Fire in the Lake (27 page)

The NLF land reform program had a strong impact upon the peasantry. At the same time it did not seem to produce the large-scale shift of support to the NLF that an American working on humanitarian instincts might have predicted. It made the new proprietors see the advantage of maintaining an NLF presence somewhere in the neighborhood, but it did not by itself convince them of the necessity of an NLF government, nor did it often persuade them to give up their hopes for a quiet, secure life and go out to fight for the NLF. As the NLF cadres discovered, the peasants did not initially make the connection between their own economic situation and the national government. Even after the NLF had driven the local landlords to flight, the people often remained submissive to the local officials and reluctant to involve themselves in what they saw as a conflict between outsiders. To turn the villagers into loyal partisans of the NLF was, in other words, a long project requiring political education and organization.

The Approach: Children of the People

As the first step in establishing a base and fanning the fires of revolution, the Party began agitation of farmers to seek their own interests — the right of owning land or reduction of land rent. This struggle, however, remained sporadic and weak and did not constitute a mass movement. To better meet the enemy, which remained strong in the village, the Party began the elimination of influence of the village notables and local security agents. However, it failed to follow this with the development of a mass base. The cadres thought that efforts to end the authority of the village leaders alone would be enough. The enemy succeeded in maintaining the village administration. In the face of such a situation the Party called for a meeting. We explained to the villagers the evil caused by village notables and security agents. We awoke the people to the fact that if the American-Diem clique succeeded in permanently maintaining the organization of village notables and security, soon Mister H, the cruel landlord, and others would return to the village to seize land and collect back rent. For that reason, we said, the farmers must eliminate the influence of the village notables and sweep away the security agents. At the same time we sought to win the sympathy of the families of the village notables (while we were urging the masses to rise up and eliminate the influence of the notables). It was a good method. After a while certain notables refused to work for the enemy and took the side of the people.

Thus, when our enemies tried to begin projects in the village no one would work for them. The US-Diem clique tried to win back the people by distributing drugs in the village. The offer was flatly rejected. Some of the people even debated openly and strongly with the enemy agents. Finally the Diem clique had to abandon the village, no village council could be maintained there.

— Extract from “Experiences in Turning XB Village in Kien Phong Province into a Combatant Village”; a People’s Revolutionary Party document.
¹

To any American reading such a document it would seem that the Front cadre — if he were telling the truth — had left something out. How, after all, could mere propaganda have any effect on these (rightly) cynical and suspicious peasants? As much strangers to the village as the government agents, the cadres had come along and asked the villagers to join them in the desperate task of evicting those people who had always dominated the village, thereby exposing themselves to retaliation by the GVN. Why should the villagers have trusted them any more than they trusted the government officials?

When asked such questions, the villagers throughout South Vietnam tended to give one answer with great consistency: “The Liberation cadres (or, for the benefit of the Americans, “the Viet Cong”) were nice to us… they behaved politely and nicely to the people… they talk to us in a friendly manner… they do not thunder at the people like the Government soldiers.… The thing that the people don’t like about the Government officials is their behavior… the Viet Cong treat us well.”
²
To the “hardheaded” American analysts of insurgency tactics, the fact that the NLF cadres were “nicer” than the government officials and soldiers hardly seemed an adequate explanation for the success of the NLF. Surely the peasants did not join the guerrillas because the guerrillas were polite. While most analysts agreed that the ARVN could help the war effort by refraining from rape, theft, and pillage, they could not quite see how good manners might translate into the hardware of “population control” and military recruitment figures.

Q. Have you any problems or reasons to be dissatisfied with your life… with the GVN cadres?

A. There was nothing for me to be dissatisfied with. Because of VC propaganda I joined the Front.

Q. What did you think were the differences between the Front and the GVN and their policies?

A. This was beyond my understanding.

From such remarks as these the analysts could only conclude that the recruit was concealing something. While it is impossible to ascertain the truth about any young man, it is highly probable that many were telling the whole truth, that the explanation for their desire to join the Front lay squarely within such testimony.

Even in the 1960’s many South Vietnamese went through half a lifetime without having any personal contact with a government official.
³
The fact that the NLF cadres had sought them out and spent time talking to them made an impression on them such as Americans must find it difficult to imagine. To such young Vietnamese the NLF cadres were powerful people. They had weapons at their disposal, they brought the exciting air of the outside world with them — and yet they talked to the people of the village as if they cared for them and needed their support. Those young men who had met the GVN officials usually had not had at all the same experience with them. On the contrary, the GVN officials were often “haughty” and “arrogant”: they made no effort to establish personal relationships or to show their concern for the people. As one former NLF propaganda cadre, who had covered seven provinces of the Delta, analyzed the GVN propaganda in 1965,

The substance is good but the propaganda cadres don’t have an appropriate attitude in dealing with people. They aren’t dressed the way the people are; the GVN armed propaganda cadres come to the village and swear and don’t know how to gain people’s sympathy. Their way of living and their behavior are different from those of the people. They work not as cadres but as officials.
⁴

The Americans, who were by then organizing the propaganda campaigns of the GVN, believed in the “substance” of the propaganda. The villagers, by contrast, believed in what they saw with their own eyes: the GVN officials did not care for them. The GVN wanted not to win them over, but merely to rule them.

The GVN officials could not, of course, be blamed for their attitude. Without any form of political instruction (such as the NLF propaganda cadre simply took for granted), they tried to assume the traditional attitude of the mandarins, to become “fathers” to their people, and they did not know what to do when it did not work. Had they been allowed to follow their own inclinations and stay out of such villages, the irritation might not have been so great. But by 1962 the South Vietnamese armed forces had expanded to the point where the GVN was drafting proportionally as many men or more as the governments of such “developed” countries as the United States or Great Britain. The young recruits had perhaps as little allegiance to the Diem regime as to the government of Thailand or Burma. But the military machine kept grinding on, the recruiters filling up their trucks. The American advisers did not see that this recruitment posed a political problem. (Surely, the Americans said, the Vietnamese boys understood they had a duty to defend their country.) Ngo Dinh Diem did not see it as a problem that required a solution. (Did he not possess the Mandate of Heaven?) The two allies were blind to one another and therefore to the effects of their own actions.

The NLF meanwhile, as a matter of conscious policy, took a very different tack. One cadre described the policy in the most vivid of terms: “The soldiers came from the people. They were the children of the villagers. The villagers loved them, protected them, fed them. They were the people’s soldiers. If the soldiers love the people, the people will love the soldiers in return.”
⁵

Next to Ngo Dinh Diem’s own paternalistic thesis about the role of government, the statement of this Front officer is indeed startling, for it sets the whole “family” of the nation upside down. Now, suddenly, it is the people who are the “parents” and the source of all authority, the soldiers who are the “children” and obedient to them. In reversing the whole order of society, the officer turned the Front army and bureaucracy into something much closer to the American military and civil “service” than to the traditional Confucian government. But there is a second message within the statement. Whereas Vietnamese mandarins had always taken the formal, Chinese father-son relationship as the model of statehood, this Front officer now seemed to be offering the Vietnamese mother-child relationship as a substitute. Because to him the soldiers came from the people — as a child comes from its mother’s womb — so they should not live in a state of repressed conflict with the people, showing only their “self-control.” Rather they should demonstrate their feelings and be nurtured with the permissiveness that characterizes the Vietnamese child’s relation to his mother. If they did so, then “government” would come to mean something very different than it had ever meant to the villagers before.

Though the NLF did not always achieve this sort of harmony with the people, its cadres invested a great deal of effort in the attempt, for to the Vietnamese villagers it was not political theory but human behavior that counted. Of the Twelve Points of Discipline for the People’s Liberation Army, eight concerned the conduct of the soldiers towards the civilian population: “Be fair and honest in business with the people.… Never take even a needle from the people.… When staying in civilian houses, maintain it as if it is one’s own.… Be polite with the people and love the people.… Be respected and loved by the people.”
⁶
Every Front member, whether he was a soldier, an officer, or a civilian cadre, had to obey the injunctions to “live together, eat together, and work together” with the people. NLF personnel, both military and civilian, were trained to treat civilians as members of their families, to include them within the circle of their trust and obligation. The cadres who lived for a while in one village would address the people in such familiar terms as
me
(mother),
bac
(uncle),
anh
(elder brother), and so forth, depending on their relative age.
⁷
To the villagers the very fact that the cadres would speak to them in a familiar manner indicated that they were not unapproachable authorities who might starve or exploit them at will.

Finally, a few Vietnamese-speaking American officials understood. By 1965 they managed to pressure the U.S. mission to pressure the GVN into creating a series of cadre teams to go into the villages and work with the villagers on political and civic action programs.
⁸
These new GVN cadres were to wear black pajamas, sleep, eat, and live with the people. They were to help the villagers with their tasks of building and harvesting, and get to know them, just as the Front cadres did. In preparation for this task, they had a twelve-week training course in political and social action conducted by a number of former Viet Minh officers who, unlike most of the GVN officers, had some notion of political education and some concern for the lot of the peasants.
⁹
By 1966 the number of these cadres had grown into the hundreds and, if one were to believe the public speeches of the high GVN and American civilian authorities, constituted the major hope for the pacification program. The Americans and the GVN had, in other words, put all their efforts into creating a line-for-line copy of the NLF teams.

But it did not work. Once out in the villages and away from their instructors, the GVN cadres tended to revert to the old habits of officialdom. They would grow long nails on their right hands — the mark of a man who did not work with his hands; they would strut about the village with their rifles on their shoulders or sit by themselves in the shade watching the villagers come and go from work. The villagers would call them “Mr. Cadre,” not even knowing their names, much less using the familiar of “brother” or “sister.” There were exceptions, of course, but only exceptions to the rule.

Seen from close at hand, the whole phenomenon was a curious one. The GVN cadres, after all, came from much the same part of the population that had produced the NLF cadres; many of them had brothers in the NLF or would spend some time in it themselves. They had received an equivalent amount of training — and still they could not behave like the Front cadres. The difference between them was completely inexplicable — except for one thing: the NLF cadres alone had the force of necessity behind them. When asked how the NLF treated the people of his village, one defector said with some irritation: “They lived on the people’s support, so they had to be nice to the people; otherwise where would they get the supplies for feeding their people?”

The idea that a government depends on the support of the people must appear self-evident to an American, but it was a revolutionary concept for the Vietnamese. Though in theory the traditional empire derived its sovereignty indirectly from the people, it had in practice so little need for revenues as to be in peacetime almost autonomous financially — a ritual state suspended over the villages. As for the French colonial regime and the Diem government, they had been almost wholly supported, armed, and financed from abroad. Of all the political groups in Vietnam, only the Communists had renounced both the Confucian and the French colonial traditions in favor of the European concept of popular sovereignty. Unable to seize power by a simple coup in the capital city, the NLF, like the Viet Minh before them, put their doctrine into practice and relied upon the people for their own survival. It was this necessity that their cadres understood. Conversely, the GVN cadres who went into the villages in black pajamas were merely playing a part, and a part that most of them did not believe in. They were brought up to believe that the people needed them rather than vice versa, and their faith was confirmed by the fact that their job was to dispense American goods to the people and to build hamlet defenses for them that they themselves would never have to rely upon. It did not take very much economic theory for them to see that their superiors, the district and provincial officials, lived on the endless supplies of money and goods from abroad, and that without foreign goods, foreign weapons, and finally foreign soldiers, their cause would be lost. As for the people of the villages, they too understood the situation perfectly. Brought up to suspect all authorities, they could see from the behavior of the officials that the GVN had no compelling reason to treat them well — even though they might actually give them things from time to time. As the former NLF propaganda cadre reported: