anti-war movements, a critical essay on
Frances Fitzgerald's Fire In the Lake, and a fuller editori­
al statement - that were originally planned for this issue
but had to be postponed for reasons of space.

2
,

Villagers at War:
The National Liberation Front

In My Tho Province, 1965-1967

David Hunt

INTRODUC TION : A LOCAL STUDY OF THE NLF

Our knowledge of a generation of war in Vietnam is

strikingly uneven. On the one hand, eye-witness accounts
from veterans, books and newspaper reports, Watergate­
related disclosures and the Pentagon Papers, have given us
a picture of American involvement in Indochina all the way
back to 1 946. But at the same time, we still know very little
about the other side, the Viet Minh and the National Liber­
ation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam. This is an essay about
the NLF in My Tho Province. It deals with the years 1 965
to 1 967 when the United States tried and failed through
large-scale m ilitary action to crush the insurgents in the
South.
By concentrating on this Mekong Delta Province, I hope

3
to show what U. S. escalation meant in a specific locale, and
how Front cadres (1 ) resisted the ambitious American
campaign to destroy the movement they had built. First,
I define the village framework within which NLF and US­
GVN (Government of Vietnam - Saigon) forces grappled
for supremacy, as well as the mode of operation shaping
the insurgents' response to U. S. intensification of the war.
In the second section, I describe how after 1 965 Americans
and their Saigon allies made bombardment of rural areas
the central feature of the counter-insurgency effort. The
effects of this bombing and shelling are then analyzed. Fi­
nally, I consider why it was that cadres were able to cope
with U, S, intervention.
NLF leaders have always stressed the interdependence
of military and political activity within the guerrilla move­
ment. Still, in practice these two facets of the insurgency
are clearly distinguishable. There is a great deal of infor­
mation available on NLF military units, on the strategy and
tactics of guerrilla warfare, on problems of supply, forti­
fication, recruitment and training of soldiers , At the same
time, many of our informants are peasants who had served
the Front in hamlets and villages, and their recollections
provide us with a unique opportunity to observe the "civil­
ian" side of the movement at this grassroots level. In the
following pages, I am concerned with the work of local
cadres who supported the war effort from their posts in the
rural communities of My Tho . In other words, our subject
is the political aspects of NLF resistance to U. S. interven­
tion.
My analysis rests on material drawn from the RAND
Corporation's "Viet Cong Motivation and Morale" project,
conducted in Vietnam from 1 964 to 1 969. Designed under
Pentagon sponsorship to explore strengths and weaknesses
of the NLF, the project consisted of interviews with prison­
ers of war and with defectors from guerrilla ranks who
sought refuge in the Chieu Hoi (MOpen Arms") program of
the Saigon Government. The interviews are organized by
topic, one of which is : "Activities of the Viet Cong Within
Dinh Tuong Province. " Covering the period from 1 965 to
January 1 968, the IVDT " sequence of interviews is the only

4
series in the RAND project to focus on a single province.
It is therefore well-suited to serve as the basis for a local
study of the NLF . My discussion of events in My Tho de­
pends almost entirely on evidence drawn from this series
of interviews. (2)
Readers should keep in mind the specific nature of the
RAND materials. Some 85% of the respondents (242 out of
285) in the "DT" sequence were defectors who had decided
to leave the Front. Called "ralliers" by Saigon authorities,
these witnesses offer us a necessarily biased view, rather
than a random sample of opinion, on the NLF . All respond­
dents were interviewed by Vietnamese employees of the
RAND Corporation, and records of these discussions were
translated and transcribed by other Vietnamese working for
the Americans. In a number of ways, these staff members
introduced their own anti-NLF prejudice into the data­
gathering process . In a broader sense, the very organiza­
tion of the project was slanted. RAND went to Vietnam be­
cause U. S. leaders knew very little about an enemy they
were determined to wipe out. Rather than carrying on an
independent scholarly study, its consultants and interview­
ers had a para-military function : they were financed by one
of the belligerents in a bloody war to gather intelligence
about the other. The distorting effect of these various fac­
tors must be kept in mind as we review what the RAND
materials have to tell us about the NLF. Readers interested
in further discussion of the transcripts as historical
sources should consult the accompanying essay, "'RAND and
the NLF. "

VILLAGE POLITIC S

Villagers interviewed by RAND see the Vietnam war first

of all in terms of its effects on their own local communi­
ties, and we must proceed from this same starting point if
we hope to understand what the transcripts have to tell us ,
The primary residential unit in the countryside is the "set­
tlement, " a cluster of ten to twenty families. Settlements
are grouped together to form a hamlet, and a number of
hamlets - from four to ten or more - constitute a village.
The interview materials make villages seem like big

5
places, with their populations of as many as ten thousand
people and their several hamlets and dozens of settlements
scattered far afield. A number of interviewees stated that
they were unable to identify the other hamlets in the vil­
lage, aside from the one in which they lived, and even
neighboring settlements seemed far away to some respond­
dents . One peasant reported that he and his neighbors sel­
dom saw village leaders, "because nobody wanted to go such
a long distance to the Village Committee Headquarters. " (3)
The NLF organizes groups of villages together to form
districts, six of which make up the Province of My Tho. In
the interview accounts, little importance is attached to dis­
trict boundaries ; they are regarded simply as lines on the
map, impersonal administrative divisions which do not
seem to have much relation to the daily routines of the vil­
lagers . When we discuss districts, we have already moved
beyond the sphere of "local" politics, as understood by most
peasants.
But in looking at maps of My Tho, we are surprised to
discover how small these places really are. The average
village of Cai Be District is less than ten square miles in
area. The District is twelve miles across on the east-west
axis, fifteen to twenty miles from north to south. Its ap­
proximately 1 38,000 inhabitants live in an area of about 200
square miles. Respondents often speak of liberated and
GVN-controlled zones as if they were separate states, and
defectors will say that they are "out here" in a Chieu Hoi
Center, while their former homes are "in there" where the
NLF still governs . And yet "out here" and Min there" may
be separated by only an hour's walk. According to a re­
spondent, the Front 's position in Cai Lay District was most
fa vorable in Thanh Hoa Village, which turns out to be the
one community in the area closest to the District Town, a
GVN center of operations . Along the same lines, the Front
strongholds of Nhi Binh, Long Dinh and Tam Hiep Villages
in Chau Thanh District are only five to ten miles from the
Province Capital City of My Tho, and My Tho is one of the
most important of Saigon's power centers in the whole Me­
kong Delta region.
The interview respondents take these distances so seri­
ously because they live in a milieu where roads are poor,

6
mechanical means of transport rare, mass media and liter­
acy only moderately developed. Almost all communication
must be done in person, and except for motorized sampans,
travel is by foot. A district headquarters ten miles away
therefore � very far away. For the peasant who has grown
up in this kind of world and absorbed its particular con­
sciousness of space, attachment to a native place will na­
turally be strong. Not surprisingly, hamlet and village seem
to be the arenas in which interview respondents feel at
home and where they are able to function most effectively.
Building a resistance movement in the countryside had to
be done within these self-absorbed communities . The people
"only believed their own eyes and ears, " noted a respond­
ent.

They believed what the other people of the village

said. There is a great difference in the level of
understanding of the villagers . Some could make
sound judgments while others couldn't. The major­
ity of them were laborers with a low level of un­
derstanding, and only a few had a relatively good
education. It is easy to read a newspaper, but it is
difficult to understand what the articles say. It al­
ways takes me a few hours to read a newspaper,
because after reading an article I spend a lot of
time pondering what has been said.

Outsiders would have a hard time winning the confidence of

cautious peasants. "Only natives of the village could under­
stand everything that was going on in the area, n observed a
respondent, "and they were the only ones who were trusted
by the people. " Taking into consideration this fierce peas­
ant localism, we can appreciate the importance of the ham­
let cadres within the NLF. These activists called meetings,
collected taxes, conducted recruitment drives, and super­
vised the police apparatus in the community. If the Front
gained sufficient local strength, popular associations for
farmers, women and the youth would be organized, with
hamlet cadres serving as leaders. According to the testi­
mony of many respondents, these officials were almost al­
ways natives of the hamlets in which they worked.

7
 The duties of village cadres were more complex. Each of
the hamlet Women's Associations was responsible to a sin­
gle Women's Association Executive Committee at village
level, and the hamlet officials were closely supervised by
the members of this Committee. Similar Executive Com­
mittees presided over the hamlet branches of the Farmer's
and Liberation Youth's Associations , The Front 's village
organization also included a variety of specialized branches
or sections, for propaganda, finance, military support serv­
ices, security, and so on. Like their colleagues in the Exe­
cutive Committees of the popular associations, the members
of these sections watched over the implementation of policy
at hamlet level. Finally the Village Committee, headed by
the Village Secretary, was responsible for coordinating the
whole local operation.
District officials exercised jurisdiction over relatively
large areas which included anywhere from fifteen to thirty
villages and in some cases more than one hundred thousand
people. Cadres assigned to this level travelled frequently
within their areas and received regular reports from below
on the people 's "state of mind. " But in general they worked
at one remove from local affairs . The district office was
the lowest echelon with its own clerical staff of clerks and
typists . Its cadres attempted to compare the activities of
village offiCials, so that strong and weak points could be
brought to the attention of local committees. For the benefit
of village and hamlet personnel, the district also defined
policy, organized study sessions to deal with specific prob­
lems, and provided training for service in specialized
branches. In frequent contact with province officials, dis­
trict cadres were strategically placed mediators whose
activity assured that national programs would be under­
stood and carried out at the local level.
District representatives tried not to linger in any one
village. Concerned with general policy, their principal
mission was to promote local initiative within the guide­
lines sent down from above. As one respondent explained,

The directives from the district never stated in

detail the method which the village had to follow to
carry out some tasks. The directives only stressed

8
 the importance of the tasks, and demanded that
they be carried out effectively. The village cadres
had to hold meetings to discuss the ways and
means to carry out the tasks to satisfy the de­
mands of the district. In special cases, when the
district had to furnish more details, it usually sent
a cadre down to confer with the village cadres and
helped them to carry out the task instead of stating
all the details in the directives.

But while district cadres appeared in villages only on spe­

cial occasions, village cadres were constantly operating in
hamlets under their jurisdiction, supporting and directing
hamlet officials . These village leaders were vital in the
overall design of the Front, because they were the highest
ranking cadres to be in daily relations with the people.
Maintaining NLF strength at this echelon was always a pri­
ority. If necessary an entire hamlet administration would
be stripped of personnel to fill suddenly vacated slots at
village level, and from the other direction district cadres
were sent down to villages in trouble when it appeared that
officials on the scene were not equal to their assignments.
Administrative charts never tell us much about the func­
tioning of an organization like the NLF . The content of its
programs, and not the complexity of its bureaucratic struc­
ture, determined what results the Front would achieve.
Still, from the purely bureaucratic point of view, NLF local
organization is interesting because it was the focal point
for such a variety of conflicting pressures . On the one hand,
guerrilla war depended absolutely on the effectiveness of
hamlet, village and district cadres, who collected the taxes
and recruited the troops needed for the war. To perform
these tasks, cadres had to be able to operate within the vil­
lage context, to speak convincingly about the needs of the
peasants and to sponsor programs which dealt successfully
with the basic problems in their lives. But on the other
hand, local cadres also had to awaken in the villagers a
sense of the national and even the international dimensions
of the struggle. The revolution could not advance at a uni­
form pace throughout South Vietnam ; a thousand autono­
mous village guerrilla movements would not add up to a

9
successful national effort. There were times when the rev­
olutionaries needed to concentrate their efforts in a few
strategic areas, while marking time in other regions . Lib­
erated villages had to remain in a state of mobilization in
order to help other, still contested areas. When after 1 965
many villages were being severely mauled by American
m ilitary assaults, the Front had to persuade villagers that
the sacrifices they were making were balanced by gains in
other regions, and that the NLF's position in global terms
was improving, even while it suffered serious losses in
many locales.
Peasants long accustomed to believing only Mtheir own
eyes and ears " were often reluctant to follow this kind of
reasoning. In a May 1 967 reorientation ses sion, one cadre
objected when a district representative presented a favor­
able survey of war developments, Myou said that we defeat­
ed the enemy in the dry season, " he argued; Mwhy were we
defeated by the enemy in (!ny villagE[) ? " The instructor re­
plied that Mthe battles we won were big and the battles in
which we were defeated were small ones ; therefore we had
to look for and understand so that we could distinguish the
common affairs from the important ones . " But the ques­
tioner remained unconvinced. With his Mown eyes, " he had
witnessed a local battle in which ten guerrillas and five
civilians had been killed. Besides, his village had been at­
tacked Magain and again" by aircraft, many villagers had
been killed, and living conditions were bad. MMaybe the
Front was winning the war in some other places, " he con­
cluded, Mbut not in my village. "
Even events very close to home could be misconstrued.
The battle at Ap Bac in January 1963 was one of the NLF 's
most dramatic and widely reported victories . Several
American correspondents were caught in the crossfire, and
their dispatches carried descriptions of the event over thou­
sands of miles to readers in the United States . Ap Bac is a
hamlet in Nhi Binh Village, in the middle of My Tho, not
more than a few miles from even the most remote corner
of the Province. But one defector nonetheless affirmed that
the famous Front victory had really been a disastrous de­
feat, in which the NLF suffered 120 casualties , His Mwife's
sister, " a native of Nhi Binh, had told him so. (4)

10
 Confronted with this village provincialism, cadres always
endeavored to place their own activities in a broader con­
text. One defector recalled that, Ii As a rule, before intro­
ducing the new policy to (Dle peopl6, the village secretary
always spoke of the international and home political situa­
tion so as to make the villagers become more enthusiastic
about paying taxes to help the Front to feed the soldiers and
to buy armaments. " In these briefings, as they are para­
phrased by respondents, Front cadres described military
developments in the various parts of South Vietnam and in
the other countries of Indochina . They reviewed the trou­
bled state of relations between the United States and its
European allies, as well as the situation in satellite coun­
tries like South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. Much
stress was placed on the U. S. anti-war movement and on
the support of other Third World countries, especially those
whose recent history provided encouraging precedent for
the Vietnamese resistance . Here is a typical briefing from
the 1 967 period•

• Despite their seemingly overwhelming strength,

• •

the Americans remain weak in many respects. One

of their main weaknesses lies in the ever growing
international movement for self-determination in
many countries . Taking Cuba and Korea as exam­
ples, the instructor showed us that the Americans
had failed to vanquish these countries . He stressed
the American failure in Cuba, stating that despite
their forces, the Americans had been forced to re­
spect the Cuba people 's self-determination even
though Cuba is quite near American territory. The
instructor also stressed the M Antiwar Movement"
which is now spreading throughout the United
States . We were told that all the American students
tore up their draft cards to manifest their resent­
m ent toward the U. S. Government and refused to
fight in Vietnam.

Building NLF strength at the Mgrassroots " level was not

and could not be done without struggling against peasant
localism. Repeated discussion of events outside the village

11
was designed to ease the strain on a local organization
which was asked to win the trust of wary villagers suspi­
cious of outsiders, and at the same time to carry out direc­
tives received from far away.

"Liaison Post"

Village relations with the outside world were also impor­

tant because the NLF had to recruit substantial numbers of
peasants to serve in the district, province, region and na­
tional offices of the Front, and to persuade thousands of
others to join Main and Local Force units where they would
fight far from their own settlements . One of the strengths
of the NLF organization was that poor peasants could easily
rise through its ranks, In the rigid, semi-feudal society of
the countryside, this meritocratic practice had a liberating
impact, and many a villager soon outgrew feelings of home­
sickness when presented with the opportunity to develop
skills and potentials in a milieu which seemed more open
and exciting than the typical hamlet or village, III liked to
move around, " affirmed a defector. III knew I might get
killed if I kept fooling around with weapons. But each day I
remained alive meant that my knowledge was furthered by
what I saw on that day. " Keeping open channels of advance­
ment was a vital necessity not only because large numbers
of people had to be found to perform essential tasks in the

12
higher echelons, but also because hope for promotion was
a significant factor in maintaining the morale of local
cadres, MI wasn't struggling and making sacrifices to stay
forever in the village, " stated an ambitious defector, from
a village where these channels were temporarily blocked :

If this practice was maintained, all the efforts, la­

bor, and sacrifices of the village cadres would
come to nothing and wouldn't lead them anywhere.
What would be the point of continuing the struggle
then ? Most of the village cadres were disappoint­
ed and discouraged, and neglected their work. They
used to say during party meetings: "No matter how
zealous we are in our tasks, when we die there
will only be a few joss sticks on our tombs, and
the commemorative ceremony will last for a few
minutes . "

For this cadre and others like him, service in the Front
was valued precisely because it provided access to the
world outside the narrow boundaries of the village. (5)
At the same time, there were peasants who found it diffi­
cult to leave behind the reassuringly familiar contours of
the native hamlet. We glibly speak of village personnel as
«local" officials, but from the perspective of an inexperi­
enced hamlet cadre, the village, with its thousands of in­
habitants, its religious and ethnic minorities, its economic
and political ties with neighboring communities, presented
an intimidating challenge. Stepping up to district level in­
volved an even more drastic adjustment. Here, for example,
are the reflections of one modest defector :

O'he cadrtf) promised me that if I tried to do my

best to carry out Front work, I would receive the
honor to lead and to serve the people according to
my capacity. Because of this encouragement I
worked very hard. After I came back from the
training course for cadres of the Youth Group
Chapter, I worked even harder than before. But
when I was called up to the district, I lost all my

13

«
 enthusiasm . I only wanted to work in my hamlet or
village, near my family, and I never wanted to go
away. I had a wife, a child, and my parents to take
care of. I thought it was about right for me to work
in the Youth Group Chapter of the village, because
it suited my capacity and I could stay near my
family. However, if I had to serve in a higher
position, it would be beyond my capacity, I did not
even have the capacity to serve as a Party cell
leader and I had to go away from my family.

NLF local organization had to perform a complex task in

this area as well as in others. For every "buffalo " trying
to "wear down his horns, " there were others who quickly
arrived at a level which s eemed "about right, " and who
were very reluctant to go any further from home. Relying
on mass participation, the F ront had to push people out of
their accustomed slots in society, but without completely
uprooting them. It had to satisfy both the peasants who liked
to "move around, " and those who "never wanted to go away"
from their native hamlet.
NLF success in dealing with these and other problems
and in building a local base is massively documented by the
interview transcripts. At first glance, it appears that NLF
and GVN forces are fighting more or less on equal terms
all over the countryside, but as we read on, we begin to see
that the two antagonists in fact have very different kinds of
relations with the villages of My Tho . It would be mislead­
ing to say that one side is more effective in the villages
than the other. The Front has a local organization, from
district down to hamlet, and the GVN does not.
Take, for example, the observation of one respondent who
noted that, "The Front's maps are made by the Front, and
are not like the maps out here <In the GVN area) . They show
every creek, trail and path going through the orchards.·
Another villager commented :

The maps «he Front> used are printed with col­

ours somewhat like the maps used by the ARVN.
But they bear no foreign words . Everything was

14
 written in Vietnamese. The place names were also
those used by the people, and it was easier to spot
the various locations on them .

Although both sides are grappling for supremacy in the

countryside, the maps tell us that the Front operates from
within the rural community. Its cartographers know the
names of Mevery creek, trail and path going through the
orchards, " and they employ the terminology "'used by the
people " themselves. By contrast, GVN officials chart these
battlefields from the vantage point of outsiders, who do not
even call features of the landscape by their proper names.
They come to the fight as' aliens, their maps covered with
"'foreign words ".
This contrast is also apparent in interview discussions
of Ucontrol" of the countryside. According to one respond­
ent, the goal of the Front is "'tight control over the village
from all points of view - economic, political, social and
military. " He explained that, U A village is said to be com­
pletely liberated when the GVN troops are no longer able t)
set foot there, when there are no shellings or bombings , and
when the Front has complete control over the people," The
terminology offers no problem s : the NLF Ucontrols" a vil­
lage when it has achieved complete hegemony and when
GVN influence in all its forms has been rigorously ex­
cluded.
By contrast, here is the situation in a village described
as Mcontrolled" by the GVN :

@ VN officials) only came into the hamlets when it

was convenient for them to do so, for example
when the Armed Propaganda Team or the GVN
troops entered the hamlets . Rural Reconstruction
cadres also came into the GVN-controlled ham ­
lets, but they only did it during the day - at night
they went back to the market place. As for the VC
cadres, they also went into the GVN-controlled
hamlets to operate, but before they came in they
had to check the situation. If the cadres who oper­
ated openly told them that the situation was favor-

15
 able, then armed VC took up positions at the roads
leading to the hamlet, and the cadres entered the
hamlet to operate. They only stayed a short time
there, however, about 20 minutes. Usually, they
collected taxes, or indoctrinated the people, or
recruited new cadres when they were in these
hamlets.

In this village, Saigon's putative "control" has little politi­

cal significance. Even here, in one of its strong areas, the
GVN does not maintain a permanent political base, as does
the NLF. GVN cadres "only came into the hamlets when it
was convenient for them to do so, " while Front cadres "who
operated openly" - that is, who possess legal papers, whose
NLF affiliation is secret - seem to live within the commu­
nity. The situation in the village is relatively favorable to
the Saigon regime in that the local Front organization can­
not function above ground during the day, and Saigon "Armed
Propaganda Teams" (the idea for such teams, including the
name itself, is borrowed directly from the N LF ) and regu­
lar troops can move around without fear of being hit hard
by guerrillas or other NLF units. But by no means does
this poSition entail "tight control over the village from all
points of view. "
Beyond notions of "controlled" or of "contested " areas,
the Saigon authorities have no vocabulary to describe the
political situation at village level. By contrast, Front ca­
dres speak of "strong " and "weak" villages. A "strong" area
is one where the local Front organizations are flourishing
and where people support the NLF . A village may be
"strong " in this political sense, while it is "contested" from
the military point of view. On the other hand, villages where
GVN military intervention is no longer a threat (which are,
in one sense, "liberated" ) may be Ilweak " because the NLF
still has not mobilized a lot of popular support. The GVN
has no corresponding set of categories . In these terms, all
the areas it controls are Ilweak. "
The asymmetry of the two points of view i s evident if we
examine the situation in "contested " villages . To a varying
degree, the Front maintains schools, collects taxes, drafts

16
 1

the youth, and organizes labor teams in contested areas ;

see the above passage for signs of such political activity
even in so-called GVN zones . If possible, land reform
measures may be put into effect, with the decision on this
kind of issue often depending more on internal political
considerations than on the threat of GVN intervention. As
one cadre reported, IIWe kept the present (land) status un­
changed, because my hamlet is still a contested area, Fur­
thermore, the land distribution policy has not yet permeated
the villagers ' minds. " In fact, as one respondent indicated,
the best cadres were often sent into contested areas be­
cause,

it has been realized that if the cadres who are as­

signed to the contested areas are demoralized,
passive, afraid of hardships and death, and are al­
ways obsessed with defeatism, they will never
carry out their duties enthusiastically in order to
elevate the movement in those hamlets.

Even in villages regarded by the GVN as completely lipaci­

fied, " NLF cadres with "a high struggling spirit" remained
behind, to carry on with campaigns of sabotage and political
::.,
assassination and to maintain contact with local sympathiz­
ers . In other words, for the Front political struggle goes on
everywhere, regardless of who has the upper hand mili­
tarily.
The Saigon regime fUnctions according to exactly the op­
posite principle. For the GVN, a village often begins to be
classified as contested only after its local cadres have been
forced out. oIIThe �aigon) hamlet chief has fled, " said one
respondent of his village, oIIa nd since then there have been
no GVN officials in my hamlet which thereby became con­
tested. » In the interview accounts, the reader does not find
GVN tax collectors and military recruiters maintaining
permanent offices in the villages . Officials barricaded
themselves up in nearby military outposts or even in the
district capital and waited for the peasants to come to them
with tax payments, while the army oIIdrafted" youths during
sweeps, As a result, the best way to describe a contested

17
village would be to say that it is an area in which the F ront
attempts to put its program into effect from the inside,
while the GVN endeavors to disrupt such activities from the
outside, by bombing, shelling and periodic AR VN sweeps.
In other words, NLF influence in its various forms blan­
kets the countryside of My Tho, while GVN influence is
spotted here and there in strips and pockets . The funda­
mentally political power of the Front is fluid and omni­
present, It exists wherever cadres can gather a few peas­
ants together for political discussion. The fundamentally
military power of the GVN is, by contrast, relatively un­
wieldly and inert. It exists only where cumbersome GVN
armed units can make their presence felt. Saigon strength
is centered in the capital city and district towns, and also
in a handful of pacified villages where large contingents of
troops are permanently stationed. It also is a factor around
the military posts dotting the rural arens and along road
and water ways on which GVN military units can move
swiftly, but which are denied to the N LF because in these
open spaces its fighters and cadres would be vulnerable to
sudden attack.
Hemmed in though it may be, the G VN presence is still
widely felt. Because the area being fought over is so small,
with roads and especially canals reaching into every corner
of the Province, the Front must live "integrated with the
enemy. " (6) We exaggerate, but perhaps in an illuminating
way, if we imagine a situation in which NLF cadres would
seldom be outside hearing range, or out of sight of the
nearest GVN authorities . Operating within this crowded
scene, cadres had to attend to thf; smallest details. For ex­
ample, the Front threatened to "kill right away anyone who
did not comply with their orders and let their dogs bark."
Why ? "The dogs would bark when Front members on mis­
sion approached and this would give away their presence to
the GVN which would shell them. " Shelling might also occur
if a cadre moved around too freely in daylight and was
spotted by a GVN artillery unit looking over from a neigh­
boring hamlet.
Given the fact that the two sides were always virtually
within shouting distance of one another, and that by 1 967 the

18
Front did not, in its own terms, fully control any areas in
My Tho (since the GVN was shelling villages from one end
of the Province to the other), it is remarkable how isolated
the Saigon authorities continued to be. When it came to po­
litical struggle, these officials might as well have been a
thousand miles away . As one peasant observed, "r have only
been indoctrinated by the NLF . Nobody from the GVN ever
gave me any indoctrination." A defector from a contested
village observed that the "Front's people are always there,
they only leave the village when the ARVN comes . " Another
respondent commented :

The people are still following the VC because they

have been doing so for a long time. The voice of
the government has never really reached them,
while the cadres of the Front are always there to
speak to them, to inform them of everything they
want them to know.

The I'voice" of the GVN was not heard because its officials
did not live with the peasants, not even in many villages
"controlled" by Saigon armed forces .
Here is another summary - which also shows the tactful
but unmistakeable way some defectors attempted to inform
anti-NLF interviewers of realities which the latter did not
want to acknowledge:

In my opinion, the people living in the liberated

area do not understand very much. They have been
only propagandized by the Front and they have not
been affected by GVN propaganda. They are people
who trust only what they see, and when GVN sol­
diers come through their hamlets, they only saw
death and sadness around them . They have wit­
nessed the civil guards seize their chickens and
their belongings and therefore they thought that the
GVN has been on the wrong path. The peasants only
trust those who remain close to them, talk with
them frequently, and help them in their everyday
life, In short, whichever side is able to take care

19
 of their security and to help them , would win their
support whether it is the Front or the GVN.

According to one respondent, NLF cadres carried no iden­

tification papers, When there was a question about some­
one 's identity, people had only to ask around the neighbor­
hood: "If you are a cadre, someone will know you." Front
personnel moved about so easily because they were right at
home in the village, As a POW recalled :

In an emergency cadres could contact the 6!illage)

Secretary at any time, because it was a small area
and the people knew the cadres and could tell the
cadres where the Secretary was. All the cadres
had to do was to ask the people if they had seen the
secretary and pretty soon they could track him
down, Since the people knew all the cadres, they
only told them where the secretary was, if some­
one they knew wasn't a cadre asked them, they
wouldn't tell him.

In this, and in so many other respects, the transcripts

hammer home a basic point : Front cadres belonged to the
villages in which they worked, and NLF local organization
was an integral part of the social order of the countryside.

THE MECHANIC S OF A PROTRAC TED WAR

The NLF was strong in the villages of My Tho because a

great many peasants firmly believed in the political pro­
gram it espoused. The Front stopped the excesses of GVN
officials and soldiers, it involved people in the government
of their communities, it built schools and developed modern
medical programs . Most of all, through land reform, the
NLF promoted economic equality among the villagers.
Cadres seized the holdings of absentee owners and put
heavy pressure on rich peasants to get them to relinquish
control over some of their fields . These lands were redis­
tributed to poor peasants, while at the same time rents
were forced down and minimum wages were established for

20
agricultural laborers . Even observers hostile to the Front
have recognized the positive impact of these programs. For
example, after conducting an extensive survey in two vil­
lages of My Tho Province, former National Security Council
staff member Robert Sansom concluded that land reform
measures

were for the vast majority, very effective. It is

difficult to overestimate the extent of these re­
forms From all the benefits it brought to the
• • • •

peasantry, it can probably be said that the impetus

behind the Viet Cong land reform was not in the
general case terror but the sanction of implied
force supported by the general will. (7 )

Land reform, and other changes consistent with the «gen­

eral will" of the villagers, won support for the NLF and led
to the exclusion of GVN influence from the countryside, thus
forCing American leaders to escalate the war in 1 965.
Once the war did escalate, programs of social reform had
to be temporarily postponed. Indeed, some of the gains al­
ready made were wiped out as the conflict intensified; for
example, recently built schools and medical stations were
levelled by US-GVN bombing and shelling. The energies of
the people, which once had enabled the NLF to fight and to
carry on a revolution at the same time, were now channeled
exclusively into the military effort . In this sense, 1 965 was
an important turning point in the history of the Front, sep­
arating an era of successful social reconstruction from the
desperate struggle for survival occasioned by U. S. inter­
vention. But in another respect, strong lines of continuity
are apparent, since the mode of operations adopted by the
revolutionaries in the early sixties very much determined
how they decided to meet subsequent tests. The methods and
precepts guiding cadres as they responded to increased
American military pressure had been a long time in the
making. In order to understand the survival of the insur­
gency, we should consider for a moment the nature of this
deeply ingrained political practice.
The logical place to begin is with the People's Revolu-

21
tionary, or Communist, Party of South Vietnam, which the
respondents invariably refer to more simply as "'the Par­
ty.· Not every active participant in the Front was a Party
member. Villagers were considered for inclusion only after
serving an apprenticeship in the specialized branches or in
one of the three popular associations at hamlet or village
level. According to the reports of many interviewees, the
most dedicated revolutionaries alone could hope to qualify.
As a POW put it,

When one becomes a Communist Party member

one ceases to think of one's own interests - even
of one's life - and one is always ready to sacri­
fice oneself for the Party. Those who aren't Party
members are still attached to their families and
to their own interests, and so they can only serve
the movement to a certain extent. I wanted very
much to join the Party.

Within a resistance movement which was meant to include

all the villagers, the Party was thus organized to form
a hard core.
Candidates for membership in the Party were frankly
told what was in store for them. One respondent, a POW,
remembers how he was approached by Party cadres.

I wasn't told anything about my rights, or about the

benefits or the power I would enjoy as a Party
member. I was told that a Party member always
had to sacrifice for his own class, and that he al­
ways had to set the good example for others - he
had to be the firs): one to do everything, and that
benefits would come to him only much later.

Another respondent recalled how he had always looked

forward to joining the Party. "'A Party member learned
about everything ahead of others; he enjoyed material ad­
vantages (food, clothing, exemption from menial work), he
could always have important missions, or a key job or a
poSition of leadership." To his dismay, this candidate dis­
covered that, once admitted, his life was very hard.

22
 1
;

1. I had completely lost my liberty. Day and

night, 24 hours out of 24, I was at the complete
mercy of the Party. Whether it rained or blew, I I
I

had to respond instantly to any demand: not a min­

ute of delay was possible.
2. My family became poorer and poorer, be­
cause I had no time any longer to work as a tailor
as before when I was just a simple Front cadre:
and
3. I was constantly subjected to severe criticism
in Party meetings . Their austerity differed totally
from the flexible and gentle manner they displayed
before I was a Party member.

At the same time, this informant, who so precisely lists

the drawbacks of Party membership, had tried unsuccess­
fully for a long time to gain admittance . Dreaming of Mma_
terial advantages" and Mimportant missions, " he was re­
peatedly rebuffed by cadres who told him that he was too
wrapped up in private pursuits, too attached to his job and
family, to endure the sacrifices of life as a Communist.
The Party was especially careful to explain its poSition
concerning domestic ties. Members were not asked to re­
nounce family loyalty, but they were required to put other
obligations first. As a female cadre explained to potential
recruits reluctant to leave home, ·Only the Front's suc­
cess could help my family and theirs to overcome misery
and starvation in the future. " Another confronted a youth,
who felt he was honor bound to care for his parents, in the
following way :

Comrade, your words show that you are a son

filled with filial piety, but in the face of the loss
and destruction of the country, you have to choose
between filial duty and duty towards your country.
In this war, the people and your family too have to
suffer. We all know that as a man you have to do
your duty towards your parents as well as towards
your country. How could you do both ? If you fulfill

23
.i
I
 your duty towards your family then you'd fail to
complete your duty towards your country, and
vice-versa. But, if you fulfill your duty towards
your country, then by the same token you will have
completed your duty towards your family, because
if the South is liberated then your family will no
longer be miserable and exploited.

A third cadre who had set aside family obligations affirmed

that IIhe had only one family, but there are hundreds of
families in the Nation. " The decision was not an easy one
to make, but Party cadres argued that people had to choose
an exceptional set of priorities if they hoped to serve the
revolution.
This line of reasoning was widely understood among the
villagers . III think that the majority of <the local officials)
are worthy cadres, " observed one respondent. IIOnly a few
of them are bad since they are still strongly attached to
their family relationships . Consequently they have some­
times neglected their duties . " Another conceded that III
have not joined the Communist Party because I did not car­
ry out my duties actively. I don't want to join it because I
still love my family. " In this spirit, many defectors testi­
fied that they finally abandoned the Front because they could
not stand to see the fortunes of their family decline while
they were absorbed in political activities .
Once recruited, Party members were introduced to the
intricate mode of operation within the guerrilla movement.
NLF success depended on the ability of its militants to ap­
ply the Front's llline and policy, " which was formulated on
a national level, in their own villages and hamlets. The
process began with meetings involving representatives of
all the villages in a particular district. Cadres from dis­
trict and province level opened these sessions by laying
down general guidelines concerning a selected topic. These
policies were usually very complex. For example, Front
revenues came for the most part from an income tax, and
cadres had to master an elaborate set of tables linking as­
sessments to the income of individual villagers, while sup­
plementary documents explained a complicated variety of
contingencies : what kind of exemptions were permitted,

24
when villagers in distress could appeal for a reduction in
payments, what to do with incomes coming from commerce
and other non-agricultural pursuits, and so on.
Participants were expected to master the policies being
presented so that they could successfully implement them
on the local level. Since the whole process of guerrilla war
depended on the results of such meetings, the atmosphere
was serious and intense, with daily sessions lasting "about
six or seven hours. " Cadres usually took notes, and those
who did not know how to read and write quickly found them­
selves at a loss. "I was invited to be a Party member, "
confessed one respondent, "but 1 did not accept, arguing that
1 was illiterate . . . . The cadres urged me to learn to read
and to write but 1 did not do it. " The pressure was too much
for some participants. A disgruntled respondent reacted in
this way :

I got irritated because they pushed me too hard.

They said that when we got back to our villages we
had to do this and do that. My intellectual capabili­
ty was not that high, it was tiring to my mind but
they kept on jamming things into my head.

Only those who adjusted to the almost classroom-like at­

mosphere of these m eetings would be able to work inside
the Party.
Local cadres had not been assembled just to learn a few
slogans and formulas . Since it was generally understood
that a cadre who left the meeting with reservations would
not be effective later on, all participants were expected to
voice questions and criticisms, so that province and dis­
trict cadres might hear about problems and have the oppor­
tunity to review the arguments in favor of the policy under
consideration. Debate continued until all uncertainties had
been cleared up to everyone's satisfaction, "Did you carry
out long discussions in these courses ? " one interviewer
asked his subject, a POW. "Of course, .. was the reply: "I had
to let the trainees discuss till they understood the policy.
The discussion only ended when the policy had permeated
the trainees' minds. "
Village cadres were also expected to describe conditions

25

c
in their home areas, with stress on the failures and weak­
nesses of the local organization. Those who presented such
reports had to be prepared for the worst. If many village
Party Chapters fell short of target goals, the district might
decide to lower its expectations. But usually such reports
were answered with stinging rebukes. One respondent, a
defector, gave this example of the kind of criticisms he had
heard at such sessions:

Our countrymen are suffering from the cruelty of

the Americans and the GVN but what have we done
to relieve the people from such calamities ? We
claimed we are fighters for the liberation move­
ment but what are we doing ? We have dodged our
duties, we have left the people to their sufferings.
We receive everything we need from the people,
the rice we eat, the clothes we wear also come
from the people. We rely on them to live and we
dodged the fighting when they were killed by Diem
and the Americans . It 's a shameful thing, and un­
less we change, we don't deserve their support and
their sympathy.

No wonder many local cadres were less than candid in de­

scribing problems iIi their villages : MIn times of trouble,
they concealed their errors so as to avoid blame and to be
left in peace. "
Party diScipline was designed to prevent such evasive­
ness. Members were trained not only to make accurate ob­
servations, but also to be completely honest in their dis­
closures . A cadre With a "sense of responsibility " never
hid mistakes because everyone in the movement would be
endangered by persistent individual errors, "We told the
assembly the entire truth, " remembered a respondent, �e­
cause this is the rule. Nothing should be concealed among
the (>istrict) Committee members.» Indeed, the ability to
take criticism and to put it to good use was the most im­
portant quality distinguishing Communists from other peo­
ple. Non- Party members were never allowed to attend
Party meetings because,

26
,.

If the course is only attended by Party members,

the instructor can use violent criticisms which are
considered very helpful in eradicating the train­
ees ' shortcomings . But in the presence of Associ­
ation members, violent criticisms cannot be used.
The Association members haven't been trained to
endure them, and, consequently the Party mem­
bers ' weak points wouldn't be corrected.

1
,

Assembly of N LF Cadre
I
Ii

Some cadres grasped the significance of criticism and self­

criticism , As one respondent explained, "When you were
wrong and you were courageous enough to admit that you
had been wrong, that was a heroic action. And it was good
because after acknowledging your errors , you were deter­
m ined to correct yourself. " But others could never get ac­
customed to this aspect of Front operations . One POW of­
fered the opinion that most defectors "were either involved
in some crimes with the Front or were unable to endure

27

d
 .,.

the weight of criticism from their colleagues . "

The success of Communist organization was not a matter
of creating paragons who never showed human weakness.
The interview transcripts present us with cases of cadres
who stole tax money and cheated on land reform, who were
drunken and licentious, who neglected their duties and ran
from the enemy. What the Party managed to do was to look
for mistakes and, more important, to involve cadres in the
process of correcting their own shortcomings. In effect, the
whole poirit of Party membership was that people voluntar­
ily accepted a situation in which their superiors regularly
demanded almost superhuman achievement from them . If
they thought these demands unfair, they were free to re­
fuse Party membership. If they changed their minds once
admitted, they could always resign : there are many refer­
ences in the transcripts to people who quit the Front and
retired to private life. But if they stayed, they had to work
toward goals which seemed impossible, to be open about
their inevitable failures, and to strive constantly to develop
their own skills . This regime, which constantly drew out
the talents and energies of its cadres, contributed substan­
tially to the vitality of the NLF.
The point of district meetings was not simply to burden
local cadres with a list of tasks to be accomplished, or to
browbeat them with criticism. More fundamentally, district
and province representatives aimed to persuade village of­
ficials that current policy made s ense and would bring the
desired results. The meetings served to heighten enthusi­
asm as much as to convey information. IitThe cadres'
speeches • •stirred up the fighters and cadres ' morale, "
•

recalled the respondent whose description of the criticism

session was cited above. "As a rule after the reorientation
courses, the trainees ' morale is much improved. "
Morale building was vital because the village represent­
atives would in turn have to inspire or, as the respondents
put it, to "motivate" the peasants back in their own villages.
Arriving home from the district meeting, local cadres did
not simply send out a few memos to get the tax campaign
or the recruitment drive under way. First, they assembled
all the other Party m embers in the village and carefully
went over the materials they had brought back from the

28
district. The representatives were expected to answer crit­
icisms, clear up misunderstandings, and most of all to con­
vey a sense of confidence about the proposals under discus­
sion. And in turn, village Party members had to listen
attentively, take notes, ask questions, explore their own
reactions and bring up any possible problems. The meeting
would go on until all were satisfied with their understand­
ing of the new "line and policy, " and were ready to present
it convincingly to others.
During the next phase, Party members sought out the
Mbackbone elements, " those villagers who were most active
in the various popular associations, and introduced them to
the Front's latest plans. In such meetings, the former stu­
dents became teachers . Local Party members described
the policy they had just studied, while the backbone ele­
ments were asked to make criticisms, to raise objections,
to take responsibility for examining the directives until
they too gained confidence in their basic soundness . If the
village Party leaders had not been fully convinced by the
first courses, if they did not feel strongly in favor of the
new line and policy, they would never be able to mobilize
the backbone elements, to answer their objections, and to
convince them that the Front still deserved their trust.
These meetings of Party members and backbone ele­
ments were not concerned solely with problems of Mmoti­
vation. " Local cadres had received nothing more than a
vague set of guidelines from the district. These general
recommendations had to be refined to fit the circumstances
of the village. It was at this point that the local background
of the cadres came into play, since in practice it turned out
that no two hamlets, indeed no two peasant households were
exactly alike, and the policy suggested for a litypical" vil­
lage never quite seemed to fit actual circumstances . Only
cadres who knew intimately the community they were deal­
ing with, and who were exceptionally resourceful in figuring
out how to get things done would be able to take the abstract
directives of their superiors and apply them successfully
within a village full of real human beings.
When cadres and backbone elements were content with
the results of their discussions, the rest of the villagers

29

d
assembled to go over the new policy. It would be wrong to
imagine Party members lecturing or, as the RAND trans­
lators put it, indoctrinating, a silent and pas sive audience.
The term used in this context by the NLF means to teach,
to instruct, to enlighten. What RAND calls an indoctrinatioI}
session would be more accurately rendered as a study ses­
sion. (8 ) From the transcripts, we can see that what many
respondents describe is not "indoctrination" at all. As with
Party m eetings, peasant assemblies were intended to pro­
mote real discus sion in the course of which villagers
grasped the logic of the directives under examination and
gained confidence in their fundamental soundness. The Front
would prosper only if large numbers were persuaded to en­
ter enthusiastically into its campaigns . Mas s mobilization,
and not mere obedience, was what the cadres aimed to
stimulate.
The development of this kind of thinking about politics
took time. One respondent recalled that genuine popular
support for the NLF emerged some time after the cadres
began to operate openly. This support was evident from the
fact that villagers "'became more eager to participate in the
discussion of the situation during the village meetings. »
Many respondents testified to the vitality of the "indoctri­
nation" process . "In order to obtain good results, " explained
one respondent, "a policy must be thoroughly understood by
the population through study sessions directed by the ca­
dres, otherwise, the implementation of the policy cannot
lead to good results. " The Front "incessantly held many
study sessions • , » remembered another observer; "peo­
. .

ple of middle and poor farming classes positively carried

out their duties and joined study sessions day and night."
A third witness noted that, "During previous years, the
hamlet cadres needed only to invite the people through a
loud speaker. People gather for a meeting in minutes. » IiAll
they had to do was to invite the villagers two hours in ad­
vance, " stated another respondent, "and 3,000 to 4, 000 per­
sons came for the meeting."
The meetings had a profound effect on the atmosphere in
many areas. Peasants who once had been excluded from the
political sphere were now being asked to study the issues,

30
 l

to raise criticisms, to make up their own minds about basic

questions in their communities . To an uncommon degree,
villages hummed with political debate. A defector reported
that,

Usually, the youths in the village liked to talk poli­

tics when they attended banquets or when they sat
around drinking tea or when they conversed with
each other about their daily work. They talked
about the world situation, socialism, Russia and
China. The old people didn't like to listen to this
sort of thing because they thought the youths didn't
even know what went on in the village let alone in
the world, Russia and China. This used to irritate
the old people.

People «joined study sessions day and night, " they could not
get enough of politics. Official meetings often did not satis­
fy this new appetite. According to the report of one defect­
or,

(rhe villagers) were so fond of attending the vil­

lage meetings that, sometimes, they were regret­
ful that some meetings ended so soon. During these
sessions, they lingered around the meeting places,
discussing the Front's policies, the cadres ' behav­
ior and the cruelty of Diem 's regime until late at
night.

These passages show that NLF «control" in a particular

area was not simply a matter of replacing one kind of «in­
doctrination" with another, but instead involved the devel­
opment among peasants of a wholly new way of dealing with
political power. The rise of the Front paralleled in fact
depended on, the beginnings of self-government in the vil­
lages.
Along these lines, one defector thought it was easier to
collect taxes in «weak" than in «strong" villages.

The people's comprehension in the «liberated"

area is somewhat higher than that of those living

31
 in "contested" areas, and therefore they are less
afraid of the cadres . They will protest against the
cadres if the classification of the fields is unjust
or inaccurate, and this has impeded the collection
a lot.

The longer an area was liberated, the harder it became for

cadres to act in a high-handed manner. Another defector
offered the following view :

When the Front emerged, the people didn't know

what it was all about, so they were very afraid of
it and treated the cadres very well out of fear . But
starting in 1 963, if the cadres said something that
the people didn't like or didn 't agree with, they
weren 't afraid to argue with the cadres. Some even
dared to insult them . After the people understood
more about the Front 's line and policy, they criti­
cized or insulted the cadre s whenever the cadres
acted contrary to this line and policy. They were,
of course, invited to attend indoctrination sessions
for this. The people still like the cadres, but they
don 't like them as much as they did at the begin­
ning. Before, the people were so afraid of the
cadres that they had to butter them up. For exam ­
ple, whenever the cadres came to their houses,
they poured tea in cups and set it in front of the
cadres, Now, when the cadres come to them, they
just ask the cadres if they would like some tea. If
the cadres say "no, " then they let it go at that, and
no longer respect the cadres as much as before,
because they know more about the Front and are
no longer afraid of the cadres.

What people learned from exposure to the NLF was to

make up their own minds, to speak up when they disagreed
with decisions, to hold cadres to the commitments they had
made. Even more fundamentally, a process of demystifica­
tion is at work here. The Front brought political authority
down to earth, stripped leaders of any super-natural aura,
encouraged peasants to see them as ordinary villagers who

32
do not have to be ""buttered up. " The better people under­
stand the organization, this witness seems to be saying, the
less they have to fear from its leaders . The more the Front
asserted itself, the more sure people were of their own
judgment and power .
Our examination of NLF methods of mass mobilization
would be incomplete if we dwelt on an image of peasant as­
semblies seething with enthusiasm. The eloquence of the
cadres was not intended to persuade villagers to storm out
of meetings and to throw them selves on the nearest GVN
post. Deepening commitment was harnessed to a daily
practice characterized by patience, caution and steadiness
rather than headlong audacity. The militance the Party
worked to arouse was just the opposite of recklessnes s, and
in fact the reason why people responded to the NLF " line
and policy " was precisely because Front cadres did not ask
them for impossible feats of courage, but instead confined
themselves to requests which they knew were within the
capabilities of the villagers. Approaching the task of wag­
ing guerrilla war in this spirit, NLF cadres broke down the
process into smaller and smaller steps, until the hUman
participation which it entailed at any one moment was with­
in the purview of the peasants who would have to carry the
burden of the struggle.
We can observe this finely differentiated tactical ap­
proach at work right from the first days of the NLF. In
1 960, when the Front began, the old Viet Minh organization
in the Province had been badly damaged by Diemist repres­
sion. The survivors who, along with other discontented vil­
lagers, started to resist had no army and no base area out­
side of the Plain of Reeds, a traditional guerrilla sanctuary
in the northern part of My Tho. According to a POW, in the
beginning all the insurgents in Cho Gao District together
could muster only seven rifles. The new organization had
to figure out how to mobilize a group of frightened, dis ­
couraged peasants and help them develop into a military
force capable of standing up to the Diem dictatorship. At
first, the small band of insurgents, their faces hidden,
moved only at night. One respondent recalled how they

appeared suddenly in the people 's houses, forced

33
 them to turn off all the lamps, then introduced
themselves as members of the National Liberation
Front of South Vietnam and requested the people
to contribute money to feed the troops , Before go­
ing to see a family, the cadres studied the finan­
cial situation of the family and determined how
much they would have to contribute • . .

Sitting in the darkness, wondering how to respond to these

unidentified intruders - who nonetheless seemed to be well
acquainted with the village and its inhabitants - the peas­
ants were "frightened out of their wits. " An interviewee
recalls that, IIAt night when they saw shadows passing by
they bolted their doors in a hurry, pretending to be asleep,
and didn 't dare to talk loudly. " In their recollections , the
respondents almost seem to go out of their way to stress
the early insignificance of the movement. At the beginning,
the Front had been nothing more than disembodied shadows,
a few muffled voices in the darknes s.
One of the first things the cadres asked villagers to do
was to beat on drums or wooden fish. Why ? One respondent
explained.

This was to create a fighting atmosphere among

the villagers and to make everyone feel that the
people were determined to resist the GVN and
very united in their actions . Moreover, if we did
not force everyone to make noise, no one would
dare to carry out our instructions because they
were still afraid of being arrested by the GVN. So,
forcing everybody to participate in knocking on
wooden fish and drums at the same time relieved
them from the fear of being denounced by their
neighbors.

Intended to create Iia fighting atmosphere, " these instruc­

tions were carried out by villagers almost paralyzed with
fright. IIMany of them were so scared of the GVN they
closed themselves in their rooms to knock on the wooden
fish. " But, as the cadres no doubt expected, perplexed Sai­
gon officials did nothing at all in response to these unor-

34
 1
thodox provocations, and the insurgents had won their first
small victory.
Now the cadres were ready for the next step, Here is one
account.

The cadres returned at night and went to every

house to call on the people to attend their meeting.
Each family sent two or three of its members to
the meeting while an elder member would stay
home to beat the drums or metallic barrels. When­
ever they stopped at one house and succeeded in
inviting some villagers to their meeting they would
take them along to the next house to invite the oth­
er villagers to the meeting. They went on that way
until they stopped at every house and the crowd of
the villagers became really large up to the place
of the meeting. The cadres got the villagers used
to meetings by working one whole week on each
family as I 've just mentioned. On December 1 960
they held a large scale meeting at which the ca­
dres put up the Front flag (it is the first time) and
announced that "Today the Front is born. "

At this point no shots had yet been fired - in fact the NLF
still had almost no guns - but, as the respondents looked
back, it seemed to them that the noisemaking had marked
a beginning. There had been no dramatic mass uprising, no
spontaneous storming of the Bastille, but instead a care­
fully planned very gradual process by which people were,
step by step, being encouraged to get together, to think of
themselves as a collective force with the ability to defend
itself and eventually to fight actively in its own interests.
By devoting as much as "one whole week" to each family
in an effort to persuade its members to attend a meeting,
the cadres were acting on the expectation that the struggle
would take a long time to develop, and that their movement
would have to be built with patience if it were to be built at
all.
The drums and wooden fish were the Front's first weap­
ons. (9) As one respondent put it,

35

-
 My confidence stemmed from the fact that every
night sounds coming from the knocking on every­
thing that could produce a sound, arose from the
dark countryside all around my hamlet. This cre­
ated a diabolical concert which gave all of us a
frightening thrill. It made me think the whole pop­
ulation had decided to stand behind the Front and
that huge manpower would give the Front the nec­
essary punch to overcome anything.

Peasants who had a healthy respect for the repressive

power of the Diem dictatorship would almost certainly not
have responded if the cadres had called for an immediate
assault on the GVN. The Front asked them to beat on drums
and wooden fish because it understood that villagers were
not ready for more aggressive collective action, and that
noisemaking was one thing they could be persuaded to do
together. Subsequent campaigns were marked by the same
scrupulous attention to the peasants ' mood. Each time am­
bitious measures were set aside in favor of more modest
steps forward, the final moment of victory was pushed fur­
ther away into the distant future. But even as they began,
cadres were convinced that they could mobilize the people
only by going slowly. The "diabolical concert" which in
1 960 "arose from the dark countryside" thus signalled the
beginning of a protracted war.
Front cadres were formed by this kind of political ex­
perience. The American media has left us with a "military"
image of the "ve " creeping about in the jungle or launching
suicide attacks on U. S. bases. Simplistic as descriptions of
its soldiers, these stereotypes are particularly unhelpful
when we are conSidering the real work of the NLF. We
should see the cadres as "civilians, " as attentive students
of politics and of village social life. Their interview re­
sponses often show a mastery of detail and a highJy devel­
oped capacity for taking complicated issues, breaking them
down in a logical way, and discussing them clearly and con­
vincingly. Some of the more cautious interviewees are non­
commital at first. But as the sessions go on, many are
drawn out, they cannot resist the temptation to describe 10-

36
cal politics, we sense their delight with the complexity of a
social world in which they had painstakingly learned to
function as administrators and leaders.
Most of all, these cadres are talkers. Molded by a rou­
tine of constant discussion and collective study, they ap­
proach questions in a self-consciously formal way, organ­
lzmg complicated responses which go on for page after
page, leaving plenty of room to explore all facets of the
issue under discussion. The RAND translators betray an
often uncertain grasp of English grammar and vocabulary,
but even so we can feel the impact of these discourses,
arresting in their way of reaching out, engaging the atten­
tion of the listener, inviting comment, objection - and
eventual concurrence . Some cadres repeat word for word
whole paragraphs from speeches they remembered hear­
ing, and their versions still ring with eloquence and pas­
sion. Fighters in the resistance, these people are formid­
able not because of their physical prowess or great marks­
manship. The Front drew its strength from their ability to
think things out together and to "motivate the people".
By 1 965, thousands of peasants had participated in many
study sessions and minutely organized campaigns . Time
after time, by careful planning, exhaustive group discus­
sion, and well-controlled attacks on Saigon power, the
movement had gone forward, always keeping its own casu­
alties to a minimum while inexorably chipping away at the
position of its adversaries . This long collective experience
gave to the NLF an unparalleled cohesion, discipline and
self-confidence. Because it had been nurtured so deliber­
ately, the insurgency had been able to develop a rare soli­
darity. This was the movement American leaders hoped to
crush by escalating the war.

BOMBARDMENT OF THE COUNTRYSIDE

Within the Front, harsh or arbitrary cadres ran the risk

of acquiring an unflattering nickname : "Little Ngo Dinh
Diem . " With its regime of forced labor and unjust jail sen­
tences , its ARVN troops marauding through the countryside,
raping and disemboweling innocent villagers , Diemism was
a byword for wanton cruelty among the peasants of My

37
TI
I

Tho. (10) And yet, for all their ferocity, Saigon authorities
had done little to oppose the rise of the NLF. According to
one respondent, when the concerted uprising broke out in
1 960, tiThe @ VN) hamlet and village officials did not have
any reaction worth mentioning, " and many other transcripts
contain similar testimony. There was a brief counter-attack
in 1 962, when the first large-scale use of U. S. helicopters
temporarily slowed the Front, but in 1 963 the guerrillas
once again seized the initiative. After the fall of Diem in
November of that year, the NLF regained all the ground it
had lost, and asserted itself even in areas of the Province
where Saigon authorities had exercised unbroken control all
the way back to 1 946.
The American response to this situation did not involve
any attempt to restore GVN officials to their former posi­
tions in the villages, and there were no new programs to
win peasant support away from the NLF. Some American
infantry units were sent to My Tho in 1 967, but on the whole
American ground troops in this region did not play anything
like the role which was assigned to them in the northern
sector of South Vietnam . Instead, US-GVN authorities began
to rain down bombs and shells on the countryside.
This new tactic represented a sharp break from former
practice. Early in the war, bombing and shelling had been
linked to GVN sweep operations, and occasional harass­
ment fire was directed against Front strongholds . Some­
times, when guerrillas shot at a post or a convoy, the near­
est Saigon installation retaliated with a barrage of shells.
"Since 1 962, the GVN artillery has never stopped pounding
my village " a defector observed in 1 965 . He meant that
shelling occurred "once every two or three months." Later
on, villagers were sometimes shelled without provocation,
but even in these cases a certain restraint was exercised.
The bombardment took place at a fixed time of day, so that
the villagers learned to anticipate and to take shelter at the
appointed moment.
US-GVN tactics from 1 965 on were qualitatively differ­
ent. This new bombing and shelling was neither linked to
individual provocations , nor confined to predictable hours.
Instead, vast areas of the countryside were subjected to a
more or less constant series of attacks from guns and

38
 1
planes . Earlier, villagers sometimes used to flee deeper
into liberated territory to avoid the danger. But by 1 967, as
a defector indicated, "Nobody dared to run deeper into
Front controlled areas, • •In the villagers ' eyes, fleeing
•

that way was equivalent to staying, in that one would run

the same risk of getting killed by mortars or by strafing."
The firepower was supposed to underline a political pOint.
As a defector put it, "The village was completely liberated.
Therefore it was continuously bombed and shelled. " The
aim of the Americans was not simply to harass or to re­
taliate against NLF initiatives , but to annihilate those com­
munities in which the Front had sunk such deep roots.
Eventually, many areas were being subjected to inces­
sant attack. Villages were bombed and strafed during the
day and shelled at night. In some areas, helicopter gunships
hovered overhead ready to strafe any moving individual. In
others helicopters circled all night, their powerful search­
lights illuminating the terrain ( "so bright that you can see
a needle on the ground" ), uninterruptedly strafing the path­
ways so that movement was impossible. B-52s joined the
assault in the summer of 1 966 with bombing raids over
Front villages . This relentless shelling of the countryside,
the creation of free fire zones in areas where hundreds of
thousands of people lived and worked, was after 1 965 the
central reality of the war in My Tho. ( 1 1 )
The interview transcripts convey a vivid sense of what
this bombardment meant to people. "One can die there any
moment, " recalled a respondent, "and most of the time one
has to live in a shelter. Even while eating, one has to stay
near a shelter because of the continued mortar-shelling.
I finally could not stand such a life. " Wherever they went in
the village, peasants needed shelters near at hand, and as
a result hours of labor time were devoted to the task of
digging trenches. The villagers had to be constantly alert,
since survival depended on reacting immediately after the
first report of long-range guns, the sound of airplane en­
gines, or even the hiss of falling bombs (B-52s could not be
heard at ground level), At the first sound, villagers "ran
into hiding, gasping for breath." They had to get used to
spending a good part of their existence underground, some

39

$
T

even sleeping in subterranean shelters. Eventually they

would almost become accustomed to the perpetual crashing
of bombs and shells . As one respondent summed up : MThe
villagers often said : lEach morning, when we wake up, we
don't know whether we are living until we open our eyes.'"
The bombardment was aimed at the peasants. Bombs and
shells fell on the clusters of houses at the center of each
hamlet, and in the process people's dwellings were de­
stroyed; 400 out of 440 in one hard hit village, according to
a local cadre. Returning to his village in February 1967
after being away for seven months, a soldier observed that

the village aspect had also changed a lot. It looked

sad and miserable, with burned houses and wildly
grown grass everywhere. I had the feeling that I
had lost my way and that where I stood looking
around wasn't the location of a former hamlet. My
house no longer existed. All that was left of it was
a devastated earthen floor. The deserted place
made me scared and I hurried to leave it.

Hospital

40
Firepower destroyed the orchards, which in most hamlets
were located near the peasants' hom es, thus knocking a
vital prop out of the local economy. "It takes the people
from five to seven years to tend their fruit trees before
they can get any income from their orchards, " a respond­
ent explained. Animal husbandry also suffered. Livestock
was killed by bombs and shells, or stolen by AR VN soldiers
during sweeps. As villagers moved out of their houses into
the open fields to escape the bombardment, they had to sell
their remaining animals, since there was no room among
the rice crops to maintain them properly.
Agricultural productivity sharply declined, Buffaloes
along with other animals were killed or sold, thus depriv­
ing the peasants of a major source of labor power, essen­
tial for effective plowing . In addition, the amount of culti­
vated land decreased because peasants were afraid to stay
out in the open too far from their trenches , Work was often
interrupted when villagers were strafed by passing planes,
or when shells exploded nearby. Bombing and shelling com­
pletely upset the usual patterns of work. According to a
respondent,

No one could farm his land on time and according

to the seasons, instead he had to wait for the time
when there was no bombing, no shelling and no
operations being conducted, In short . a quiet time
before he could work on his land. There were
times when we just got through ploughing and
planting when amphibious vehicles destroyed all
our efforts . Night or day, it didn't matter any
longer, as long as there was no harrassment, we
worked on our land. It has been a year now that
farming has become a thousand times more diffi­
cult because the war has escalated, operations
were conducted continuously, bombing and shelling
rained on us night and day,

After crops were planted, farmers never knew when fur­

ther military operations would deprive them of their har­
vest. Amphibious vehicles passing across the fields tore up
the rice crop, and, as a respondent explained, Mone napalm

41

s
 bomb could destroy a plot of land 50 meters wide and 1 00
meters long . " " Right now, it 's almost as though the village
isn't producing anything, " commented this same observer,
as he reflected on the ruins of his village.
Bombing and shelling also curtailed commercial activi­
ty. "Not everyone could do commerce in this day and age, "
stated one female peasant. "Only the adventurers who
weren't frightened by GVN bombing and shelling or intimi­
dated by Front checking and taxing could do it. " Moving
goods to market in liberated areas, where all roads were
routinely strafed, could be a fatal proposition. Thus the
fire-power which prevented peasants from working their
land properly and then destroyed many of the crops they
did succeed in cultivating, finally stood in their way when
they attempted to sell what little surplus they had managed
to accumulate.
By destroying their houses and livelihood, US-GVN au­
thorities hoped to force the villagers who were not killed
by the bombardment to move out of their Front controlled
communities, to "leave the VC behind. " But the task of pry­
ing the people loose from their native lands required a
sustained effort.

The people were afraid of bombs and bullets if

they stayed in an insecure area, but they did not
want to give up their land. What they really wanted
was to move temporarily to the nearest GVN-con­
trolled area, not necessarily a New Life Hamlet,
then come back to their native hamlet when the
GVN restored security to their hamlet.

Or, as another respondent put it, "I think these refugees

only left their villages temporarily. Sooner or later they
will com e back to their villages, because I am sure that
they will miss their orchards, their ricefields and the
tombs of the ancestors, and because they lived on their or­
chards and ricefields . " In other words, a bombardment
which appeared to be only temporary would not achieve
lasting results. During attacks, villagers were likely to
cluster along the nearest major highway or canal, the tra­
ditional nerve centers of GVN strength, where Front forces

42
were reluctant to appear and which were seldom bombed or
shelled. Other peasants took refuge in a nearby military
post or new life hamlet. But almost all tended to move
�ack to the village when things calmed down." In one ham­
let, the villagers

each bought a sampan. Every afternoon they took

their wives and children and brought along their
belongings in their sampans and sailed for the
GVN-controlled zone where they would stay over­
night in their relatives' or acquaintances ' houses.
The following morning, they would return to the
village if the situation permits . The reason is that
my village has been heavily bombed and shelled at
night time.

Others practiced a similar routine, sleeping in makeshift

huts near a highway, a canal or a GVN post. Frightened as
they were, these peasants still had not completely left their
homes. Insofar as it was possible, they continued to live
Itout there " with the NLF.
Continuing escalation forced the peasants to set aside
these expedients and to adopt more drastic measures . In
many villages, the inhabitants dismantled or abandoned "
their homes and moved out into the ricefields where they
lived in temporary huts. By scattering out across the coun-
tryside, they hoped to present a less conspicuous target for
US-GVN bombardment. But, as a POW recalled, the fields
were eventually to become just as dangerous as the center
of the village :

They built shacks in the middle of the field to live

in, but still didn't feel protected in the field. When­
ever an airplane flies by, everyone stands still
because if anyone runs out or into the house there
will certainly be strafing. It is also because of this
hanging threat that few people dare leave their
children at home alone and go out to earn more
money. Children aren 't aware of the danger, when
they see airplanes, and running here and there,
thus brings much harm to the entire hamlet.

43
As the scope of the bombing and shelling increased, the
whole village area became unsafe. In one community, the
Front built "dummy houses" in an effort to draw off the
bombing and shelling, but the tactic did not work because
"the AR VN airs trikes and artillery firing were all over the
village, and no place was spared. " Inexorably, US GVN-

military authorities were establishing their own peculiar

kind of credibility. They were prepared to bomb and shell
indefinitely and at an every intensifying rate all over the
countryside until the people finally gave up and left their
homes for good.
Gradually the peasants were worn down by this ceaseless
punishment. One respondent described his neighbors ' reac­
tions in the following way :

In the beginning a great majority of people did not

want to move out of the hamlet thinking that the
war would end within two years at most. But when
they realize that after almost six years of fight­
ing, bombing and shelling is far from being over
and, in fact, is even more violent, they seem to
lose all their hopes. Worried and frightened they
finally flee the VC to settle in safe areas.

Another witness testified to a similar evolution of opinion :

Eighty percent of the villagers have evacuated to

government areas, because of relentles s bombings
and shellings and three-fourths of the cattle in the
village have been killed by planes. There is a great
shortage of man-power and buffaloes in the vil ­
lage. The situation is getting more and more crit­
ical. Two years ago, in spite of relentless bomb­
ings and shellings, people still managed to farm
their land just to get enough rice to satisfy the
needs of their families. Those who had a lot of
land, of course, could not expect to till every inch
of it because it was so difficult to hire workers.
But by early t 967, the peasants began to evacuate
the village, It was no use to till the land because

44
 none could say for sure what would become of
their crops under the present circum stances. If a
sweep operation was launched in the area, their
ricefields, except those situated in the vicinity
• • .

of New Life Hamlets, would be completely de­

stroyed by government amphibians.

Even large-scale evacuation did not seem to stem the al­

most maniacal bombardment. MIt made no difference to the
aircraft that the hamlet was deserted, remembered a de­
fector; Mthey continued to bomb it all the same."

The Village o f An-Than After a Bombardment

I'GENERATING " REFUGEES

US-GVN bombardment Mgenerated " refugees because it

destroyed those social arrangements which gave form to
the lives of the villagers . In the countryside, just about
everyone was tied to the land. As one defector explained,
"A piece of property in the village, however big or small it
was, represents the results of hard work and savings
through many generations, and the villagers were very re­
luctant to leave it behind for an unknown future. " Tailors,

45

0"
carpenters, barbers, "also cultivate their land, " noted a
POW ; "therefore, they are also considered farmers . " The
village medic was likely to be a landowner, and so was the
schoolteacher, one of whom commented that he preferred
his village to life in Saigon; "living on my garden, " he af­
firmed, "1 had enough to eat. " Even the local cadres were
peasants first, and when it seemed that the Front might be
forced out of a village, they reacted like any other small­
holder. A defector from an area in which the NLF was on
the defensive, noted that

The village cadres will have to live in other vil­

lages. This is exactly their biggest fear. How could
they make a living in an alien village ? They have
no houses to dwell in and no land to till. They don't
get any pay from the Front, either. They simply
will have to starve. They couldn't assist their rel­
atives, either. The prospect is frightening and
their morale has declined.

Close relationship to the land was a trait shared by all

members of the village. It was the basic element giving
substance to rural society . US-GVN bombs and shells were
supposed to sever this bond between peasants and their
fields, and thus to demoralize and ultimately to disperse
the community from which the Front drew its strength.
For the peasants, land and subsistence went together.
The decision to leave home was postponed because people
were not sure they could survive without farming.

The se villagers had moved from their orchards to

the middle of the paddy fields to take care of their
fields. If they moved further away it would be dif­
ficult for them to take care of their ricefields.
This is why they had to cling to their land and run
the risk of getting shelled and killed. The people
there lived on farming, if they left their lands they
would starve to death. They were families with
many children to feed. If they moved to the New
Life Hamlets, they would have no means of making

46
 their living and they would not be able to feed their
families. Even if the government distributed money
to them , it would do so for a few months only, and
after that they would have to be on their own.
If they stayed with their land, they were sure of
having rice to eat for a long time. Some of them
who had gone to the New Life Hamlets to live for a
while came back and said that the allowances that
the government gave them were not enough. These
were the reasons why they decided to stay with
their ricefields in order to make their living.

The cautious peasants were not tempted by other ways of

making a living. Wages or government doles were tempo­
rary devices, ttfor a few months only, " but families with
land "were sure of having rice to eat for a long time, " in­
deed forever.
Living in an urban, wage labor economy, we may skip too
quickly over these statements, without fully comprehending
the depth of the villagers ' concern about leaving home.
Peasants were perplexed when confronted with the prospect
of leaving the one resource from which they had always
drawn the means of life. As a respondent recalled :

Most of <the villagers) had a large family and they

didn 't dare to move elsewhere . How could they feed
all their children without land to till ? So they just
resigned themselves to the conditions in the liber­
ated area and clung to their land to make their liv­
ing.

"If one has land, one can live easily, " affirmed another re­
spondent. By contrast, those who were forced to depart
seemed pitifully uprooted. The refugees itwere in one place
and their land was somewhere else, " observed a third in­
terviewee. "Even though they received GVN assistance,
their standard of living was still lower than before. "
Leaving the village was not just a matter of economics ,
of balancing accounts and deciding which environment guar­
anteed the steadier income.

47
 Everyone wanted to live, everyone was afraid of
death, and everyone wanted to live in secure areas,
but the people had to remain in the hamlet because
the situation forced them to do so. They had never
been outside their native hamlet, and they didn't
know of any other means of making their living
besides farming. They were afraid that if they
moved to the GVN areas, they wouldn't have any
means of earning their living, and they would be
lost and starve to death.

The peasants sensed that IIthey would be lost" if they moved

out of the village. In a strategic or new life hamlet or in
the district town, in My Tho City or in Saigon, they found a
new world, run according to a strange set of rules. A de­
fector offered this analysis :

The Strategic Hamlets were too crowded and the

cost of living was too high. The people would have
to buy everything, a stick of firewood, a handful of
vegetables, a red pepper, a tomato, things which
had been abundant and taken for granted when the
people were living in their own village. Yet once
they moved into a Strategic Hamlet, those things
became scarce and they'd have to spend hundreds
of piasters to buy them . In the village, one could
catch a few fish in just a moment in the swampy
field and one's meal would be completed. In the
GVN-controlled area, one has to buy practically
everything.

In this respect, and in many others, such a move disrupted

a thousand small routines . For example, according to one
respondent,

The men wanted to move to the GVN areas, but the

women didn 't like the idea . They were used to life
in the hamlet where their children had the run of
the orchards . When they had some spare time they
could go fishing and work in the fields or or-

48
 1

chards, Whereas if they moved to the cities, they

would have to rent a small house for 300 or 400
piasters a month. They would be very crowded and
they couldn't do anything to help add to the income
of their families. Their husbands would be the only
ones to work and support the families, while they
would just sit at home.

Refugees were not just changing one residence for another.

Bombing and shelling compelled them to abandon a whole
social world, with its network of habits and relationships,
and to plunge into an alien environment for which they were
radically unprepared.
The disintegration of rural society was particularly
marked in the area west of My Tho City where in 1 966 US­
GVN forces began to build the Dong Tam military base. The
lands of many peasants were seized, and, in the process of
construction, other adjoining fields were made unfit for
cultivation, Meanwhile, counterinsurgency efforts in the
District were escalated to a crescendo unmatched anywhere
else in the Province, Bombing, shelling and sweep opera­
tions were intensified in order to drive the NLP back, and
permanent garrisons camped in some villages to keep
guerrilla forces away from the American military installa­
tion.
Many peasants had to move to make way for the base.
Before they left, the Saigon dictatorship offered them a
«compensation" for the property it had taken, an ineffectual
gesture which crystallized the gap between the GVN regime
and the villagers , As if peasants could be compensated for
the loss of their land ! In fact there was no way to «com­
pensate" rural dwellers for their stolen fields, except per­
haps by providing them with another source of subsistence
which they could count on for the rest of their lives and
which could then be passed on to their children, «Pair"
compensation would also include membership in a new
community, with its own carefully developed and integrated
culture, comparable to the old village community which they
had been forced to leave. This «equity" on the part of the
Saigon regime must have provided a bitter consolation for
the villagers so catastrophically uprooted.

49
 Saigon authorities also overlooked the fact that many
property arrangements in the countryside were regulated
by custom and oral agreement rather than written rules and
contracts . As a worried peasant explained : "There were
many villagers who rented land from the landlords without
making any contracts , and, for this reason, they won't be
able to obtain any compensation. " Some absentee landlords
were thus provided with an unexpected windfall. When the
NLF established itself in the village, it usually ordered
either the confiscation of lands belonging to absentee own­
ers or that no rents be paid to landlords who did not come
personally to collect them . The Saigon government ended
up paying "compensation" to many landlords for holdings
which they had already written off as casualties of NLF
land reform . In all these respects, the issue of compensa­
tion represents in a concentrated form the essence of US­
G VN social policy. People living in one culture, with its
subsistence economy and semi - socialized property ar­
rangements, its customary and face-to-face way of doing
things, and its intimate relationship to nature, were being
forcibly recruited into another, very different culture, based
on wage labor, written law, private property and life in
crowded urban slums .
Certain American academics have claimed that the United
States has been speeding the "urbanization, " the moderni­
zation of South Vietnam, ( 1 2 ) The interview transcripts
document this process and give us a special insight into its
consequences for the inhabitants of the countryside. The
success of the "American style urban revolution" depended
in part on its ability to create its own constituency among
the transplanted peasants, And in fact the interviews inform
us that a few villagers were able to make a successful ad­
justment. A respondent noted that, "Of the refugees, only
those who had specialized jobs, such as tailors, merchants,
alcohol makers, etc., became more prosperous easily. »
"Most of those who left my village to take refuge in town
were middle farmers or richer people who could afford to
live there, " stated another respondent. A third remembered
that, "Many left in 1 965, especially those who had money. "
Still another witness pinpointed similar factors :

50

-
 The first who left their property to go and settle
down in GVN-controlled areas were small land­
owners and middle-class farmers . They have some
money and a trade, so when they were settled in
the GVN-controlled areas, they did not fear unem­
ployment, as they could live a decent life there.

For the commercially minded, life in Front areas was often

difficult, since taxes were high and labor scarce and ex­
pensive. These villagers might actually profit from the new
circumstances . IJA few people earn their living by selling
food, or trading in rice in the My Tho marketplace, and thus
have some income, " remarked one respondent. "These for­
tunate people are leading an easier life than most others . "
The peasants mentioned here, and others like them, might
be ready to applaud the transformation engineered by the
Americans.
But most refugees "didn't know anything about trading"
and were at a loss when suddenly confronted with a strange
world, so different from the one they had left behind. Even
prosperous peasants might shrink from the prospects of
such dislocation. The reflections of one woman defector
bear this out :

My parents live on farming and they own quite a

lot of land . They are afraid that they won't be able
to make a living if they move to the city. At any
rate, they don't want to leave their house and land.
Besides they are old and they don't know what to
do once they move to the city. My older sister has
asked them to come here and promised to give
them 2 000 piasters per month, but my parents have
refused.

For these peasants, the lJurban revolution " brought about

by the war was a catastrophe. For as long as pos sible they
shunned it, clinging to their lands in spite of endless bomb­
ing and shelling.
The economic stagnancy of the Saigon zone only made
matters worse. The strategy of generating refugees was

51
socially disastrous for the Vietnamese not only because
peasants were forced to abandon their land, and the culture
which went with it, but also because there were almost no
jobs in the areas where most refugees sought a new home.
The main employer in the GVN areas was the government
itself, The fact that so many defectors ended up as pacifi­
cation cadres, spies, and GVN soldiers had little to do with
the political appeal of the Saigon regime. Here is the way
one defector approached the matter.

My aspiration is to work for some agency so that

I can support my wife and children. I want to work
at the American base - doing things like scooping
dirt, or mixing cement, because I'm not a strong
man, I think that I can make more money working
for the Americans, but the only thing is that the
job might not last long. If I work for the GVN Rural
Reconstruction or Armed Propaganda teams I'll
get paid less but the job will last longer. My spe­
cialty is farm work, but now I no longer have any
land to till. Before, I rented my rice fields but
• • •

this land has been seized, and besides, by next

year the dredge will have blown mud all over it.

It would be interesting to know how this peasant really feels

about working for the Americans building a base which, al­
most literally, lies right on top of the land he has just lost.
In any case, we can see what he would most like to do . "My
specialty is farm work, " he observes laconically, the lan­
guage grotesquely deforming the social and cultural exist­
ence of the peasant into a "job, " one "specialty" among
many. As a result of US-GVN pacification efforts, "farm
work" is the one "specialty" no longer open to him . Once
he has accepted this reality, the rest follows more or less
automatically. If he wants to support his family, he must
work for the GVN.
In fact, the genius of the American strategy lay precisely
in the fact that it did not depend in any way on the political
strength of the Saigon authorities, Once bombing and shell­
ing intensified, circumstances would drive people into the

52
 GVN zone no matter how its officials behaved, The testi­
mony of numerous interview respondents indicates that the
decision to leave home was seldom a matter of principle.
One defector cited the words of his uncle :

There is too much bombing and firing here. If 1

was forced to stay here and I could earn 1 , 000
piasters a day, I still wouldn't stay. I'd rather go
hungry, but live in a place where there is no war,
no bombing, and no firing. If you keep on living
here, 1 don 't think that you can survive long.

A POW remembered his encounters with refugees who said

the same kind of thing :

When the refugees returned to their hamlets to

cultivate their lands, I met some of them and they
said, MWe understand that there would not be
enough land in the GVN-controlled areas for our
cultivation, and our living would be more difficult
than over here. However, if we remain in our
hamlets, our lives and those of our children would
not be safe • . • • "

When urged to return home, another refugee told a cadre :

"I have my family charge to look after. Life in the hamlet
has been so dangerous that I'm scared and have to move
along the canal to live, but I'm always with the revolution."
The se refugees might still be "with the revolution" in spir­
it, but nonetheless US-GVN bombardment was inevitably
forcing large numbers to "leave the VC behind. "
Cadres who had unraveled so many other complex prob­
lems now found themselves unable to deal with the political
challenge of U. S. escalation. A defector described the dis­
comfiture of local officials in these terms :

At first, when only two or three families moved

out to the new Life Hamlet and went back to the
village every day to farm their land, the Front
cadres kept asking them to return to the village

53

l t
 and making them attend one indoctrination session
after another. But now that the majority of the
people are doing the same thing, what can the ca­
dres do ? Now, they resort to political persuasion
and heart-to-heart talks to win the sympathy of the
people who had moved out of the village, They told
the people : IIPlease come back to the village, Why
do you want to stay in that prison that the GVN has
set up for you ? " The majority of the people ar­
gued with them and said : "'If we move back to the
village and live here, will the revolution be able to
protect us ? The village is shelled every day, And
then there are those bombings . Will the Liberation
Front be able to protect us and our property from
these shellings and bombings ? " Of course the
revolution couldn't protect them, so if the people
refused to move back to the village, the cadres
just let things go at that. What could they do ? They
couldn't possibly kill everyone, The Front has to
obey the people' s will.

When many peasants concluded that they had to choose be­

tween survival in the Saigon zone and certain death in their
own villages, the Front found itself in the midst of a poten­
tially fatal crisis.
The transcripts show the effects of bombing and shelling
in many area s . Even in 1 965, one village had shrunk from
its original population of about 3,000 to 142. Later on, a
defector reported that there were only three families still
living in his hamlet. Other respondents noted that one-half,
three-quarters, even eighty to ninety percent of the peas­
ants in their villages had fled. As we have seen, military
pressure was particularly intense in the area west of My
Tho City. To shield the Dong Tam military base, US-GVN
authorities mounted an ambitious campaign against the
Front in Binh Duc, Thanh Phu and Song Thuan Villages.
Massive bombardment drove many inhabitants away and
made it impos sible for big NLF military units to operate in
the area . In the second phase, Saigon troops moved out over
the scorched earth, repeatedly driving Front cadres into

54
hiding, and eventually settling into permanent occupation of
the terrain, Few cadres remained in these communities,
which were described by the insurgents in 1 967 as the three
weakest Villages in Chau Thanh District.
The Americans and their Saigon allies next attacked to
the north and west, thus dealing a blow to Front organiza­
tions in Nhi Binh, Long Dinh and Tam Hiep Villages , After
the great victory at Ap Bac Hamlet in January, 1 963, Nhi
Binh had been the most secure Village in the Chau Thanh
region, and as a result the Province military hospital and
many District offices were located there, But after 1 965,
according to one respondent, Ap Bac became "the most
shelled place" in the area , Another stated :

The Front hastily boasted to the world that it had

started the largest theater of war in the South with
the battle of Ap Bac - the biggest and most well­
known battle - and how it was fighting a guerrilla
war with spike pits, wasps and so on, The whole
world admired the Front for it. But, now, if we
went down to Ap Bac, we would find that all the
spike pits, communication trenches and so on there
were gone. Suppose now some people in the world
asked the Front to take them to Ap Bac to have a
look, the Front would be in a difficult position, be­
cause Ap Bac had become a weak Front area.

Long Dinh and Tam Hiep "are the Villages which sheltered
the cadres during the Concerted Uprising Campaign, " re­
membered another respondent. Because of their large and
wealthy populations of "high spirited people, " they were
'"the two most important villages" in Chau Thanh District.
Situated between the Plain of Reeds and the Province Cap­
ital City, they served as "the gate to My Tho, " and thus
always played a vital role in the strategic design of the
NLF. Early in 1 967, Long Dinh and Tam Hiep, which had
already been bombed and shelled, were targeted for special
pacification drives . Many of the villagers, who "are well
known for their eagerness to dig trenche s and for their
willingnes s to continue to stay in their villages , " eventually

55
decided to evacuate. The Front's position was substantially
weakened, while for its part the GVN moved a garrison of
troops from the AR VN Seventh Division into the area.

"Vil lage Life"

To the west, US-GVN authorities drove a wedge into the

liberated zone. Bounded by the Mekong River on the south,
and the Indochina Road on the north and west, this territory
was known within the NLF as the "20/7 " zone, a reference
to 20 July 1 954, the date of the signing of the Geneva Ac­
cords . Bombing and shelling dealt a heavy blow to the in­
surgency in this 20/7 sector. A village like Bang Long, for
example, had played an important part in the Concerted
Uprising of 1 960. It had always been counted a "strong "
area and was the site for a number of Chau Thanh District
offices. But under the bombardment, a respondent explained,
"local people do not dare to meet for fear of possible dan­
ger . " Life became "unbearable, " and most of the people
had moved elsewhere , Cam Son Village suffered a similar
fate. Once "the merriest <yillage) in the liberated area, " it
was one of the two strongest Front bases in Cai Lay Dis­
trict. According to a defector, Cam Son has "always been
considered the center of the Party's indoctrination schools
and it was in this Village that big meetings of high-ranking

56
 1
cadres have often been held. " oWl think that Cam Son was
j
shelled so intensively, " another respondent observed, ilbe_
cause it was one of the first liberated villages. " The Sev­
enth Division appeared around Cam Son in 1 966 and 1 967,
setting up a usecurity belt " and five military posts. Sub­
jected to this heavy pressure, the Front gave ground, Vil­
lage fortifications fell into disrepair and umany" of the
villagers evacuated their homes. A similar deterioration in
the NLF position was evident throughout the 20/7 heartland
region.
The outlook in Cai Be District to the west was not quite
so grave. "I was told that the military and political situ­
• • •

ation in this District is now better than in the others, " noted
a respondent in mid- 1 966. But even in Cai Be, the NLF suf­
fered serious losses . As an example, consider the case of
Hau My Village, perhaps the strongest Front village in the
whole Province. "Deep in the liberated zone, " it had a long
tradition of insurgency, going all the way back to the Re­
sistance of the First Indochina War against the French. Hau
My was counted one of the "three model NLF villages in all
of South Vietnam, " and in a number of interviews it was
singled out as a key political base for the insurgents. After
1 965, US-GVN authorities bombed and shelled Hau My; the
remarks of one interviewer suggest that it was hit by B-52
attacks beginning in 1 966. Defoliants were also dropped
over the community in an attempt to destroy ground cover
used by the guerrillas. These attacks hurt the Front. A re­
spondent from one of the hamlets in Hau My noted in mid-
1 967 ua desperate lack of cadres" in the Village, He de­
scribed his own settlement as Udeserted. "
These villages may have been especially hard hit, but the
interview transcripts make clear that the same kinds of
events were occurring in many other areas of My Tho
Province. For the first time in the history of the war, it
seemed that the GVN was succeeding in uconcentrating the
people " in zones under its control. Years of bombardment
had finally compelled the villagers uto leave the VC be­
hind. "

57
 POST PONEMENT O F THE
"GENERAL INSURRECTION AND O F FENSIVE"

Guerrilla tactics can sustain a struggle for national lib­

eration over a long period of time, but they can never
achieve decisive victory, They are the devices of a move­
ment which is unable to fight in conventional terms against
its enemies, but which must lie low, conserve its energy,
and gradually wear down the adversary, In the final stage
of a guerrilla campaign, para-military local units give way
to the regular army which the insurgents have gradually
assembled, If all goes well, this army fights and wins con­
ventional battles leading to the dissolution of the estab­
lished government and the end of the war.
In 1 964 - 1 965, the NLF entered this apparently crucial
stage of guerrilla warfare. With large areas of the country­
side under its jurisdiction, the Front organization func­
tioned openly, more and more like an established govern­
ment, while the division-sized units of its army inflicted a
series of crushing defeats on the Saigon force s. Up to that
moment, the NLF had relied on volunteers to fill its mili­
tary ranks and had solicited contributions to pay the bills.
However, in preparation for the anticipated final phase of
the war, cadres organized a regular system of taxation and
instituted universal conscription in the villages. These
moves were highly successful. The Saigon government was
driven to the verge of collapse, and as a consequence the
United States had to make what for a great power was a
humiliating choice : should American leaders acquiesce in
the defeat of their GVN allies ? Or should they risk an in­
ternational crisis by sending substantial military forces
into South Vietnam to stop the NLF ? But when the United
States did intervene, the inherent dangers of the Front's
initiative cam e to light. At the moment when the Pentagon
started to increase its efforts, the guerrilla movement was
fully extended, its cadres geared for a showdown, its peas­
ant supporters exerting every effort to win key battles and
thus bring the liberation war to a rapid, successful conclu­
sion, Just when the United States began to escalate, the NLF
was fully mobilized, its reserves already committed to the
struggle.

58

m
 U. S. intervention sent shock waves throughout the coun­
tryside . Here was a new adversary on the battlefield, in­
comparably more powerful than any the insurgents had
faced up to that time. One respondent remembered a de­
pressing conversation with a friend in the summer of 1 965.
"A district comm ittee member disclosed to me one night
when we had dinner together that the United States was a
very strong and rich country. He stressed that only one
American capitalist could finance this war for a full year."
Even the most dedicated cadres were shaken as the full
weight of American power made itself felt . A POW remem ­
bered having these reactions :

Formerly when I was in the liberated area, I be­

lieved firmly that the Front would win, because it
had been able to start from nothing and accom­
plished a very strong organization and a powerful
army. But now, after having compared the strength
of both sides , I came to the conclusion that it will
be difficult for the Front to win this war, because
the U, S. is too rich and too powerful . How is it
possible to wear it out ? I am too inferior intellec­
tually therefore I cannot tell who will win this war.
It is difficult for the Front to win, but probably it
is not going to lose, and I am afraid the war might
go on and on until the generation of my descend­
ants.

Cadres who thought they had reconciled themselves to the

realities of a protracted war suddenly faced the possibility
of struggling on far longer than even the most pessimistic
observers had imagined, Many had already

been fighting for a long time, and their families

were waiting for them to come home and support
them , this is why they were all eagerly awaiting
the restoration of peace to go home and work for
their living. But the war just went on and on, and
they becam e discouraged.

59
People speculated that Mthe war would drag on for five, ten,
fifteen or twenty years. " In such gloomy discussions , one
pessimistic prediction led to another. A respondent re­
called : Ma number of cadres said that if the war lasted this
long, the Vietnamese people would all die. They were afraid
that the war would last five times as long as the Resistance
- 45 years. A number became discouraged "
• • •

Fighters and cadres had to reassess their own individual

prospects in the light of U. S. escalation. Instead of looking
forward to imminent victory and the satisfactions of a vic­
torious peace, observed a defector,

all of us thought that we would have to die and the

cadres also said that we ought to expect to be
killed if we were decided to fight for the revolu­
tion. They added that our death would serve our
children's interests and therefore would be of val-
ue.

MI asked myself whether r could stand up under another ten

years of fighting, " mused another defector. "r saw the pos­
sibility of the war dragging on for ten or more years and I
felt r couldn't even take another year or two of it, let alone
ten. r had what they call in the Front the Isurrender com­
plex, ' '' Just when the war's most dangerous phase was get­
ting underway, the NLF had to cope with this spreading
disappointment and demoralization within its own ranks.
The villagers too were discouraged. Speaking of the situ­
ation in 1 965, a cadre noted, "All of us agreed that the peo­
ple were then very tired of the war and that they were also
very afraid of it. " This fatigue was laced with a certain
bitterness. The Front had Mpromised victory too many
times, " and people remembered how they had been told of
the coming MGeneral Offensive and Insurrection" which
would Mfinish off" the GVN .

The Front said that i n April 1 965 all the cities

would fall in its hands, and there would be no more
cities because they would be merged with the
countryside - My Tho would be a village of Go

60
 Luy only. But we are in 1 966 now, and no such
thing has happened. All the fighters, cadres and
people know that the Front hasn't been able to do
what it promised. At that time all the people had
to study about the general insurrection and offen­
sive, but two years have passed since that time,
and this is why the people are so pessimistic and
dissatisfied with the Front.

The new tax and draft obligations were points of particu�

larly heated controversy . Resistance to such measures had
at first been undercut by the expectation that quick victory
would both justify the sacrifices and bring them to a rapid
end. A defector explained.

The people said that if national reunification was

close at hand they would gladly let their children
fight for the Front, but since the war was going to
last for a long time they didn't @anO to let their
children join the Front. They said that their chil­
dren would run the risk of getting killed, and that
with their children gone no one would help them in
their farm work.

U. S. e scalation meant that even more money and recruits

were needed. Within a few months, the end of the war sud­
denly receded off into the distant future, and the peasants
realized that their burdens were bound to increase in the
days ahead.
In late 1 965, the NLF held Msupplementary reorientation
sessions " throughout My Tho Province. Province and dis­
trict representatives stressed the need to prepare for Ma
long and bloody war, " and they indicated how the Front in­
tended to deal With U. S. escalation. The situation seemed
grim, but not hopeless. In this criSiS, and in the ones to
follow, cadres took heart from the history of the movement.
Some remembered the events of 1 962, when U. S. helicop­
ters terrorized the people, casualties increased, and nu­
m erous villages fell to the Saigon regime. Supplementary
reorientation sessions then helped the insurgents pull

61

l I
...
themselves together, and the Ap Bac battle inaugurated a
new phase of expansion for the NLF. Looking back further,
many recalled that in 1 960 just getting the revolt underway
had seemed like a miraculous achievement. As one defec­
tor put it,

No movement in the world has expanded as rapidly

as the Front did. The Front started to build up its
forces right in the midst of the enemy, It neither
had weapons nor training schools to train its men.
And yet it was able to form Province Mobile Units
and then Main Force Units, and expanded very
rapidly right in the midst of the enemy. The Amer­
icans and the GVN tried to nip it in the bud - by
arresting the Front cadres and jailing them in Phu
Loi and so on - but failed.

When times were bad, some of the older cadres delved even
more deeply into the past, A POW offered this observation :

The government states that it will win. The Front

also says that it will win, ultimately. So, it is dif­
ficult to predict which side is correct. In Front­
controlled areas, cadres and people like to believe
the Front 's statements because they have been
proved correct once before. During the Resistance,
they asserted that they would win ultimately. They
said so when the people could see nothing which
could guarantee that they would win. The Resist­
ance dragged on for nine years, and indeed, they
won after the Dien Bien Phu battle. This success
has scored an excellent point and has enabled the
cadres and people to draw a comparison between
this war and the Resistance. This has given much
credit to the Front.

One veteran, who had survived many rough periods, re­

membered 1 952, when the French seemed to have excluded
Viet Minh influence altogether from Chau Thanh District,
as the worst time in the history of the revolution. These
s easoned fighters were not about to be stampeded by U, S,

62
escalation .
According to one report, two factions emerged from the
1 965 "supplementary reorientation sessions. " On the one
hand were "the skeptics " who

believed that the Revolution would definitely fail

because the Front couldn 't possibly counteract the
U. S., a country with such a powerful and well
armed force. They also believed that the more the
Front prolonged this protracted resistance, the
nearer they brought the country to the brink of de­
struction.

But on the other side, this same observer noted the consol­
idation of a second group, "the fanatics, " who "became
more enthusiastic after the reorientation course, believing
that their leaders had all the essential factors in their
hands to defeat the Americans and to liberate the South. "
The NLF had been shaken, some cadres had dropped out of
the movement, but a hard core of dedicated insurgents re­
turned to their villages to meet with the backbone elements
and eventually with the people to explain to them how the
Front, with their help, planned to carry on the struggle.
The general policy which the NLF adopted in the 1 965-
1 967 period involved a return to guerrilla warfare. The
regular NLF army, which had been concentrated for the
campaigns of 1 964- 1965, found it increasingly difficult to
function in subsequent years. The Front had three Main
Force battalions operating in the upper Delta and one Local
Force battalion which functioned within the boundaries of
the Province. But these large troop concentrations, from
500 to 800 soldiers each, had difficulty operating in the
conditions created by US-GVN bombing and shelling. Bat­
talions maneuvered for months trying to get into position to
attack the GVN without running the risk of prohibitively de­
structive counter attacks from planes and artillery. To a
considerable extent in 1 966 and 1 967, intensive bombard­
ment succeeded in neutralizing, if not in demolishing, these
NLF units. (13) With regular armed forces in the back­
ground, local guerrilla units had to carry the brunt of the
fighting.

63
 Reemphasizing guerrilla methods was interpreted by
some cadres as a step backward. Understanding full well,
from a tactical point of view, why it was important to break
up large NLF units, these cadres could plainly see that
such a step amounted to a strategic retreat. Only regular
forces could win the war, and so it naturally followed that
withdrawing these forces from action postponed the phase
of decisive fighting until some moment in the unforseeable
future. As one respondent put it, ItAll cadres are very well
aware that if they return to guerrilla warfare, they will
never be able to win even if they have to fight for one hun­
dred years . " Another observer made basically the same
point : ttln a small nation, we have to progress from guer­
rilla warfare to modern warfare in order to achieve vic­
tory, If the NLF has done the contrary, it will never win
this war. "
Guerrilla tactics are devices which grow out of military
and technological weakness, Cadres were depressed by the
abandonment of positional warfare because they harbored
no romantic illusions about the nature of the alternative.
Following the guidelines of a guerrilla strategy, the peas­
ants of My Tho had to disrupt the environment in which they
lived, As a POW observed, such efforts always threatened
to cause them as much harm as they did the enemy.

Before a road was destroyed or dug up, or a bridge

was blown up, a mass meeting was usually held,
There the cadres explained that the sabotage work
would be to obstruct the enemy operations in order
to protect the lives and property of the population.
The villagers easily took the explanation and went
on to work as directed, At first, I was surprised,
I asked myself why the roads and bridges were
destroyed when they had been constructed for the
people's own movement, But when I listened to the
NLF cadres ' explanation, I thought that they were
right, and the villagers joyfully carried out the
work, too.

64
 l
Here is an account of the results of such tactics in one vil­
lage :

At present, only waterways can be used. Roads are

completely obstructed since they have been de­
stroyed and planted with booby-traps, spikes, and
mines. Furthermore, the NLF has officially for­
bidden the use of roads in order to facilitate the
construction of defensive emplacements to hold out
against operations.

Another interviewee noted that, "In 1 966, the Village Com­

mittee ordered the villagers to destroy every road and
bridge and forced the people to use new paths . Spike boards
have been planted in the old roads. " The Front had no choice
about such tactics. Without heavy guns and planes, it could
block enemy movement only by ripping up the ground itself.
Fortifying hamlets created the same kinds of problems .
O n the face o f it, digging trenches, cutting and sharpening
spikes, and setting booby traps were all pitiful expedients
when the adversary had high powered weapons, amphibious
vehicles and jet planes . Such fortifications seldom inflicted
serious injury on the other side. As one peasant argued to
a cadre, ""These spike traps are useless and yet we have to
dig them all the time. When the soldiers come, they are too
smart to walk in the orchards and fall in the traps. They
are not as stupid as you think." What was worse, the vil­
lagers, as well as their animals were constantly blundering
into the traps, which dotted their own fields and orchards.
One village adopted the device of posting warnings around
each trap: a guerrilla would hurry to remove the notices
when enemy troops began an operation. No wonder many
villagers resisted requests to maintain hamlet fortifica­
tions, since it appeared that their "efforts did not pay off
commensurably. "
These fortifications did, however, serve a purpose. While
they might not deter a large AR VN force, they often dis­
couraged smaller units from entering the village. More
important, trenches, spikes and traps won time- for the vil­
lagers . If ""one GVN soldier was wounded, " recalled a re-

65
spondent, "the rest would become cautious and advance
slowly. " Another interviewee noted that Mfighting a guerrilla
war without the combat hamlets is just like having no point
of support." GVN soldiers "could get at you from all direc­
tions, " while by contrast the existence of fortifications
compelled them to "take a fixed route" into the village.
Sentry duty and village self-defence was thus much simpli­
fied. Finally, invading troops would be delayed by the ob­
stacles, thus allowing "the Front members enough time to
go into hiding and to move their equipment and documents
elsewhere. "
Fortifying hamlets was dull, hard work, requiring the
constant attention of the peasants. The task was particular­
ly frustrating because it produced no dramatic results.
Without fortifications , NLF local organization would not
have been able to protect itself, but such fortifications had
no real offensive potential. At best, they affected the invad­
ers' morale, since U. S. and Saigon troops usually found
themselves picking their way through a hostile terrain lit­
erally bristling with lethal spikes and traps. ( 1 4 ) But the
damage done to the other side was not much greater than
to the villagers themselves. A painful trade-off was in­
volved here. The tedious labor of the peasants, plus the in­
convenience of booby-trapping one 's own hamlet, had to be
weighed against the aggravation caused to the opposition.
Success depended on the ability of the villagers to outlast
the enemy, on their readiness to live with the strain and
sacrifice of guerrilla war until adversaries of the NLF
could no longer tolerate further combat.
Similar difficulties arose out of the activity of village
guerrillas. Such forces do not win wars, or even local en­
gagements, and when they undertake offensive operations,
it is usually to harry, to distract, to keep the pressure on
enemy units. These tactics becom e increasingly costly as
US-GVN authorities took to employing heavy fire power in
response to small-scale NLF initiatives. When guerrillas
harassed a post, then retreated through a nearby village,
which was consequently shelled, a peasant angrily stated :
Mit is nonsensical to shoot at the post recklessly like that.
If they want a fight they only have to attack the post once

66
and for all. This reckless shooting only hurts innocent peo­
ple. " In a similar situation, another peasant sarcastically
called after the retreating guerrillas : "Why don 't you stay
here to enjoy the fight ? " We can imagine what effect it
must have had on the morale of local forces preparing for
an engagement to hear villagers affirm : "We all may be
killed because of you ! They're very strong, don't stand
against them ! You can't overcome them ! " The problem
was that guerrillas could not deal with a well fortified GVN
post Monee and for all" any more than they could stay around
to confront much larger enemy units . Still, we can also un­
derstand the point of view of peasants who insisted that
guerrillas "only cause the people to get killed and to suffer
damage, while causing no harm to the GVN at all."

Facing the Enemy

Villagers were particularly angry when the guerrillas

shot at passing planes. Here we have one of the most telling
images to com e out of the war : the Vietnamese peasant
firing from the ground at a huge U. S. jet, the guerrilla
fighter pitted against American technology. And in fact NLF
cadres initially encouraged this kind of shooting, as part of
a general effort to maintain morale among local fighters by
giving them a sense that they could respond in some way to
the firepower being directed against them . But when planea

67
 were shot at, they tended to drop bombs in response. A sin­
gle sniper could endanger the existence of a whole village,
and as a consequence villagers bitterly resented guerrillas
who fired randomly at passing planes. In response to this
situation, Front cadres gradually developed a complicated
set of ground rules which limited shooting at airplanes to
certain relatively isolated parts of the countryside. In this
instance, considerations of the trade-off involved with a
particular tactic led to the decision to restrict its use.
Spotter planes might be reluctant to fly over a village which
was known for its sniper fire, and of course there was a
slight chance that such planes might actually be downed by
a shot from the ground. But these costs to the enemy usu­
ally did not overbalance the damage done to villages subject
to retaliatory bombing and shelling.
The F ront could refine such tactics, but it could not give
them up completely. Like the destruction of roads or the
fortification of hamlets, guerrilla activity was an integral
part of NLF strategy. And like these other tactics, guerrilla
actions were undramatic and indirect in their consequences.
In fact, many of these effects would be invisible to the vil­
lagers : the AR VN soldier who decided to desert after nar­
rowly avoiding one too many ugly spike pits during a sweep,
the Saigon commander mindful of his reputation, who kept
his troops close to base camp because regular small scale
guerrilla activity in the area had given him the false im ­
pression that substantial Front forces were nearby . The
local guerrilla who had time to do farm work because his
unit only had to guard one entrance to the village, the cadre
who managed to slip into hiding with all the Front 's local
records, the peasant whose livestock was not stolen because
Saigon troops were afraid of the booby traps around his
settlement - all were beneficiaries of hamlet fortifica­
tions . These tactics were not easy to carry out, and they
usually did not produce conspicuously satisfying results,
but in the absence of other means, the NLF had no other
way of fighting the war.
The liberated zone was a school in guerrilla methods . In
countless daily incidents, and in many study seSSions, the
point of the NLF approach had to be defined. Here is a typi­
cal complaint made by a villager to a local cadre :

68
 MThe guerrillas can't fight against GVN troops on
sweep operations. What posses sed them to fire at
the troops anyway ? They should have kept quiet
and let the troops pas s , If they had sneaked away
quietly, nothing would have happened. But they fired
at the troops while they ran away, so the troops
shot back and killed my cow that was worth 7000
or 8000 piasters . "

In this instance, a s in so many others, military operations

created a political problem for the NLF.

The Party Chapter heard about this and sent a

cadre to see her and apologize . He explained to
her why the guerrillas had to shoot at the GVN
soldiers, and asked her to accept the incident as a
war hazard. The guerrillas' shots were intended
to warn the people so they could take refuge else­
where and to warn the cadres so they could put
their documents away and go into hiding.

The peasants were learning the hard way to understand

protracted war. Short of the "General Offensive and Insur­
rection, " indefinitely postponed after 1 965, they could never
finish with the enemy once and for all, they could hurt the
other side only a little bit at a time, and for every blow
they landed there would be a counterstroke compelling them
to pay for their gains with further disruption and sacrifices
in their own lives .
The war required a major political effort from the ca­
dres, a constant round of discussion and explanation, so
that villagers would be willing to put up with the vexation
of local guerrilla tactics . At the same time, the Front also
had to support its Main Force units , not only in My Tho,
but also in the north, where the NLF army was fighting
pitched battles with U. S, forces throughout this period.
Military necessity thus led to increased taxation and uni­
versal conscription at the local level, just as the war it­
self, the bombing and shelling, was crippling the village

69
economy. A popular movement, once so successful at ap­
pealing to the «general will, " now had to ask peasants to
carry on with a struggle which was tearing their society
apart and causing a rapid degradation in their standard of
living.
Villagers and cadres were trapped by the logic of guer­
rilla war. As the Front grew stronger, the United States
was compelled to increase its military effort. In turn, the
more fighting intensified, the more the Front had to demand
contributions from the peasants. The draft, war-related in­
flation and other developments brought the conflict home to
people in the United States, but at the same time escalation
also took an impersonal form, in the shape of bombs,
planes, defoliants, and other technological means of de­
struction. By contrast, the NLF had only one resource with
which to fight : the Vietnamese people themselves. When the
U. S. built new weapons, the Front had to ask villagers to
work harder, to sharpen more spikes, pay higher taxes,
send all of their children into the armed forces. On the one
side, escalation was to some extent a matter of augmenting
the mechanical war-making apparatus, and in this sense
American capacity for intensifying the fighting was almost
limitless. On the other side, escalation involved a growing
political crisis, in which the NLF had to demand even more
of peasants already driven almost beyond the limits of en­
durance by the exigencies of the struggle.

"'ROOTING OUT THE VIET CONG INFRASTRUCTURE "

While escalation was forcing cadres to make increasing

demands on the peasants, at the same time it was destroy­
ing those institutions on which the Front had depended for
its political leverage. Bombardment of liberated zones did
not just drive people out of their villages, it also disrupted
NLF functioning in countless ways. Bombing and shelling
made it very dangerous for the people to get together, for
whatever purpose. As a defector put it, "The villagers
stayed home simply because they thought that a big congre­
gation of people would make the GVN shell them and that
was the surest way to get killed. " Political meetings were

70
economy. A popular movement, once so successful at ap­
pealing to the «general will, " now had to ask peasants to
carry on with a struggle which was tearing their society
apart and causing a rapid degradation in their standard of
living.
Villagers and cadres were trapped by the logic of guer­
rilla war. As the Front grew stronger, the United States
was compelled to increase its military effort. In turn, the
more fighting intensified, the more the Front had to demand
contributions from the peasants. The draft, war-related in­
flation and other developments brought the conflict home to
people in the United States, but at the same time escalation
also took an impersonal form, in the shape of bombs,
planes, defoliants, and other technological means of de­
struction. By contrast, the NLF had only one resource with
which to fight : the Vietnamese people themselves. When the
U. S. built new weapons, the Front had to ask villagers to
work harder, to sharpen more spikes, pay higher taxes,
send all of their children into the armed forces. On the one
side, escalation was to some extent a matter of augmenting
the mechanical war-making apparatus, and in this sense
American capacity for intensifying the fighting was almost
limitless. On the other side, escalation involved a growing
political crisis, in which the NLF had to demand even more
of peasants already driven almost beyond the limits of en­
durance by the exigencies of the struggle.

"'ROOTING OUT THE VIET CONG INFRASTRUCTURE "

While escalation was forcing cadres to make increasing

demands on the peasants, at the same time it was destroy­
ing those institutions on which the Front had depended for
its political leverage. Bombardment of liberated zones did
not just drive people out of their villages, it also disrupted
NLF functioning in countless ways. Bombing and shelling
made it very dangerous for the people to get together, for
whatever purpose. As a defector put it, "The villagers
stayed home simply because they thought that a big congre­
gation of people would make the GVN shell them and that
was the surest way to get killed. " Political meetings were

70
scripts are to be trusted, by 1 967 almost all Front schools
had been closed down.
The delivery of medical services was similarly dis­
rupted. In the early days of the war, the Front maintained
hospitals and clinics, often right under the noses of GVN
authorities. A defector explained that :

When there was a GVN operation, hospital beds

would be dismantled and submerged in the creek,
while mediCines, bowls, glasses, and wounded sol­
diers were carried into underground shelter. The
villagers did not evacuate, they were educated to
tell GVN troops that those houses (used as a med­
ical station) belonged to villagers who had gone to
the ricefield. So far, GVN troops have never dis­
covered a wounded soldier or any medical agent,
or medicines of the Chau Thanh District medical
corps in the three above stations.

In spite of " living integrated with the enemy, " doctors and
nurses continued to function, and, in one locale, "The med­
ical team were the most loved people in the village . " Bomb­
ing and shelling destroyed hospitals and medical equipment
just as it did schools and houses. To make matters worse,
the departure of refugees from the center of the village
made it increasingly difficult for medical cadres to be of
service to the peasants. A respondent noted that

Whenever the people got sick, they went to the

GVN areas for treatment. If they wanted the Front
medical personnel to give them injections, they
had to walk a long distance in order to find them.
The medical personnel stayed in houses that peo­
ple had abandoned, far off in the orchards . This
was why no one went to see them when sick.

The speaker had been strafed while walking in his fields,

and had been taken to a GVN doctor. His perspective has
been turned inside-out by the bombing. Living in a hut built
in the ricefields, he is the one who is located "far away, "

72
while the medical team remains in the original village.
Health, like education, was an area in which US-GVN bom­
bardment dealt the Front a serious blow.
Bombing and shelling also interrupted the activities of
Front entertainment teams. The reports of a number of re­
spondents indicate that these troupes had made a significant
contribution to the growth of the NLF, Here is a typical de­
scription, from a defector :

It was not before 1 963 that my village came under

Front control. I was then a 1 7 year old teenager
and was very taken in by the happy and excited at­
mosphere that existed in the village. What im­
pressed me most was the Village Entertainment
Troupe which gave all of us a very good time once
every one or two months . Whenever it came to my
hamlet, the youths were overjoyed and I even neg­
lected meals to be with the troupe all day long.
Besides singing songs, the troupe also performed
short plays in favor of the Front, and eventually,
I heartily welcomed whatever the Front did. That 's
why when the conscription policy was put in force
in (fny village) I volunteered to join the Front's
armed forces without the slightest hesitation.

Like any other gathering of villagers, audiences attending

such presentations were bombed and shelled after 1 965,
and as a result the work of these troupes was seriously
hindered. "Why weren't there any more spectators ? " asked
one interviewer when this subject came up during discus­
sions with a defector. "Were the people fed up with the
shows ? " ""No, that wasn't it, " was the answer :

The people are still very fond of the shows, but

they daren't gather to attend them because they
feared being shelled. A s evidence, instead of at­
tending the shows, they came there when the en­
tertainers were rehearsing for the shows . But on
the day of the performance nobody dared to come.
The people were convinced that if they gathered in

73
 a crowd, the GVN would find out about it and shell
them .

The shows had once stood at the center of a revolutionary

culture which the Front was helping to build. According to
the testimony of a defector :

The best period lasted from 1 962 to 1 963. Life in

the countryside was a lot of fun. Every village
meeting was followed by a show given by the vil­
lage entertainment team and the villagers were
very eager to attend them . At night, the people
stayed up late to drink or to chat. We didn't have
to worry about shellings.

After 1 965, the disappearance of the entertainment teams

indicated that this revolutionary culture was in deep trou­
ble.
The most important institutions to fall apart under the
bombardment were the popular associations . These organi­
zations, uthe reserve forces of the Revolution, " served both
as local organs of self-government and as schools of rev­
olutionary politics , from which the Party recruited its own
membership. UAn association or a group is a bridge con­
necting the people with the Party, " remarked one analyst;
uTo get to the Party, one must go through an association or
a group." Associations were entrusted with much of the
day-to-day detail of local administration, and their offi­
cers, the neighborhood Party members and backbone ele­
m ents, were the leaders of hamlet and village. Associations
mobilized the people, they were the vehicle through which
the Front's line and policy was translated into action.
The Liberation Youth' s Association was primarily re­
sponsible for recruitment, and from its ranks the Front
drew most of its soldiers. Especially in its early days, this
had been a revolution of young people. "'I joined the Front
almost immediately after 1 went back to my village, " re­
membered one POW.

74
 I was then a youth and was very excited by the at­
mosphere the Front had created in the village. The
villagers knocking on drums and wooden fish every
night, the explosions of fire-crackers, which I took
for rifle shooting from afar, all these sounds ex­
cited my young mind longing for adventures and
changes , It certainly was not what the mature and
aged men felt ; they were rather afraid of all these
events.

The Liberation Youth's Association was the most important

of the popular organizations during the first years of the
revolution, when the army and local administration were
being set up. But as time passed, several factors tended to
empty the villages of their young people , Many were killed
in the regular or the guerrilla forces, and others died un­
der bombing and shelling. Since both the Front and the
Saigon regime were increasingly rigorous about enforcing
conscription, young men found it difficult to evade military
service, Finally, the youth, along with everyone else, joined
the flow of refugees who from 1 965 on were making their
way into the more secure GVN areas. As a result of all
these developments, few young people remained in the vil­
lages, and many Liberation Youth's Associations ceased to
function,
The Women's Association was responsible for the mobil­
ization of women and for enlarging the political and social
role they played in the village, More generally, it was in
charge of "'motivating the people, " of presenting them with
the requests of the Front and getting them to participate
actively in its campaigns , As we have seen, the constant
work of persuasion was the essence of the Front's political
practice, and in this sense the Women's Association worked
at the very center of the insurgents' local effort, Women
convinced the youths to enlist, the farmers to pay taxes,
the villagers to build fortifications. Finally, the task of
conducting political struggle against the GVN was also
among the duties of the Women's Association, Women par­
ticipated in demonstrations, protest marches and petition

75
drives in an effort to keep GVN officials on the defensive
by forcing them to justify their actions as the uofficial"
government to the people they claimed to represent. This
form of agitation, called "face-to-face struggles" by the
interview respondents, had been particularly important in
1 962, 1 963 and 1 964, after the Diemists had lost the initia­
tive, but before U. S. escalation lent a new ruthles sness to
the Saigon regime, and in this period Women's Association
was the most important mass organization in the villages.
By 1 965, the Women' s Associations were encountering
growing obstacles. In the first place, political struggle with
the GVN was no longer feasible, In the old days, no matter
how repressive they may have been, Saigon officials none­
theless imagined that they were competing politically with
the NLF, and so when demonstrations materialized outside
their offices, they felt some obligation to give the protest­
ers a hearing and to consider their petitions. ( 1 5 ) But with
escalation, the GVN attitude hardened. Demonstrators were
frequently beaten or jailed, and some were threatened with
strafing from the air if they returned. In any case, massive
bombardment was creating a new kind of atmosphere in the
villages. Marches and protests were ineffectual gestures
when the adversary was systematically attempting to pul­
verize the countryside in which the protesters lived. The
Women's Association could not convince people to partici­
pate in Ilface-to-face struggles" under such conditions. At
the same time, with more m en either killed or in the army,
women were forced to take over work in the fields, leaving
them with less time for other activities. The difficulty in
holding meetings, and the departure of many Association
members from the village, when combined with these other
developments, all contributed to the decline of many Wom­
en 's Associations .
The Farmers • A ssociation could not escape from this
general process of dissolution. According to one respond­
ent, the Association was I'composed of the basic elements
of the revolution, that is, the poor farmers between 1 8 and
55, " and its members were expected "to play the role of
vanguards in every duty required by the Front. " After ca­
dres had discussed policy with backbone elements, the two

76
 groups worked together in meetings of the Farmers ' Asso­
ciation, supporting each other and setting a good example
for the rest of the villagers. In such meetings, peasants
heard backbone elements reiterate the cadres' point of view
and observed that they took the lead in paying taxes, volun­
teering for work on hamlet fortifications, and promising to
participate in various combat support functions like trans­
porting ammunition or carrying the wounded away from
nearby battlefields . In 1 965, the Front was powerful in part
because its Farmers ' Associations were thriving. A well­
informed defector noted that "the Farmers ' Association is
a very strong association because it enjoys very good and
inspired leadership and a very wide spread organization
throughout the countryside. It will not do the GVN any good
if it tries to break it up by means of arrests and torture as
Diem had done before. "
What "arrests and torture" could not do was to some ex­
tent accomplished by bombing and shelling. From 1 965 on,
the constant drain of population away from the liberated
zones hurt the Farmers ' Associations severely . Many
members became refugees, others were killed, and the
survivors were discouraged and hesitated to attend meet­
ings. Gradually this organization, along with the other pop­
ular associations, went into decline . In many villages,
maintaining the skeleton of the old associations , "one or
two cadres in the leadership positions, " was the most that
could be salvaged. "In actuality, the Front 's organizations
in these hamlets could be considered as non-existent, " re­
marked one observer, during a discussion of his own locale,
"because the cadres were there but there were no villagers
left for them to work with. The Farmers ' Association Exe­
cutive Committee still exists but it doesn't have any mem­
bers. " With its " infrastructure " at least partially "rooted
out, " the Front had lost a good deal of its political force.
Such damage was serious, but not fatal to the Front. As
we have noted, the key to the NLF 's local effort was the se­
quence of meetings linking district office to village cadres
to backbone elements to the villagers in their hamlets, This
vital communications system was responsible for the trans­
mission of information and the inculcation of fighting spirit

77
throughout the countryside. Designed to withstand even the
worst shocks, the system nonetheless began to break down
in 1 966 and 1 967,
In the first place, bombing and shelling disrupted rela­
tions between villages and district offices so that organiz­
ing even one single meeting now required a major effort.
To begin, a site was chosen. "The terrain should be favor­
able, " explained a respondent, "and we should be able to
disperse easily. The people living in the area should be
good elements, and the area should be one that wasn't often
shelled or bombed." Once this decision was made, liaison
agents "were s ent out right away " to contact local Party
members, since the mails were unreliable, and people were
likely to "say that they hadn't received the invitations we
sent them. " Party members were taken to "a temporary
gathering place, " then, if the situation was favorable, they
were assembled at the real meeting site. Meanwhile, local
guerrillas dug trenches and shelters for the participants.
The discussion itself was likely to be interrupted, and the
noise of nearby bombs and shells was enough to distract
s ome members, making it hard for them to concentrate,
and leaving them, at the end of the meeting, not quite sure
that they had fully digested the points of the day.
Returning to their villages, local cadres were faced with
similar difficulties . Many of the less determined offiCials
found it impossible to carry on with the normal procedures,
a point which emerges in one respondent 's discussion of the
"incorrect method of motivating the people to pay taxes. "

Those Village Secretaries whose comprehension

was limited did not initiate the campaign in ac­
cordance with the procedures . Others wanted to
save time and held indoctrination sessions for both
the Party members and the Popular Associations
members . This way of initiating the campaign is
called "Initiating with overhead leaps. " In light of
the Party's experience, this way of proceeding
never brings about success.

When backbone elements met with Party members before

78
the latter had been fully convinced of the soundness of a
new policy, the subsequent discussions did not go smoothly.
After all, if the Communists and "vanguard " elements
seemed to hesitate, few of the other villagers were likely
to participate with enthusiasm. Half-hearted cadres who
approached popular associations without having fully pre­
pared could only add to the growing mood of demoraliza­
tion. Here is a defector's account :

I saw that many popular organizations were begin­

ning to disintegrate, because I didn't see them
holding meetings and carrying out activities as
regularly as the Party regulations would have it.
As for the Labor Youth Group and the Party, they
were still in operation but they lacked a sense of
responsibility. The group as well as the Party were
only executing the directives handed down to them
from above, and in a too mechanical manner. They
simply received the resolutions from above, dis­
cussed them summarily in a Party Chapter meet­
ing and then executed them right away, leaving out
entirely the studying part of them . Previously, fol­
lowing closely to the principles, as soon as any
directives or resolutions were received from the
Party, the Party Chapter only executed them when
all the Group or Party members had already been
clear about the directives and were determined to
carry them out. Only in this manner could the
mission achieve the required targets .

Ostensibly, the system was still functioning in a normal

way, but the essential ingredient, "the studying part, " from
which in the past real conviction and enthusiasm had been
derived, was now miSSing.
The sequence of meetings was supposed to convey infor­
mation up to the District level as well as send instructions
down into the villages, But escalation made it just as hard
for the local cadres to enlighten their superiors as it was
for the higher echelons to give proper guidance to village
and hamlet representatives . Before dispatching delegates

79
to district meetings, local Party Chapters were supposed
to get together so that "weak and strong points were re­
viewed, checked and summarized." But in 1 966 and 1 967,
"continuous GVN operations and airplane attacks " led to the
cancellation of such meetings, so that the Village Party
Secretary was forced to visit each of the other local cadres
individually . As a consequence,

the branches and structures cadres could make

false claims without having to worry about their
claims being checked or their strong or weak
points reviewed because the Party Chapter Com­
mittee members could no longer hold meetings to
determine and measure the overall successes of
their activities in the village.

Without collective discussion, Party Secretaries did not

have a good grasp of the situation in their villages, and as
a result they were much less effective at keeping district
cadres in touch with local affairs.
When cadres and backbone elements were poorly pre­
pared, the general perfunctory quality of their presentation
was immediately apparent to the villagers . As one defector
noted, of the officials in his area,

The cadres were uninspiring. When they held

meetings they kept repeating the same arguments
over and over again because their level of under­
standing was low. In the end, the people in the
hamlet refused to come to the meetings because
they said that there never was anything new at the
meetings.

In any case, villagers attending meetings in 1 966 and 1 967

were bound to be more skeptical and unfriendly than they
had been in previous years . The Front was asking more and
more of them , in the form of taxes and labor services like
digging trenches and carrying ammunition, while at the
same time bombing and shelling made village life close to
unbearable. As a result, the atmosphere in local meetings

80
was tense, and cadres whose self-discipline faltered ran
the risk of losing control of the progressively more deli­
cate negotiations between themselves and the peasants.
One respondent described the danger in these terms :

Before, the Front cadres used to say that the

Front 's expansion was due to the fact that the peo­
ple contributed their opinion to the cadres and in­
formed them of many things that were going on.
It was also said that when the Front committed an
error, the people contributed their opinion and,
therefore, helped the Front correct these errors
and serve the people better. It was claimed that
the cadres worked in a democratic manner because
they listened to the people and didn't order the
people around arbitrarily, as the mandarins used
to do . But now, the people no longer contributed
their opinion to the cadres, or supported them. The
cadres are now isolated from the people, from the
political point of view. This was why, when the ca­
dres told them something, the people didn't listen
to them, because they thought that what the cadres
said wasn't close to the truth. This was why, when
the cadres asked them to do something, the people
refused to do it because the cadres couldn't con­
vince them of the nece ssity of the tasks entrusted
to them. When the people refused to perform these
tasks, the cadres screamed at them, but in so do­
ing, they behaved exactly like the mandarins, and
this attitude, in turn, isolated them further from
the people.

In situations like this one, cadres had come full circle.

Representatives of a movement which had promised to de­
liver peasants from the oppreSSions of the old regime, they
were now forced by the weight of circumstances into
"screaming " at the villagers, and behaving "exactly like the
mandarins. " Such behavior only "isolated them further
from the people, " thus making the crisis even more seri­
ous than it had been before.

81
 The central flaw described in the above episode, and in
others like it, is that lithe people no longer contributed their
opinion to the cadres. " This hardening of the peasants into
a mutinous silence was the one possibility most feared by
the cadres, who had to intervene immediately and to do
everything possible to halt the villagers' downward spiral
into a stubborn apathy. '"They kept silent when we spoke to
them , " noted one discouraged cadre; IIWe had to urge them
to let us know their feelings." Another respondent com ­
mented that, lithe villagers were fed up with (the cadres ),
therefore nobody felt like criticizing them . " Once this
process gained momentum , it might be impossible to re­
verse . "I am a good citizen, " announced one peasant to an
importuning cadre. " I have not done anything against the
Front. Therefore it is up to you to decide my fate. I am
resigned to accept any treatment the Front wants to impose
on me, because I have no choice. " Such comments were full
of historical irony. In response to cadres who demanded
their participation in the political process, some villagers,
with a perverse shrewdness, adopted the traditional attitude
of peasants confronted with an alien authority . Deliberately,
they chose resignation. Almost mockingly they insisted on
offering nothing more than a sullen obedience.
The NLF communications system could spread demorali­
zation almost as quickly as it once had promoted high
morale throughout the countryside . Cadres who failed to
enlist the full cooperation of the peasants in their hamlets,
who found themselves quarreling fruitlessly and eventually
losing their tempers, would have to report back to district
officials that they had fallen far short of district goals . As
usual, they would be strongly criticized by their superiors
who always started with the assumption that political per­
suasion could overcome any problems among the people.
From this point of view, difficulties in tile village were in­
variably blamed on local "cadres' lack of effort in motivat­
ing the people to participate eagerly in carrying out the
Front's policies, " as one respondent put it. Along the same
lines, another interviewee noted, "In there, the Front usu­
ally stated that there weren't any bad villagers and if there
were any it was just because the cadres hadn't indoctrinated

82
them well, and not because they were against the Revolu­
tion. " The Party members being criticized, who saw every
day at first hand the terrible destruction caused by the war,
must have come to resent this kind of criticism, which
seemed to disregard objective circumstances prevailing
throughout the countryside. With relations thus embittered,
discussion of the latest policies was not likely to prove
fruitful, and local cadres were as a result even less well
prepared than before when they returned to their villages
to launch new campaigns .

Digging Anti-Ta n k Traps

The NLF method of operations was also flawed in that it

required plenty of time to function smoothly. The compli­
cated and time-consuming process of maintaining morale
had to work within the context of an escalating war, When
villages were hard hit by bombs and shells, or when unusu­
ally punishing GVN sweeps took place, a cumbersome se­
quence of adjustments was set in motion, While the villag­
ers milled about in confusion, rumors of new disasters
mingled with grief for the victims, and with many packing

83
their bags to leave home, cadres had to resist the tempta­
tion to throw all their efforts into an immediate stop-gap
response, Answering the aggression would take time, The
first step was to rebuild the spirits of Party members, A
respondent reported that after a sweep,

The Party Secretary had to hold a Party meeting

to bolster their morale and reconsolidate their
stand - this took at least 7 days, including the
time it took to prepare for the meeting, After the
morale of the cadres was bolstered they went out
to try to and bolster the morale of the people.

Seven days ! And this step was only the first needed to re­
pair the damage, If a second sweep followed hard upon the
first, and a third upon the second, the Front position in the
village was in danger of falling apart completely. (16)
Here as elsewhere, we can see how the NLF was forced
to operate within the limits of its own situation. Taking such
pains with Party morale was an agonizingly slow process,
but, however time consuming, it still promised better re­
sults than more hasty m ethods , The materials out of which
a strategy had to be constructed were human beings, some
more resolute than others, but all subject to the normal
emotions of fear, panic and despair. An immediate response
to US-GVN inflicted disasters was impossible because peo­
ple have only limited inner resources, It would take time to
gather the most dedicated cadres, to encourage them to pull
themselves together, to help them gain once more a sense
of initiative and confidence , And it was just as certain that
the same process of rebuilding would take even longer with
the other villagers, and that the morale of the peasants
could never be restored without the good example of their
bolder neighbors , Thus U, S, escalation, with its largely
technological and inhuman means of destruction, forced the
NLF to draw more and more deeply on the inner resources
of cadres and people.

84
 "WHO WILL WE WORK WITH,
WHO WILL WE LIVE WITH ? "

Escalation completely changed the lives of NLF cadres .

In the first place, simply staying i n touch with the villagers
was now a major problem . A respondent noted that

Because of intensive shelling, the cadres dared not

gather the people in meetings for a time . They had
to call on every villager to explain to them what
they had to do . Even when they waged face-to-face
struggles, they had to call on every family to urge
them to go on demonstrations.

In some villages, the cadres divided hamlets into "sectors, "

and sectors into "SUb-sectors, " each containing five fami­
lies. Individual cadres then took responsibility for carrying
on political work in one sub-sector at a time. Business
previously dispatched in one large village meeting now re­
quired a considerable number of small ones. "This has
made the NLF cadres busier than before, " remarked one
observer, no doubt with some understatement. Trying to
mobilize people individually or in small groups would be
more difficult than appealing to them in large crowds, where
each listener could feel the potential strength of the mass
simply by looking around. So in addition to the fact that
there were a greater number of meetings for cadres to at­
tend, the work of persuasion itself was probably more dif­
ficult than before.
Local cadres also had to undertake a growing volume of
physical work. Earlier, the three associations organized
labor teams to dig trenches, transport ammunition, or car­
ry wounded fighters to medical centers, but as these organ­
izations disbanded, cadres "had to grab everyone they came
across, " or else do the work themselves. They "were angry
at having to do the labor which they had been exonerated
from previously, II according to this respondent.

Many a time, we reported our dissatisfaction to

85
 the village chapter, but what it replied to us was
to say that we had to make more efforts to endure
it. Since the beginning of this year, I had to carry
out these labor jobs almost all the time.

In addition, villages could no longer afford to maintain spe­

cial funds to support NLF personnel, so its members were
compelled to adopt a policy of self-sufficiency. They took
part time jobs, either cultivating lands held from the Vil­
lage Committee, or delegating some of their m embers to
do hired labor around the village. As one cadre put it, "All
of the m embers of the group took turns earning money " ;
they busied themselves "catching fish o r getting firewood, "
in order to support their comrades.
These m easures were politically necessary. According to
a cadre,

In order to be able to wage a long war and lighten

the burden of contributions for the poverty-strick­
en people who have been suffering for a long time
because of the war, the Front has decided that each
fighter would have to try his best to provide for
his needs from one to four months, depending on
the nature of his missions and the circumstances.
By helping the Front cut down the people's contri­
butions to the war efforts, fighters prove that they
are grateful to the people.

As the villagers ' ability to contribute to the Front went

down, cadres had to take up the slack. A small respite for
all the peasants meant substantially increased work loads
for each of the cadres in the village. Not only did peasants
stop working for the NLF, in some hamlets, the Front be­
gan to work for the peasants. A respondent provided the
following explanation for this development :

We had to carry out the civilian proselyting task,

that is to work for the people in taking care of
their orchards or in dredging the ditches . At pres­
ent, there is not much manpower left in (fhe vil­
lage) and our help is much appreciated.

86
The fact that casualties and defections were simultaneously
creating a shortage of experienced officials compounded
such difficulties . Increasingly, cadres were forced to do the
work of two or three people at the same time.
While struggling with all these obligations, cadres were
also expected to support their families, In some ways, they
were even worse off in this respect than the other villagers.

Those who didn't work for the F ront were better

off than those who did, because they could spend
all their time tilling their land. The revolutionar­
ies just got poorer and poorer, and their families
didn't enjoy any benefits at all. On the contrary,
they had to pay higher taxes to the Front than the
common people, because they were told that they
had to set the good example for the rest of the vil­
lagers.

After years of sacrifice, MThe revolutionaries just got

poorer and poorer." The interview transcripts eloquently
testify to the despair of many cadres as they watched their
families becoming increasingly miserable, with parents and
young children unable to provide for themselves, huddled in
shelters, without enough food to eat.
Even more sobering for cadres was the departure of the
refugees. At first convinced that it could hold village com­
munities together in spite of bombing and shelling, the
Front had by 1 967 reluctantly come to accept the evacuation
of many villagers from their homes . When U. S. escalation
was just gathering momentum, cadres had sternly prevented
peasants from fleeing the bombs and shells, and had threat­
ened to confiscate the land of those who did succeed in
leaving the village. At the same time, projects were organ­
ized to dig trenches and shelters , According to one account,
it was impossible to make people ""ignore the fear of shell­
ing, " but at least with shelters the peasants felt Mless de­
pressed" and temporarily set aside thoughts Mof leaving
their villages for the town. "
But as bombing and shelling went on for month after
month, year after year, cadres lost control of the situation.

87
 A respondent explained.

The people were told that if they moved into the

Strategic Hamlet, they would not have land to work
on, they would lose their freedom, and they would
live in virtual confinement, and that they should
live in the liberated area to have land to work on
and to till that land in togetherness with other
people. Political indoctrination against moving into
the Strategic Hamlet was successful at the begin­
ning, because the people tended to cling to their
land and therefore few would move into the Strate­
gic Hamlet. But when they began to be harrassed
by bombs and bullets and the fear of death, nothing
could deter them from leaving any more.

The United States had resolved that peasants should not be

allowed "'to till the land in togetherness with other people, "
and as time passed it became clear that the NLF had no
effective means of reassuring villagers who were being
"'harrassed by bombs and bullets and the fear of death. "
As refugees continued to leave the village, cadres were
heard to sponsor tactics they originally had scorned. For
example, in 1 965 they attempted to prevent peasants from
building huts in the ricefields, but now the construction of
such makeshift dwellings was encouraged in order "'to re­
duce the present atmosphere of sadness and desolation in
the liberated zone. " The confiscation policy was also modi­
fied, so that those who resolved to depart were no longer
threatened with the loss of their lands. "'The VC wanted to
keep the land of those who had left in order to use it as bait
to lure them to come back to their hamlet, It explained an
interviewee.
For the first time in its history, the NLF had been unable
to persuade a Significant number of people to follow its
"'line and policy." As they attempted to counter U. S. esca­
lation, cadres came back again and again to the same prob­
lem . A POW noted :

The present war fought by the NLF is a people 's

war. The people are considered its main power.

88

-
 If all the people flee, the NLF armed forces can
have nobody to support and strengthen them .
Therefore I realize that the more the people leave
the village, the more the armed units of the dis­
trict and village will be weakened.

Departure of the refugees and the subsequent decline of the

popular as sociations were devastating blows to cadres who
were quite unused to a political defeat of this magnitude,
A defector stated that :

This situation made all of us feel more and more

isolated from the people. We ca.n 't help feeling
this, because all of us have been intensively in­
doctrinated that the I?arty is like a human body
whose legs and arms are the popular associations.
Now, without legs and arms, how could a human
body survive ? We were also told that the Party
represents the enlightened leadership, while the
people are the ones who carry out the policies .
Now, without the people's help, how could the poli­
cies be implemented ?

Cadres felt lonely and exposed, "'Without the people, life

was very dull and sad, " remarked a defector from a village
which had been considerably emptied by bombing and shell­
ing. Another remembered the mournful reflections of a
comrade : "We have to convince the villagers not to leave
the village and this must be the primary goal because if
they leave us, who will we work with, who will we live
with ? ,.
Deprived of communal support, cadres were completely
out of their element. One defector explained that

In the cadres' eyes, the loss of the people's sup­

port is always the worst thing, because all of them
know well that every cadre had to rely on the peo ­
ple's support for his own security and for turning
in a good performance . They are convinced that
they never could accomplish their aSSignments if

89

l
 they cannot get the people's support. Not only did
they have to rely on the people to safeguard their
own lives. When they lived surrounded by the peo­
ple, they felt much more reassured. Not because
the people were very eager to inform them of the
arrival of GVN forces - very few people did - but
because whenever GVN soldiers came into their
hamlets, those villagers who had their sons and
their relatives working for the Front always
rushed to advise them to flee. Therefore, the vil­
lage cadres always knew of the danger in time and
succeeded in fleeing . That's what the cadres un­
derstood by the common saying that the people are
like water and the cadres are like fish, Without
water, the fish cannot survive.

The dictum about fish in water was as much a "common

saying " in the corridors of the Pentagon as it was among
the villagers , According to the testimony of the "fish"
themselves, U, S, bombing and shelling was doing its job.
Over the years, sharing common dangers and common
hopes had created a profound solidarity among local ca­
dres. Seeing dear friends killed and the long-sought victory
receding was almost too much for many to bear. They gath­
ered together and talked in somber tones of the future.

Some of them said that in 1 967 it was going to be a

life and death struggle, and that the risk of their
getting killed would be greater, Some said : Itl am
looking at your face today, but tomorrow we might
never see each other again. " That was all they
said, They all seemed very confused and demoral­
ized.

For years, these cadres had looked forward to the day when
they would capture My Tho City, when they would cut once
and for all Route 4, '"The Indochina Road, " which bisects
the Province and serves as a lifeline between Saigon and
the lower Delta. Now, as one discouraged cadre put it�

90
 The villagers have all left the village and moved
out there to make their living. The village is large,
but there are only a few of us cadres living here,
so how are we going to expand the movement ? It's
certain that from now on until we die we won't see
My Tho or the Indochina Road.

Some cadres became so demoralized that they plunged into

a frenzied hedonism . For example, one respondent belonged
to a local Party faction which "took joy and consolation in
liquor to forget the times when we had to work hard. " This
Chapter was regularly disrupted by bitter disputes between
these drinkers and the "zealots " who clung to the austere
mode of life the Front had always recommended.
Multiplying failures prompted an increasing number of
cadres to defect to the other side . Saigon's "Chieu Hoi "
("Open Arm s " ) program did not compete effectively with
the Front for the allegiance of NLF cadres, and so long as
the insurgency was making good progress, it had little to
fear from defections. ( 1 7 ) But in villages where the Front
was on the defensive, where local cadres were lOSing their
morale and perhaps beginning to quarrel among themselves,
the Chieu Hoi program could wreak havoc. The desertion of
just one cadre always threatened to touch off a chain reac­
tion which could prove very difficult to bring under control.
After a defection, all local offices and supplies had to be
shifted to new hiding places, a respondent explained, "for
fear that the rallier might inform the government about
their location and lead them there to destroy their bases. "
Meanwhile, close friends of the defector were now left alone
with their own thoughts , As one defector surmised :

Such a radical shift coming from a district com­

mittee member must have raised a lot of questions
in the cadres' and villagers' minds , They couldn 't
help guessing that I must have some good reasons
to do so. They would certainly try to discover the
motives for my shift, but first, they must have
thought of their own cases and their endeavors to

91

-
 stand hardships and privations. Unavoidably, they
must have questioned themselves about their own
future. From thought association, they would have
wondered whether or not there would be any profit
for them in continuing to serve the Front, since a
cadre like myself has to abandon it half-way.

And indeed, the interviews show that some defectors re­

solved to change sides after hearing about the flight of oth­
er cadres they had known.
While thinking such thoughts, local officials were also
surveying all the other cadres and wondering if they too
were contemplating desertion. In this poisonous atmos­
phere, the very realization that one was for the first time
an object of suspicion was sometimes enough to catalyze
long-standing grievances. A respondent described the fol­
lowing situation after his cousin had defected :

I thought I had worked for the Front for a long

time, and that it must be well aware of my revolu­
tionary standpoint. But I couldn't help thinking over
(iny cousin's) behavior. I told myself that since
C!te) has a larger comprehension than mine, he
might have had a good reason to act the way he
did.

In this way, defections tested the solidarity of local Front

organizations , Only the most cohesive would be able to pull
together after such betrayal and succeed in rebuilding mu­
tual trust.
Defections did their most serious damage in the area of
relations between cadres and villagers . Here are the
thoughts of one defector on this matter.

In the Front areas, the cadres very often don't

have enough to eat, and they usually go to the
houses of the people to ask for help and food, When
a cadre rallied and the GVN conducted an opera­
tion in the village about two weeks later, the peo­
ple believed that it was the rallier himself who had

92

-
 guided the GVN troops into the village to arrest
the people and seize their paddy. They hated the
rallier a lot, and as a result, they opposed the ca­
dres who were still in the Front whenever the latter
came to see them to ask· for help. They told the
cadres : "'You ask for our help, but when you rally
and surrender to the enemy, you will denounce us
to the GVN so they can come and make a mess of
our house. If we help you, it will be like 'raising
wasps in one's sleeves. ' We 've paid all our taxes,
and we don 't have anything left to give you . " What
a humiliation for the cadres !

This "'humiliation, " along with the other problems cited,

made defections a political problem for the Front. "Each
time a cadre rallied, " affirmed a female respondent, "con­
fusion reigned and control couldn 't be maintained as tightly
as before. It took the Front at least two months to recon­
solidate its ranks and bring things back to a normal level.
Every time a cadre rallied, the movement went way down
hill. " Added to all their other worries, defections from
within their own ranks increased the strain on already
hard-pressed militants.
Representatives of a movement which seemed to be los­
ing the war, cadres suffered a decline in personal influence
and prestige. Formerly, they had moved around in the open,
immune to GVN armed intervention, but in 1 967, according
to one observer, "They have to hide most of the time in the
secret trenches . They are no longer free to talk loudly in
front of the mass, or to travel to and fro to carry out their
missions. Self defense becomes important to the cadres,
and their missions only came second. " Activities were con­
stantly interrupted by bombing, shelling and sweeps. At
such times, cadres ran for their lives, flinging themselves
into damp trenches six or seven times a day, or taking ref­
uge in underground hideouts where some died of asphyxia­
tion, or seeking concealment in the chilly waters of a near­
by canal until they almost froze.
Attitudes toward the cadres changed now that "the Front
no longer could protect (the people's) lives and property. "

93
As one defector observed :

The cadres have lost their prestige in the eyes of

the people, because the people have seen that the
cadres are much more afraid of the commandoes
than they are. At present, the cadres no longer
stand up majestuously and bravely in front of the
people during meetings to bolster their morale af­
ter each GVN operation in the village, as they used
to do in the previous years.

Another defector stated that villagers once Mlooked up to

<the cadres ) as national heroes who dared to sacrifice
themselves for the people. " But now

When the war came to the area, the Front's secure

base was attacked, the cadres ' prestige decreased
a great deal. Whenever there was a military oper­
ation or an air and artillery attack, the cadres al­
ways ran away very quickly and ahead of the vil­
lagers . They were the last to return to the village.
The villagers realized that the cadres were no
better than themselves.

A history of dramatic successes had invested the Front

with a special aura, and its cadres commanded respect at
least in part because they seemed so sure of themselves
and of their movement. But now, as villagers saw that the
cadres "'were no better than them selves, " this aura was
stripped away. Once proud leaders could no longer hold the
attention of their frightened constituents . Those who parti­
cipated so enthusiastically when the Front was winning now
hesitated as the tide of events began to run against the in­
surgents.

THE "'F ANA TICS" STAND F IRM

With one defector after another cataloguing the Front's

mounting difficulties, interview transcripts for 1 967 make

94
grim reading. In their shared misery, cadres and peasants
always seem to be either quarreling or eyeing each other
with sullen mistrust, and the NLF as a whole appears help­
less to resolve the massive problems created by U. S. es­
calation. But in reading further, we become aware of un­
derlying trends which create a somewhat different, less
gloomy impression. The situation is indeed very desperate,
but the futility of the NLF is more apparent than real. Be­
yond the panic and disillusionment of many cadres, we be­
gin to perceive that the organization as a whole maintains
a certain cohesion. Badly disrupted, its basic method of
operation remains intact in spite of the numerous obstacles
thrown up by the war.
The disputes between peasants and cadres during this
period have a very distinctive tone. Here is a typical ex­
ample, a tax collector arguing with one of his neighbors.

I, myself, cannot keep body and soul together and

do not know what to tell you about the taxation. My
job is to force you to pay; however, I know per­
fectly that your income is low, while the taxation
is too high. I have to do what I am told and I assure
you it is not because I want to do so for my own
prestige. I am also a taxpayer like you, Therefore,
I hope you understand the position I am in.

Unmollified, the peasant Mgrilled" his interlocutor. MYou're

a native of the village, " he answered, Myou are also a farm ­
er, and consequently, you know perfectly well about the crop
this year. Do you think that the people can get enough money
to pay such taxes ? "

When faced with such questions, the tax collector

was at a loss and didn 't know how to reply, but
begged for the villagers' sympathy : MPlease, try
to understand my position and try to pay your taxes
to feed the fighters in order to help them fight
harder for an earlier victory."

Escalation has turned this relationship upside-down, with

95
the official now in the role of suppliant, while the villager
adopts an obdurate, interrogating stance. The cadre is long
past the point of threatening or browbeating delinquent tax­
payers . Economic problems in the village are so manifest
that he cannot plausibly attribute the peasant's stubborn­
ness to ill will or bad politics. All he can do is to plead
humbly for sympathy and cooperation. On the other side,
the villager voices his criticisms freely. He is deeply ex­
asperated with the NLF, but he does not seem to fear it as
he would an arbitrary or dictatorial government bent on
using brute force to win compliance with its wishes.
An unmistakeable complicity, based on the shared expe­
rience of living in the same hamlet and working the same
land, binds these two people together. The cadre gets a
hearing because he is "also a taxpayer, " a "native of the
village, " a man like his neighbors and not someone with a
special stake in his own "prestige. " At the same time, his
willingness to persist with his assignment serves in some
way to make a political point. Tempted to present himself
as a lOW-level official who has to "do what he is told, " he
nonetheless manages in the end to steer the discussion back
to the main point : that taxes must be paid, "to feed the
fighters in order to help them fight harder for an earlier
victory . " For his part, the peasant does not turn his back
on this importuning official. Indignant, even bitter, he is,
almost in spite of himself, drawn into the debate. Molded
by the give-and-take of many past study seSSions, he some­
how cannot find it within himself to refuse to discuss even
this latest, apparently unconscionable demand.
If peasants simply refused to pay, we can assume that the
tax collector returned soon afterward to broach the matter
once again. The interviews present us with a picture of lo­
cal cadres who in 1 967 often did not get anyone to follow
instructions, or even to respond to their appeals save with
hostile silence or bitter invective. But in spite of setbacks,
most cadres did not give up their work of persuasion. With
an almost pedantic stubbornness, they clung to practices
which from the beginning had given the Front its distinctive
political character. For example, though it was by this time
apparent that refugees were not going to return to their

96
villages until bombing and snelling ceased, many interviews
indicate that local Front representatives continued to talk
whenever possible with the transplanted peasants , NEvery
day I came to these seven empty houses, " remembered one
respondent, Nto wait for the house owners who might return
for gathering crops or wood, I would talk to them, urging
them to come back and relay the message to other refu­
gees."
Whatever else happened, the face-to-face aspect of Front
procedure was maintained. In the difficult circumstances of
1 967, several cadres were reprimanded for their reliance
on written instructions . When meetings were dangerous,
and discussion usually unproductive, local cadres may have
been tempted simply to circulate memos or to publicize
orders on a poster in the center of the village, But such
practices were quickly criticized. In a society where many
were illiterate and others read only with the greatest diffi­
culty, written orders were almost by definition an authori­
tarian device, since few of the villagers were comfortable
enough with reading to be fully persuaded by arguments
presented in written form . Cadres were to continue with
the old method, and to bring personally to each peasant the
requests of the NLF.
«The higher authorities have always encouraged the vil­
lage cadres to be patient, to stay close to the people, to get
them to attend meetings, " remembered one defector . Ca­
dres should never "detach themselves from the people, "
another explained, because in that case, they would "no
longer understand the people's problems . Being unacquaint­
ed with their problems , the cadres failed in persuading
them and consequently, had to resort to out and out orders
to carry out their assignments. " As we read the tran­
scripts, we see that these down-to-earth instructions mean
just what they say, the admonitions are intended to be taken
literally : good cadres do not detach themselves from the
people, they stay close in an imm ediate, physical way.
Maintaining this closeness was important because the task
of explaining, of asking for criticism and attempting to
promote diSCUSSion, was the essence of the F ront's method,
even when audiences were small and the response negative,
"The Front cadres didn't mind how much time they had to

97
spend on indoctrinating someone, " stated a female defector,
"and they would do it until the person became self-enlight­
ened. " By persisting with this commitment, even when
peasants seemed unresponsive, the NLF was in effect say­
ing to people that it was sure its line was right, it knew
peasants could not be forced to fight a guerrilla war, but in
the meantime it had confidence in the villagers ' ability,
sooner or later, to analyze the situation, to become "self­
enlightened, " and to respond to the appeals which were so
methodically being repeated, The Front was demonstrating
its permanence, not just in an impersonal, bureaucratic
sense, but also in terms of its loyalty to a particular style
of political activity in which a large role would always be
reserved for "the people 's will."
To back up this commitment, the NLF gradually modified
its ambitious draft and tax policies , which had been estab­
lished in the 1 964 - 1 965 period. Since the insurgents neces ­
sarily relied on villagers for money, rice and labor power,
compromise was possible only within limits , but the tran­
scripts do show unmistakeably that the Front responded to
U. S. escalation in part by easing the burden on its belea­
guered rural constituency. For example, with American
troops pouring into Vietnam by the tens of thousands , ca­
dres in My Tho phased out the NLF draft program - an
astonishing step for a political movement to take in the
midst of a war which was calling into question its very ex­
istence. Recruiters were told that they had to rely entirely
on persuasion, and to be content with volunteers, and, as a
result, in some villages there were no new recruits at all
in 1 966 and 1 967. ( 1 8)
The tax system was also modified, by permitting villag­
ers to pay in installments, to claim more deductions , and
by allowing them to bargain individually and collectively
with assessors. Here is a POW's report on NLF tax col­
lecting on one district :

This year the Front intends to collect 1 , 800, 000

piasters in taxes, but as of May (} 966) it has suc­
ceeded in collecting only 700,000 piasters. My
guess is that the most the Front could collect this

98
 year is 800, 000 piasters because during many
heated meetings the cadres had had to either re­
duce the amount of taxes for many villagers or
exempt many of the villagers from tax payment.
This year, the villagers have had to attend six in­
doctrination sessions so far. The Front only
started collecting taxes after the people under­
stood this problem and no longer had any questions
in mind.
Thus, at a tim e when the United States was raising annual
expenditure on the war up to the $30 billion level, the Front
grudgingly consented to decreases in its own tax revenues.
The NLF did not discontinue compulsory military serv­
ice and lower taxes because it suddenly realized in some
abstract way that such compromises were morally appro­
priate. All accounts make clear that cadres implacably
pushed the peasants very hard, and that "many heated meet­
ings " were needed to force reductions in their demands . In
any case, the peasants ' obligations were still painfully high,
even with Front concessions taken into account. Nonethe­
less, modest as they were , these steps required great po­
litical courage. Cadres knew perfectly well that the Front
armies were suffering high casualties and critical short­
ages of basic supplies. For months, they had tOld peasants
that enlisting in the army and paying big tax bills were vital
to the survival of the resistance . The temptation must have
been very strong to cling to a hard line and hope for the
best, especially since the concessions demanded by the vil­
lagers threatened to compromise the Front 's military
position at a time when U. S. escalation showed no signs of
slowing down. The Front accepted these dangers and modi­
fied draft and tax policies because it saw that the greatest
of all pitfalls was the irrevocable loss of popular support.
Faced with an agonizing choice, NLF leaders had the clarity
and the conviction to hold on to a central insight : the war
could not be carried on long in the face of concerted oppo­
sition from the peasants.
Much more was involved here than some glib or abstract
notion of «winning popular support." In 1 967 more than ever
before, the Front 's ability to keep in touch with its own

99
constituency depended on the steadiness and humanity of its
local officials . Cadres had to maintain a delicate position :
to require contributions from the peasants which were gen­
erous enough to keep the NLF alive, but not so great that
they drove people over the edge into outright opposition ,
We have seen examples of cadres who could not cope with
this complex political situation. Unused to the lack of re­
sponsiveness they found among the villagers, and convinced
that their future and the future of the NLF were at stake,
such officials "screamed at" the peasants when the latter
refused to cooperate, Uthey behaved exactly like the man­
darins. " This loss of self-control only made matters worse
in that it Uisolated them further from the people. " Others
became convinced that the Front was being defeated. Their
perfunctory appeals were ignored by the villagers, and a
number of them defected to the other side.
What sustained the NLF was the inner strength and moral
authority of those cadres who persisted with their old rou­
tines, making the rounds to "motivate the people" in spite
of all the obstacles they encountered. These officials stayed
close to the peasants though the latter no longer held them
in awe and did not respond enthusiastically to their appeals.
They remained loyal to a mode of operation based on per­
suasion when lack of response made this method appear in­
effectual and even foolish. Refusing to be provoked when
peasants boldly declined to consider their requests, they
patiently continued to present the point of view of the NLF.
Most of all, they maintained a sense of confidence during
the bad times in 1 967 after the Front had lost considerable
ground and had been forced to change tax and draft policies
which it once had uncompromisingly insisted were vital to
its own survival. While some peasants jumped to the con­
clusion that the movement was falling apart, they continued
to affirm that in spite of everything the NLF would win in
the end . The Front owed everything to these cadres who did
not panic, even when the resistance endeavor seemed to be
collapsing all around them .
The ability of many cadres ato stay close to the people"
saved the NLF. The Front had staked everything on its as­
sertion that the people of the countryside had no choice but
armed resistance . At the same time, its leaders knew that

1 00
all peasants in every hamlet were not likely to recognize
and act on this conclusion at the same time. For each vil­
lager, the war was an ebb and flow, an endless series of
inconveniences, of regular brushes with disaster, and,
sooner or later, of stunning personal tragedy. Peasants who
were exasperated by frequent labor details and bitter over
high taxes would suddenly be shocked into a rage by the
death of a loved one or the los s of their crops . Cadres had
to be close by throughout this process, to bear with the ir­
ritation and the criticism so that when the moment came,
when peasants were ready to fight back, there would be a
way for them to make contact with the NLF.
The transcripts contain several illustrations of this Nre_
pres sion-resistance spiral. " ( 1 9 ) A woman POW remem­
bered that

it was difficult to wage face-to-face struggles. The

people were afraid and they did not want to go on
demonstrations. But in the last months before I
was arrested, the people sustained excessive dam­
age and this stirred them up to such an extent that
they couldn't care less about being arrested. Back
then, they wanted to meet with the District Chief
to ask him to stop shelling their village. Many vil­
lagers wept profusely when they saw their har­
vests wiped out. In June, July and August 1 965,
about 20 hectares of paddy were damaged.

The Saigon regime itself often inadvertently pushed villag­

ers into the ranks of the NLF. NMany times, the GVN sol­
diers arrested, jailed and beat up innocent people whom
they accused of being VC , " noted a respondent.

So the innocent people who had been arrested and

beaten up all said : NWe 're not VC , and yet we have
been arrested and accused of being VC . It would
be better, then, for us to become VC . " The VC took
advantage of the situation to make propaganda.
They told the men that whether they worked for the
revolution or not, they would be arrested, jailed

1 01
 and beaten up by the enemy, and that, therefore,
they had better join the Front to help fight against
the enemy.

The parents of another interviewee had been killed by GVN

artillery. A cadre said to him : "Why don't you do some­
thing to avenge your parents' death ? You have to do some­
thing, you will be killed anyway even if you do nothing
against the GVN. " The Front could not force people to ac­
cept this perception. Its cadres were schooled to be patient,
to hold out the option of resistance until the war itself per­
suaded peasants that they had no choice but to join the NLF,
When the Front was forced out of an area, the GVN might
be tempted to rebuild its own local presence. But as soon
as the balance of forces tipped in its favor, the people would
be exposed to the full weight of Saigon dictatorship. Peas­
ants who had been complaining about NLF taxes and labor
duties were then face to face with a qualitatively different
kind of political authority. In 1 967, when the Front seemed
weaker than ever before, the rigorous logic of this " repres­
sion-resistance spiral" kept the movement alive. For ex­
ample, one respondent described "the recent enlistment
movement of the youths " which took place in that year.
During previous years, that is, in 1 963, 1 964 and
1 965, volunteers for the Front's armed forces
were very scarce . There were, at most, about ten
volunteers every year. In 1 966, despite tremendous
mobilizing efforts, none of the youths agreed to
join the Front. But this year, while the Front had
stopped waging propaganda in favor of its con­
scription policy, the youths took the initiative on
their own to volunteer. This was the consequence
of the ill-treatment they had received from the
AR VN soldiers . Among the volunteers, there were
those who were fathers of two or three children.

"The recent enlistm ent movement of the youths " was not an
entirely spontaneous development. Much apparently unfruit­
ful work had created a political climate in which angry
young people were able to join the F ront. We should not
overlook the many study sessions of 1 963- 1 965 when re-

1 02
cruits "were very scarce, " or the campaigns of 1 966 when,
"despite tremendous mobilizing efforts, none of the youths
agreed to join the Front."
The repression-resistance spiral benefitted the NLF be­
cause its organizational core outlasted U. S. escalation.
Bombing and shelling demolished schools and hospitals and
broke up the popular associations. It drove people out of
the countryside, killed many villagers and coerced others
into defecting to the GVN. But with a nucleus of dedicated
cadres standing firm, two key institutions managed to hold
together ! the Party and the armed forces. Communist or­
ganization not only endured, in some respects it became
even more rigorous and painstaking in its operations , For
example, one POW noted that in spite of mounting recruit­
ment difficulties, the Party was tightening procedures for
inducting new members . " The reason is that careless ad­
mission of people to the Party will cause much harm to the
Party itself, " he explained, "especially when the war is
getting more and more atrocious . Party members without
character and conviction can't put up with hardships and
may surrender to the enemy easily." At the same time, the
regime of stringent criticism among local cadres was toned
down. A defector observed that

When the village didn't obtain the desired results,

the district sent a cadre down to criticize the Par­
ty Secretary, then the Party Secretary criticized
all the Party members in the village. But now,
there was les s emphasis on criticism and more
emphasis on indoctrination, Starting in the middle
of 1 966 the cadres were indoctrinated more than
before to consolidate their morale. In order to do
so, we were told about the situation in the region
and about the victories won by the Front all over
the country - the victories won in the Center, in
the region and in the various villages in the prov­
ince and so on.

Every precaution was taken to preserve local personnel.

As a POW put it in late 1 967, "If the war gets more and
more atrocious, the Party will go underground even in 'lib-

1 03
 erated areas ' in order to safeguard its members , Party
m embers are a precious capital for the Party, " The sur­
vival of this Itprecious capital" cannot be overstressed, So
long as there were villagers still anxious to fight, the Par­
ty provided them with a framework within which to carry
on the struggle.
To the cadres who stuck with the Front, the situation in
1 967 looked like this. Imagine a village in which a few
peasants and cadres continued to cling to their homes and
orchards, and to carry on as best they could the activities
of the NLF. Around them, in concentric circles, were the
refugees . The first group was scattered across the rice­
fields living in makeshift huts. Others clustered in tem­
porary dwellings along nearby highways and canals, in new
life hamlets, or next to GVN m ilitary posts in the area . In
the outer circle, refugees in district towns, My Tho and
Saigon tried to adjust to urban life.
A few of the refugees had given up hope of returning
home and were resolved to make the best of their new
lives. But most of the displaced people still thought of the
village, tried to visit as often as possible, and looked for­
ward to the day when circumstances would allow them to
go back to their native places , Some refugees �uried their
belongings or entrusted them to their acquaintances " before
setting out, Many times, a family would leave one member
behind to watch over the land. Others might be content to
send a representative back periodically Itin order to gather
wood, fruit, or to catch fish. " Still others, gone for months,
reappeared during the Itfarming season" to lay down a new
crop, or at the Tet holiday to visit with relatives and old
friends, ItLiving integrated with the enemy" facilitated this
process, The refugee could find relative security in a new
life hamlet or even in a district toWn which need not be
more than a few m iles from home. The departure was trau­
matic for many, but in terms of physical space, they were
in a position to return quickly to their homes if circum­
stances permitted.
The attention of these refugees was drawn to the small
group which continued to occupy the original village site.
To some observers, these survivors seemed pitiful indeed.
A defector noted that :

1 04
 At present, houses are all dismantled, weeds grow
everywhere, the inhabitants are living an unstable
life hiding themselves in ricefields all day long.
They are unable to work to earn their living. Their
jobs have become more difficuit, also, they could
be killed or wounded by mines and booby-traps
which are planted throughout the village. Almost
all the people have left the village and those who
remain are poverty-stricken beyond your imagina­
tion.

The impressions of another defector were equally bleak.

Those who stayed in the liberated areas - either

because of family reasons, or because they couldn't
earn their living elsewhere, or because they were
fanatic Front followers - are now living like
"'people who have lost their spirits " - they are
frightened and haggard : they live in hiding to avoid
bombing and shelling, and then when there is no
bombing and shelling they have to slave to earn
enough to live from day to day. I didn't expect to
find the situation so different after living four
years away from home and from the people, My
family reached the bottom of poverty and the lib­
erated areas were in ruins and de serted - there
were only a few people left. They were scattered
in the village, and lived in shelters, and their ric�­
fields and orchards were destroyed.

Other accounts convey a similar impression : a handful of

"'fanatic" NLF cadres and their relatives, a few poor peas­
ants clinging to their lands, a remnant of the thriving com­
munities in which the Front had taken root only a few years
before.
Those who stayed were not shell-shocked peasants who
did not know any better. The men and women who had en­
trenched themselves in their homes were very special peo­
ple. According to a defector,

1 05
 There are a very small number of cadres who are
still remaining in the village or in higher head­
quarters to carry out their activities. Perhaps it
is they are high ranking cadres and they have such
absolute confidence in the NLF that they have be­
come fanatics with high morale and an everlasting
endurance of hardships. They are very aggressive
to carry out NLF activities, awaiting a final vic­
tory.

The Front had been weakened, but not defeated. Bombing

and shelling had driven many people away from their ham ­
lets, but with some "very aggressive" local cadres still
carrying out NLF activities and "awaiting a final victory, "
escalation had not gained the strategic objective which it
had been intended to achieve.
The Front presence in the villages was not just symbolic.
In the first place, local organization, even when reduced to
skeletal form, was of considerable importance to the regu­
lar armed force s of the Front . By 1 967, NLF Main and Lo­
cal Force battalions were finding it increasingly difficult
to move around in the countryside, to find food, shelter, and
support services among the peasants , But so long as some
sort of village organization remained, these units were able
to function in the classic guerrilla manner, without being
compelled to undertake a strategy of complete self-suffi­
ciency and independence from the civilian population. By
enabling these regular units to stay in touch with the peas­
ants, even in a marginal way, local cadres helped to keep
alive their potential striking power - as the Tet Offensive
of the next year was to demonstrate.
The tenacity of cadres and backbone elements was im­
portant in another respect as well. Bombing and shelling
could drive away the people and disorganize the popular
associations in a village. Once proud institutions enrolling
hundreds of peasants were effectively reduced to a handful
of cadres operating more or less in a political void. But so
long as this handful remained, the possibility of rebuilding
the as sociations was still alive. As one respondent put it,
"In case the hostilities calm down, it will be easy for the
Front to reorganize them . " US-GVN authorities could bomb

1 06
 and shell for years at a time, but if they did not succeed in
wiping out the core of NLF strength, they had not gained a
lasting advantage over the insurgents . As soon as the bom­
bardment stopped, the refugees, who, as we have seen, were
for the most part eagerly awaiting just such an eventuality,
would stream back to their villages. In that case, cadres
would begin once again to build up their ""infrastructure, "
and within a matter of time the Front would once more have
the countryside fully mobilized.
If bombing and shelling had completely emptied a signif­
icant number of villages, if the hard core of NLF strength
in many communities had been pulverized once and for all,
the Americans would have won the war. By their persist­
ence, these revolutionaries demonstrated that US-GVN fire­
power could damage but could not break the bond between
the peasants and their land. If even the ""fanatics, " with
their ""high morale and an everlasting endurance of hard­
ships, " had given up and left home, thoughts of someday
returning might have died out among the refugees. The ef­
fect of such a loss of hope on morale throughout the coun­
tryside would certainly have been very damaging to the co­
hesion of Vietnamese society. By standing fast, cadres and
peasants kept alive, both for themselves and for the refu­
gees who had departed, the reality of a community living in
the midst of its own orchards and fields.

A VANGUARD OF POOR PEASANTS

American escalation rested on assumptions which seemed

plausible enough. Amidst the bombing and shelling, with
homes and fields in ruins and villages emptied of peasants,
with the ranks of the NLF split by defections and its method
of operations sabotaged in a thousand ways, surely the in­
surgents would lose faith in the Front and gradually give up
the struggle. But the cadres did not give up. In spite of dis­
appointments and failures, they persisted with their activi­
ties and thereby prevented the United States from winning
the war. Difficult as it is to explain such intangibles, we
must try to account for this stubborn determination. When
the American onslaught forced them to make a cruel per-

1 07

L
sonal choice, why did so many cadres resolve to keep on
fighting ?
Remarks from one of the defectors help us come to grips
with this question. The interviewee, a very poor peasant,
was asked to describe the local cadres he used to work
with :

They were all poor people in the village. They

were greatly dissatisfied with the GVN adminis­
tration during the 6 years of peace a 954 - 1 96�.
They had met with difficulties every time they had
contact with the village authorities who had al­
ways make light of them and never assisted them.
That was why, when the Liberation Front rose up,
they joined the Front to struggle against the vil­
lage authorities.

Poverty thus partially explained the commitment of these

insurgents. At the same time, their lowly background was a
positive asset in the work the Front asked them to do.

These cadres had many experiences in the class

struggle's political activities. Since they belonged
to the poor class, they had known many hard ex­
periences of the underprivileged rural people. So
they based their political activities on the common
thinking of the peasants and adopted methods suit­
able to the rural people's thought and situation in
carrying out these activities . That explained why
they enjoyed the sympathy and confidence of the
peasants.

Service in the NLF remade these poor peasants. '"Enticed

by the Party with its proletariat doctrine, " they '"acted with
their proletarian spirit and not with the thought of a senti­
mental people. They had lost all sentiment towards their
friends, parents and relatives. They only knew the Party
and adopted the Communist spirit in all their activities. "
Within the Front, they performed feats one might not have
expected of men and women from the most oppressed strata
of the population :

1 08
 On the question whether (the village party com­
mittee secretary) deserved to assume this posi­
tion, I may say that he was not qualified to assume
such an important position. This was because he
had the same low level of education as any other
poor peasant. He had never learned any working
methods, any laws. In spite of this, he was en­
trusted with the position and he succeeded in ful­
filling his task because there were other members
in the village Party committee who contributed
their ideas and suggestions on every problem .
Thanks to this close cooperation among Party
committee members, who met and discussed care­
fully every problem , the Party secretary could
s atisfactorily perform his duties. Besides, his en­
thusiasm and positive effort in every task en­
trusted to him by his superiors, his devotion to
the service of the Party were also reasons why he
could assume the most important Party position in
the village.
With his iilow level of education, " and without having
"learned any working methods, and laws, " this peasant
managed to function effectively for the Front. In "close co­
operation" with likeminded cadres, carefully discussing
every issue, and bound to comrades by a shared "devotion
to the service of the Party, " he "succeeded in fulfilling his
task. "
The Front was an organization primarily of the rural
poor. Several witnesses indicate that the Farmers ', Wom­
en's, and Youth' s Associations were reserved for very
poor, poor and middle peasants, and the Party gave prefer­
ential treatment to these same groups . In recruitment, a
respondent explained, '"emphasis is put on youth and the
right class (i.e., middle farmers, poor farmers, very poor
farmers, workers and the poor people in the cities)." Rich
farmers and landlords were usually not admitted. The re­
cruits themselves were aware of this situation, and indeed
at times s eem to have been somewhat bemused by the odd
preferences of the Front, which contrasted so sharply with
the traditional hierarchy of the countryside. As a defector
put it,

1 09
 The Party also takes into consideration the capac­
ity and moral behavior of the member so ap­
pointed, but his social class origin was the most
important factor : it pays most attention to poor
farmers like me; the reason that I have advanced
so fast is that I am a poor farmer.

In this very concrete way, the Front gambled its whole ex­
istence on a certain kind of class analysis : it would stand
or fall with the poor peasants who made up the greater part
of its rank and file.
The NLF appealed to peasants to rise up and fight for
their rights . One defector stated :

I was told by the Front cadres ({>efore I joine�

that the Front was fighting to give rights and ma­
terial benefits to the poor people, and to liberate
the people. I was told that the Front was fighting
against the landlords and the feudalists to bring
rights and material benefits to the poor class.

"You are a very poor farmer, " another defector remem­

bered being told; "therefore you have to take part in the
present struggle which aims at liberating the country and
safeguarding the interests of yourself and of your class."
A third respondent related how a cadre

called on me and persuaded me to join the Front.

He said that I was poor because, like the other
poor, I had been exploited by the GVN which only
defended the landowners and the capitalists and
allowed them to exploit the poor. O' he cadre) also
accused the GVN of allowing its soldiers to rob the
people, thus causing a lot of suffering to the vil­
lagers . He boasted that the Front, sympathizing
with the people's hardships, couldn't help rising up
to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem in order to liberate
the country. At that time, I thought that �he cadre)
was right and that everything he said was very
logical. I guess I thought so because I was poor.
I agreed to follow him and to join the Front.

110
 NLF strategy depended on peasants seeing the ulogic " of a
policy which put the most despised group in society sud­
denly into a vanguard role.
To get results, the Front had to undermine ideological
justifications of poverty and persuade powerless villagers
that they did in fact have the means to assert themselves.
A defector, who was suspicious of the Front because it
"didn't care about religions, " remembered how cadres

Often stated that there wasn't any spiritual power

and that human beings are their own bosses. They
said : "There isn't any power superior to human
beings . Human beings can decide on everything. In
this war, for instance, it's quite useless to pray
either to Jesus or Buddha with a view of winning
the war. They cannot do us any good. But if we are
determined to fight, we will win. " Such statements
were repeated very often and although I didn't like
them at all, I couldn't help feeling they sounded
rather right.

''' ' 'J'

I' Iii' �t:V'·>

Vi l l agers Assemble to Confront the Enemy

There was nothing inevitable about poverty, the people were

told. "You are poor because you live under an unjust sys­
tern, " insisted a cadre to his peasant audience . An espe-

111

l
cially pointed critique was directed against religious doc­
trines of poverty. Here is the account of a female defector :

Before, the bourgeois and the rich used to say that

the poor were those that were not blessed by heav­
en. But when the Front came, the cadres told the
people that this was not so, and that the people
were poor because they didn't have land to till, and
that the well-off farmers were rich because they
had land to till. The cadres said their economic
conditions weren't due to heavens' blessings or the
lack of it. The people understood that heaven had
nothing to do with their life and they stopped going
to the pagoda and shrine to pray for a betterment
of their conditions . They knew that if they worked
hard and if they had land, they would become bet­
ter off.

With almost complete unanimity, interviewees indicate that

the Front practiced a policy of religious freedom . People
could "'pray to Je sus and Buddha" if they wished, but the
Front reserved the right to point out that prayers would not
"'Win the war. " No competing ideological elements were al­
lowed to interfere with NLF efforts to persuade peasants
that they did indeed have the power to seize control of the
countryside.
In explaining to peasants the "unjust system " in which
they lived, the NLF emphasized the connection between the
villagers' misery and rural property arrangements. A de­
fector recalled that

I also had to learn about landowners ' exploitation

of the poor. The instructor said that South Vietnam
is a rich country, that on the ground, there is rice
and fruit, in the water, there are fish and sea
products; and under the ground, there are exploit­
able mines. "'But nevertheless, " they said, "'The
people are still poor because we have been ex­
ploited endlessly ! " As evidence, an old and poor
villager was then led into the class, and this old
man related how he has been exploited by land-

112
 owners during his life, In conclusion, the instruc­
tors summoned us to follow the Revolution and to
take up arms to liberate ourselves from the im­
perialists and the landowners ' yoke.

According to the Front, this exploitation had developed as

the result of a historical process.

In the formation of the earth, land didn't belong to

anyone. But since there have been people who were
shrewder than others, knew how to exploit others,
and to seize their land, the man-exploiting-man
system was born under these circumstances. The
Front, therefore, had to stand up and redistribute
land to the poor.

«The Front said that the landlords from whom the poor
people rented the ricefields were exploiting the people, "
remembered another respondent, hostile to the NLF. «The
Front said that the ricefields were a natural gift and that
they were not the products of anyone 's making, and that the
landlords had relied on the imperialists to acquire their
vast land holdings . " The peasants' poverty was thus to be
explained not in terms of the absence of «heavens' bless­
ings, " but instead as a consequence of a "'man-exploiting­
man system " set up to benefit the landlords.
These arguments paved the way for confiscations and
land reform by calling into question the claims of landown­
ers on their property. They rested on the expectation that,
like peasants in so many other parts of the world, the rural
dwellers of My Tho were prepared to support the redistri­
bution of the land. For such peasants, land reform would
not appear to be a drastic break with tradition, but rather
as a common sense restoration of the natural arrangements
which an inequitable SOCial system had deformed. If «in the
formation of the earth, land didn't belong to anyone, " then
the landlords were nothing more than usurpers . <lLand can­
not be private property, " asserted a cadre. "Land is given
to mankind by Nature and the Front is about to distribute it
equally to everyone. There will no longer be rich and poor. "
By stressing the goal of economic equality. Front cadres

113
r

presented land reform as part of a larger endeavor : to

prevent property ownership from becoming a source of
power over other people. A female POW analyzed the land
question in these term s :

Very poor, poor and middle farmers are consid­

ered good elements by the Front, because they are
generally industrious people, living on the fruits
of their own labor. They are not exploiting anyone.
The Front 's aim is to improve their welfare and
to help all of them to rise to the middle farmer
class. But the Front will prevent them from going
higher, because if they become rich farmers, they
would then care only for their own interests . They
would become selfish, and would forget their civic
duties, I think land distribution is really a good
deed and that, thanks to it, the poor will get richer
and nobody will have to steal and to rob for their
living.

Taking land from the rich and giving it to the poor was , in
other words, not merely an attempt to turn the social sys­
tem upside down, so that new owners could oppress their
neighbors . On the contrary, the project was designed to
change qualitatively the social role of property. One peas­
ant grasped this change in the terms of the abolition of
wage labor.

Yes, I did think about the building of a new society

where there was no exploitation between man and
man, e.g., where I did not have to hire my labor
to another person and he did not have to hire his
to m e, where there were no landlords, and the
people were free to work and free to enjoy.

A property system which allowed some free access to the

wealth of the land, while condemning others to accept a
position of inferiority, and to sell their labor power in or­
der to live, was firmly rejected by the NLF, and by many
of the peasants who were attracted to its programs.

114
 In struggling to create a society where everyone was a
"middle farmer, " the Front and the peasants of My Tho
were evolving an egalitarian principle of social organiza­
tion. The female POW quoted above sided with the Front
because she

liked its aim of building up a just and democratic

society in which the people 's welfare will be taken
care of, and in which the people will love one an­
other and eliminate the exploitation of man by man.
I am sure that the Front can bring about this good
society.

Another POW stated, "I wanted to see a society in which no

one would be exploited, in which men would not kill each
other for money, and in which no one could use money or
power to oppress others. " "The reason why Front cadres
were so active and dedicated, " explained a defector,

was that the Front had declared that it would bring

to the people egalitarianism in every respect. The
farmers would become the owners of the land they
were working on now. The workers would own the
factories they were working in. Therefore, the ca­
dres had to work hard to keep their land and fac­
tories for their children and grand-children to
benefit from it.

"Peasants had to struggle against landlords, " a POW re­

membered being told, Min order to be in a position to enjoy
their own productions . " This respondent's uideal" was '"to
struggle for equality among people, to erase all class dis­
tinction in society." As we read these affirmations, we can
see that narrow self-interest only partially explains the
participation of many villagers in the revolution. For them,
gaining more land was only part of a broader social trans­
formation, Here is how another POW described his motives.

I left my family to fight and bring rights and ma­

terial benefits to the people, to my family and also
to myself. If we achieved success, my family and

115

L
 other families in my village would share in the
prosperity and happiness. There wouldn't be any
more difference s between classes - there wouldn 't
by anyone too rich or anyone too poor - and all
social unjustices would be corrected. No one would
have to work as servants for others - no one
would be insulted and humiliated by their masters.
That was my goal.
In the process of combating the destructive effects of an
inequitable system of property ownership, peasants were
led to imagine the contours of a society in which the com­
mon sharing of economic resources would end exploitation
once and for all.
Cadres who discussed the matter in detail realized that
it would be a long time before the Front could m eaningfully
contemplate a socialist, let alone a communist transforma­
tion of society. One POW saw the issue in these term s :

In order to reach the proletarian society, we have

to go step by step through socialism first, and then
reach Communism . The South hasn't even set up
any cooperatives, so it hasn't reached the socialist
stage. In discussion sessions, the cadres said that
we were still at the stage of private ownership,
and that in the future, we would have to go through
socialism before we could have Communism. But
this would take a very long time, and no one knew
when it could be accomplished.

The interview transcripts offer some evidence that in 1 965

the Front did try to press ahead in some areas of My Tho
with the development of agricultural cooperatives. A POW
reports being told that «starting in 1 966, the Front would
begin to implement socialist doctrines in the South. " He
spoke of plans for «collective agricultural s ites, " managed
by local Farmers ' A ssociations, of work exchange teams,
wages based on work points, nurseries for children and free
medical care. "We were told that the Chinese had accom­
plished all that, and that the North had been applying this
socialist doctrine for 3 years. " In fact, some respondents
speak of experiments with work exchange programs, but

116
almost all indicate that such programs had to be abandoned
because of bombing and shelling and the resistance of peas­
ants who still preferred to work individually.
US-GVN bombardment destroyed whatever material base
there m ight have been for the introduction of cooperative
methods of agriculture. In China and North Vietnam, the
socialization of agriculture took place in stages . Volunteers
set up model projects which gradually expanded as the other
peasants realized that cooperative methods lead to higher
production and a more comfortable standard of living than
could be generated by the old family-based economic sys­
tem . But in My Tho after 1 965, no such plan could be im­
plemented. The fruits of collective labor were bombed and
shelled, or napalmed, or plowed up by tanks, just as fast
as the crops of peasants still engaged in solitary work.
Villagers who were dubious about cooperatives therefore
had no economic incentive to try the new form of organiza­
tion. In fact, as we have seen, peasants working in groups
were worse off than their individualistic neighbors, since
they made better targets for enemy firepower. Escalation
thus created a situation where in the short run the sociali­
zation of agricultural production actually hurt the people
who agreed to participate. Given the circumstances, such
plans had to be temporarily set aside.
But if socialism was still something of an abstraction to
most peasants, at the same time many believed that the
Front program would improve the material conditions of
their lives . While they could not offer a sophisticated blue­
print for the socialization of the means of production, they
knew that there were concrete advances to be made if they
followed the NLF and the example of the North. For exam­
ple, one defector stated that,

In 1 964, during a political indoctrination session,

the cadre said that class struggle was carried out
to improve the lot of the poor farmer's class so
that they could have "'good food and good clothes. "
The cadres also said that in order to be able to en­
joy such privileges, we should struggle against the
landlords, the feudalists, and the imperialists.

117
Another respondent, a POW, listed these aspirations :

After I joined the Front, I was indoctrinated and

I thought about my future as follows . First of all,
I wanted to give myself and other people freedom .
Second, I wanted to fight so that my family and the
Very Poor Farmers wouldn't be exploited by the
landowners any more, and so that there would be
no exploiters of the people left. Third, when I mar­
ried and had children, I would see to it that my
children have an easy life - that is to say, that
they have enough to eat and to wear, and a house to
live in, They must have a good education , I thought
that, in order to get all thiS, I would have to fight
for the unification of the country and for peace, In
order to get this, we had to win over the foreign
army and we had to chase them from Vietnam .

"Why not join the Revolution and fight with us ? " another
respondent, a defector, was asked :

When national reunification is achieved Commu ­

nism will be established. Then we'll advance to
universal communism . Your life will be very hap­
py. There will be no rich and no poor. If someone
in your family gets sick, he 'll be taken care of by
the doctors and you won't even have to pay for the
medicine , You'll be paid for your work and you'll
have enough to eat. After the harvest, everyone
will put their paddy together in a common store.
When you need paddy to eat, you 'll just go to the
store to get the grain. You won't have to live in the
fear that you might starve one of these days.

In the light of these excerpts, we can see why US-GVN

authorities were so overwhelmed on the political plane by
their opponents, [n competition with Saigon's anti-commu­
nist exhortations, the Front put forward its vision of the
future, rich in specific details concerning land, subsistence,

118
clothing, health and education - the very issues which most
preoccupied the peasants in their daily lives.
Within the village, groups responded with varying degrees
of enthusiasm to the NLF program . Prosperous peasants
were cautious, and in turn the cadres regarded them with
suspicion. "I think that the property owners certainly didn't
like the revolution, " said a POW, "because they knew that
this is a proletarian revolution. If this revolution succeeded,
their interests would be hurt, because this is a class strug­
gle." In some villages, the insurgency built up so much
momentum that even the rich were swept along, but the
quality of their commitment continued to inspire a certain
skepticism . iiThe upper middle farmers and rich farmers
that joined the Front were just opportunists, " insisted a
defector, who was voicing commonly held views :

When the Front was strong, they were very zeal­

ous, but when the Front weakened, they joined the
other side. Only the poor and very poor farmers
who had been exploited by the landlords were
staunch supporters of the VC and I'm sure they
will fight till the end.

Those of upper class background who made a genuine effort

to stay with the Front were put through a prolonged appren­
ticeship, during which they were carefully watched, A de­
fector explained that

When these representatives cPf the intellectuals,

bourgeoisie and religious sects) had been with the
Front for some time - from seven months to a
year - and proven by their enthusiasm that they
could be trusted, the VC would start propagandiz­
ing them about the class struggle and about the
Party . If they responded favorably to this propa­
ganda the VC would push their propaganda further
and gradually transform them into Party members.

For another respondent, a POW, the issue was clear-cut :

"If the higher classes dare to live and die with the lower
classes against the higher classes, " then they could be in-

119
tegrated into the Front.
The position of the middle peasants was more ambigu­
ous. People of some means (when compared with most of the
villagers ), and perhaps even employing the labor power of
others, middle peasants might in fact be owners of no more
than two or three acres of land apiece. Better off than their
neighbors, they were still far from economically secure.
Not surprisingly, the political character of this intermedi­
ate group tended to be equivocal. No solid majority in the
countryside could be created without their participation,
and the Front never ceased to reserve for them a place of
honor within its ranks. At the same time, the frankly class­
oriented politics of the NLF did not appeal to the middle
peasants quite as strongly as it did to their poorer neigh­
bors. Some observers thought that middle peasants were
no more trustworthy than the rich. They too falsely aligned
themselves with the NLF, in the hope "that the Front would
protect their property and forgive their crime of 'exploiting
the people, ' " as one defector put it. Another defector, a
middle peasant, frankly told the interviewer that "under the
Front's control, it was better for me to be a Front cadre
in order to keep intact my position in the village - that of
a man with a little property and a certain reputation among
his peers. " Ready enough to participate in good times, such
recruits were naturally inclined to desert as soon as the
trend of the war seemed to be swinging against the NLF.
The cadres had to move with care because, as we have
seen, the thrust of land reform policy was to create a vil­
lage full of "middle farmers . " According to NLF plans,
land reform was only a stage, and new landowners were to
be persuaded to join cooperatives before they became en­
trenched in private ownership. But any kind of delay could
undermine the whole program. In the first Indochina War,
the Viet Minh had also carried out land reform in various
areas of My Tho, but when the United States violated the
Geneva Accords of 1 954 and set up the Diem dictatorship
in the South, the benefits of this redistribution were to some
extent negated. The Diem regime helped landlords regain
part of what they had lost, and at the same time the inher­
ent dynamics of a village economy based on private own­
ership also promoted the return of inequality. The more

1 20
energetic peasants competed successfully with their less
industrious neighbors and gradually bought up their lands .
Middle peasants with many children found that, when they
subdivided their modest holdings, there was only a poor
peasant's legacy for each of their various offspring, The
beneficiaries of land reform who prospered tended to be­
come conservatives with a stake in the status quo, and in­
surgents of one generation thus turned into passive observ­
ers, if not outright opponents of the resistance, during the
next . To grasp this delicate situation more firmly, the
Front in some areas slightly modified its usual practice of
appealing to all the middle peasants . Instead it refined its
classification system , distinguishing old and new middle
peasants. The old m iddle peasants had been prosperous for
some time, and they were to be treated with the same wari­
ness which cadres usually reserved for the rich. The new
middle peasants were those who recently had been promoted
to this status, and the Front continued to urge them to side
with their natural allies among the poor.
Including middle peasants in the vanguard category was
not a mere formal device, for cadres had solid arguments
designed to win their support. To some extent, the dynamics
of the revolution were enough to pull them along. A female
defector noted that

As time passed by, the children of more and more

of <!he middle farmer s) joined the Front. When a
youth joined the Front, he also pushed his friends
to do likewise, and the number of youths who joined
the F ront became very large. With their children
in the Front, these people changed their attitude
toward the F ront. They supported the Front and
had a lot of confidence in it. After the youths joined
the Front and learned about the Front's line and
policy, they came back and indoctrinated their own
parents and the latter became very confident in the
Front.
The NLF was also able to offer the prospect of material
improvement to the middle peasant, although in this area
the situation was not quite as clear cut as it was with the

1 21
poor. Here is the way one middle peasant, a defector, sized
up the NLF program.

I was much better off than the Poor and Very Poor
Farmers in the village, but my life wasn't easy.
Our land was located on high and dry ground and
the harvests were poor. Besides, when I looked
around me I saw many poor people, and I didn't
have the heart to sit at home and enjoy my rela­
tively comfortable life - compared to that of the
poor. I couldn 't take my land and give it to the
poor, because my family wouldn't have let me.
When (the cadre) told me that after victory was
achieved the poor would lead a very happy life I
felt enthusiastic, Q-Ie) also told me : "You are a
Middle Farmer now, but will your children be
Middle Farmers too ? Where will you get the
money to buy enough land to distribute to them so
they can earn enough to eat ? » I saw the poor peo­
ple around me and I felt that I didn't want my chil­
dren to lead the same kind of life, Where would I
get the money to buy land so that each of them
could have at least 3 or 4 cong of land ? The 1 0
cong of land my family had didn't all belong to me.
So I decided to join the Front to ensure the future
of my children.

This line of argument was sufficient to hold the loyalty of

some middle peasants , Indeed, a number of witnesses
claimed that middle farmers made the best cadres. Their
somewhat more secure economic position meant that they
were not distracted by problems of providing for their
families - a constant and often demoralizing worry among
poor cadres and fighters .
The interviews show that poor peasants were the most
ardent supporters of the NLF, MEveryone in the village, »
noted a defector,

has to support the Front. The rich farmers ' con­

tributions to the Front are the most considerable,
but the poor people of the village support the Front

1 22
 more wholeheartedly, and also carry out more as­
signments because they hope that the Front will
bring them a better life.

To some of these peasants, the emergence of the NLF

meant an increased dignity and self-respect, According to
a female defector :

After the Front came, the people . no longer had

. •

to live in constant fear of the rich, they no longer

had to kowtow to them, and they no longer had to
offer the rich the choicest food they had on the an­
niversaries of the deaths of their ancestors. They
now were able to treat the rich like their equals
and they could maintain their prestige vis-a-vis
the rich.

Another defector remembered joining the Front in search

of '"glory, " which he defined as the ability '"to make a revo­
lution in order to liberate the people, and to prevent land­
lords and wealthy farmers from crushing me down . That 's
what 1 liked. " Another reported that, "I felt much encour­
aged when the Front emerged because under the Front's
control, poor farmers aren't despised by the rich as they
were before . " A fourth defector stated that

1 liked most of all the distribution of wealth to the

poor people. 1 saw that the poor people were the
slaves of the rich, they had to work as servants
and hired laborers for the rich. 1 loved the poor
people and was convinced that the rich class was
exploiting the poor class.

Greater self-respect seemed to lead to a more profound

class consciousness, "I loved the poor people, " this peasant
affirms, And in fact, a major theme of Front propaganda
addressed to poor peasants was that victories "were due to
their patriotism and to their love of their social class . "
Another theme, often stressed, was that the poor, once
the most downtrodden group, were to become the vanguard

1 23
 of the revolution. This point was noted by a defector who
recalled that

with regard to the Very Poor Farmers, they sup­

ported the Front wholeheartedly, because the Front
declared that their class was the main class in
society and the leading class in the country. The
Front, therefore, satisfied the pride of the Very
Poor Farmers who had always been despised by
everyone.

"The poor farmers wholeheartedly backed the Front be­

cause they were the ones the Front took the greatest care
of, " said another defector. "The cadres promised them :
'The poor farmers will have the glory of assuming the
leadership of the countryside, and of returning the land to
the farmers ' '' . "'The Front used the land question to egg the
farmers on, " a third defector stated,

The Front declared that it would give rights and

benefits to the poor and that it would make the
farmers the owners of the land they till and the
masters of the countryside, and for this reason
most of the Poor and Very Poor Farmers sup­
ported it wholeheartedly.

Still another defector called attention to the same theme.

The cadres spoke highly of the Poor Farmers '

class, promised to give them land and make their
class the leading one once the Revolution was ac­
complished. So one or two months after harping on
such propaganda, the Front succeeded in gaining
the wholehearted support of the poor farmers and
sharecroppers in the village.

By "'harping on" this message, by using "'the land question

to egg the farmers on, " the Front was counting on the read­
iness of the poor peasants to fight for their own interests
within the framework of the guerrilla movement.

1 24
 A number of peasants testified to the power of these ap­
peals , For example, a defector stated that

Among the lessons, the principal one that taught

that socialism could bring happiness to man
pleased me most. It also said that poor farmers
would become the masters of their land and or­
chards, and the workers the masters of their fac­
tories, etc. I like these most.

Along the same lines, another defector offered this view :

I must admit that when the Communists talked

about the policy and line of the Party, it all sounded
so good, They said that they were fighting to give
land to the farmers and to make the farmers the
owners of the land they till and the workers the
owners of the mills , When I heard this, I thought
that this was exactly the right policy to be carried
out.

The Party analysis involved a total change in the social

role of poor peasants and yet the respondent affirms that
"when I heard this, I though that this was exactly the right
policy to be carried out." In such matter-of-fact declara­
tions, we can measure the enormous impact of the NLF on
a society where for centuries poor peasants had been con­
fined to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Other witnesses were even more enthusiastic, imagining
that the liberation of their class would form part of a uni­
versal revolution. Here is the testimony of a POW :

When I heard that socialism would grant rights and

material benefits to everyone, and would bring
material well-being to the people, I was bowled
over and thought that socialism was a right doc­
trine. I found it very appealing because I wanted to
see the world living under universal Communism.
When universal Communism was achieved, there
would no longer be any national boundaries, and all

1 25
 people in the world would live as brothers, I liked
this very much. I was poor, and I liked the idea of
bringing material well-being to all the people ­
all the poor liked this idea.

Reading these affirmations, scattered throughout the tran­

scripts and expressed with fervor and a striking lack of
self-consciousness, we begin to sense what kind of force
the NLF had created. MAll the poor liked the idea, " notes
this respondent in speaking of the Front's program of
Mbringing material well being to all the people." The NLF
had succeeded in imbuing a social class with its revolu­
tionary vision.
Many of these declarations were made by defectors.
Those who deserted, because of illness, a loss of faith in
final victory, mounting family concerns or internecine
quarrels, did not all forget the NLF program. One defector
stated that the Front's political theory Mwas great yet it
could not be implemented. " Another respondent, a POW who
was trying to persuade GVN authorities that he should real­
ly be classified as a "rallier, " remembered that at one
time, Mthe people and I longed for the Front to win because

Saigon Students Protest ARVN Troop Presence i n Cambodia

1 26
it stated it was fighting for social justice and for erasing
all class distinctions. " He offered the opinion that, ulf the
GVN wins the war, there will not be any changes in the
society. If the Front wins there would not be any class
distinction, and men would not be exploited by men . II But
then, reminding himself that he is supposed to be a Mralli­
er, " the POW somewhat lamely added, '"I think I could en­
joy my life no matter how the war turns out. "
The most poignant interview in this respect is one of the
last in the series . "At first, I didn't pay much credit to the
contents of the (Chieu Hoi ) leaflets, " this defector reports.

I was a poor farmer who had been given land and

I felt indebted to the Front for having assisted me
by giving me land. I must say that during the pre­
vious years my annual income increased notice­
ably and life became easier for me. So I did sup­
port the Front wholeheartedly. I wished it success
because it would bring more profits to a poor
farmer like me.

But faced with the prospect of being drafted by the Front,

he decided to defect. '"If I was drafted, " he says to the in­
terviewer, 011 1 might perhaps be killed and then land would
be of no use to me. Since there was no hope for me to safe­
guard the land, I thought I had better give it up and rally to
the GVN . "
Interviewer : Did you ever expect that the GVN might de­
fend your interests against the landlords after it wins over
the Front ?
Respondent : I never expected this, If the GVN wins, I will
certainly lose the land. But now, it doesn 't matter any more.
Interviewer : Do you ever hear of any GVN land reform
projects ?
Respondent : Never.
Interviewer : How would you feel if the GVN allows you to
keep the land after it wins over the Front ?
Respondent : That would be marvelous. But what about the
landlords, then ?
'"The Government as presented to the poor farmers

1 27
through VC propaganda was a coalition of landlords and re­
actionaries, " the interviewer informs us in his postscript.
The propaganda stuck with this defector and with many oth­
ers, long after they had lost hope in the ultimate victory of
the Front. "It doesn 't matter any more, " says the respond­
ent, of his lost land. Though he has defected to what he ex­
pects to be the winning side, his mood is gloomy. The tran­
script suggests that he experiences the decline of the Front
as a personal defeat.
We can sense that this defector did not take lightly the
decision to leave home. NLF strategy was based on the hope
that other poor peasants would be even more steadfast.
They were a vanguard not as a consequence of some doc­
trianl peculiarity, or because Front leaders liked them
better than the rich. Reliance on poor peasants was a prac­
tical necessity. As one defector noted, the Party Malways
said that the members of the well-off classes wouldn 't be
as faithful and wouldn't fight as long as the members of the
poor classes." While "fighters from the middle farmer
class would be afraid of death, " in the words of another re­
spondent, Nand would think of saving their skins first when
they came face to face with danger, " peasants of the poor
and very poor categories "wouldn't hesitate to die for the
right cause. "
The pressure of events drove Front cadres to appeal to
the poor. Here is a defector's analysis.

If you tried to appeal to everyone you couldn't

really appeal deeply to anyone. If you tried to do
thiS, in every indoctrination session you would
have the poor farmers, the rich farmers, the no­
tables, the landlords all together, and they felt that
this wouldn 't work. For example, if you had an in­
doctrination session to denounce the landlords, and
you had the landlords Sitting over there, the -rich
farmers over here, the poor farmers over there,
and the notables over there, it would make it rath­
er difficult to carry out the denunciation, so that
if you tried to win them all over together like this,
you would not do very well. They felt that if you

128
 made a special appeal to the middle, poor and very
poor farmers who were in the large majority, you
would get better results, and that if they shunted
the others aside it wouldn 't be very harmful.

Along the same lines, numerous respondents explained the

resilience of the Front by pointing to the class background
of its members, For example, a POW described the Party
Chapter Secretary in his village as "an effective cadre with
a good sense of ideology, a high fighting spirit and a deep
loyalty to his class, which is the proletarian clas s , " In spite
of their lack of education, their ignorance of Many working
methods, any laws, " these poor peasants were supremely
qualified in one key area ! having the most to gain by the
destruction of the old society, they could be counted on to
fight long after other, more prosperous peasants had been
persuaded to abandon the struggle.
Class-oriented politics enabled the Front to maintain its
position in many villages even during the worst of US-GVN
bombing and shelling. Viet Minh land reform in the early
fifties, and NLF land reform ten years later, gave many
people that stake in the countryside which made them so
determined to cling to their fields , and which drew them
back to the village whenever the bombing and shelling
abated. The Front could count peasant feeling for the land
among its political assets precisely because it had identi­
fied itself with the aspirations of the villagers and had tak­
en concrete steps to multiply the number of small holders.
Throughout the escalation, cadres kept coming back to
this basic issue. If the NLF won, land reform would be
consolidated and extended, if the GVN won, peasants would
lose all the fields they had acquired . This was what the war
was all about. (20 ) As one cadre argued,

Our gardens, our land and our prosperous eco­

nomic income are the results of many years of
endurance and hardships of our ancestors . It is
our duty to guard this land and not to let it fall in
the hands of our enemy who will exploit us as much
as they can. We don't care how much blood we have

1 29
 to shed when dealing with our enemy, we will fight
until the end for our right and for all that our ene­
my conspires to usurp.

Those who remained in the villages did so because they

were moved by such appeals. ·One always takes care of
the tree that gives one fruit, " explained a respondent in
analyzing peasant loyalty to the Front. "What about your
personal prestige ? " a POW was asked. "Don't you think
you will be glorious if the Front wins ? " "I couldn't care
less about glory , " was the blunt reply, "because glory is
not so important as land." After all, "For a peasant, being
able to participate in controlling the countryside is the
highest aspiration, " another POW affirmed. "All of them
longed to have land to till." Along these lines, a defector
noted that

Most of (fhe people) like <land distribution) very

much. They didn't have any land to till, so when
the Front gave them land, they naturally were very
happy about it. Some liked it so much that they kept
clinging to their land, in spite of the insecurity in
the village.

These peasants held on to their fields not because they

were too miserable to make a living anywhere else, but be­
cause of an unshakeable political commitment. According
to another defector :

As the war is growing in intensity and spreading

everywhere and as the Front cannot protect its
rear areas, the people no longer believe in the
Front's final victory. They have evacuated to gov­
ernment areas in large numbers leaving all their
property behind, Only the very poor farmers who
have profited from the land redistribution still be­
lieve in the Front and are determined to stay on in
the village despite bombings and shellings . They
said, «Why don't we stay on in the village to farm
the land the Front has given us ? Isn't it better to

1 30
 die with a full stomach ? If we go and settle in
government-held areas, we may avoid being killed
by bom�ings and shellings but we will surely die of
hunger. Such a death will be, of course, much more
shameful. "

This depth o f conviction served to vindicate the NLF strat­

egy of relying on poor peasants , "Fanatic " determination
and an unbroken faith in "the Front 's final victory" held to­
gether a nucleus of poor peasants in spite of massive US­
GVN efforts to dislodge them .

THE FORCE OF HATRED

The decision of cadres to stay with the Front did not rest
alone on visions of a better society after liberation. Driving
them on with at least an equal urgency was the force of
hatred. (2 1 ) For many, resentm!�nt against those responsi­
ble for their poverty , as well as indignation aimed at an
enemy who conducted the war with extreme brutality, fueled
a rage which not even the frustrations of a protracted war
could quench. The first objects of this hatred were the land­
lords, who refused to "share" the land and «exploited end­
lessly " those less powerful than they were . «I, myself, hate
the landowners, bullies and wicked persons , " confessed a
POW, who then added, «As a matter of fact, I hate my own
landowner." A defector voiced similar sentiments . "What
I liked best about the political indoctrination was the hate
campaign against the landlords and class struggle because
I wanted to struggle for the rights and privileges for my
class, and I wanted to be the master of the countryside . "
In the minds o f peasants, big landowners were closely
linked to "feudalists , " who in turn were perfectly epitomized
by the dictator Diem . As one defector asserted :

The Front called upon the people 's patriotism and

meanwhile promised that it would overthrow Di­
em 's regime in a very short time. This was exact­
ly what the people were longing for because Diem

1 31
 had made their blood boil for a long time with the
forced labor that had been imposed on everyone of
them.

In another transcript, a dramatic exchange brings out the

same point. "Who has started the class struggle ? Who has
invaded South Vietnam ? " demanded an irate interviewer;
"The Front has acted as a war criminal, and an invader,
has it not ? " The respondent, a POW, cautiously replied :
"I cannot determine who is the true war criminal because
I don't know who has started the war first ? " But under
persistent hostile questioning, he gradually revealed his
true thoughts :

. , . It might be that the Front started the war first.

However, I still have some misgivings about this
matter, for I have seen so many cadres arrested
and detained by the Diem government in 1 957- 1 958.
Although a peace advocate myself, I could not help
feeling suspicious, the question that has kept both­
ering me is why the Government did not give the
ex' Viet Minh cadres a chance to live in peace and
happiness, but instead sought to apprehend them .
To me, this is an act of provocation, And it is this
very act that has forced the former VC cadres to
side with the Front, to save their own lives.

To these fugitives, Mthe uprising meant survival, " argued

the POW. Warming to his subject, he went on to affirm :

I like best the class struggle objective (Pf the

FronO because I belong to the poor farmer class.
The next thing I like is the liberation of the people.
I am for peace also . But in order to have peace,
there has to be fighting and killing.

This Mpeace advocate" ended on a grim note : "'Peace can

only be achieved when one participant in the war is com­
pletely defeated." Cadres like this man believed that they
were involved in a war to the death with an enemy who did
not give people "'a chance to live in peace and happiness."

1 32

-
They would not stop until the Saigon regime had been "com­
pletely defeated. "
According to the Front, hating landlords and feudalists
led directly to anti-imperialism. The real enemy, the one
which gave substance to the threats of landlords and kept
the Saigon regim e afloat, was the United States. Before
1965, few peasants had ever seen an American, but some
were ready to believe the worst. Like the Japanese and
French before, these foreigners were rich, and it seemed
logical that they "would never want to liberate the poor.
(The U. S. l would be just like France and Japan. " After
1965, of course, the Vietnamese image of the United States
took on more substance . In analyzing atrocities, the cadres
argued

that the aims of the Am ericans were to annihilate

the Vietnam ese nation and send their own people to
colonize this land. These killings constituted the
very policy of the American government, and were
not misdeeds committed by undisciplined soldiers.

Another defector remembered a similar speech, made by a

Front cadre to the assembled peasants :

They should not hesitate to fight because the

Americans were invading the country, and because
the Americans ' aim was to take over the country
and to transform it into a colony and a military
base. The troops hated the Americans as much as
they did the French before. It angered them to hear
that the GVN had invited the Americans to come to
Vietnam to sow death and destruction.

In discussions with villagers, the cadres attempted to lo­

cate American intervention within their class analysis of
the Vietnamese situation : "Speaking of imperialism, " they

said that the Party represented the poor farmers

class . So long as the imperialists, e.g., capital­
ists, still existed, the workers would never become

1 33
 the masters of the factories ; therefore we should
fight the imperialists to seize the factories in or­
der to promote our interests . If the imperialists
survived, the factories would be in the hands of the
Americans and the interests of the working class
would not be served. In the Front, the working
class was always cited in every effort to stir up
the fighting spirit of Party members .

In this way, U. S. escalation was seen as a new phase in the

struggle "to make the farmers the owners of the land they
till and the workers the owners of the mills . " As a respond­
ent noted, ""In short, everything the Front said aimed at
fostering the people's hatred against the Americans . " The
invaders would have to be defeated, along with the landlords
and Saigon officials they supported, before peasants could
lay down their arms.
The Front placed American intervention within the con­
text of Vietnamese history. Speaking of the early sixties, a
defector explained :

It' s true that the people haven't yet witnessed the

Americans doing anything wrong and in reality,
anti-American slogans weren 't as appealing as
anti-Diem slogans. But the Front has cleverly
associated the Americans with Diem 's misdeeds
such as forced labor for the construction of Agro­
villes, and arbitrary arrests of former resistance
cadres , The Front has also charged them with im­
perialist aims . In the people 's eyes, the imperial­
ists are regarded as the defenders of the native
landlords' interests . Since most of the people hate
landlords, they abhor the Americans . Front propa­
ganda repeatedly stated that it was the Americans
who started this special war, incited Diem to mis­
behave toward the people, and ordered helicopter
crews to kill the innocent and AR VN soldiers to
take the gall bladders from human bodies , So far,
this malicious propaganda has penetrated the vil­
lagers ' minds so deeply that the latter, even though

1 34
 they haven't come across any Americans yet, have
a preconceived opinion about them and regard the
Americans as even more cruel than the French.
On the other hand, the Front continuously appeals
to the national consciousness , and inspires the
people by reminding them of the recent victory
over the French and the past heroic struggles
against the Chinese so that the people reach the
point that they wouldn 't tolerate anyone who fears
the enemy_

When the war escalated in 1 965, the American people were

taken by surprise . But for the peasants of My Tho, the ap­
pearance of U. S. forces confirmed a line of analysis to
which they had been exposed for many years.
For the NLF, hatred was a vital resource which cadres
should work to intensify. According to a defector,

Before carrying out its land distribution at the be­

ginning of 1 965, the Front had the people study this
policy in order to instill hatred in the minds of the
Farmers against the landlords and the Rich Farm ­
ers , During indoctrination sessions, the cadres
emphasized the exploitation of the rich farmers
and landlords who Mstayed idle in the shade but ate
from golden bowls." It was the farmers who had to
labor to till the land. The landlords and the rich
farmers acted as henchmen of the colonialists and
feudalists in order to be able to clear forest land
and transfer it into rice fields, but they them selves
had never farmed the land.

These efforts were concentrated especially on the personal

experience of the peasants. Here are the recollections of a
defector.

a he cadres) told me that our people had been op­

pressed, exploited, and stripped of all their rights
by the American imperialists and their henchmen,
in their scheme to impoverish the people, He used

1 35
 as an example, my family, my father and mother
who slaved all year round, selling their labor,
their sweat, and their tears yet they achieved noth­
ing but poverty.

The expression of hatred was not just a device to make

people feel better. As one high level cadre stated to a group
of subordinates, whose latest assignment had not been fully
carried out : "Com rades, you didn 't succeed, because you
didn 't give enough indoctrination, and haven 't brought the
hatred to the proper level . That 's why all the political and
military missions didn 't get good results. " In this sense,
underlining the peasants' hatred of their enemi.es was in­
tegral to the task of "motivating the people . ..
Anti-imperialists hate campaigns were similar to those
directed against landlords and feudalists in that they fo­
cused on the individual 's personal experience. One defector
remembered a "speak bitterness" session for Party mem­
bers in which participants took turns describing the hard­
ships of friends and relatives during the war : "I witnessed
many of �he cadres) crying . The atmosphere of hatred was
terrible. The degree of hatred, in my opinion, was notice­
ably increased. Everyone swore that he would die for the
Party's sake . " These cadres, and others like them, were
not naive idealists playing with a blueprint for utopia. On
the contrary, they were driven people whose experience
had left them deeply scarred, Dreaming of revenge, they
longed to square accounts with enemies for whom they felt
a terrible hatred.
Knowing how to mobilize the peasants ' hatred was not as
simple as one mi.ght assume. For example, dwelling o n
atrocities commi tted by the other side did not always serve
a useful purpose, The United States was , after all, an an­
tagonist of apparently unlimited power, and its brutal meth­
ods tended to inspire as much fear as anger. Within the
ranks of the NLF, firm measures had to be taken to contain
the natural reactions of cadres who were intimidated by the
enemy. According to a defector,

anyone who is accused of fear of the Americans

1 36
 always reacts strongly against it. The District
Committee m ember who wants to accuse a minor
cadre of having this fear has to move slowly to
this ultimate criticism by presenting evidence be­
fore he comes out with it. The usual reaction of
the cadres, after they acknowledged being subdued
by this fear, is to make greater and bolder efforts
in order to prove they no longer fear the Ameri­
cans. In fact, within the Front-controlled area,
anyone who is considered afraid of the Americans
is regarded as an outcast, like a woman accused
of illicit affairs.

Among villagers, the problem was even more delicate, and

hate campaigns directed against the United States could
easily backfire. In one village, after a particularly violent
anti-imperialist speech, many people simply packed up and
left, '"because they are doubtful of the capacity of the few
guerrillas and cadres to protect them from the cruel and
strong Americans."
PaniC, however, was not the only danger. Explosions of
rage were no more valuable to the Front than fearful timid­
ity. With their fire-power, the Americans always did best
against a reckless enemy, and in fact U. S. m ilitary leaders
regularly complained about the refusal of the guerrillas to
·stand up and fight." Within the framework of a protracted
war strategy, cadres cautioned followers to control their
feelings, to avoid impulsive actions, to discipline them­
selves within the restrictions of an approach which stressed
patience and the careful husbanding of resources.
In line with this strategy, cadres asked the peasants to do
something quite special with the spontaneous anger they
felt. The anti-American campaigns were not so simple as
they might appear at first glance. Take, for example, the
following anecdote concerning a m ilitary unit which had just
been caught out in the open during an American bombing
raid :

Some of the fighters even went so far as to under­

estimate the effectiveness of the jets. They said :

1 37
 «The Americans who piloted the L- 1 9 and the jets
were not very clever. Our whole battalion was
here and yet they killed only a few. " But they were
criticized at once for saying that. The political of­
ficer scolded them right away and said : uDo you
wish that the Americans had killed more people ?
Are you happy because a few of our brothers got
killed ? You should instead hate the Americans
with all your heart and translate this hatred into
action by fighting harder against the Americans . ..

This cadre has something very precise in mind when he

tells soldiers to hate the Americans «with all your heart."
Blind rage is not his goal, since incensed fighters who
challenged U. S. planes would quickly be wiped out. On a
more subtle level, he is disturbed by the note of contempt
in the fighter's remarks. In fact, U. S. pilots were not in­
competent, and soldiers were wasting energy, as well as
slipping into a dangerous overconfidence, by adopting an
attitude of derision toward their adversaries. What the ca­
dre wants is neither uncontrolled fury nor cynical con­
tempt, but a measured, constant hatred kept under tight rein
in order to sustain people over a prolonged period of fight­
ing a more powerful enemy. As one respondent noticed, the
most resolute cadres had «harbored their hatred towards
the U. S. " In a movement without factories and modern tech­
nology, this hatred was one of the people's few resources ,
making possible the sustained effort o f a guerrilla war.
The classic peasant revolt is a sudden, violent affair.
Long simmering rage explodes, crowds of angry people
form, m ansions burn and enemies are often cruelly muti­
lated . Then, sooner or later, the bands are dispersed, lead­
ers punished, and the survivors go home. Fury subsides,
and a sullen s ilence settles over the countryside . Volcanic
eruptions, these rebellions quickly seem to build up a for­
m idable striking power, but the intense concentration of
feeling thus achieved cannot be maintained for long. Inevi­
tably, the peasants become exhausted, while the passage of
time brings other preoccupations, like planting or harvest­
ing, back to the fore.

1 38
 The NLF has asked peasants to act in a different way, to
develop a highly complex relationship to their feelings.
They must trust in their own fury, indeed seek it out and
bring it to the surface, but at the same time they have to
control this hatred under an unbending self-discipline, to
store it up against the rigors of a protracted war. The
Front has taught villagers to read and write, to blow up
bridges and shoot down airplanes . The sophisticated self­
awareness it has cultivated among its followers is perhaps
an even more noteworthy achievement. The partisans of the
NLF understand themselves, they see what they can and
cannot do, they know how they must deal with themselves
if they hope to achieve their long sought goals.

WOMEN «WITHOUT CAUTION AND CARE "

From its origins, the NLF was strongly committed to

winning the support of women villagers . A well informed
male defector suggests that in this endeavor the Front had
been far more effective than its Viet Minh predecessor.
Beginning in the early 1 960s, women Mexpressed their ideas
vehemently, and participated in NLF activities agressive­
ly, " according to a female defector, who then went on to
recall :

When I was promoted to be a hamlet cadre I was

taught the duties and responsibilities of a woman
in a time of national danger. First of all, if a wom­
an wants to be regarded as equal to a man, she
must take charge of their responsibilities toward
the people, and carry out the activities of a man,
if necessary !

As we have seen, village Women's Associations were in the

forefront of local politics. They took responsibility for
«motivating the people, " as well as for organizing "face­
to-face struggles " against the Saigon regime.
Members of this Association were also active around is­
sues relating specifically to their status as women. The
follOWing summary was offered by a male defector :

1 39
 The goals of the Women's A ssociation, besides
serving the nation, was to liberate themselves
from the following three oppressions . They had to
struggle to obtain equality with men, to abolish the
system of daughter-in-law (the wives were the
slaves of their husbands ' families), to abolish the
system whereby the men were respected and wom­
en despised, and to liberate themselves from the
oppression of the m en.

The daughter-in-law "system " affected women's lives in an

immediate way. A female defector stated that, as a result
of the Front's efforts, daughters-in-law uno longer had to
observe old customs such as bowing to the in-laws every
time they came in and went out of the house. " Another
woman, a POW, affirmed :

I liked life in the Front and did not have any dis­
satisfaction with the Front. I considered my serv­
ing the Front an escape from all the hardships I
endured while I lived with my mother-in-law be­
fore I joined the Front. She behaved very harshly
toward me, It was also an opportunity for me to
care for the people's welfare and happiness, That
is what I liked the most.

By agitating in this area, and also by criticizing other in­

stitutions like forced marriages, the NLF helped women
identify and change s exist conditions rooted in the family
structure.
The Front also conducted a campaign against ulewdness "
and "illicit" behavior, According to a female defector,

We were told that the Communist policy didn't

permit the m en to have many wives, and that hus­
bands should treat their wives as equals - the
men shouldn't abandon their wives for other wom­
en. It was said that any cadres who took many
wives violated the teachings of the Communists,
and harmed the revolution in the eyes of the peo­
ple.

1 40
Sexually unscrupulous individuals were among the main
targets during regular criticism and self-criticism ses­
sions , As a male POW described them , the sessions were
in fact designed precisely to isolate and reform this kind of
anti-social conduct :

The critique is good in that it can turn a criminal

into a good individual. It can cause a lot of diffi­
culties for people who do not want to admit their
mistakes and continue to commit the crim es, For
example, a married man can be severely criticized
by the village chapter or the District Party com­
mittee if he is involved in some iUegal love affairs
with other women, If he repents from his vice, he
can become a good individuaL If not, he will be
criticized again and again, Lots of people readily
admitted their faults and tried to correct them.
These would be considered virtuous and loyal to
the revolution and the people, Others did not ad­
mit their mistakes and continued to commit them
again and again. These would be subjected to
every-mounting criticism and would feel dissatis­
fied with the Revolution and would seek to defect
the Front and the people.

Political cadres Who tried to uslip into the beds of women

in the village, " ran the risk of demotion or even exclusion
from the Party. til joined the Front when it first arose, "
stated a male defector, in explaining why it took him so
long to become a Party member :

I belonged to the basic social class, I performed

my tasks well, I did well in the training courses,
but I was accused of having a bad behavior be­
cause of my lewdness and my many illicit love af­
fairs, and for this reason, I wasn't admitted in the
Party early, even though I became a Labor Youth
member in 1 962.

The transcripts make clear that the NLF attempted in a

systematic way to break up patterns of sexual objectivica-

1 41
tion which undermined the dignity and autonomy of women.
A POW remembered that the Viet Minh had employed "the
alluring women tactic, " whereby female cadres posing as
prostitutes gained access to GVN military posts . But at
present, he observed, this tactic "is no longer used because
the Front thinks that this degrades womenhood."

..
5l
..
'"
u
...
.c
'"
Z

Escalation had a complicated effect on the lives of village

women. On the one hand, the sheer volume of physical work
required of them was sharply increased. A male defector
noted that

In peacetime, the majority of working people were

men. The source of labor was enough. Today most
laborers are women. Male villagers and youths
have either joined the military service or taken
refuge in secure areas, Only a few youth remain
in the a hamlet. They do not have legal papers, ID
cards, and so on, so they do not dare to go out to
work in the field or to leave the hamlet, All hard
work such as plowing, thrashing, or building small
dikes are done by women and old people.

1 42
"At present, " stated a female defector in 1 967, the women

have not time to work for the NLF or to attend

meetings. If compelled to attend meetings, they no
longer express their ideas enthusiastically. In
short, the people's daily problems of securing food
and clothing have inadvertently taken the women
back to their families .

As we have seen, all the popular associations were hurt by

escalation. Women were no exceptions to the general trend
which saw the Front 's mass activities decline.
At the same time, the pressures keeping women out of
the insurgency were being counterbalanced by a special ef­
fort on the part of Front representatives to bring them into
its ranks. Faced after 1 965 with a critical shortage of ca­
dres and soldiers, the NLF mounted an unprecedented drive
to mobilize the female population, One male defector indi ­
cated that in 1967 the Main Force units of the Front army
inducted more women than men by a proportion of two to
one, Meanwhile, the specialized branches of the Front ci­
vilian organization, the sections for finance, propaganda,
security, and other tasks , were also making a special effort
to recruit women, In this way, the crisis of an escalating
war compelled the Front to deepen and extend its commit­
ment to sexual equality.
This participation of women in the Front provoked oppo­
sition. First of all, families were likely to take exception.
In the following citation, a female defector recalls the com­
plaints of her father :

You're my girl. Because you have left this house

day and night and abandoned your home chores,
one-half of our two "cong" of land has not been
completely cultivated and weeds have grown up
everywhere. Where can we get food to eat ? Many
persons can work for the revolution, but I can find
nobody like you ! People who make the revolution
do not receive any salaries , Therefore, their ac­
tivities are limited. They attend meetings sporad-

1 43
 ically, and they also spend their time doing their
home chores . You, however, are always away, and
I have to cook your meals, although I have been
sick and am old. I feel very bad ! I can't stop you
from working for the revolution, but you should at
least take pity on me and not compel me to cook
your daily meals. As your father is old and sick,
no cadre could blame you if you stayed home. At
present, bombs and shells are poured on the Vil­
lage. All the male cadres, old and young alike, get
so frightened they try to hide themselves, and do
not dare to appear among the people. You know
this well. Why have you gone out day and night to
carry out their activities and to torture yourself ?
Unfortunately, if you're killed in a bombing or
shelling, I will have to bury you, This truly is an
unhappy lot, According to the heavenly law, as our
ancestors said, children should bury their parents.
On the contrary, if parents have to bury their chil­
dren, this will truly be the ruin of the family, and
people will laugh, An old saying goes, I'lt a man
has to bury his wife when he is young and to bury
his children when he is old, this will be his great­
est grief." If you're not killed by bombing or fir­
ing, but instead you continue to go out day and night
to make contacts and attend meetings with those
cadres, you might be led into a loose life. You
might lose your virginity and get pregnant. In that
case, I think that it would be better for me to kill
myself than to endure shame when I face other
people. Take pity on me, and remember all my
efforts in bringing you up until you're now an adult
girl. YOU'd better listen to me, and stay at home
and care for this family, so that we are not so
destitute, Otherwise, if you take your family so
lightly and only think of your organization, do
whatever you want, But don't tell your cadres to
come here to warn or try to motivate me !

This lengthy harangue amounts to a catalogue of all the ar­

guments women had to answer as they decided to become

1 44
activists, The speaker manages to mix threats, pathos and
flattery, to suggest that his daughter is violating long­
standing traditions, causing him great physical and spiritual
anguish, is running the risk of losing her virginity, and will
probably goet killed for her trouble.
The demands made on daughters of such parents were
formidable. "I love my father more than anything else in
this world, insisted the woman whose father we have just
n

heard.

I love him more than I love my own life. But, at

that time 0 965 - 1 966 ) I was very confident in the
NLF. Therefore, I was very embarrassed and did
not know how to act in that kind of situation, al­
though my father repeatedly cried and pleaded with
me very every night.

This and other anecdotes in the transcripts indicate that

women often had to pay an emotional price for their politi­
cal activity which m en were spared.
Relatives were not the only ones to hold women back.
Attitudes among the male cadres varied, Some described
the advances of women without comment or with approval,
while others were not sure how they felt. A POW remem­
bered his own reaction when a regroupee showed off a pic­
ture of his wife (who still lived in North Vietnam ) driving a
tractor : ULooking at the photograph, I couldn't tell whether
I liked or disliked the North. " Som e observers were de­
cidedly hostile, like the POW who said :

The Front always speaks highly of the women's

role in the war. Slogans such as MYoung m en fight
on the battlefield while women take charge of the
rear area " are found everywhere. To encourage
women, the Front's policy is to give Mequal rights
to both men and women." Many women are now
assuming important functions in various agencies
of the Front. Personally, I have no idea about the
ordinary women, but the women cadres whom I
met on my various missions and those who worked

1 45
 in the Province Medical Section seemed to have
lost all the charm of the fair sex, In my opinion,
women cadres have actually become maSCUline and
ridiculous , They all liked to argue and use gran­
diloquent "revolutionary " words such as IIwe must
consolidate our spirit to overcome all kinds of
hardships - we must strengthen our ideology and
fight for the final victory, etc , . , " I never liked
women cadres, so I had no girlfriends among them.

The Front called for respectful equality between the sexes,

but from time to time we sense the persistence of more
traditionally sexist bias, A typical example would be the
double standard thinking evident in a pas sage already cited,
where a defector observed that "'anyone who is considered
afraid of the Americans is regarded as an outcast, like a
woman accused of illicit affairs."
The women villagers also had mixed feelings . According
to a male POW, some, who "were still deeply influenced by
the old-fashioned way of living, " and who "were not used to
collective living outside the family, " did not react sympa­
thetically to the changes they saw taking place, For exam­
ple, an 86-year-old woman POW spoke harshly of the

female cadres who lead ridiculous ways of living,

which are completely out of step with the tradi­
tional manner , They are educated by the Front and
so they have that manly way of talking and behav­
ing. They liked to use terms that I had no idea
what they meant, lived with the male cadres, and
don't care about cooking and housekeeping. As soon
as they open their mouths , words such as : con­
struction, criteria, struggle, etc . , . come out.

In any case, what happened to women within the Front, where

sexual equality was a highly charged political issue, some­
times tended to become detached from the situation through­
out the countryside. IIMost women in the village are still
good housewives, " argued a male defector, "'Only a minority
of them who are working for the Front are indoctrinated
with new ideas. " But, as other witnesses indicate, the ex-

1 46
ample of the cadres was not without its effects on the soci­
ety around them , "Recently, when I attended a banquet, " re­
called a male defector,

I found that when the young men told the young

women to wash the dishes or to take their meals
in the secondary house and not in the main one of
the host's family, they replied, "There is now
equality between the two sexes, How dare you tell
us to wash your dishes and to take our meals in
the secondary house whereas, you sit in a large
one ? That 's unfair ! " In addition to these stories,
the women now often take the equality of the two
sexes slogan as their weapon to struggle against
the men,

NLF agitation thus helped to spread about "the equality of

the two sexes slogan, " and as a result this new "weapon"
with which "to struggle against the men" became accessible
to all women,
Throughout the transcripts, we see female cadres work­
ing actively in the Front, in spite of the various obstacles
they encountered, These women "live and behave like young
men, " commented one defector. "They like to argue about
everything and carry on their activities regardless of the
late hours, and without minding public gossip, " MThere are
quite a number of female cadres in my village, " noted an­
other. They "talked politics all day long. Their talks are
now sprinkled with political terms which are rather unfa­
miliar to the ears and, therefore, quite different to the tra­
ditional woman 's nature. " A third observer, a POW, re­
called that

There were two female members in the 6'illage)

Party Committee , • Both of these female party
. •

members were local people, single, came from

the poor class, joined the Revolution from the be­
ginning, about 30 years old, These two female ca­
dres were very enthusiastic in their activities • • •

The villagers liked and respected these two female

cadres because of their comportment and their
 virtues, but sometimes they ridiculed and mocked
their manly way of living : they were away all night
long, going here and there, talking to everyone
without caution and care like the other women.

Women "without caution and care" had been with the Front
from the beginning. They were among the "shadows " hov­
ering outside the houses of frightened peasants in 1 960, then
standing up "majestuously and bravely " when the NLF came
out in the open. We should count them in the ranks of the
"fanatics with high morale and an everlasting endurance of
hardship" who stayed by the NLF in spite of U. S. escala­
tion. Like the other cadres, they fought to make the poor
peasants "masters of the countryside, " and to destroy a
hated enemy. At the same time, the stakes in the war were
even higher for these women since they were also fighting
«to liberate themselves from the oppression of the men. "
When we ask how the NLF kept itself together in spite of
American efforts to destroy it, the special stubbornness of
many women cadres must be considered an important part
of the answer.
One of the best features of the RAND transcripts is that
each interview gives us a picture of someone ' s life, an in­
dividual experience full of peculiar detail, an autobiography
woven in and out of the greater flow of events, The stories
provide a human dimension to the often impersonal history
of the war which we get from other sources. Perhaps it
would be helpful to review one life history, especially since
this account, which is among the most satisfying in the
""DT " series, sheds so much light on the role of women in
the NLF. (22 )
"She is a special case, If stated the interviewer o f subject
#2 1 3.

The subject's state of mind is a very complex one.

Her belief in the Front' s cause is so big that she
can't distinguish what is wrong, At the same time,
she is very naive, and constantly views all Front
cadres as heroes, The image of a few hamlet ca­
dres has impressed her that way although she

148
 didn't know them well.

This 1 9-year-old woman had been taken prisoner in April

1967 in Chau Thanh District, Among the respondents in the
Dinh Tuong series, she is indeed one of the few "special
cases , " a POW whose outspoken loyalty to the Front sur­
vived even the trauma of arrest, torture and imprisonment
by the Saigon regime - not to speak of her encounter with
an interviewer who did not understand her "naive" dedica­
tion to the Ilwrong " cause.
Working as a s eamstress and living in the home of her
grandparents, the respondent's political commitment grew
out of direct experience.

The sight of m isfortunes which happened every day

in my village shocked me a great deal. They made
me feel that the cause of the Front is right while
the GVN, despite its repeated statements of help­
ing the people enjoy a good life, is simply doing
harm to the people by setting houses on fire and
extorting money by means of arbitrary arrests.
The Front' s cadres, on the contrary, worked with­
out pay, without any advantages whatsoever . Many
of their families didn't even have enough rice to
eat, but still, they agreed to continue to work for
the villagers in the hamlet, They are willing to
accept any sacrifices required of themselves and
of their relatives for the country. They helped the
people in their work in the fields ; they dug ditches
to improve the villagers ' crops . Since I witnessed
the cadres ' sacrifices, I paid much respect to the
Front although I didn't know much of this organi­
zation or what it represented. I viewed the cadres
as living embodiments of heroes of our legends ;
they are those who stand up to fight the evil in or­
der to protect the people. That's why I respected
the Front a great deal.

GVN atrocities prompted the respondent to take her first

political initiative. A woman cadre asked her to attend the
funeral of four men who had been killed by Saigon soldiers.

149
She Itcried a lot because of these misdeeds " and, in spite of
fears of GVN retaliation, agreed to participate in the me­
morial ceremony.
Along with some other young insurgents, this woman had
to go against the wishes of her family in order to respond
to the Front's appeals . Attending the funeral Itwas the first
time I disobeyed my grandparents, " she stated. "This was
also the first time I took a resolution of myself. After I
listened to the cadres' speech dealing with misdeeds per­
petrated by GVN people, I felt most angry. That night, I
couldn't sleep." But in spite of such strong feelings, the
respondent was not yet ready to break completely with her
grandparents . In the weeks that followed, a woman cadre
patiently tried to recruit her, while GVN troops continued
with their depradations - they even stole the clothing she
was sewing for customers . The decisive moment came in
September, 1 965 :
Another female cadre came to see me quite unex­
pectedly. She introduced herself as the Head of the
Village Liberation Women's Committee. Her name
is XXXXX. She asked to stay overnight in my
house. When the night was far advanced, she asked
me : ItAre you ready to leave your family behind to
join the F ront now ? Do you love your grandpar­
ents ? " I replied that I had not arranged anything
yet since I had lost all my savings in indemnifying
the customers . "As for my grandparents, I love
them very much. But why did you put this question
to me ? It sounds quite absurd. " "If you do love
them, you ought to think about how to secure them
a good life, " she went on. What do you mean about
securing them a good life ? I mean that if you do
love them very much you ought to see to it that
they could enjoy a good life in the years to come.
A good life for them could be secured only if the
Revolution becomes a success. It will be then that
they could live with freedom and welfare. No one
might oppress and exploit them, as the enemy is
doing to the people at present.

150
"Her words, in fact, sounded right, " commented the re­
spondent, and she made up her mind to join the Front.
When the grandmother learned of this decision, she was
deeply wounded :

NOh ! my granddaughter ! How can you be so un­

grateful to me ! Your mother died when she gave
birth to you and I have bred you ever since ! And
now, how can you be so awful towards me by leav­
ing me alone ! " After that, my grandparents left
us behind and went outdoors , (T he female cadre)
and I stayed home until 4 PM before we set out.
I didn 't meet my grandparents anew because they
didn't come back home, Either out of discourage­
ment or out of anger at me, they stayed with neigh­
bors seemingly to avoid us.

This painful episode did not shake her resolve.

I felt very sorry for them . They were very old and
yet, they had to live under risks of being killed by
bombs and bullets every day. But the deeper I felt
sorry for them , the quicker I thought I had to join
the Front. I believed that the Front's cause is right
and therefore, I didn't have any fear of being killed.
Together the two women set out for an NLF base area , The
cadre was not insensitive to what this new recruit was go­
ing through, and she tried to help the young woman deal with
her apprehension and homesickness . "We talked abundant­
ly, " recalled the respondent, "I suppose to alleviate my pain
and to build up my morale. She said : 'You are a true daugh­
ter of the Revolution. ' "
The respondent's career i n the Front was i n many ways
exemplary, From a poor peasant background, she acquired
in less than two years a variety of technical skills. She
served first as a liaison agent, then as a medic, and finally
in a demolition unit. Her political understanding grew, and
in the course of the interview, she had no trouble dealing
with the feeble polemics which the interviewer initiated
against the NLF, She sometimes quarreled with other ca-

1 51
dres and had her share of disappointments within the move­
ment, but her revolutionary commitment did not waver.

Wherever I went, I could realize how terrific the

destruction caused by bombings and shellings was,
and the farther the liberated areas were, the more
miserable the people's life was ! orchards, paddie
fields and houses, all of them are being abandoned.
All these calamities had been caused by the GVN
and the Americans , In point of these calamities, I
felt heartbroken and therefore I was more decided
to work for the Front so that the enemy would be
driven away and freedom and happiness could be
secured for everyone.

In her account, we see graphically the force of the Mrepres­

sion-resistance spiral. " The more «calamities " she came
across, the more determined she became «to work for the
Front so that the enemy would be driven away and freedom
and happiness could be secured for everyone. "
The interview itself helps us to measure this woman's
revolutionary stand, Where many respondents, including
some POWs, equivocated about the politics of the war,
complained that the Front tricked them into serving its
cause and repeated freshly learned slogans about «commu­
nism" and the "free world, " she refused to compromise.
Will she agree to go home peacefully if the GVN wins the
war ?

In case the GVN freed me from jail and torture,

I would be very grateful of it but it wouldn't cer­
tainly be for this reason that I would agree to stop
fighting. As far as soldiers, exploitation, oppres­
sion would plague the countryside, I would continue
to fight the GVN. If I am freed now, I will return
to my grandparents to take care of them until their
death. After that, I'll join the Revolution again.

MI'll join the Revolution again" ! this was no debater's point,

but a matter of life and death. The respondent was a pris-

1 52
oner, already well acquainted with GVN police methods.
Here is her account of events after being captured :

The district chief himself interrogated us . We told

him the truth but he didn't want to believe it. He
ordered five or six soldiers to kick us with their
shoes on our faces, our thorax and our waists.
They also forced us to lie down to the ground and
with their feet they jumped over our thorax, When
we fainted, they threw water on our faces, When
we came back to life, they repeated the same tor­
ture, We were all covered with blood, which came
out from our ears and mouths , We were beaten up
this way for a day and after that they locked us up.
I couldn't lie down or sit up without pain. I coughed
out much blood which spread all around us. To re­
lieve pain, I had to sit with the support of my arms
leaning to the wall.

Capture and imprisonment thus represented in a somewhat

more intense form the daily experience of villagers sub­
jected to the violence of a ruthless and barbaric enemy.
Even more than the bombing and shelling, the sweeps and
crop destruction, these torture sessions were designed to
break the will of the insurgents, force them to abandon
their cause and beg for mercy.
The respondent was not swayed :

On the next morning, the district chief call us

again up, and the same torture took place anew
with more savagry. I couldn't stand it any longer
and thought of ending my life. But before dying, I
thought I had to show the district chief my hate and
anger. So, I began to curse him and jumped up to
strike his face . His spectacles were broken and
his eyes were wounded, His anger burst out and he
beat me till I fainted. When I came to life again, I
saw myself lying in a cell. Pain everywhere in my
body and blood was coagulated in puddles all
around.

1 53
 Eventually the prisoner tried unsuccessfully to commit
suicide , She was taken to a hospital, then put in jail, where
the RAND interviewer found her in July, 1967 , If alive to­
day, she is probably still interned along with 200,000 others
in the prisons of the Thieu diatatorship,
This scene stays with me more than anything else in the
transcripts : a woman answering torture with curses, then
smashing the puppet official's glasses into his face, "'Heart­
broken" at the invasion and destruction of her country, the
respondent was not intimidated by the GVN and the Ameri­
cans , Leaving home and family for the NLF, she developed
into a fanatic cadre whose dedication held firm in spite of
many "calamities . " Seamstress and poor peasant, once in
awe of the revolutionaries around her, she herself became
one of those " living embodiments of heroes " who in Viet­
namese legend "stand up to fight the evil in order to pro­
tect the people. " We can make sense of the war only if we
assume that hers is not at all a "special case, " Along with
so many others, when faced with American aggression, she
chose to live as "'a true daughter of the Revolution, "

EPILOGUE : FROM TET O F F ENSIVE TO "'RICE WAR"

On January 30- 3 1 , 1 968, the National Liberation Front

launched its Tet Offensive. In a series of coordinated at­
tacks all over South Vietnam, the NLF struck at over one
hundred cities and U. S. bases, In the Mekong Delta, My
Tho City, along with many other provincial capitals, was
invaded and briefly held by the insurgents . After two years
of the most intensive bombardment in military history, with
its liberated areas in ruins, its ranks decimated, its sur­
viving cadres worn down by the tensions and hardships of
protracted struggle, the NLF brought off the most ambi­
tious campaign in the history of the war,
The MDT" transcripts give no warning of the coming of­
fensive, even though the last of the interviews in the series
was conducted only days before the attacks , Indeed in one

154

b
or two cases, responses are so non-committal that the
reader might be pardoned for suspecting that "false ralli­
ers " had been sent out to lull US-GVN authorities with
misleading information. From another source, we learn
that the Tet Offensive in My Tho Province was a political
triumph for the NLF, In a New York Times article, pub­
lished November 5, 1 972, Fox Butterfield speaks of "a re­
cent study for the Rand Corporation" on the Front in Dinh
Tuong Province •

• The study noted that before the 1 968 Tet offen­

, •

sive, many Vietnamese and American officials

thought that the Vietcong in Dinhtuong were on
their way to defeat , But once the Communists gave
their sudden order to attack, "almost the entire
rural population in the province was mobilized and
coordinated in support of the attack, " the study
concluded.

The RAND transcripts miss all of this preparation. For the

most part consisting of the testimony of defectors, who
wrongly concluded that the NLF was going to lose the war,
these historical sources cannot tell us what we most want
to know. Excellent in detailing all the problems faced by
the Front, they only glancingly deal with those sources of
strength within the NLF which made Tet possible.
The Offensive must have had a profound impact on the
villagers of My Tho , For years, the Front had promised a
"'General Insurrection and General Offensive. " The slogan
was repeated so many times that it began to lose its force.
As refugees reluctantly moved away from their villages,
Front cadres had warned them that, in the end, the cities
too would be bombed and shelled. At the time, such argu­
ments must have seemed like the desperate threats of a
movement which could feel itself going downhill. But in 1 968
Front units erupted in the middle of cities like My Tho.
"'The psychological implications of the attacks are incal­
culable, " wrote Tom Buckley of the New York Times. -For
the first time, �ity dwellers) found the Vietcong in the
streets, shouting their slogans and fighting with nerve­
shattering fury against the hastily gathered American and

1 55
 I

�I "Mauy :
I

I I
I
I
)

" ,
I
l
\
\ \
\ \_,
\. ./
,_ _ _ I

Vietnamese units sent in to oppose them. " (23 )

T o save themselves from total defeat, US-GVN soldiers
turned their guns against the cities, large portions of which
were destroyed. For example, one half of My Tho was lev­
elled, according to the estimate of the A P correspond­
ent. (24 ) After devastating the rural areas for two years,
US-GVN firepower was now employed to tear apart those
sections of the country which a few days before had seemed
to be most firmly under the "control" of the Saigon regime.
Front forces withdrew under the bombardment, and their

156
 MY THO
PROV I NC E
(w�� � on\y )

adversaries naturally claimed this as a "'victory. " But if

we look at the matter from the point of view of the peas­
ants, we see it in a different light. The s elf-destructive re­
action of US-GVN leaders inadvertently confirmed what the
Front had said all along about the course of the war. In
spite of its technological superiority, the Saigon dictator­
ship did not really control any part of the country ; in spite
of its many losses the Front still had the power to carry
the war where it pleased.
In 1 968, the Front might reasonably have hoped that its

157
demonstration of strength would persuade the United States
to withdraw from Vietnam . Firmly entrenched throughout
the Mekong Delta, which had been almost entirely liberated
from Saigon control, cadres carried on their political work
more openly than at any time since 1 965. We have no inter­
views for the period after 1 968 with which to measure re­
actions in the countryside to the new American escalation
engineered by the Nixon administration, but I think we can
assume that events followed a familiar course, Once again,
massive bombardment generated refugees, and forced the
NLF onto the defensive, and again, in 1 972, a large scale
offensive was needed to demonstrate that the insurgents
were still strong. This time the U, S, decided to come to
terms .
W e know that since the signing o f the Paris Agreements
in January 1 973, fighting between NLF and GVN forces has
continued, Specific news about the My Tho area, however,
is hard to come by. The Province has been a major battle­
field in the «rice war " which occasionally is m entioned by
one of the wire services. On August 30, 1 973, for example,
A P quoted "military source s " in Saigon to the effect that
the "Communists aimed" to cut Route 4, the main highway
through the delta to Saigon. «The drive now is centering on
the districts of Cai Be and Cai Lay, areas of traditional
Vietcong control in Dinh Tuong Province in the northern
delta. " Apparently the cadres in My Tho are still deter­
mined to win «the Indochina Road. " A UPI dispatch, dated
December 1 8, 1 973, describes "fierce fighting in the out­
• • •

skirts of the district towns of Cai Lay and Cai Be. " Sai­
. • .

gon sources claimed the attackers left behind 97 dead, not

necessarily a figure to be taken seriously, but at least one
which suggests that a battle between fairly large size units
had taken place. The cryptic account tells us perhaps more
than the Saigon source intended. If the Front can concen­
trate significant armed forces on the «outskirts " of the dis­
trict capitals, it must be in a strong poSition, with freedom
to move around in the countryside, and with the Saigon
authorities bottled up in a handful of strongholds isolated
here and there in the Province.
Recent newspaper reporting on Vietnam did involve one
special bonus for those interested in My Tho . Right after

1 58
the signing of the January agreement, a number of western
journalists were able to travel in liberated areas of the
Province. (25) Le Monde 's Jean-Claude Pomonti visited the
20/7 heartland of the NLF between Route 4 and the Mekong
River, twenty kilometers west of My Tho City (around Bang
Long). The French correspondent found large political
meetings taking place, while Front schools were being re­
built and its entertainment troupe was "'constantly on the
move" from village to village. Veronique Decoudu (Agence
France Pr��se) and Jacques Leslie (Los Angeles Times )
also toured the 20/7 area, beginning i n the Village of Binh
Phu, somewhat to the west of the region explored by Po­
monti. They attended a show put on by an NLF troupe where,
according to Decoudu, "'the atmosphere was enthusiastic, "
and 6,000 spectators were still absorbed in the spectacle
after midnight when the visitors had to leave. Six thousand
spectators ! And this in an area where several years ago
groups of five to ten people were dispersed by bombs and
shells . Preventing villagers from joining together in groups
was precisely the aim of U. S. escalation. Large as semblies
of peasants indicate far better than any more narrowly
military development the continuing vitality of the NLF .
Right at home in communities of real people, with their
own past, present and future, cadres thus continue the work
of the NLF. Pomonti recorded the remarks of his seven­
teen-year-old guide : UWith Uncle Ho, people were happy.
Around Uncle Ho, people felt good. What a shame he COUldn't
hold on till the peace ! " The words reminded me that Ho
Chi Minh's name has a special meaning in the interview
transcripts. Respondents thought of him when trying to
come to terms with the reality of a protracted war. Accord­
ing to a POW,

As Uncle Ho said, the Front soldiers would have

to fight a long-term war. As the bamboo trees
wither and bamboo sprouts spring up year after
year, the Front will continue to fight, and it will
fight until there are no Americans left in the
South. Then we will have national reunification.

1 59
 Another respondent repeated the following remarks from
a military cadre :

At present, we are similar to the farmers who

start to plant their crops . They have to endure the
lack of their families' affection and temporary in­
sufficiency of food. But when the rice is ripe, har­
vested and brought home, they will have plenty for
their expenditures and they will joyfully unite with
their families. Chairman Ho has resolved to make
slight his family's affections. He took refuge in
foreign countries and lacked food and clothing. He
was also tyrannically tortured by capitalists . Even
so, he has patiently maintained his revolutionary
standpoint. Therefore, at present, we must follow
President Ho 's bright example. We must sacrifice
our families' affections and resolve to bring vic­
tory to our people.

"Ifhe speaks in these familiar terms of Ho Chi Minh" noted

Pomonti of his guide, "it is not by accident. In his hamlet,
the memory of the 'Uncle' of Vietnam is still alive, even
among the youngest. "

"I am a son of the revolution, " affirmed one cadre during

a talk with Pomonti . "With hollow cheeks and an intense
gaze, a dry manner and a calm voice, " the speaker appeared
to the French journalist to be "a kind of Saint Just whose
authority imposed itself from the start. " "I was born in the
revolution, " the cadre continued, "I've lived in it, I grew up
in it, I've been nourished by it, It's my life, my upbringing,
my experience. What I 've learned, I 've learned from the
people. "

A s the interview went on, the audience never

stopped growing, and the hut seemed to be sur­
rounded by about fifty pairs of eyes and ears,
mostly young partisans. Two journalists of the
NLF took careful notes, while the host, an old
peasant, passed around little glasses of tea.

160
 Habitants au kml

o de O . 10
�"1
• zones contr6h�es
par les forces
gou\lernementales
" 0 de l 0 . 50
D de 50 . ,00
_ de l 00 . 2 oo
.. plus de 200

Population Density per Sq. KM Relation of Forces at Cease Fire

/
(L' Expres I ntercontinental Press)

RAND AND THE NLF

The RAND Corporation went to Vietnam in 1 964 as part

of the American war making apparatus. Since the money
for staff members ' salaries came from the Department of
Defense, its interviewers and consultants were in effect
employees of the Pentagon. RAND's client status must be
stressed because, in the wake of its withdrawal from Viet­
nam , the Corporation has attempted to portray itself as an
independent research organization which studied the NLF
for purely scholarly purposes. The "User's Guide" to the
transcripts, written by RAND consultant W. Phillips Davi­
son, presents us with a picture of dedicated researchers
seeking out the truth in spite of the often obtuse interfer-

161
ence of US-GVN authorities. "Few Vietnamese or American
officials in Saigon every really understood the purpose of
the project, " writes Davison. "Most of them seem to have
regarded it as an intelligence-gathering undertaking rather
than a long-range study of political, social, and psycholog­
ical factors. " Given the fact that the Pentagon was paying
the bills, such assumptions were not unreasonable. "We got
the best damn intelligence in the war ! " boasted RAND con­
sultant Leon Goure in the early days of U. S. direct inter­
vention. (26 ) As we will see, the interview schedule used by
RAND was clearly designed, at least in part, to gather mil­
itary intelligence.
RAND's Vietnam enterprise, in other words, is the very
model of a dishonest research project. The reality was that
the Corporation worked for the U, S. Government, and its
staffers by necessity cooperated closely with American and
Saigon military personnel, whose good will was essential in
day-to-day operations . RAND consultants were given mil­
itary titles. For example, J. J. Zasloff, the first RAND
"scholar " in Vietnam, was made a general. But in their
work, RAND staffers systematically attempted to hide the
fact that they were employees of the Pentagon. Here is
Davison's description :

The interviewers were coached to introduce them ­

selves to respondents as persons studying the so­
cial, economic, and political situation in Vietnam,
in order to understand the National Liberation
Front and its position vis-a-vis the government of
Vietnam • When pres sed as to the exact aus­
• • •

pices of the project, the interviewers usually de­

scribed in general terms a research organization
under contract to the government.

Davison also cites the recollections of a Vietnamese inter­

viewer who stated that I'some interviewers claimed that
they were reporters , " while "still others posed as social
science students doing research for their oncoming the­
s es. " (27 )
In one sense, these lies were unavailing. As some of the

162
interviewers discovered, respondents held to their correct
assumption that, in Davison's words, "the interviewer has
some connection with either Vietnamese or American au­
thorities. " On the other hand, the attempted deception did
serve one useful purpose When RAND first arrived in
Vietnam, the Saigon government was reluctant for political
reasons to permit U. S. military personnel free acce ss to
NLF defectors and POWs . Such contact would emphasize
the American presence in Vietnam and bring out the client
status of the GVN. From the point of view of Saigon author­
ities, RAND proved to be a good intermediary. As David
Landau explains :

While RAND, which had been set up by the Air

Force in 1 947 and had depended entirely on official
subsidies ever since was effectively a government
agency, it nonetheless drifted in the half world of
consulting and "management" firms and managed
to preserve the aura, if not the reality, of political
and intellectual independence. (28)

Under the cloak of non-partisanship, RAND talked to pris­

oners and defectors, then handed over useful information to
US-GVN military officials. In this way, it was hoped,
RAND's mythical neutrality would lend credence to the
equally mythical independence of the Saigon regime. Pup­
pets of the world, unite !
As for the transcripts themselves, intelligence consider­
ations are manifest throughout. The interviewers ask many
questions about NLF reaction to different U. S. military
tactics. They try to pin down in minute detail the routines
of Main and Local Force units. They ask for information on
how the NLF planned to counter U, S. pacification drives.
They go on for page after page in search of information on
the names, whereabouts and activities of NLF local cadres.
They show great interest in the proces s of defection, ask­
ing what defectors thought of Chieu Hoi leaflets, how they
reacted to loudspeaker broadcasts from U. S. helicopters,
whether they listened to Saigon radio when they decided to
defect, how escape had been arranged, whether other ca-

163
dres still in NLF territory might be induced to follow in
their footsteps. The connection between this information
and any Mlong term study of political, social and psycho­
logical factors" is not clear, but the military value of the
inquiries seems apparent.
In examining the dynamics of the interview situation, we
find that the transcripts are flawed in another way as well.
Prisoners of war were routinely tortured before being
interviewed, and could look forward to a grim future of im­
prisonment, further "interrogation" and possible death, The
RAND interviews , therefore, did not unfold in neutral cir­
cumstances, and indeed GVN police officials were often
present during questioning. (29) Defectors were only slight­
ly more able to speak freely, A certain number were in
fact NLF spies (the GVN called them "false ralliers "), and
Saigon authorities would be watching all "ralliers " closely
for signs of residual loyalty to the other side, Some defec­
tors were put through intensive indoctrination sessions be­
fore the interviews, and their answers show the imprint of
these propaganda barrages. (30) In other words, with both
prisoners and defectors, a strong anti-NLF pressure was
bound to shape the responses given.
The RAND interviewers brought their own bias to the
project. According to the "User's Guide, " all the interview­
ers of known occupation were from the urban middle class.
Close to half had a university education, and the others
whose educational background is given were graduates of
secondary school. Two-thirds were born in North Vietnam,
and 30% of those indicating a religious preference were
Roman Catholics. On the other hand, the interviewees were
almost all peasants, with a few years of primary schooling
at most. Only one in 285, a North Vietnamese POW, was
born in the North, and Catholics formed a small proportion
of the sample. (3 1 ) Urban and rural culture in Vietnam are
divided by a considerable social gulf, and the interviewers
who ventured out into the countryside were like foreigners
groping about in an alien country. Davison speaks of these
safaris as "field trips" during which the "urban Vietnam­
ese interviewers " and the Americans had to contend with
primitive accommodations and uncertain Msanitary facili-

1 64
ties and standards of hygiene, " in a milieu where Nfinding
a meal that was both safe and palatable" was often a diffi­
cult chore. In the later phases of the project, some inter­
viewers took to carrying their own food with them on their
trips out of town. On occasion, the teams fell behind sched­
ule and would have to go to considerable trouble to get
safely back to Saigon before nightfall. (32 )
These details have a political significance. Several of the
interviewers saw the NLF as a class organization, uniting
poor peasants against the bourgeoisie to which they be­
longed. Numerous peasant respondents shared this per­
spective, and as a result the interview situation in some
sense brought together two antagonists in class struggle.
The number of Northerners among the interviewers also
seems significant, Refugees who left the Democratic Re­
public of Vietnam in 1 954 after the Geneva Accords have
provided the backbone of U. S.-sponsored right-wing coali­
tions in the south ever since . The presence of a number of
Catholics, traditionally hostile to the resistance, seems to
suggest the same kind of political bias. On the face of it,
the interviewers come from groups predisposed to take a
hostile position toward the NLF.
The transcripts confirm this expectation. In their post­
scripts to the interviews , and in the way they ask questions,
many of the interviewers betray a strong anti-NLF preju­
dice. One spoke of the NFront's unreasonableness and im­
becility." Another noted that his subject, a POW, «wanted
to conceal his ideas , but he could not conceal them for long.
He has been deeply indoctrinated with atheist materialism.
However, he still loves his family. " Suspicion of the NLF
was balanced by solidarity with the Saigon regime. An in­
terviewer suggested that one respondent, a defector, �e­
came less skeptical and more confident (in our cause)" in
the course of the interview. NThe subject was deeply indoc­
trinated, " another observed, in speaking of a POW, Mand he
was not sincere or cooperative with the interviewer. If the
subject were released now, he would join the VC to fight
against us . That was what he had in mind, unless we could
change it by giving him a good brain-wash in prison. " (33)
In this excerpt and in others, we s ee that a number of
interviewers saw their role in para-military terms. Many

165
acted like interrogators, probing for hidden subversive
leanings ; see the above example of the interviewee who
'"wanted to conceal his ideas, but he could not conceal them
for long." Here is the postscript for another interview, in
which the respondent, a POW, had forthrightly outlined the
principles which motivated him to serve the NLF :

The subject was not sincere at all. He tried to

avoid answering the questions of the interviewer
to the point. He refused to reveal anything about
the high ranking cadres who he certainly knew. He
liked to express his views boldly, and seemed to
want to make propaganda for the Front. But he re­
vealed his thoughts and showed that he was a hard
core Front cadre.

Others used the interviews as a vehicle for GVN propa­

ganda. After discus sion with a POW who had been tortured,
an interviewer stated :

The subject was very cooperative and sincere. He

agreed with the interviewer that his being beaten
up by AR VN soldiers was simply an uncontrolled
incident which occurred in a hot spot. He also
agreed that the way the Front had drafted him away
was inhuman.

Another interviewer described how he "'tried to summarily

explain to (his subject) the American aims in Vietnam and
drew a map of southeast Asia to help him to understand. " (34 )
Time and again, the interviewers press for anti-NLF
views. Often the phrasing of questions is designed to compel
a certain response. "'1n your opinion, " asks one interviewer
of a POW, '"were those totalitarian methods of leadership of
the party good and correct ? " "Why is killing such a trifle
to the NLF ? It demanded another. Occasionally, interview­
ers lose their composure and simply quarrel with their
subjects. Here is one question from discussion with a de­
fector.

Why were the people glad when China or the Soviet

166
 Union gave aid to North Vietnam, as you just said,
and regarded them as good friends, but when the
U. S. and other nations of the free world gives aid
to the GVN which is about a hundred times that
given to Hanoi by China and Russia, they said that
the Americans were invaders ?

Such outbursts are usually informative. This one, for ex­

ample, tells us that the interviewer regards as an enemy
not just the NLF, but "'the people" as a whole, with their
obstinate mistrust of the "'free world. " At times these ar­
guments have an ugly, vindictive edge. One POW was asked :

In the future, where will the NLF cadres go if

there are no people in their areas ? Will you de­
part for North Vietnam and live there with Mr.
Ho ? As a matter of fact, if you don't come over to
the GVN side, you will have no people to support
you.

Other interviewers show more restraint, and a number of

interviews are developed in an intelligent and dispassionate
manner. But the overall political atmosphere in which these
exchanges take place is unmistakeable. None of the inter­
viewers show a pro-NLF bias, and statements favorable to
the GVN are seldom challenged. Even if the interviewers
had been sympathetic to the insurgents, the conditions of
their employment discouraged candor. They were, after all,
working for one of the parties in the war, and pulling down
a handsome salary in the process (·comparable to what they
would have received in the top ranks of the Vietnamese
civil service, " according to the "User's Guide " ). (35)
In attempting to promote the historical objectivity of the
transcripts, Davison affirms that "'the existence of several
very different political biases among the group (pf inter­
viewer� even though all were non-Communists, probably
serves to offset bias in the interviews as a whole. " This
puzzling statement can be explained by the fact that Davi­
son shares the ideological predispositions of the people
whose objectivity he is attempting to measure. He is not
particularly struck by their prejudices because he himself

167
looks at things in a similarly one-sided way. He thinks the
dictates of political objectivity have been satisfied, while
recognizing that all the interviewers are "non-Communist"
(meaning in this context "non-NLF "), because he takes it
for granted that "Communist" views are beyond the pale
and do not deserve to be included within the framework of
scholarly inquiry. Clearly, no one could reasonably expect
RAND to make a practice of employing people who were not
"non-Communist" ! In a similar vein, Davison argues, "The
fact that all the interviewers were Vietnamese nationalists"
assured that they would not be content simply to tell the
Americans what they wanted to hear about the NLF, "Devo ­
tion to their country, " he as serts, "probably moved inter­
viewers to represent conditions as accurately as possi­
ble. " (36 ) Some of the interviewers, and of course Saigon
authorities , call the GVN the "nationalist" party in the war.
But the usage is so questionable that it has been avoided
even in the American press , As a foreigner in Vietnam,
Davison identifies the nationalists as those who express
"devotion to their country" by agreeing to join him in work­
ing for a military establishment which at that moment was
busy killing thousands of Vietnamese people. His judgment,
and RAND's as well, of what constitutes an objective study
of the National Liberation F ront does not deserve to be
taken seriously.
The transcripts suffer from a number of other defects.
First, an attempt has been made to remove all names of
people and places, ostensibly in the interests of protecting
the respondents from future reprisal . With a bold cynicism,
these Pentagon-financed consultants affirm that "Research­
ers have an ethical responsibility to ensure that no one
suffers from having been a subject of research. " (37 ) On the
other hand, studies published by RAND consultants often
reveal these names and places, while careless editing has
left a few identifying details still legible in the transcripts.
Although anonymity has by no means been uniformly main­
tained, the general policy of eliminating such detail causes
considerable inconvenience for the reader.
More serious, information on American and GVN atroci­
ties has been removed from the text. Davison concedes,
"One team leader reported that he occasionally cut material

168
having to do with mistreatment of prisoners , in order not
to jeopardize access to certain police and military instal­
lations , but that does not seem to have been a general prac­
tice. " The reason given for deletions makes sense, and
readers may wonder how other team leaders avoided the
need to edit transcripts in order to stay on the good side of
US-GVN officials . On the same subject, Anthony Russo has
written :

Material on torture of prisoners or brutal treat­

ment of civilians by Americans, Koreans, or Sai­
gon troops was removed when the interviews were
being typed up in Saigon. The policy, set by Goure,
was the subject of bitter disagreement between
him and me; I would never remove any material
from interviews that went through my hands , nor
would several others; but most complied with
Goure' s censorship policies. (38)

For these reasons, the transcripts cannot be considered

fully accurate sources on American activity in Vietnam.
When considered altogether, these various factors limit
the value of the transcripts as historical sources. Two
hundred forty two of the respondents are defectors, and not
surprisingly they tend to stress the shortcomings of the
NLF. At the same time, reports from the 43 POWs are not
that different in tone from those of the defectors. In fact,
some try to convince their interrogators that they were
just about to desert before being captured and therefore
should really be counted as uralliers. " (39) The generally
m ixed picture of the NLF which we get from the transcripts
might be a reflection of the real situation, but we cannot
draw such a conclusion given the fact that the bias of the
information gathering situation was so marked. Both de­
fectors and POWs had no good reason for speaking well of
the NLF and many which encouraged a negative report. In
some respects, udefectors " and M pOWS " are not the best
categories for dividing up the respondents . The group might
be more meaningfully split between the witnesses who dis­
cuss in some detail the activities of the NLF, and the inter­
viewees who offer only cursory testimony. Usually, the

169
Front's "'line and policy " tends to seem more complex,
realistic and attractive in the longer and more thorough
interviews , involving both defectors and POWs . But all too
often, for reasons which by now should be clear, the inter­
viewers are content with pat anti-NLF comments, and do
not press their subjects for further information.
The RAND materials are thus well suited to answer cer­
tain kinds of questions , but not very helpful at all in dealing
with others . For example, the reader quickly discovers that
a credible picture of NLF strengths is not easily extracted
from the transcripts. If we took them at face value, we
would assume that in 1 967 the Front was falling apart,
losing public support and helplessly giving ground before
adversaries who were on the verge of winning a military
victory. This picture is inaccurate, as we know from sub­
sequent history, but it is what we would expect from defec­
tors who had decided the NLF was doomed and had escaped
from an apparently sinking ship by joining the GVN side.
Many of the defectors are well informed, but their obser­
vations are distorted by this fundamental miscalculation.
Jumping to the conclusion that the Front was finished, they
overlooked those strong points which enabled the insurgents
to stage the Tet Offensive and to keep fighting for years
afterward.
Along the same lines, the transcripts do not, and cannot,
tell us the full story of Saigon rule in the countryside or
the impact of U. S. military intervention on Vietnamese so­
ciety. Interviewees speak with some candor of their hatred
of Diemism. After all, the dictator Thieu himself had been
a m ember of the military junta which usurped power from
Diem in 1 963. But they are not asked, and they do not vol­
unteer, any opinion of later Saigon governments. As Davi­
son explains, need for the "cooperation of Vietnamese and
American authorities " dictated that Nquestions could not
be asked about South Vietnamese politics . " (40) Similar
concerns prevented interviewers from probing very ener­
getically for villagers ' attitudes toward the United States.
In any case, as we have seen, negative information which
was uncovered tended to be censored out of the transcripts.
One of the topics the interviews do cover, and in price­
less detail, is the array of difficulties encountered by the

170
NLF . The way cadres solved problems is not fully docu­
mented and must often be inferred from the more lengthy
and thoughtful interviews . Instead defectors dwell on the
Front's weaknesses, and interviewers are happy to encour­
age such reports . The result is that we are presented with
a comprehensive picture of all the different kinds of prob­
lems which came up as the Front responded to American
escalation. Rather than trying to make the transcripts per­
form a function for which they are not well suited, I have
followed the RAND sources in stressing this side of NLF
history. The perspective is not without value. We gain a
special appreciation of the Front as we observe it confront­
ing, and surmounting, obstacles which would have stymied
a less cohesive political movement.

FOOTNOTES

Bob Purdy helped me a great deal with the final version of

the paper. I want to thank him , as well as Steve Karaian, who
drew the map; and also the following people, for their sug­
gestions and criticisms of earlier drafts : Feroz Ahmad,
Herbert Six, Paul Faler, Jim Green, Jim Hunt, Allen Hunt­
er, Jim Kaplan, Esther Kingston-Mann and Henry Norr.
I am especially grateful to Linda Gordon and Peter Weiler .
Their firm attachment to the NLF has meant a lot to me ­
I wouldn't have dared to undertake this project without their
support.
( 1 ) A cadre is an official exercising responsibility in one
of the NLF ' s local organizations.
(2 ) For a general description of the Rand project, see W.
Phillips Davison, "User's Guide to the Rand Interviews in
Vietnam " (Santa Monica, 1 972), published by the RAND
Corporation. E xcellent critical discussion of RAND' s Viet­
nam work is found in David Landau, ·The Viet Cong Moti­
vation and Morale Project, " and Anthony Russo, "Looking

171
Backward : Rand and Vietnam in Retrospect, " both in Ram ­
parts (November, 1 972),
�word on terminology, Saigon authorities speak of MDinh
Tuong" Province, and the name is used by American offi­
cials and journalists, and by RAND as well. But the NLF
calls this area, along with neighboring MGo Cong, " My Tho
Province, after the Capital City of My Tho . District bound­
aries and village names also may vary, depending on whose
maps are consulted, Throughout the paper, when I am aware
of contrasting terminology, I have chosen to employ the
vocabulary of the NLF , for reasons which I hope will be­
come clear in the Chapter on MVillage Politics . " According
to one RAND study, MIn clinging to the French province
names, the Viet Cong would appear to be the more practical
nationalists . Several generations of Dinh Tuong peasants
have grown up thinking of their province as 'My Tho . ' "
David Elliott and W. A , Stewart, I'pacification and the Viet
Cong System in Dinh Tuong : 1 966- 1 967 " (Santa Monica,
1 969), 7 FT.
(3 ) I have transcribed passages from the MDT " series
just as they appear in the original, complete with misspell­
ings, grammatical errors and clumsy phrasing, No attempt
has been made to signal when inclusion of such mistakes
has been deliberate. Putting in a "sic" for each of the doz­
ens of errors, it seemed to me, would only add to the dis­
traction for readers already bothered by the mistakes
themselves. Readers should keep this in mind when they
encounter words like Mmajestuously" and Mproseltying " in
the paper.
Pairs of numbers separated by a slash are references to
the MDT" series . The first number refers to the interview,
the second, to the question within the interview. For exam­
ple, this quote is from interview #250, question #27 : 250/27.
Because of space limitations, I have not included in this set
of footnotes most of the references to transcript passages
referred to in the text, Readers interested in a complete
set of footnotes should write to Radical America for a copy.
(4) See the description of this battle in Wilfred Burchett,
Vietnam : Inside Story of the Guerrilla War (New York,
1968), 85ff.

1 72
 (5 ) There is a good discussion of this issue of "upward
mobility" within the NLF in Jeffrey Race, War Comes to
Long An : Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province
(Berkeley, 1 973), 167ft.
(6 ) "Living integrated with the enemy" is discussed in
Burchett, Inside Story, 59ff.
(7 ) Robert Sansom , The Economics of Insurgency in the
Mekong Delta of Vietn,am (Cambridge, Mass., 1 970), 65.
(8 ) The Vietnamese phrase hoc tap is translated as "po­
litical indoctrination" by RAND - see 49/33, for example
- when "study" is really the more appropriate term . RAND
translators sometimes disagree about this matter ; note
references to "indoctrination sessions" in some interviews,
"study sessions " in others.
(9) Later on, these tactics played a more direct military
role. For example, when Saigon troops passed through a
village, the peasants beat on their wooden fish. Guerrillas
were almost impossible to trap because, when GVN forces
attempted to encircle them, they simply headed in a direc­
tion where no noise-making could be heard . See 159/60 for
an example.
( 1 0) When Wilfred Burchett first published accounts of
Diem atrocities, he was criticized by American observers
sympathetic to the Saigon regime . Burchett, Vietnam Will
Win ! (New York, 1 970), 49, But the transcripts corroborate
Burchett 's grim picture of Diem 's rule. See, for example,
the long discussion with interviewee # 1 35, a defector, and
one of the most authoritative respondents in the whole se­
ries. Long patronized by American scholars and journalists
as a MCommunist, " and therefore a hopelessly biased ob­
server of the NLF, Burchett's description of the insurgency
is borne out again and again, even down to minor details,
by evidence from the transcripts. Note, for example, the
respondents ' references to Mmother carbine" incidents,
first analyzed in InSide Story, 1 09ff.
( 1 1 ) Sansom devotes only a page to bombing and shelling,
which, he recognizes, "threatened to push the issue of land
reform, technology, Viet Cong taxes, and everything else
into the background. " The Economics of Insurgency, 240.
( 1 2 ) The most notorious proponent of this view is Samuel

173
Huntington, '"The Bases of Accommodation, " Foreign Af­
� (July, 1 968).
( 1 3 ) NLF regUlar forces did fight some major battles
during this period. For example, see John Albright, '"Fight
Along the Rach Ba Rai, " John Albright et al., Seven Fire­
fights in Vietnam (Washington, 1 970), 67-84.
( 1 4 ) These fortifications look quite different if we simply
switch over to view them from the invaders ' perspective :
'"My Lai 1 was screened by a thick hedge and heavily guard­
ed by booby traps , Within minutes one of the mines hidden
in the hedge line was tripped and the men of Bravo Com­
pany heard screams . Lieutenant Cochran was killed and
four GIs seriously injured in the explosion • . Another
• .

booby trap was tripped; once more there were screams and
smoke. This time three second platoon GIs were injured and
the unit was in disarray. The surviving GIs insisted that
they were not going to continue the mission, and said as
much to Captain Michles. Colonel Barker flew in himself
to see to the evacuation of the wounded, and then made an
amazing decision; rather than call on the first or third pla­
toon to complete the mission, he simply canceled Bravo
Company's order to search and destroy My Lai 1 . " Later
that day, Bravo Company murdered scores of peasants in
neighboring My Khe 4, Meanwhile, in the more publicized
incident, '"Charlie Company, " also under Colonel Barker's
command, was massacring Vietnamese in My Lai 4 , Sey­
mour Hersh, Cover-Up (New York, 1 972), 1 3.
(15) MFace-to-face struggles " are discussed in Burchett,
Inside Story, 62ft, He notes that during the Diem adminis­
tration, '"It was difficult for the police and local authorities
to be too brutal with demonstrators who all claimed they
were loyal supporters of the government and only came so
that the government should know what was being done in its
name in the countryside. And as high authorities of the gov­
ernment could not admit that atrocities were authorized in
its name, the demonstrators had a useful weapon to take
back with them in their arguments with local authorities. "
Inside Story. 67.
(16) This example shows the close interdependence be­
tween political and military activities of the NLF. Ideally,
the Front counted on guerrillas to keep Saigon troops on the

174
defensive, leaving its regular units free to strike where
they pleased. When military forces functioned in this way,
enemy soldiers stayed close to their bases, and local ca­
dres could operate freely in the villages. Their activities
led to the mobilization of more recruits and taxes, thus
strengthening military forces, which in turn were even
more able to protect liberated territory from hostile in­
cursions . But bombing and shelling tended to reverse this
process. When people fled their villages, taxes and recruits
were hard to come by, and big NLF units suffered accord­
ingly. In any case, they could not easily venture into areas
which were being intensively bombarded. As a result, the
mobility of AR VN forces was augmented by bombing and
shelling, and, left on their own, guerrilla squads could not
prevent them from penetrating many areas . In such circum­
stances, without a military shield, local cadres found it
impossible to carry on with their work. The complex inter­
relationship of politics and military affairs, and among the
various Front military units, is discussed in the excellent
article by Elliott and Stewart, "Pacification and the Viet
Cong System in Dinh Tuong."
( 1 7 ) The political weakness of Saigon's defector program
was summarized this way by a POW : "When reading the
Chieu Hoi leaflets, I experienced a mixed feeling of disbe­
lief and apprehension. I felt that the war being waged in
South Vietnam was not the business of an individual, but of
an entire people. Therefore, peace can only be achieved
when the leaders of both participants in the war agree to
sit down and negotiate. I hardly believed that peace could
be obtained through the conversion of cause of any lone in­
dividual. " 1 42/1 89. With their meager understanding of the
reasons why people joined the NLF, Saigon authorities did
indeed conceptualize defection as a form of "conversion, "
in which cadres were persuaded to turn away from Com­
munist blandishments. To them, the defector was a "ralli­
er" who had come back to the true faith.
These thoughts from Bernard Fall further help to put the
Chieu Hoi program in perspective : it • • In Vietnam during
•

1 966 a total of 20,242 Chieu-Hoi ( tOpen Arms' defectors)

came out of the jungle, bringing with them a total of only
1 , 963 weapons - i.e. most of these defectors were unarmed

175
civilians . • Meanwhile the South Vietnamese Army lost,
. •

that same year, at least 1 1 0, 000 men, who simply walked

off and out of the war. " MThe View from Vietnam , " New
York Review of Books (February 9, 1 967), cited in In the
Name of America (Annandale, Virginia, 1 96 8 ), 35 1 .
( 1 8 ) The draft seems to have been reinstituted in late
1 967, apparently in conjunction with planning for the Tet
Offensive. As in 1 964- 1 965, the move was part of a major
effort which, it was hoped, would end the war. See 285/ 1 8 ,
288/ 1 9, 289/33.
( 1 9 ) The phrase is Wilfred Burchett' s . See his discussion
in Vietnam Will Win, 1 1 5ff.
(20) Contrasting land policies of the Saigon regime on the
one side, and the Viet Minh and NLF on the other, are dis­
cussed in Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency. Many in­
terview respondents corroborate Sansom 's findings.
(2 1 ) For another discussion of this subject, see Frances
Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake : The Vietnamese and the
Americans in Vietnam (New York, 1 973), 220ff.
(22 ) This interview is particularly valuable because in
general the "DT " series is short on female respondents.
Only nine of the defectors and three of the POWs are wom­
en. Other informative women interviewees are #65, a POW,
#1 82, a defector, but, in the words of her interviewer,
"a great fan of the VC , " and #253, a defector.
(23) New York Times, February 4, 1 968.
(24 ) Ibid., February 6, 1 968. The dispatch read in part :
"To stop the enemy troops, the allied forces had to attack
them in the positions they had taken in homes and other
buildings . It was a necessity of war. But the looks that the
people of Mytho gave the Americans today appeared to be
angry. " The correspondent offered an estimate of 750 ci­
vilian casualties in My Tho as a result of the fighting.
Ben Tre, Capital C ity of neighboring Kien Hoa Province,
was brought to the attention of American readers by another
paragraph in this same dispatch. UIt became necessary to
destroy the town to save it, " a U. S. Major was quoted a s
saying. liThe V C had people all over this town, " noted Major
Phillip Canella of Ben Tre; liChrist, they were everywhere."
(25 ) Jean-Claude Pomonti, liDans la zone du G. R . P."

1 76
(MIn the PRG Zone" ), and MChez les partisans du G. R, P,"
("With the Partisans of the PRG" ), Le Monete, February
7-8, 1 973. V lronique Decoudu, MBinh- Phu, village deltalque,
contr81€ par . Ie G. R. p . : Quand six mille paysans assistent
'a une spectacle de danses dans une atmosphere de reconcili­
ation nationale" ( MBinh Phu, Delta village controlled by the
PRG : When six thousand peasants attend a dance show in
an atmosphere of national reconciliation" ), Le Monde, Feb­
ruary 3, 1 973. Jacques Leslie, MExclusive Report : A Day
Inside a Viet Cong Stronghold, " Los Angeles Times, Feb­
ruary 1 , 1 973.
(26 ) Davison's observation is in MUser 's Guide, " 27. The
remark by Goure is cited by Anthony Russo, MLooking
Backward, " 57. My analysis of the RAND project is much
indebted to the Russo article, and also to David Landau 's
essay in the same issue of Ramparts.
(27 ) Landau discusses Zasloff's rank in "The Viet Cong
Motivation and Morale Project, " 32 . The remarks about
RAND staffers ' hidden affiliations are in Davison, MUser's
Guide, " 32-33.
To be fair, we should note that the first RAND team in
Vietnam produced some of the best studies to come out of
the project. See J. C. Donnell, G. J. Pauker, J. J. Zasloff,
"Viet Cong Motivation and Morale : A Preliminary Report "
(Santa Monica, 1 965). This study, sympathetic to the NLF,
came out at a particularly awkward moment. IIIf what you
say is correct, then we have joined the wrong side, " noted
Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton after
reading the report . Cited in Landau, "The Viet Cong Moti­
vation and Morale Project, " 33. Committed to escalating
the war, U. S. planners chose to ignore Zasloff's findings .
No discussion o f the RAND project would be complete
without a m ention of its most impressive results, the truly
inspiring reports of Konrad Kellen, IIA View of the VC : Ele­
ments of Cohesion in the Enemy Camp in 1 966- 1 967"(Santa
Monica, 1 969), MConversations with Enemy Soldiers in Late
1 968/Early 1 969 : A Study of Motivation and Morale" (Santa
Monica, 1 970) and 411971 and Beyond : The View from Hanoi"
(Santa Monica, 1 97 1 ).
(28 ) Davison's remark on relations with US-GVN author-

1 17
ities is in NUser 's Guide , " 32 . The interviewer of subject
#208 noted that, NHe mistook the interviewer for a GVN of­
ficial, even though the interviewer had done his best to ex­
plain the purpose of the interview to him. " Landau 's com­
ment is in ioIThe Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, "
31.
(29 ) Russo : «Virtually every prisoner was tortured • • • •

Prisoners were tortured as a matter of course, even those

who tried their best to be cooperative. NLooking Backward, "
54, 56 . Davison : " Many prisoners had been mishandled or
even tortured during earlier interrogation sessions, and
some defectors had been treated roughly, or at least with­
out respect. " NUser's Guide, " 33-34. One POW among the
respondents reported that he was tortured Nlike the rest of
the POWs . " 1 42 / 1 89. Another indicated that he had been
"beaten up savagely. " 239/83. The 86-year-old woman POW
was also beaten. As her interviewer noted : "Mrs. XXXXX,
86-years -old, was very sick, tired, and unable to sit up• • • •

I don't understand why the Special Forces arrested and tor­

tured such an old lady. " 264/interviewer's comment. See
also 49/40, 2 1 3/43, 272/3. For police presence during in­
terviews, see 57/interviewer 's comment, 1 44/19. Davison
suggests the possibility that interviewing rooms were
bugged, in "User 's Guide, " 30.
(30) See RUsso 's discussion of the Chieu Hoi program as
a -rest and relaxation program for the V. C ., " in "Looking
Backward, " 55. For an example of a "false rallier, " note
interview #87 . Jacques Doyon writes that according to the
C IA 7- 1 0% of the deserters eventually returned to the NLF.
He also provides a vivid sketch of the My Tho Chieu Hoi
Center. -The My Tho camp was pitiable. For the first time,
a water tank on wheels from the army had been obtained.
Before, it was necessary to boil the filthy water from the
irrigation canals. A dirty, shabby building, a cramped dor­
mitory of thirty to forty beds, tents where the deserters
sleep or daydream. A painful atmosphere of idleness, bore­
dom, neglect. Men hang around, while at the camp gate the
interrogations go on non-stop. " Les Viet Cong Paris, 1 968),
257, 259.
Here are impressions from another French observer, on
Saigon's attempts to educate defectors :

178
 When the head of the Center enters one of the con­
ference rooms, he shouts, "'Let me introduce a
friend, stand up ! " The ralliers stand up in unison,
clap their hands «with force and enthusiasm " (com­
ments my guide) and shout : ICWelcom e . "
To relax them or put them i n the mood, one of
the instructors orders his proteges-prisoners to
beat out the rhythm of the " Fantastic Ride of the
Anti-Communists . " The men are seated in a cir­
cle. Hands flat on the table, they listen to their
mentor chant in rhythm : "'One, two, cavalry of
Vietnam, one, two . " On the words one, two, the
men strike the table first with their right hands,
then with their left, and then with both at once. Af­
ter the hands, the feet, the right, then the left,
striking the floor. After the feet, in turn heads
shake. Finally their whole bodies participate in
this bizarre dance which ends with a chant, taken
up together by master and pupils :
"'Forward, forward, have courage. Life is rosy.
A fresh wind is blowing. Don 't hesitate, don't be
afraid of anything, one, two. Don 't wander, for fear
of losing your vigor, one, two . "
The rhythm accelerates a s the song approaches
its end. Faces are streaming with sweat and an
implausible joy shines in people 's eyes . Result of
the exercise ? or of conviction ? In addition, each
day the center rings with the sound of the anti­
vietcong hymn, designed, as was gravely explained
to me, to condition minds in the proper spirit.

Sample lyrics : "Today I have broken with the Vietcong, my

life begins to smell perfume from all sides," etc. Fernand
Gigon, Les Americains face au vietcong (Paris, 1 965), 1 95ff.
(31 ) Occupations : Secretarial or clerical, 3; Profession­
al, 1 4 ; Business, 3; Government Service, 2 ; South Vietnam­
ese Army, 6 ; Student, 3; No data, 5. Education : Secondary
School, 5; University, 1 6 ; No data, 1 5 . Place of Birth : North
Vietnam, 2 2 ; South Vietnam, 5; Central Vietnam, 6 ; Cam­
bodia, 1 ; No data, 2. Religion : Roman Catholic, 7; Viet­
namese -traditional (mainly Buddhist), 1 4 ; Protestant, 2 ;

179
No data, 1 3. See chart in ""User's Guide, " 1 6 . By contrast,
a villager who reached the "first grade" of elementary
school (the fifth, and last, year of elementary school) de­
scribed himself as "relatively well educated. " 1/31. Only
one respondent, a POW from the North Vietnamese Army,
was born in the North : #287.
(32 ) Davison, "User 's Guide, " 24-25 . Perhaps signifi­
cantly, Russo reminisced in an entirely different spirit :
"The field trips I took in Vietnam revealed a lot about the
war. Everywhere the American advisors seemed hassled,
powerless, and isolated from the Vietnamese, as they stuck
together in their compounds. I felt much more in touch with
the country than most of them because I traveled with Viet­
namese, stayed in Vietnamese hotels (which averaged about
fifty cents per night before inflation hit), and ate in Viet­
namese restaurants. The food was delicious ; I had never
dreamed there were so many varieties of rice. Usually, af­
ter we arrived in a place, I would leave the Vietnamese to
the interviewing and explore the area, talking to village and
hamlet officials and going out into the countryside whenever
possible. " ""Looking Backward, " 55.
(33) The four observations cited in this paragraph are
found in the interviewer's comment for interviews 45, 1 6 1 ,
1 7 1 , and 230. The subject of the second of these interviews
had been asked : "Do you think that there is an afterlife ? "
He answered : "In my opinion, I cannot understand what I
am unable to see with my own eyes. Whether a man has a
soul or not, 1 cannot see it, so I am not confident in its ex­
istence. Death puts an end to everything" - hence his
"atheist materialism . " He also stated : "'I have not joined
the Communist Party because 1 did not carry out my duties
actively. I don 't want to join it because 1 still love my fam ­
ilY." 1 6 1 /26, 12.
(34) These three remarks are found in interviewer's
comments for interviews 1 59, 272, and 1 5 .
(35) The four interview exchanges mentioned i n this par­
agraph are found in 1 57/60, 159/ 1 1 , 1 40/40, 1 95/92 . On
salaries, Davison, MUser's Guide, " 1 4 , When asked about
totalitarian methods, subject #159, a POW, stated : II I
• • •

don 't think they were totalitarian because the Party forbade
all forms of totalitarianism. Everything was decided upon

180
by everyone in the Party Chapter, and everything was car­
ried out collectively. When I was not a member, I didn't
find any totalitarianism either, because the directives or
orders from above were carried out well for the good of
everyone concerned." A moment later he suggested that the
Diem government was a much better example of totalitari­
anism. 1 57/62 .
(36 ) Davison, MUser 's Guide, " 2 1 -22.
(37 ) Ibid., iii.
(38) Ibid., 43 ft. Russo, MLooking Backward, " 57-58.
(39) See, for example, subjects 1 48 and 209.
(40) Davison, MUser' s Guide, " 7.

181
 CHRONOLOGY OF VIE TNAM WAR

1 960. At the beginning of the year, the Diem regime

seemed firmly entrenched. Its armed forces occupied the
countryside, many peasants had been forced off their lands
into barbed wire encampments known as agrovilles (later
called strategic hamlets or new life hamlets ), while local
officials and landlords ruled unchallenged in the villages.
But during the year, opposition to Diem began to coalesce,
as Viet Minh veterans joined with others in armed resist­
ance. On December 20, various dissident groups formed the
National Liberation Front.
In My Tho, the Concerted Uprising began when under­
ground cadres quietly made contact with the villagers.
Soon, terror was unleashed against the local Saigon appar­
atus, and villagers were feeling confident enough to at­
tend meetings for study of the line and policy of the new
insurgency.
1 96 1 , The revolt spread rapidly. Diem appealed to the
United States for more aid, and PreSident Kennedy respond­
ed, first with contingents of the Special Forces , then with
numerous advisors to bolster the Saigon army and admin­
istration. Clandestine warfare against the Democratic Re­
public of Vietnam was also stepped up.
In My Tho, popular associations were set up, and the
Front began to develop Local and Main Force military
units. Land reform campaign then got underway.
1 962, Expanded U, S, aid temporarily checked the N LF
advance, with helicopter tactics causing particular prob­
lems for the insurgents ,
In My Tho, after starting so well, local cadres and guer­
rillas were thrown into disarray by growing American in­
tervention. But a round of "'supplementary reorientation
sessions " helped them to reconsolidate morale.
1 963. The NLF surged forward throughout the country­
side. Rebellion spread to the cities, with the Buddhist peace
movement playing a prominent role. In November, the de­
teriorating situation prompted American leaders to cast
Diem aside and to bring in a new Saigon regime.
In My Tho, the NLF won the battle of Ap Bac (January 2 ).

1 82
Organized by village Women's Associations, "face-to-face "
political struggle against Saigon authorities was stepped up.
1 964. The N LF threatened to expel its enemies complete­
ly from the rural areas, while urban cadres agitated openly
in the streets of Saigon. A series of coups further disrupted
the counter-insurgency effort. Tied down by an election
campaign, the Johnson administration secretly planned
drastic counter measures .
In My Tho, strategic hamlets and military po sts in great
numbers were destroyed. The insurgency was stronger than
it had been at any time since 1 946. Local cadres put in mo­
tion a regular system of taxation and universal conscrip­
tion to mobilize resources needed to finish off the Saigon
regime.
1 965. To prevent an NLF victory, the U. S. sent troops to
South Vietnam and started to bomb the North. After months
of instability, the Thieu-Ky regime was installed in Saigon.
U. S. and NLF forces collided in a series of bloody, incon­
clusive battles.
In My Tho, US-GVN authorities began the systematic
bombardment of the countryside. Faced with prospects of
prolonged war, and temporarily stunned by the bombing and
shelling, local cadres organized another round of supple­
mentary reorientation sessions to pull the insurgency to­
gether for the next phase of fighting.
1 966. Stalemate on the battlefield. The Americans found
that they had to pour in more troops just to hold their own.
The NLF talked of a long war lasting into the next genera­
tion.
In My Tho, bombing and shelling intensified, and US-GVN
forces launched pacification drives in key villages, espe­
cially to the west of the Province Capital City . Among the
insurgents, regular military units withdrew somewhat from
combat, while guerrilla tactics received renewed emphasis.
1 967. In spite of increasing pressure, the NLF seemed
to be holding its own. With victory still not in sight, and
troop levels soaring up to the 500, 000 level, the United
States was plunged into a political crisis. The anti-war
movement grew. Within the government, a disenchanted
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara secretly organized
the "Pentagon Papers " project.

183
 In My Tho, U, S. troops appeared in January, and pacifi­
cation measures forced the NLF out of a number of vil­
lages. Bombing and shelling generated more refugees,
Front military recruiting became impossible in mahy
l
areas, and its tax receipts dwindled, Casualties and defec­
tions thinned the ranks of the cadres, but enough insurgents
hung in there to keep the NLF presence alive in most vil­
lages.
1 968. The NLF stunned the world, and demoralized the
Johnson administration, with its powerful Tet Offensive
(January 30). Striking simultaneously at over one hundred
important targets all over the country, the F ront hurled its
adversaries back into the cities. President Johnson was
forced to resign his office. Gestures from the U. S, con­
veyed the impression that a negotiated settlement was near.
In My Tho, NLF forces participated in the Tet Offensive
with an attack on the Province Capital City.
1 969- 1 9 7 1 . The newly elected President Nixon chose to
continue the war. U. S. ground forces were gradually with­
drawn, but bombing and shelling escalated to new heights.
Invasions of Cambodia in 1 970 and Laos in 1 97 1 extended
American military commitments throughout Indochina and
touched off giant protests at home. An influx of veterans
lent authority to the anti-war movement.
In My Tho, the Front lost ground. More bombing and
shelling.
1 972 . Another major guerrilla offensive. Like Johnson in
1 968, Nixon worked to persuade the American people that
"'peace is at hand . ..
In My Tho, the offensive enabled NLF forces to liberate a
number of villages, including key strongholds in the Front' s
2 0/7 heartland region.
1 973, Paris peace agreements signed in January. But af­
ter official withdrawal of American presence, the war went
on, with survival of the bellicose Thieu regime dependent
on massive U. S. aid.
In My Tho, the political strength of the NLF was intact.
In the new "'rice war, " its military units repeatedly threat­
ened to cut the Indochina Road.

1 84
F R E E ! Special Dan Berrigan issue, by return mail, when you get a $5, half-yea
(six issues) to Liberation, the monthly radical political magazine_ Read for
yourself the text of Berrigan's controversial speech on the Middle East, plus:
"Daniel in the Lions' Den" by Noam Chomsky, "Thoughts & Recurrent Mus­
ings on Israeli Arguments" by Allen G i nsberg, "Bringing It All Back Home" by
Dave Dell inger, & "Grand I l lusion: American Jews & Israel" by Paul Loeb_
o I want a sub & here's $5_ 0 Just send the Berrigan issue. H ere's $1.

New York, N Y 1 00 1 2 TODAY ! ! I I ! ! ! ! ! ! !

185
BOOKS RECE IVED DURING 1 973

(All books listed were published in hardcover in 1 973 unless

indicated. )

Charles H. Anderson : The Political Economy o f Social

Class (Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice-Hall, 1 974, 340pp)
$ 10.00

Stanley Aronowitz : False Consciousness : The Shaping of

American Working Class Consciousness (New York : Mc­
Graw-Hill, 465pp) $ 1 0.00

Reverend William H. Carwardine : The Pullman Strike : New

Edition with Introduction by Virgil J. Vogel (Chicago :
Charles H. Kerr, 286pp) PB $2.50

Eugene V. Debs : Walls and Bars (Chicago : Charles H.

Kerr, 286pp) PB $3.50

Farrell Dobbs : Teamster Power (New York : Monad Press,

255pp) PB $2.95

Richard Fitzgerald : Art and Politics : Cartoons of the

Masses and Liberator (Westport, CT : Greenwood Press,
254pp) $ 14.50

Marc Fried : The World of the Urban Working Class (Cam­

bridge : Harvard U. Press, 404pp) $ 1 5.00

Michael Glenn and Richard Kunnes : Repression or Revolu­

tion : Therapy in the United States Today (New York :
Harper Colophon, 1 89pp) PB $2 .95

Daniel Guerin : Fascism and Big Business (New York : Mo­

nad Press, 31 8pp) PB $3.25

Charnie Guettel : Marxism and Feminism (Toronto : Cana­

dian Wom en' s Educational Press, 1 974) $ 1 .95

186
Patrick Kinnersley : The Hazards of Work : How To Fight
Them (London : Pluto Press, 400pp) PB .90p

Robert J. Lifton : Home From the War : Vietnam Veterans

- Neither Victims Nor Executioners (New York : Simon
and Schuster, 478 pp ) $8.95

Charles Lipton : The Trade Union Movement of Canada,

1 827- 1 959 (Toronto : N.C. Press, 384pp) PB $3.95

Paul Nizan : Antoine Bloye (New York and London : Monthly

Review Press) $6.95

Gilberto Lopez y Rivas : The Chicanos (New York and Lon­

don : Monthly Review Press, 187pp) $7.95

James J. Matles and James J. Higgins : Them and Us :

Struggles of a Rank and File Union (Englewood Cliffs, NJ :
Prentice-Hall, 1 974) $6.95

Dave Nichols : Financing Elections : The Politics of an

American Ruling Class (New York : New Viewpoints
Press, 1 974 ) $9.95

James O 'Conner : The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York :

St. Martins Press, 2 76pp) PB $3.95

William L. O'Neill, ed. : Insights and Parallels : Problems

and Issues of American Social History (Minneapolis :
Burgess Publishing, 355pp) PB $4.95

Pedro Pietri : Puerto Rican Obituary (New York and Lon­

don : Monthly Review Press) $7.50

Thomas Powers : The War at Home (New York : Grossman)

$8.95

George P. Rawick : From Sundown to Sunup : The Making of

the Black Community (Westport, CT : Greenwood Press,
208 pp ) PB $2.95

181
David Riazanov : Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New
York and London : Monthly Review Press, 1 974, 2 3 1pp )
$8.95

Ron Roberts and Bob Kloss : Social Movements : Between

the Balcony and the Barricade (St. Louis : Mosby, 1 974,
200pp) PB $7.95

William Serrin : The Company and the Union : The "Civi­

lized Relationship" of the General Motors Company and
the United Automobile Workers (New York : Alfred A.
Knopf, 306pp) $ 7.95

Pedro Juan Soto : Spiks (New York and London : Monthly

Review Press) $6.50

Jeanne M. Stillman, PhD and Susan M. Daum , PhD : Work

Is Dangerous to Your Health (New York : Vintage Books,
448pp) PB $ 1 .95

Stephen Thernstrom : The Other Bostonians : Poverty and

Progres s in an American Metropolis, 1 880- 1 970 (Cam­
bridge, Harvard U. Press, 339pp) $ 1 2 .00

B. J. Widick : Detroit : C ity of Race and Class Violence

(Chicago, Quadrangle Books , 1 972, 239pp) $8.95

188
INDEX

VOLUME SEVEN OF RADICAL AMERICA

THE WORKING CLASS

Martin Glaberman : A Note on Walter Reuther, 6:113-117

David Montgomery, Martin Glaberman, and Jeremy Brecher : Symposi­
urn on Jeremy Brecher's Strike !, 6:67-112
Adriano Sofri : Organizing for Workers Power, 2 :33-76
Katherine Stone : The Origin of Job structures in the Steel Industry,
2 :19-64

WOMEN'S LABOR

British Women' s Liberation and the Working Class : Three Case His-
tories, 4-5:131-187
Linda Gordon : Introduction (to the Women ' s Labor issue), 4- 5:1-8
Ira Gerstein : Domestic Work and Capitalism, 4-5 :101-128
Jerry Berndt and Ann Popkin : Women Working (photographs), 4-5:95- 100
Selma James : Women, the Unions and Work, Or • • • What Is Not To Be
Done, 4-5:51-71
Patricia Mainardi : Quilts : The Great American Art, 1:36-68
Sheila Rowbotham : The Carrot, the Stick, and the Movement, 4 -5 :73 -79
Angela Weir and Elisabeth Wilson : Women ' s Labor, Women ' s Discon-
tent, 4-5:80-94

AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE

Anthony Chase : The Strange Romance of Dirty Harry • . • , 1:20-35

Dave Wagner : Donald Duck : An Interview, 1:1-19

U. S. mSTORY

Nick Thorkelson and Jim 0 'Brien : Underhanded History of the U. S. A.,

3 (whole issue)

RADICAL HISTORY

Stan Weir : Requiem for Max Shachtman, 1 :69-78

POETRY

Pablo Neruda : In Praise of Ironing, 4-5 :72

Lillian Robinson : Political Ecooomy, 4-5:129-130

FRANCE

Cahiers de Mai : The Lip Watch Strike, 6:1-18

189
ITALY

Autonomous Assembly of Alfa Romeo : Against the State as Boss, 2:7-76

Ernest Dowson : The Italian Background, 2 :7-14
Jim Kaplan : Introduction to the Revolutionary Left in Italy, 2 :1-5
Lotta Continua : Take Over the City, 2:79 - 112
Potere Operaio : Italy, 1973 : Workers struggles in the Capitalist Cri­
sis, 2:15-31
Bruno Ramirez : Interview with Guido Viale, 2:113- 119

I
FED UP WITH ESTABLISHMENT SCIENCE??? I
THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE . . .
I
I
SUBSCRIBE I
I
TO:

I
I
SESPA/SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE is an organization of I
I
scientists, engineers, teachers and all others united to challenge
the current trends in science.

I
It argues that science is inevitably political, and in the con·
text of contemporary U.S. corporate capitalism, that it largely
contributes to the exploitation and oppression of most of the
people, both in this country and abroad. It calls for a reorient­
ation of scientific work ahd suggests ways in which scientific I
workers and concerned people affected by science (everyone!)
can redirect research to further meaningful social change. I
I
Learn about what we're doing (and about groups in your
area) by subscribing to our bi-monthly magazine SCIENCE FOR
THE PEOPLE.
I
Write to: SESPA, 9 Walden St. , Jamaica Plain,
Mass. 02130. Tel. No. 4 27-064 2 (6 1 7)

I
I
190
 Subscribe to

RADICAL AMERICA
An i n dependent Marxist journal with i n depth analyses of
the history and current condition of the working class in
North America and Europe, shop-floor and community or­
ganizing, history and politics of women's liberation, contem­
porary socialist theory and practice, and popular culture.

Subscription Type:
1 year $ 5 1 year with pamphlets * $10
__ 2 years $ 9 2 years with pamphlets $18
___ 3 years $12 3 years with pamphlets $24

Send t o :

Name Radical America is also a fine

gift to send to close or long­

Address lost friends. Send RA gift s u bs

of __ year ( s ) with ___ or
without __ pamphlets to:
City State Zip

Name Name

Address Address

City State Zip City State Zip

Tear out this page and send to Radical America, 5 Upland

Rd., Cambridge, Ma. 02 1 40

*For a selection of RA pamphlets included in recent mailings

see listing on the next page.

191
 Radical America offers a pamphlet subscription designed
to make available new pamphlets and magazines from the
Left press in the US and abroad.
Over the past year we have sent out the following mail­
ings to pamphlet subscribers :

Winter, 1973 : Italy After Mussolini by John Hewetson from

Radical America; Rise and Fall of the Union by James
Boggs from NEFP; Punching Out by Martin Glaberman
from Sojourner Truth; Parable of the Water Tank by Ed­
ward Bellamy from Chicago Workers ' Defense; and Rana
Mozelle by Paul Garon from Black Swan Press .
Spring, 1 973 : General Strike, France 1 968 b y Andrew Hoyle
from Sojourner Truth; Union Committeemen and Wildcat
Strikes by Martin Glaberman from Bewick Editions; Two
Steel Contracts by Staughton Lynd from NEFP; Traite de
Savior Vivre, Part II by Raoul Vaneigum, now no longer
available; and Down Below by Leonora Carrington from
Black Swan Press.
Summer, 1 973 : Dialectic and History by C .L.R. James from
Radical America; Run-Away Shops by Robert Zimmer­
man from United Front Press; Hospital Workers by Eli­
nor Langer from N EFP; Where 's I.W. Abel by Workers
for Democracy, now no longer available; The Fetish
Speaks by Freddie Perlman from Black and Red; and
Music is Dangerous by Paul Nouge from Black Swan
Press.
Autumn, 1973 : Race and Ethnicity in the American Working
Class by Madison Labor History Group from Radical
America and NEFP; Women in the Working Class by
Madison Labor History Group from Radical America and
NEFP; and Bolsheviks and Workers' Control by Maurice
Brinton from Black and Red .

The year's worth of pamphlet plus a regular subscription

to Radical America is available for $ 10. Help the Radical
America pamphlet program develop with the magazine, and
help yourself to a bargain.

1 92
RADICAL
AMERICA
A SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE ON

Women's Labor
- The Political Economy of
House Work

- The Family & Wage Labor

- British Women's Liberation

and Labor Struggles

1 92 pages, $2.00 from Radical

America, 5 U pland R d . , Cam­
bridge, Massachusetts 02 1 40
 •