5

While most of America and people at Cornell were consumed with finding a way out of Vietnam, I was equally engrossed with finding a way back in. I had a sense that I would be a witness to the final chapter of the conflict and wanted to be there to document what I felt was certain to be a controversial and pivotal moment in the history of both America and Vietnam. The immediate origins of the conflict in the late 1950s had not been well documented by eyewitness accounts. The overwhelming bulk of the documentation about the war had been done during the height of the American intervention, when Rand and other researchers flooded the country. Now that the war was winding down, so, too, was the American interest in it. I thought the tragedy of our ignorance in intervening in Vietnam would be compounded if we were equally clueless about the way it ended, and the reasons for the failure. Sadly this turned out to be the case, as many Americans (and Vietnamese) concluded that the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime was due to North Vietnamese tanks crashing through the gates of the Presidential palace, without much attention to how and why the situation had changed between 1971 when the GVN seemed on the brink of victory, and April 30, 1975 when it collapsed in shambles. My research did, at least, show that the “brink of victory” view was illusory.

In addition, I had planned to base a significant part of the research for my thesis about the establishment of the institutions of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam after the Geneva Agreements on interview accounts of those who had lived and worked in that system. The only source available was North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors who were in South Vietnam. I had hoped to reestablish my former contacts from the first Rand project in My Tho to do an update of the 1965-68 study, and then use these same contacts to gain access to North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors for my dissertation research.

Although Gerry Hickey and other anthropologists were encountering problems about the conditions under which their research was undertaken, the even more troubling issues of human subjects of interviews in wartime situations was only beginning to appear on the horizon. For me, having already done the earlier Rand study, I was convinced that the historical value of the eyewitness accounts to an important cold war issue would be sufficient justification for the project. I was well aware from my Cornell experience of the potential controversy, but my personal drive to understand the complexities of Vietnam swept aside any scruples I might have had. David Mozingo was supportive, and so, reluctantly, was George Kahin, who clearly had reservations about my dissertation plan, but did not try to deflect me. Kahin was probably intrigued by the possibility of producing a counter-narrative to the Washington view of North Vietnam from authoritative insider accounts of how the system operated.

A major obstacle to this plan was finding a willing sponsor. Fred Iklé , chairman of the Social Science Department at Rand had told me in June 1969 that Rand had no interest in such a study, since it too had no interested government sponsor to pick up the tab. It was clear that the controversies generated by earlier Rand studies and the collapse of interest in pacification or any other aspects of the military side of the war after the Tet Offensive made a “Dinh Tuong II” project a non-starter for Rand. But a number of factors that emerged in the post-Tet period gradually brought new elements into the situation.

The first was that, contrary to many people’s expectations, newly elected President Richard Nixon decided against a rapid termination of the war, which meant that it would endure as priority issue throughout his first term in office. In addition, starting in 1969, reports of progress in pacification began to reach Washington, after a year of post-Tet gloom and doom.

As I wrote in The Vietnamese War: “The Washington Post reported right after President Richard Nixon’s inauguration that a comprehensive policy review of Vietnam policy elicited ‘galloping optimism’ among American officials in Vietnam, despite the skeptical tone of the questions posed in Washington.” The answers to questions about how the war was going “for the most part reflected the dominant theme of high American officials in South Vietnam that the war, to quote one official, ‘is going better than at any time since 1961.’ ” The optimism reflected a view that “it is not so much a question of allies doing better as the enemy doing much, much worse, and the population becoming increasingly disenchanted with the war.”¹

The following year, in October 1970 the New York Times reported that “opinion in US has been polarized for so long that it has not kept up with realities of Vietnam and is about [two years] behind current events.” U.S. officials maintained that the “allies have never been stronger and [the] enemy never weaker,” though there was still uncertainty about how the South Vietnamese would perform on their own. Because of the legacy of previous overconfidence and the resulting credibility gap between official pronouncements and the U.S. public, “officials are reluctant to express their new optimism openly…”²

From the early Nixon administration on, many insiders were skeptical of the “New Optimism,” as the Washington Post reported in February, 1969. “a reluctance on the part of NSC [National Security Council] staffers to ‘believe the good news.’”³ From my perspective, this was a ideal constellation of opinions about the war. The “new optimism” put Vietnam back on the policy agenda, while the skepticism of some NSC staffers created an incentive to gain a more accurate and realistic understanding of what was really happening in Vietnam.

Among the NSC skeptics was Bob Sansom, who had been very supportive of my earlier work in Dinh Tuong, which he found very helpful for his own research. Sansom had become the National Security Council staff member in charge of collating and analyzing information on the Vietnam War in the Vietnam Studies Group of the NSC, and had a strong interest in being well informed. The idea of having an independent source of information about the situation in the Mekong Delta therefore appealed to him. In addition, his own research in Dinh Tuong gave him a personal interest in the area. It was, therefore, Robert Sansom who generated the momentum for my return to Vietnam.

It was certainly Sansom who provided the momentum for this sudden revival of Rand’s interest in my resuming research, since Rand was always on the lookout for ways of remaining on the radar of Henry Kissinger and the NSC. Sansom responded on July 9, 1970, that the proposal looked “superb” and that he could not add anything to it.⁵ At that point, it looked like my return to Vietnam was a done deal.

I had one interested supporter in Rand, “Blowtorch Bob” Komer,⁶ who had left his position as pacification czar in Vietnam (head of the Civilian Office of Revolutionary Development or CORDS) in the waning days of the Johnson Administration, and had ended up with Rand, writing up his Vietnam experiences.

“Blowtorch” Bob Komer – onetime “pacification czar’ in Vietnam

On a trip I took to Santa Monica sometime in the fall of 1970, when it looked as though my departure for Vietnam was imminent, Komer offered some encouragement, and noted that the new province chief of Dinh Tuong was the dynamic Col. Le Minh Dao, who later distinguished himself by his heroism in the last stand of ARVN forces against the North Vietnamese making their final assault on Saigon in 1975. With his usual bluster, Komer said, “Tell Col. Dao you’re one of my boys.”

I didn’t find the role of acolyte in the Bob Komer club especially appealing and, needless to say, did not bring up Komer when I finally met Col. Dao. But, as it turned out, Bob Komer was the only one at Rand or in government who paid attention to my reporting once I was on the ground and was consistently supportive of my work. I suppose I should have been grateful.

However, months passed without any finalization of the project. I waited in limbo in Ithaca without any clear idea of what the holdup was. Finally, in December 1970, I received a letter from Rand that explained that the military had rejected the idea and that the MACV was denying the “theater clearance” necessary to enter Vietnam in an official capacity. Without this validation of credentials by the American Government, the Vietnamese government would not issue me a visa to enter the country for purposes of research. This was a major setback, since I did not have a “plan B” in the event the Vietnam project fell through.

The prime source of opposition evidently came from General Creighton Abram’s headquarters, the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV), which asserted that it was fully on top of the situation in Vietnam, which it claimed was going well. MACV, therefore, did not require or welcome any competing assessments. Moreover, MACV said that supporting such a project would be an unacceptable burden on its limited (and diminishing) resources. (In the event, other than supplying some office space for Mai and providing APO privileges, MACV did nothing at all to facilitate or support the project when it finally got underway). MACV’s objections were outlined in a December, 1970 telegram informing Rand that the proposal to do interview research in My Tho had been rejected.⁷ I later saw the pile of correspondence relating to this project, which was an inch thick.

I had not corresponded with Bob Sansom during this period, and so did not know the inside story of the controversy stirred up by my proposed return to Vietnam. It was clearly Sansom who broke the impasse by using his position on the NSC to urge the intercession of his NSC boss. The Rand Study on its various Vietnam projects notes “The logjam was finally broken when General Alexander Haig delivered a message from the National Security Council to MACV, asking that the project be approved. A memo later found in the National Archives indicated it was it was Sansom’s boss, Wayne Smith—Larry Lynn’s replacement on the National Security Council after Lynn resigned over the Cambodia invasion in 1970—who had intervened to get the project going by asking Haig on one of his trips to Vietnam to carry his message to Saigon.

“The memo to Haig, dated December 11, 1970, carried a notation in bold letters, “Urgent Action for Your Trip,” and addressed the subject of “David Elliott’s Study of the Viet Cong in Dinh Tuong.” Smith mentioned that Elliott had produced “some of this government’s best analytical work on the Viet Cong in his RAND studies of 1965–67.” Smith added that Elliott had “proposed to update his earlier work” and that the Vietnam Special Studies Group had “strongly urged him to do so.” Smith emphasized that Elliott’s study  would be “an important contribution to our current knowledge on VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure] strength and activities” and concluded by asking Haig to raise the issue with General Abrams, stressing that, “If we don’t get this turned around ASAP, we will lose Elliott and the study.” Smith pointed out that DoD supported the study, but MACV had just “turned down the proposal after dragging out their review for months (in the hope, undoubtedly, that Elliott would give up),” without giving any reasons for their rejection. The refusal “was signed by Chief of Staff Dolvin.” However, at Wayne Smith’s behest, Haig delivered a countermanding order to a MACV representative meeting him on the tarmac of Tan Son Nhat airport as he stepped off the plane, and the My Tho project received a green light.⁸

A Changed Landscape

When I last saw Vietnam in May 1968 just after the devastating second wave of the Tet Offensive, large parts of Saigon were in ruins, and consternation dominated both American and Saigon officialdom and many in Vietnam and America thought the war had been lost.

During my absence in the intervening period, I had been unable to follow the course of the war in any detail, and was dependent on news coverage which gave only a superficial overview of how the war was progressing. I had been reluctant to credit the “new optimism,” having encountered similar claims in the past. But, on arrival in 1971, we quickly found out that the security situation was indeed dramatically different from the chaos of 1968. The Viet Cong had been substantially weakened in many rural areas and it appeared as though vast swaths of territory had been “pacified” in the sense that one could travel widely in places like the Mekong Delta without fear of being shot at. There were a number of Americans in Vietnam who thought that the war was nearly over.

We arrived in Vietnam in February 1971. The following month, the GVN launched the disastrous Lam Son 719 operation against North Vietnamese forces in lower Laos. This was, in effect, a test of Vietnamization. The operation was largely planned by the ARVN (Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam) and American ground forces were forbidden to accompany the Saigon forces into Laos. The attack culminated in chaos and retreat, with memorable photos of panicked ARVN soldiers clinging to the skids of helicopters in a chaotic retreat.

We embarked on the My Tho project at this critical juncture, where optimism reigned but clouds were appearing on the horizon. I can no longer remember the interactions I had with MACV and the US military in the weeks after our arrival.Apart from establishing APO mailing connections, MACV did nothing to facilitate the project. Somewhere along the line, MACV assigned a Major Smith as a liaison with ARPA, but any communications with him were left to my intiative. As far as I can remember, I never met Major Smith or discussed the My Tho project with him. In February 1972, I sent him a summary of our preliminary findings.

When Rand closed down the motivation and morale project in 1969, the spacious villa at 176 Pasteur was returned to MACV, which now used it as headquarters for a demolition unit.  When we arrived Mai found a place to work at the ARPA compound.

Mai in front of entrance to Rand office in ARPA compound 1971 Former ARPA compound on Ben Bach Dang, since demolished, now the Ton Duc Thang Museum 2019

DE, Joan Allen and Joe Carrier at Elliott Virginia farm, 1974

Gerry Hickey was still engaged in research, and working out of his apartment, picking up his mail at the ARPA compound along the Saigon river. Joan Allen was the administrative assistant supporting the modest Rand activities there. She remembered that there was “a sense of suspended animation,” in sharp contrast to the once bustling grand villa at 176 Pasteur.⁹ Other than that, the only Rand presence was Andy Sweetland of the Economics Department who had been sent to Saigon in 1968 as a caretaker for the interview programs which were being terminated. Sweetland moved to the ARPA office when Pasteur closed down, and made himself useful to MACV over the next several years using his computer skills to analyze data from the Hamlet Evaluation Surveys which attempted to measure the extent of Saigon’s territorial control of the countryside. When we arrived in early 1971, Sweetland was engaged in attempting to fine tune yet another version of the HES survey, which had by this time become so convoluted and immersed in figures that purported to measure economic development that it no longer accurately measured the simple indicator of how likely it was that the authorities would be shot at in a given place. As we were to discover, there were plenty of other fundamental problems with the HES, which we discovered during the course of our study. Joan Allen was Rand’s administrative assistant, based in the ARPA compound, supporting Hickey and Sweetland. Not long after our arrival, Joan left Vietnam and Mai assumed many of her duties, in addition to helping with the My Tho project.

We were able to rent a one room second floor apartment looking out on Tu Do street, adjacent to the Continental Hotel. It was, fortunately, air conditioned. It had to be, since we were forced to keep the single set of windows facing Tu Do closed because of the noise and pollution. It was ideally located but somewhat dingy and claustrophobic. This would be our base in Saigon for the next year. In 1971, the view of Tu Do street was of the modest Xuan Thu book store across the street, and the since-demolished Passage Eden arcade, with its once-fashionable shops selling imported luxury goods. The bureaus of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post were within a half a block of our apartment, and I made good use of this proximity during our stay in 1971.

.

Our 1971 apartment on Tu Do street. On the upper right of the picture, painted white, is the corner of the Continental Hotel. Our apartment is in the tan colored second story block above the ground floor businesses, with awning (second to left of the corner of the Continental Hotel and in photo below right). Le Thanh Ton street is on the far left of the photo. The entrance to the apartment was around that corner, through a non-descript alley (below). Photos DE

Xuan Thu bookstore on Tu Do viewed from our apartment. Photo DE

Having made the connection with MACV and settled into our living quarters, my next move was to find a way to reestablish our former connections in My Tho so I could begin interviewing. The first step was to contact Vuong Bach, who had been one of the three key interviewers during the first phase of the Rand My Tho project. By this time, Nguyen Huu Phuoc had been reinstated in the army and promoted to full colonel, and was now serving as the commander of the Regional Forces Training Center in Ben Tranh district of Dinh Tuong province. Dinh Xuan Cau, who had been a pillar of the previous project, was fully engaged with various entrepreneurial and political projects.

Bach turned out to be absolutely indispensible to the second phase of the My Tho project. Not only did he do the bulk of the interviews – with customary insight and sensitivity, but he was the one who made the connections with the Vietnamese government, without which the project would have never gotten off the ground. His key contact was his political patron Nguyễn Tiến Hỷ who, was a minister of state without portfolio in the government of Nguyen Van Thieu, which allowed him to network in any branch of the government he chose. The question of access to the My Tho Chieu Center was arranged by Bach through Nguyễn Tiến Hỷ, who had obtained his position in the Thieu cabinet in recognition of his longstanding leading role in the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD) political party and achieved political prominence as a member of the Caravelle Group, opposing Ngo Dinh Diem in the early 1960s. Bach had a different entrée into the local Dinh Tuong Police. His Saigon political connections included Đỗ Kiến Nhiễu, the mayor of Saigon, who came from the upper Delta and whose younger brother Đỗ Kiến Mười was the police chief of Dinh Tuong province. Bach thus obtained carte blanche to interview any prisoner in the province. Thus the whole project was arranged through Bach’s political connections.

Bach’s effectiveness as an interviewer was magnified by the fact that he brought with him an assistant named Nguyen Van Thi, who did much of the leg work in arranging interviews, and was himself a proficient interviewer. Bach also had a network of family and retainers who transcribed his interviews, significantly increasing the productivity of our small group in My Tho. We ended up producing nearly one hundred interviews from the beginning of March to the end of August, 1971. Rand certainly got its money’s worth.

I rented a modest sedan, far less roomy and grand than the Citroen I had once rented from Phuoc, to facilitate our commute to My Tho as well as transportation within My Tho. At first Bach and I stayed in the local hotel, and even did interviews there. Eventually I contacted our former landlord, who had now been promoted to Lt. Col. (he was a second lieutenant when we first arrived in My Tho in 1965) and arranged to rent one half of his duplex once again. This time Mai did not join me in My Tho. I worked in My Tho during the week and returned to Saigon on the weekends.

I made a protocol visit to the province chief Le Minh Dao (but did not pass on Bob Komer’s assurance that I was “one of his boys.”). I was impressed by the dynamism of Col. Dao, and also uncomfortable that I could not frankly tell him that I felt the future was bleak for the Saigon government, and that I did not see a happy ending, no matter how effectively he performed. This turned out to be prophetic, when he courageously provided the last effective military resistance to the communist forces before they swept into Saigon on April 30, 1975. Unlike the previous stay in My Tho, this time I was not there in a joint effort to find a way to win the war, but rather as pessimistic observer whose main objective was to document the end of a tragic historical chapter and fill in some of the gaps in the previous research now that I had a better idea of what issues to explore. I simply told Col Dao that we hoped to continue our study of the Viet Cong movement in the province that we had conducted in 1965-68.

My changing views on the war also affected my relations with the US advisory team in Dinh Tuong. Unlike the 1965-67 period, where I had close ties with the province advisory team, and was on good terms with both of the province senior advisors who served during this period, I had a rather distant relation with the 1971 senior advisor, John Evans, a civilian official (the military senior advisor position had been phased out during the course of “Vietnamization.”). Evans quickly saw that I would be little use to him, and my presence in his area of responsibility seemed to be just another headache he had to endure. I, in turn, felt that Evans was clueless about the Vietnamese situation in his province, and seemed to be focused on making himself look good to his superiors by presenting a rosy picture of the situation. Needless to say, he was not receptive to anything that challenged this view.

First Impressions

In the first phase of the Rand interviews starting in 1965, our initial impressions were misleadingly shaped by what turned out to be a one-time event. The majority of the first twenty or so interviews were with a flood of defectors who had been dragooned into military service as part of a short-lived Viet Cong attempt to mobilize new recruits from the Mekong Delta to send to battlefields in Central Vietnam to obtain decisive military victories before the U.S. could intervene. As discussed in an earlier chapter, this strategy was quickly abandoned when the U.S. did intervene in Vietnam, so the flood of deserters who managed to escape en-route to Central Vietnam and return to Dinh Tuong that we first encountered was actually an echo of a previous decision that had been reversed, and not of current realities. So, in 1965, we got off to a slow start, and did not begin to get a better grasp on the situation until we had been interviewing for several months.

There was no equivalent group in the Dinh Tuong Chieu Hoi center when we arrived, so we were confronted with the task of piecing together a picture of the current state of affairs by laborious gathering of impressions from the interview subjects that were available to us, most of whom were fairly low level hamlet cadres. The exception was the very first interview Bach did in early March 1971 with the former village Party Secretary of a village right next to the recently constructed Dong Tam base of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division, which had been withdrawn from Vietnam in July 1969.

We had no way of knowing it at the time, but this first interview previewed many of the important themes that ran through our subsequent research. His account of the security situation in this area, a supposedly secure zone less than ten kilometers from the province capital, alerted us to the complexities underlying the apparent pacification of most of Dinh Province. It was true that the number of Viet Cong cadres in the area had been dramatically reduced by the Ninth Division and Saigon security forces since the 1968 Tet Offensive, and that the revolutionary movement’s capacity to operate in villages like Binh Duc in this area had been drastically diminished. Given its geographical position, right next to the big U.S. military base, and as a key to controlling the road that connected the base to the province capital, this was to be expected. On the other hand, remnants of the Viet Cong “infrastructure” in Binh Duc still managed to hold on. (I titled my chapter on this 1971 period in The Vietnamese War “Holding On.”). This implied that while the Viet Cong were down, they were not out, and the war was far from finished. The term the Vietnamese used was bám (to cling to something, like a leech) or bám ruộng – to “cling to the ricefields.”

Since we had completed nearly 300 interviews in the first phase of the Rand study (1965-68) I numbered our interviews in 1971-72 as a continuation of the earlier series. The first of these, DT [Dinh Tuong] 301, was a young man, 24 years old, who was typical of the post-Tet generation of new recruits to the revolution to replace the 1960 generation of local cadres that had been largely killed off by 1971, especially in the period during and after the 1968 Tet Offensive. Ironically, he had joined the Party in October 1969, the very month the Binh Duc village Party Organization was formally disbanded. His rapid promotion to the rank of Village Party Secretary in 1970, even though there was no formal Village Party Chapter was, he said, due to the high attrition of local cadres. He did not have any formal training – which would have been unthinkable in the pre-Tet 1968 period. In the event, the district authorities soon discovered that he could not handle the complex duties of a Village Party Secretary and, in any event, there was no formal Party organization in the village. So he was reassigned as the political officer of a newly established village armed propaganda unit – a throwback to the 1959-60 period when such paramilitary units were the spearhead of the revolutionary movement as it attempted to gain a toe-hold in Dinh Tuong’s villages.

DT301 confessed that his level of political understanding was low, and that he mainly occupied himself with the tasks necessary for self protection. Despite his limited political sophistication, he did grasp and approve of the major objectives of the revolution. At first “when the VC cadres came to the village I was kind of frightened, but when I went to meetings and listened to them I began to have sympathy for them. I respected the Village Party Secretary the most because he was spell-binding when he spoke. I understood him right from the start. He talked about class struggle and volunteering to rise up to fight the GVN. Every family would benefit from the revolution, and in the future everyone would have enough to eat and wear.” His family, however, was concerned that they would get in trouble with the Saigon government if they discussed the revolution, and didn’t want their son to be politically involved on either side. But the success of the Tet Offensive in the villages of Dinh Tuong (the GVN forces had been compelled to withdraw to help defend the province capital, leaving a temporary power vacuum which was filled by the Viet Cong), like Binh Duc, encouraged him to join the guerrillas. There were only a handful in Binh Duc even in 1968 – each hamlet had one or two cadres and two or three guerrillas who were dispersed in order to maintain a more extensive foothold. DT310’s story was significant in that it indicated that recruiting was still taking place – enough to keep the revolutionary movement on life support. It was also significant in that he did not come from a family with a background of revolutionary sympathies or involvement, indicating that there was a potential recruiting base beyond the shrinking circle of longstanding Viet Minh and Viet Cong supporters.

By October 1969, a combination of a corruption scandal involving tax money and the killing off of local cadres let to the disbanding of the local village Party organization in Binh Duc village. A village armed propaganda unit was formed. This is usually a paramilitary force used in transitional situations before the revolutionary forces have gained full control of a village. The Binh Duc armed propaganda unit which combined military and political action thus represented a backward step from the period where there was a full-fledged revolutionary organization, led by a formal Party Chapter, but it was different from its 1959 counterparts in that it did not attempt to engage in political persuasion or mobilization of the villagers. Its main function was to protect higher level cadres when they periodically came in to collect taxes, which the local cadres no longer did because of the corruption scandal and the lack of capable cadres. The fact that there had been a corruption scandal was itself an indication of the declining effectiveness of the village Party organization, which was no longer able to keep such abuses in check. Moreover, the reliance on armed forces who were not native to the village created uncertainty among the villagers. DT301 revealed that “roving gangsters posed as tax collectors to shake down the civilian population. This made life more difficult for the genuine guerrillas, because the high turnover and secrecy had made it difficult for the people to tell who really represented the revolution, so the armed team coming to collect was often greeted with suspicion.” Nevertheless, the revolution continued to collect taxes, even in nominally Saigon-controlled areas.

Despite the weakness of the revolutionary movement in Binh Duc village, other villages on the other side of the Dong Tam base, farther away from the province capital. Thanh Phu and Long Hung village had a total of 30 to 50 guerrillas. But unlike the early and mid 1960s there were only a few scattered dispersed higher level military units to support them, and these spent most of their time on the outer fringes of the province, far from Binh Duc. These local guerrillas carried out the functions that civilian supporters had once provided the revolutionary movement, such as liaison agents linking the villages and hamlets to the districts. They were slower and more cautious than the civilians, who could more easily blend into the landscape, but still managed to hold the remnants of the revolutionary movement in the area surrounding Dong Tam together, despite the near crippling of the movement in DT301’s village of Binh Duc, where his defection left only two surviving Party members in the village. Having lost control over most of the village, the revolutionary movement was reduced to sporadic tax collections by sudden penetrations into GVN controlled portions of the village which sometimes resembled home-invasions by a marauding external force, without the backing of the community pressure that had been effective when the Party presence in the village was stronger. But the mere presence of 30-50 guerrillas in two villages on the western side of the major military base in the province was evidence that “pacification” was not complete.

This interview with DT301, the first that we did after my return to Vietnam, also previewed what we came to understand as the central feature of the security situation in Dinh Tuong in 1971, two years after the departure of the U.S. Ninth Division: that the “pacification” that had produced the apparent security in the province had been achieved not by extending Saigon’s control throughout all the villages of the province, but by compelling people in outlying areas to relocate to areas surrounding GVN centers of control such as roads and military posts. This was done through a combination of indiscriminate bombing and shelling, which made life in many areas not directly controlled by the GVN intolerable, and also by military operations that directly compelled peasants to dismantle their homes and move them to areas more easily controlled by Saigon. It was, in short, Sam Huntington’s “forced-draft urbanization” with bombing and shelling and coerced population transfers rather than industrialization driving the depopulation of the countryside. Pacification by forced population transfers left open the question of whether or not the GVN would still be able to control these displaced peasants if the situation became secure enough for them to return to their former hamlets and villages.

DT301 noted the impact of the post-Tet surge in US and ARVN military operations, and said “they caused a lot of difficulties for the people, destroyed their crops and belongings with the bombings and shellings, and this is why the people had to suffer privations. If they stayed in the liberated areas they wouldn’t be able to earn their living, so they had to flee into the strategic hamlets.” By “strategic hamlets” he did not mean the Diem-era enclosed hamlets surrounded by fences and moats and sharpened bamboo stakes (which had not been prevalent in the Mekong Delta, where hamlets were strung out along roads and canals rather than concentrated in compact settlements as in some other areas in Vietnam). Rather “strategic hamlets” typically referred to an agglomeration of thatched roof huts surrounding a local militia post, or clustered along roads.

GVN military post and scattered settlements along a canal in the northern part of Dinh Tuong province, 1971. Note the profusion of bomb craters. Photo DE

DT301 showed that despite his desertion, his sympathies still lay with the revolution. The people, he said “didn’t resent the Front. If they had to be far away from the troops and the revolution it was only because the GVN campaign had separated them ‑ if the people returned to their orchards the ARVN would investigate them and suspect them and then arrest them and beat them up. So the people were afraid to have contacts with the revolution only because they were

afraid of these hardships not because they either resented the revolution or the cadres.”

This first interview of 1971 alerted me to the complexity of the situation. First of all, one couldn’t reliably infer political disenchantment with the Viet Cong from the simple fact that a “rallier” had defected. Second, the account of DT301 raised the possibility that there were submerged reservoirs of support for the revolution, despite its apparent quiescence. One of the main points made in both the interim and final report on these interviews was that the Viet Cong were down, in 1971, but not necessarily for good. Should the situation change, as it did in 1972, the submerged support for the revolution might resurface. In short, the war was not over, as many “optimists” had concluded in 1971.

DT301 told us “at present Front forces are entrenched in every village even though the GVN is defoliating, cutting down the orchards and attempting to attract the people, they only encroach a little on the liberated areas. GVN soldiers don’t dare penetrate deep. In Binh Duc village GVN soldiers have penetrated only a few hundred meters into Ap Dong hamlet and are only able to shell liberated areas.” Several trips around the province revealed how costly these clearing operations were for the GVN soldiers, who suffered debilitating losses themselves while operating in an environment of mines and booby traps.

Toward the end of our research, Bach’s interview with a Region level cadre confirmed this picture of “holding on.” In many outlying villages the constant bombing and shelling forced the peasants to flee to GVN controlled areas. Although the cadres urged them to return or at least commute back and forth to tend their fields, the fear of being caught in the fighting ultimately discouraged them from doing so. In the end, it was mainly the cadres who were able to “hold on” in the areas they had once controlled and administered. But they continued to maintain a presence in 1971 and waited for better days.

It took nine months and nearly 100 interviews to corroborate this story, but it is remarkable that we should have encountered this fairly accurate overview of the complexity of the security situation in Dinh Tuong on our very first interview. What added to his credibility was that he was very open about the weakness of the Party in his village even as it managed to “hold on.” “The thing that I was most sad about was being unable to hold firm the people’s sympathy (giữ vững được lòng dân) and to motivate and attract people into the organizations of the revolution.” The depopulation of formerly “liberated” hamlets had caused the dissolution of the popular associations (farmers, women, and youth) which had been the foundation of the revolutionary movement, leaving only a skeleton organization comprised of the remaining hamlet and village cadres.

Although the GVN had gained dominance in Dinh Tuong by 1971, it had reached the peak of its power and was not able to translate this dominance into an end-game that would conclude the conflict. The Viet Cong were in a substantially weakened position compared to earlier years, but they were still able to sustain a stalemate by clinging to the villages and hamlets of province despite the GVN’s efforts to finish them off.

Filling in the gaps: Reconstructing What Had Happened in Dinh Tuong since the Earlier Rand Study

Although I happened to be visiting in Vietnam at the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive, we had already moved to Taiwan in late 1967, and I had submitted a report on the My Tho project to Rand at this time. A few interviews were conducted in late 1967 and into 1968, they were not incorporated into the report I wrote for Rand. There was nothing that I had seen that would suggest something as audacious as the Tet Offensive. The Viet Cong movement was being slowly ground down in Dinh Tuong, and the U.S. Ninth Division had just moved into its Dong Tam base. The devastating attack on the town of My Tho was totally unexpected, and I had learned nothing prior to my return in 1971 that would explain what had happened and how it had been possible, given the weakened position of the Viet Cong in the province. Finding answers to these questions was one of the primary tasks in “filling in the gaps” about the period between fall 1967 when, for all practical purposes, the research and analysis of the situation in Dinh Tuong ended, and our return in February 1971.

The Vietnamese War described the impact of the Tet Offensive in My Tho in the following terms: “When the Tet attack by the revolutionaries hit My Tho on the night of January 30–31, 1968, only the presence of special detachments providing security for President Thieu near the province compound, and some tactical mistakes by the attacking revolutionary forces, saved the city from being overrun. Only on the second day of the offensive, when President Thieu was evacuated to Saigon by helicopter, did the attacking forces become aware of his presence in the town. This was one of many unforeseen circumstances which undermined the Party’s offensive plan. The two lead attacking regiments were driven out of the city after three days by a determined defense of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and by province forces and, ultimately, by devastating U.S. firepower. Of Ben Tre, the province capital south of My Tho across the Mekong River, a U.S. major reportedly remarked, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” but the same might have been said of My Tho. The U.S. advisory team in Dinh Tuong reported after the first week of the offensive: “An estimated 25% of the city was burned, 5,000 residences have been destroyed and 25% of the people are homeless. The psychological impact of a calamity of this importance cannot be measured so close to the event, but it is obviously enormous.”

“In the excitement, shock, and turmoil of the nationwide revolutionary offensive, and the natural focus on the major cities, what was happening in the countryside went largely unreported. By the time the situation had stabilized in late spring of 1968, the extraordinary turnabout that had occurred in the villages of My Tho had subsided. However, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Tet Offensive in My Tho was that the demoralized and increasingly passive civilian population in the rural areas participated energetically, and often enthusiastically, in tasks which they had shunned during the previous year. This view from the villages is the main missing dimension of most accounts of this critical turning point of the war. Another important point raised by the Tet Offensive in My Tho is what it can tell us about how the local situation in the province fit into the ‘big picture’ of the war.” The surge of revolutionary enthusiasm following the peasants’ increasing political apathy prior to the Tet Offensive was less a resurgence of political sympathy for the revolution than a drive to push the war to a conclusion and bring about peace. In 1971 I took note of the fact that overwhelming dominance of the GVN had not stimulated a similar bandwagon of active support from the civilian population, perhaps partly due to lack of political sympathy with the Saigon government, but also probably due to a pragmatic conclusion that the GVN would be unable to achieve a definitive victory.

This “untold story” of the Tet Offensive, the remarkable and sudden regeneration of the revolutionary movement in Dinh Tuong province outside the urban areas, was a significant revelation to us as we attempted to fill in the void that had been left by our suspension of interviewing in 1968. The implication of this revival was that there were deep reservoirs of support for the revolutionary movement, and however beaten down it might appear at specific times, such as 1971, there was always a possibility of recuperation if circumstances changed.

The extent of the dislocation of the civilian population in the province became increasingly apparent as the interviews progressed. The process of depopulation often started with the decision of rural residents to move from their traditional homes in the shady orchards to temporary straw huts in the middle of the ricefields, because the orchards and treelines were under constant bombing and shelling as suspected Viet Cong military campsites. In some cases, the orchards were simply cut down, and the houses forcibly removed. By 1971 the GVN was forcing peasants living in temporary shelters in the middle of the ricefields to dismantle their huts and move into GVN controlled areas near posts or along the roadside.

DT301 suggested that the very success of the GVN in blanketing the province with a network of small militia posts created problems which were not apparent to most external observers at the time, but actually benefitted the Viet Cong in their struggle to “hold on” until a more favorable situation developed. In some ways the GVN success in setting up a network of posts was a contributing factor in this failure to take advantage of the military weakness of the revolution. The posts made Saigon complacent and reduced the scope and intensity of GVN ground operations, leaving the cadres and guerrillas with safe havens and some respite. The Binh Duc leader described the change caused by the departure of U.S. troops. “When the Americans were still here, their regular troops were very active so they didn’t need to set up posts or to have many units operating. They only relied on aerial bombings day and night without letup, and sent their ground troops deep into liberated areas. After the Americans withdrew, the GVN set up many posts. Each village built something like eight or nine posts, whereas the Americans used to have only two or three posts at most. The increase in the number of posts created a lot of obstacles for the VC [but] before, the Americans used shellings and bombings to the maximum and were only concerned about protecting their bases and barracks, so it was easy for the Viet Cong to hide, provided they built fortified bunkers.” Still “The increase in posts restricted the VC from carrying out their attacks a lot” [DT301].

The Region cadre interviewed by Bach (DT313) confirmed the remarkable capacity of the cadres and guerrillas to fit themselves into the interstices between GVN military posts and continue to operate under the noses of their adversaries. He stated that “the building of posts has reduced the area of operation of the cadres, and caused the Front a lot of difficulties. At present, the Front occupies the gap between the posts as its base of operation; for example, there are three posts in three corners, and the Front people live in the area in the middle where they plant mines and booby traps, and apply guerrilla warfare, etc.”¹⁰A special operations cadre from North Vietnam who operated in the western part of Dinh Tuong in the 1971-75 period described to me how his unit operated under the noses of a nearby GVN militia post and showed me a picture of himself taken in 1971 surrounded by unit members grouped around a table with a radio calmly listening to GVN radio transmissions from a military post only 350 meters away from their own camp.

When Sáu Đường, the party leader for the provinces of the central Mekong Delta travelled from the revolution’s base area in the Plain of Reeds to the villages in the so-called 20/7 Zone west of the massive American military base, between Highway 4 and the Mekong River, the very heartland of Dinh Tuong province in late 1971, “every hamlet in the 20/7 zone was covered with posts. Everywhere you looked there was the [GVN] yellow three striped flag flapping from high observation towers—you could even see the soldiers standing guard on them.” When Sáu Đường later described this situation at an expanded meeting of the Politburo in Hanoi in 1973, his listeners were stunned and skeptical.”¹¹ Even these hardened veterans of guerrilla war could not grasp the close-quarters conditions in which the Dinh Tuong revolutionaries were “holding on.”

Echoes from the Past

As we filled in the gaps of the historical evolution of the conflict in My Tho province, it became evident that this history had a powerful effect on the calculations of the peasants, as they assessed their present and future prospects and attempted to figure out what to do to preserve their interests while caught in an unpredictable conflict. We found it intriguing that many older interviewees mentioned previous instances when the revolution had been in a perilously weakened position. It was these recollections of a series of past recoveries from adversity that underlay the theme of a potential dramatic recovery from the revolution’s decline in Dinh Tuong in my preliminary and final report to Rand. Another factor was the ARVN setback in the disastrous invasion of Lower Laos which happened just as I arrived back in Vietnam, and provided an example of the kind of military setback that might start to unravel the position of temporary GVN dominance.

One of the illustrations of the revolution’s recuperative powers was in the last years of the First Indochina War. By 1952 the Mekong Delta appeared to be nearly pacified. But by late 1953 the situation elsewhere in the country began to shift against the French, and by 1954 this adverse tide had reached the Delta, and revolutionary movement experienced a resurgence of strength. My later research confirmed what the interviewees told us in 1971, that during the last months of the First Indochina War there was a dramatic resurgence of revolutionary power in the Mekong Delta. My Tho’s province Party history contends that by the signing of the Geneva Accords in July 1954, almost the entire rural area of the province was under Viet Minh control, as well as many of the secondary roads in the province.

The French military’s assessment of the situation in the Mekong Delta at the time the Resistance War ended was that pacification remained “fragile”: “Its eventual success requires a perseverance which we sometimes lacked. A characteristic example of this is the deterioration of the situation in Cochinchina during the last months of the war. At that time there occurred a renewal of Viet Minh military activity that would have required the initiation of a new pacification campaign. ‘Only the zones held by the sect forces remained relatively healthy; all other zones supposedly under our control became gangrenous.’ ” As A.M. Savani, the French intelligence officer who chronicled this period pointed out, however, in the end even the anti-communist religious sects abandoned the colonial cause.¹²

Another historical lesson about the transitory nature of attempts to suppress the revolution was the Diem regime’s attempts to eliminate the residual Viet Cong movement during the “Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign of 1956-59. During this period, large numbers of Viet Minh, both current and former members, were arrested and incarcerated for several months of indoctrination, only to be subsequently released. This campaign’s main impact was to prove to these former Resistance fighters that they had no place in Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnam and they would have to resist for survival. It was this group that became the nucleus of the Viet Cong insurgency in 1959-60. An even more recent example of Viet Cong resilience was their recovery from the setbacks of 1962 when stepped up US military aid put the revolution on the defensive until they devised ways of responding to the new counterinsurgency tactics of helicopters and armored personnel carriers in the battle of Ap Bac, January 1963.

These historical memories, recounted by many of the interview subjects, indicated to them that the down turn in Viet Cong fortunes in Dinh Tuong in 1971 was temporary. As the Region cadre interviewed by Bach put it, “The Front has had reverses before and has faced a loss of confidence before, such as at the time of the Strategic Hamlets when the cadres had to scatter, but later on the movement became strong again. Why did it become strong again? At that time the Front could motivate the people. According to the revolutionary pattern, the Revolution sometimes is up and sometimes it’s down. The more it goes down, the higher up it will go. If the Revolution has difficulties, it can overcome them if the village and hamlet machinery is still functioning.”¹³

If the ordinary peasants did not entirely share the confidence of people like this committed revolutionary, their own experience convinced many of them that the rebound of the revolution was plausible enough so that they had to take the possibility of history repeating itself into account. Thus, while a “rational peasant” (to use Sam Popkin’s term¹⁴) might be tempted to climb onto the GVN bandwagon as a way of protecting his interests, the record of the past suggested to many of them that this might not be a wise investment in the long term. A specific case was the response to the belated GVN “land-to-the tiller” program. In many ways this was a much better deal for the peasants than the Viet Cong land reform (which did not guarantee permanent ownership of the land and was accompanied by onerous demands for taxes). But it was only an attractive incentive to support the GVN if the peasants were confident in the long-term future of the Saigon regime, and many rural residents were not, in part because of these cautionary historical lessons.

An even more important reason for the limited impact of the “land to the tiller” program was that the war had depopulated much of the countryside. Landlords had abandoned their land, and often could not find anyone to cultivate what they had left behind. Much the land was in insecure areas, and was overgrown to the point that it could not be cultivated. DT313 said “The people clearly see that the government is doing something that is superfluous and useless. Superfluous because on the other side, the Liberation has always distributed land wherever it goes, and in fact, the problem now is not to give land to the tillers, but to end the war, the bombings and the defoliation, etc. There is now an excess of land, but there aren’t enough people to till it. The farmers have either taken up arms on this side or the other side, and others are so afraid of bombings and shellings that they don’t dare to go out and farm.”¹⁵

It was clear to many peasants that the land tenure situation would only be clarified when the war was definitively concluded, security restored so that peasants could return to their hamlets, and the question of who had to power to confer land tenure was conclusively resolved. Thus the appeal of land reform while the war continued was very limited.

There was fragmentary evidence that such a return to the land was starting to occur in early 1972 after the forced exodus of the previous several years. The New York Times cited official American sources who stated that they expected that 200,000 civilians in the Mekong Delta would return to their villages. “The main motivating factor is that, at least for the time being, the countryside is safer. There are still occasional skirmishes but, over-all, fighting in the delta has tapered off. Most of the American bombers have gone home and less is heard from the Viet Cong.” The Times observed that “Whether the Vietcong have been incapacitated to some extent, as American and South Vietnamese military men say, or whether they are just lying low is hard to know.”¹⁶ The story was printed on March 20, 1972 but datelined March 9, three weeks before the coordinated assaults in Central Vietnam that opened the Spring Offensive of 1972 which brought the period of quiescence to an end throughout South Vietnam and largely halted any large scale return to the depopulated countryside.

We discovered that for many peasants, both those who stayed in their hamlets and those who became refugees, the deepest appeal of the revolutionary movement was not its revolutionary political program, or the promise of material benefits, but the fact that in many rural areas it represented a force committed to preserving traditional village ways in a society that was being assaulted by disorienting social change. Although much of the revolutionary movement’s one-time supporters had been dispersed into quasi-urbanized settlements (“forced draft urbanization”) those who remained in the more remote villages felt alienated by the social transformation that they saw in the towns and cities.

In this regard, the GVN was more an agent of “modernization” and social change than the “revolutionaries,” who in these circumstances were social conservatives. It was telling that most interviewees used the terms “in there” (ở trong kia) and “out here” (ở ngoài này) when referring to the former liberated areas, primarily remote villages far from the main roads, and the GVN controlled areas, the towns and market villages along the main roads. This implied that “in there” was closer to the core of an authentic Vietnamese identity, while “out here” was an artificial or external environment. For many rural peasants, the Saigon controlled areas constituted an alien world.

It was difficult to document this, but one memorable illustration was an interview I had with a civilian prisoner, who had been a village cadre in a village which linked Highway 4 and its urbanized settlements with the more remote rural hamlets bordering the Plain of Reeds. A cadre from Nhi Binh village, [DT312] with a strong revolutionary tradition, described how negative urban social influences reached the village and described how Vietnam’s society was become divided not only by politics but by culture, rural and urban. “Those who have fled to the towns have been greatly influenced by the outside. Those that stayed in the local area are very simple and hardworking. They earn a plain and honest living, and wear ordinary clothes as they always have.” The peasant cadres would lecture those returning from the towns on clothing styles. “We are peasants, and should dress plainly and simply.” Plain dress and polite speech were the hallmarks of the virtuous rural society. “As for running after the social trends out there,” said the cadre, “that means wearing really thin clothes, and false breasts, which induce sexual excitement when young men and women get together.” For the most part, the children of families with a “revolutionary tradition” did not succumb to the lure of the cities, said DT312. Village cadres tried to get the young people returning from the towns to change their ways and go back to the old rural style of dress. The youths replied that “Living out there in the Saigon society, we have to keep up with the other people. If we dress like that they’ll call us bumpkins and cut us dead [coi mình là quê chết].” For young women, living in the cities could offer financial rewards beyond the imagination of the simple peasants. Being a prostitute with an American clientele could bring in 30,000 to 40,000 piasters a month, “so that when girls from ordinary peasant families returned they lived a luxurious and decadent life. But in comportment, the home-grown girls far surpassed them” [DT312].

Most of the urbanized youth returning to the villages were women, since the young men were either drafted by the GVN, evading the GVN draft in the anonymity on the cities, or afraid to return to the villages for fear they would be drafted by the revolution. These young women were subtly ostracized.

They were isolated. Take the case of a relative of mine named Miss Khoa. Her father had been a Saigon soldier. When the Concerted Uprising came, she married a village guerrilla, and they had a child. He was pulled up to the concentrated units, and she left for the town. First she “married” an American, had a child, and then they split up. Since then she has “married” two or three other husbands, and this has deeply affected her in-laws [family of the former village guerrilla]. When she first came back to the village the cadres told her that if she mended her ways and returned to the right path they would help her out financially. When the revolution succeeded, they would send a cadre to persuade her husband to forgive her. She replied that she had left her first husband and had rebuilt her life. After that, she didn’t dare come back often, but at Tet or at family death anniversaries she would return. It appeared as though she wanted to win the sympathy of her relatives, but I saw that though they didn’t say anything in front of her, they talked about her “hippie” [form fitting, bell bottom pants] pants, which the peasants really hated. In my view, her intention was to impress the people by dressing like that, but it ran counter to their psychology. This young woman didn’t have a deep understanding of the peasants’ feelings, because she was still young and didn’t understand the traditions of our people [DT312].

Because she had become accustomed to the cultural patterns of the Saigon lifestyle, Miss Khoa could not recognize the social cues and subtle putdowns of the peasants. Despite their reserved reception, she didn’t get the message. “Our people have a very special characteristic,” said the cadre. “They can meet someone and exchange pleasantries and be very soothing. [They would say to the girl,] “Well! Before you were so plain, but look at how beautiful you are now, with all that makeup, and with your shoes and sandals [most people went barefoot in the villages and shoes or dressy sandals were regarded as an affectation] and beautiful clothes!” In my view the people were being sarcastic, but she didn’t understand. There were five or six episodes like this” As he recounted this story, DT312 clearly relished the opportunity to underscore to me, his American interviewer, the extent to which the Saigon government had become the promoter of cultural degeneration.

The peasant conservatism characteristic of most revolutionary cadres made it difficult for them to operate effectively in an urban environment. A region level cadre who was assigned to operate on the outskirts of My Tho described the problem which he had witnessed in his work. “Unfortunately, the male and female cadres coming in from the countryside didn’t understand that using obscene language was a common thing as far as the urban people were concerned, because the city wasn’t revolutionary territory. As for the thing which the City Party Committee strongly stressed, ‘creating a revolutionary nucleus’ and ‘exploiting the class oppression,!’ The female or male cadres coming in from the countryside couldn’t see the problem clearly, and refused to make contacts when they saw things that offended them. For example, many of the girl students or the 19 to 20-year old girls in the city were dressed and acted like actresses, and the cadres found them ‘offensive’ since they weren’t used to such sights. They were irritated and put off, and refused to make contacts. These difficulties were caused by the fact that the cadres from the countryside brought into the city with them the simple, virtuous, and traditional views of the countryside. When they went to the city, they found everything offensive, so how could they operate effectively? There were reasons why the cadres who went into the city were unable to do anything. They came from the countryside, they had never lived in a city before, and so they were unfamiliar with the language, the style of living and the activities of the people in the city. For example, almost all the female water carriers in the city had short hair. But female cadres who just came into the city from the countryside absolutely refused to cut their hair in order to merge with the life in the city. Or a cadre might have keen observation in the countryside, but when he went into the city and heard a pedicab driver use obscenities such as ‘F ••• you!’ etc., the cadre refused to contact him, thinking that the pedicab driver was immoral and a criminal–someone who couldn’t be used by, let alone recruited into, the Front. Unfortunately, the male and female cadres coming in from the countryside didn’t understand that using obscene language was a common thing as far as the urban people were concerned, because the city wasn’t revolutionary territory.” ¹⁷

At the time, we grasped the immediate problem easily. The peasant conservatism of the revolutionary movement, reflected in their cadres, made it difficult for them to relate to the urban “proletariat” – the pedicab drivers, day laborers, and female water carriers – despite their Marxist-Leninist ideology. Thus they were ineffective in recruiting the most obvious base of urban support for the revolution. This also explains why the Tet attacks on the cities failed to have a lasting impact, and diverted the revolutionaries from the opportunity to take advantage of the power vacuum in the countryside created by Tet, while the dogmatic Viet Cong strategists in Hanoi pressed for a continuation of the disastrous assaults on cities long after it was evident that this approach was a costly failure.

After the war, the lure of the cities and the appeal of “life in the fast lane” for many youths, which I describe in my chapter “Holding On” was a greater long term threat to the revolution than programs like land to the tiller, or the Phoenix program. The longer term problem became apparent only much later when the victorious revolutionaries failed miserably at transforming the cities into bastions of “socialism” and the urban styles and economy of the South ended up transforming the North – far too late for the Saigon regime or the Americans to savour the irony. For a lengthier discussion of this, see my account in Changing Worlds on the growing “Southernization” of Vietnam after the apparently conclusive victory of the revolution in 1975.

Fancy clothes and “far out” music were not, however, a sufficient motivation for those who enjoyed them to join Le Minh Dao on the barricades in 1975 to resist the onslaught of revolutionary forces about to overrun Saigon. Moreover, the social decay and urban decadence that was a by-product of the war turned many conservative Southern Catholics against the Thieu regime just at the time the American departure made it imperative that Thieu consolidate the strongest possible anti-communist political base possible.

Urban Politics and the Third Force

From the vantage of revolutionaries in the countryside the urban areas were regarded as decadent enclaves whose fads and fashions were eroding traditional Vietnamese values. This view was not confined to the countryside or to puritanical revolutionaries, however. The disorienting social changes wrought by the American presence in the cities increasingly alarmed some of the most stalwart anti-communists, who might have been expected to support the GVN. By 1971, there was widespread disaffection with the Thieu government even from some of the most anticommunist sectors of society. A former Diem official wrote a blistering attack on the “brothel society” for a Saigon newspaper that extolled the purportedly uncorrupted rural people, “who have maintained the tradition of their ancestors in opposing foreign aggression,” while excoriating GVN officials as a “gang of prostitutes.” Infuriated by the mysterious death of his brother, who had been killed for exposing corrupt practices, and his son, a medical student and opponent of the Thieu government who was also assassinated, this formerly zealous anticommunist wrote that “The yeast has already begun to rise. When the hamlets and villages become a base from which all the people can escape from the addiction to material goods, and the value of struggle and production is recognized, no foreign power can force us to become a Brothel Society.” After the 1973 ceasefire some fiercely anticommunist Catholics began to form what would become a formidable opposition to President Thieu on the grounds that South Vietnamese society needed to be purged of corruption in order to avoid a communist takeover.

Apart from the Catholic social conservatives, there were militantly anti-Thieu Catholics such as Chân Tín, Nguyễn Ngọc Lan, and Trần Hữu Thanh. Even by 1971, some moderate Catholics were turning against not only Thieu, but the Americans and the war itself. The probable catalyst was Thieu’s bald power-grab in the scheduled Presidential election of 1971, in which he disqualified his most formidable challenger, and ran uncontested, making a mockery out of the claims that America’s ally was progressing toward democracy.  The New York Times noted the impact of this one-man election. “Among President Thieu’s enemies are the militant students, the intellectuals and the nucleus of deputies who hate him but who have so far not been able to hurt him seriously. Others are the organized disabled war veterans, and half a dozen minor peace groups that are often composed of Vietnamese who once had power or political influence. They have now been joined in their frantic but often feeble efforts to arouse the Vietnamese public against President Thieu by some factions of the Roman Catholics and by the strongest group of the nation’s Buddhist leaders, the An Quang faction. Leaders of the Hoa Hao religious sect – considered traditionally as anti-Communist as most Catholics – have this week also criticized the one-man elections.”[1]

As in the turbulent years of the mid-1960s, it appeared in the early 1970s as though there might be the possibility of a “Third Force” emerging between Thieu’s American-supported military regime and the communists. “‘Our politics today are  completely unlike those of our past,’ Prof. Ly Chanh Trung said recently. He is a Catholic who teaches philosophy at the University of Saigon. ‘For the older Vietnamese, religion once came before the country,’ he continued. ‘Now for the younger Catholics the nation is just about as absolute as religion. Nationalists are those who cannot accept dependence on foreigners and more and more Catholics are saying no to the Americans.’”  This evolution of activist Catholics from defense of the faith to political activism spurred some Buddhist groups to intensify their political opposition to Thieu.[2]

The idea that there was a moderate “Third Force” which might be an alternative to the authoritarianism and corruption of the Saigon government, and the harsh implacable repression of the communists had an obvious appeal to many Americans, who hoped for a middle ground solution that might end the war. For myself, even as my support for an increasingly unlikely Saigon victory faded, I could not envisage the weak and divided “Third Force” as an alternative, believing that they would be crushed by the communists when they came to power – which is, in fact, what happened. Still, one had to admire those who sought to end the war with a compromise solution for their decency and the courage of their convictions.

Among my American friends, Tom Fox was the one with the closest connections with the Third Force opposition to Thieu, especially among the Catholics.  I had known Tom slightly during my first stint in Vietnam with Rand when he was a member of the International Voluntary Service (IVS). Tom had been an All-State athlete in both baseball and football, and had gone to Stanford on a football scholarship.  A profile of Tom writes “At Stanford he found himself immediately drawn to the teachings of Dwight Clark, dean of freshman, a Quaker and a pacifist. “At that time I was a Catholic who believed, I thought, in just war.” He learned about nonviolence, started reading Thomas Merton, and listened to the songs of a young guitarist, Joan Baez, who would stop by the dorm to play and sing. She and Fox’s classmate David Harris eventually wed. In the break after his freshman year, Fox was one of 20 students Dwight Clark invited to visit Asia as volunteers. Fox went to his football coach to ask if he could go. The coach said no, he’d be too out of condition to play football when he returned. The sophomore-to-be went anyway, ending his football career. Before summer ended, however, he had received an academic scholarship.”[3]

I have an indelible memory of walking down a street with Tom and, as he related the story of the end of his athletic career, he nostalgically and reflexively pantomimed throwing a pitch, showing how much he missed that life. This showed me how deep his commitment to bettering the lives of others was, and what a steep price he paid to pursue it. After his stint with IVS, Tom got a master’s degree at Yale, and was then taken on by the New York Times as a stringer, launching the journalistic career that was to become his passion and vocation for the next half century. I recall reading the New York Times announcement of his wedding to a graduate of the elite private woman’s lycee in Dalat, Couvent des Oiseaux a month prior to our return to Vietnam in February, 1971.[4] Hoa had also studied at the Law School and was working for the Committee of Responsibility, which arranged to bring children who were napalm victims or had other war injuries to the United States for treatment and rehabilitation.[5] It turned out that Tom Miller, my Yale classmate, had quit his lucrative job in corporate law, and had also become involved with a program related to the Committee on Responsibility. He helped found Children’s Medical Relief International, which sponsored a plastic surgery hospital in Vietnam that treated young war victims. The Committee of Responsibility was at the time bringing war victims to the United States. The U.S. government, embarrassed by this, helped fund the hospital in Vietnam, writes Miller^[1]  Tom met Tran Tuong Nhu, a friend of Mai’s with extensive family contacts on all sides of the political divide. They were eventually married, and became another Vietnamese-American couple brought together by the war. I think Tom and Nhu were able to ignore any negative responses when they appeared in public, but Hoa and Tom were sensitive to the constraints of being a mixed couple in Vietnam, as were Mai and me.  “Tom and Hoa couldn’t travel together, or even go out together much, because the Vietnamese, particularly the youth, had a fixed idea about young Vietnamese women who went with Americans.”[6]

Because my focus on the Viet Cong and the progress of the war kept my attention on those things, I was not well informed about either Vietnamese domestic politics and things like the Third Force, and civilian war victims. Tom and Hoa Fox, and Tom and Nhu Miller were thus able to offer us important insights which we might otherwise not have been exposed to. Tom Fox, however, was in a very sensitive position because of his close connections with the Third Force. The Saigon government was suspicious of these contacts but so, it turned out, was the revolutionary side. A profile of Tom writes “The Foxes were not planning to leave, but a dangerous situation grew more dangerous. Hoa was pregnant. One evening when Tom was away, a close Vietnamese friend, a progressive Catholic, part of a Vietcong cluster, went to see Hoa one evening. Said Fox, ‘He told her that the communist cluster he belonged to planned to either kidnap or kill me because for some reason they believed I was CIA. I’d never had any connection with the government, my reporting was always very antiwar. My stories had the same theme: Students, people, all Vietnamese were getting screwed.’Hoa asked the young man to return when Tom came back. He did. Fox asked the Vietnamese to tell the cluster if they would give him two weeks, he and Hoa would leave the country.” “I was targeted,” Tom told an interviewer. “You can’t say, ‘Where do I hide?’ I was just too vulnerable.” The bargain was sealed. They flew to the United States in December 1972 “during the U.S. Christmas bombing of Hanoi.” They went to his parents’ home. “I was unemployed, no job prospects, a pregnant wife, no money and in Detroit.”[7]

GVN Political Failure in the Countryside

A major reason the GVN was unable to consolidate its military gains in places like Dinh Tuong was its inability to win over the rural base of support most likely to support it in opposing the Viet Cong. A striking illustration of this failure was the alienation of the village and district notables in Vinh Kim, which had been a center of political activism since the 1920s, and had produced a number of eminent people who had become nationally known. Through Hai Nien, a former Viet Minh who had earlier been the revolutionary leader of the village (which was also a district administrative center), I got to know the current GVN village chief and a variety of prominent local citizens, including the largest landowner in the area.

I had gone to Vinh Kim in 1966 with Don Oberdorfer, then working for the Knight-Ridder chain and later chief diplomatic correspondent of the Washington Post. Oberdorfer had wanted to do an in depth study of a village in order to get a more nuanced picture of the war. As it turned out, just at the time he approached me for ideas, three of the top Viet Cong cadres in Vinh Kim village had defected, offering the prospect of getting the inside story of the situation there. The failure of the GVN to rally potential supporters to take advantage of the Viet Cong disarray is described in The Vietnamese War.¹⁸

In 1971 I accompanied Peter Jay of the Washington Post to Vinh Kim for an update of this story, and found the situation was even worse. Although village democracy had been promoted with great fanfare as an example of the political progress being made by the GVN, relations between the Saigon district chief and the elected Vinh Kim village council were at a low ebb. A corrupt and arrogant district chief, a military officer as were all province and district chiefs in South Vietnam at the time, had irreparably alienated the local notables who were the natural (and only) base of support for the GVN in the Vinh Kim area.

As Peter Jay explained the situation The village council accused the GVN district officials of corruption but, wrote Peter Jay of the Washington Post, “Perhaps the greatest source of resentment against [the district chief, Major] Dai among the village leaders is the authority that he has over them, as elected officials of their villages and hamlets, and the arrogance with which he exercises it. Residents of Vinh Kim are proud of their village, which according to local historians has a past ‘rich in heroes and famous men’—including a number of celebrated guerrilla fighters. [Dai] mentioned this tradition in a tirade he delivered to a council of village elders, which is repeated with anger and without prompting by those who heard it. ‘He told us that he didn’t see any heros and famous men in Vinh Kim,’ a council member recalled. ‘He said all he saw were a lot of mangy dogs.’”

Village notables of Vinh Kim. Hai Nien is in white shirt second from left, and the village chief, the son of the largest landlord in the area is standing next to the pillar, fifth from left. Photo DE

George and Audrey Kahin were in Vietnam in the summer of 1971 and came to visit us in My Tho. George was intrigued by Peter Jay’s article on Vinh Kim, so we took a trip to the district seat on July 24, which Audrey later reconstructed from George’s notes. “We had a long talk with the chairman of the village council [see photo above] supported from time to time by the hamlet chief and several others living in the district. The chairman was the son of one of the largest landowners in the district, his father having an unusually attractive house, and he himself having received a letter from the NLF indicating he had been marked for assassination, ‘a death warrant’ he said.”¹⁹

“The chairman observed that the Government of Vietnam was something like the traditional dragon, with a head, the national level in Saigon, and a tail, village government, with nothing in between. Later this was brought up again in conversation and the chairman corrected himself saying, ‘ There is something in between, and it is a snake – the military-staffed provincial and district levels of government.’ There was general agreement on this proposition.”²⁰

The village notables in Vinh Kim were thus caught between two forces. Reviled by the GVN district chief, they were also targets of revolutionary assassination. Some secretly supported the local cadres, whether out of genuine sympathy for the revolutionary cause, nationalist fervor, community solidarity, or simple prudence as insurance against the eventuality of a revolutionary victory. Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post discovered on a return trip to Vinh Kim in 1980, that Đào Văn Hội, a village notable during the pre-1975 period with extensive Saigon contacts was still a notable in revolutionary Vinh Kim.

Hoi “was introduced as ‘advisor’ to the Red Cross in the village and ‘an honored person.’ ” He proudly told Oberdorfer that the “leaders of the ‘liberation forces’ in the village took refuge against Saigon government sweeps. Since he is among one of the richest men in the village, a fourth-generation landowner here, the hiding place, by his account, was both unsuspected and undetected throughout the war.”²¹ The linkage between Đào Văn Hội’s secret support to the revolution, and the death threat to his son is probably one of the many aspects of the Vietnam War that will never be unraveled by outsiders.

Neither Đào Văn Hội or his son, the village chief, were reluctant to express their dismay at the appalling cost of the war to their village. Hoi told Kahin that “approximately half the district was an H-and-I [Harrassment and Interdiction] area into which the government pumps artillery and some air strikes daily, and he estimated that since 1965 approximately one-tenth of the district’s civilian population of 40,000 have been casualties, with about 40 percent of the total, about 1,600 being killed. This is apart from the military casualties of outside GVN troops.” Kahin observed that “While we were talking an ambulance backed up to a landing on the river and three bodies were taken abord – government ‘Popular Forces’ soldiers who had been killed the previous night 2 km to the west across the river. Every few days [the village chief said] three or four soldiers on an average were killed in the district.”²²

Taking Stock of the Situation in Dinh Tuong, mid-1971

Throughout most of 1971, the GVN appeared to have total dominance in most of Dinh Tuong province. My first report to Rand cautioned that appearances were deceiving and argued that the Viet Cong were far from defeated even in one of their weakest provinces. It noted that much of what was regarded as successful “pacification” was the result not of the extension of effective GVN control into villages formerly controlled by the Viet Cong, but rather by the depopulation of vast areas formerly regarded as “liberated.” It also noted that, while the peasants had fled into GVN areas, the Viet Cong cadres, diminished in numbers as they were, were still there.

The report also analyzed the strategic change of direction that had been ordered by Hanoi in its Directive 09 issued in mid-1970 which had, in essence, directed a major scaling down of military activities for an unspecified period, in order to preserve the revolution’s badly battered forces. My August report said that “The major changes since the end of 1967 have been the Tet offensive, the retreat from the Tet strategy embodied in COSVN Resolution 9, and the recent Directive No. 1, which modifies parts of Resolution 9. Although the full text of Directive No. 1 is not yet available … it seems to point toward a more vigorous defense of the cadres’ present position in areas that they control, and a stronger effort at regaining lost territory (in the Delta, at least). This, in turn, suggests that the stand-down of 1970 may be coming to an end, in which case the question of capacity, as opposed to deliberate policy, as an explanation for the relative quiescence in the Delta may soon be put to the test.”²³

This was, it turns out, an accurate prediction of the Spring Offensive of 1972 which partly succeeded in laying the groundwork for a revival of the guerrilla war movement in the Mekong Delta. Although the GVN succeeded in containing this offensive, it was only with massive air support from the U.S. Following this offensive it was clear that the Saigon forces could not survive on their own and, in that sense, Vietnamization was a failure. This recognition caused President Nixon to make the final concessions which led to the Paris Agreement and the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The first phase of Rand interviews from 1965 to 1968 started off with an examination of the functioning of the organizational structure of the Viet Cong, on the assumption that this was the key to their success. It then morphed into a study of ways in which this structure was deployed, and how it adapted itself to different environments, like the Mekong Delta. The final report for this first phase of research was titled “Pacification and the Viet Cong System.” It argued that the success of the Viet Cong in resisting pacification in the Mekong Delta was largely due to its flexible operations which were based on complementarities and coordination between different levels of military force ranging from hamlet self defense forces to village guerrillas, usually in platoon strength, district and province concentrated forces, usually in company strength, to region units of battalion or regimental size. By deploying the concentrated forces in constantly shifting locations along an interconnected system of fortified positions scattered throughout the province the Viet Cong created uncertainty about where these forces were at any given time, thus creating a “psychological umbrella of security” which sheltered the civilian cadres by inhibiting GVN security forces from operating in large areas of the province for fear that they might encounter a large Viet Cong force.

This system of prepared positions was supported by an elaborate supply and liaison network which allowed the Viet Cong forces to move around the province constantly changing locations which made them difficult to attack, especially with the GVN’s cumbersome system of planning which usually required days to mount an operation, by which time the intended target had usually moved on. The reason for this inflexible planning system was that most operations were predicated on the worst case assumption that a very large force might be encountered in a known base area (and thus a very large attacking force would be needed), whereas typically these Viet Cong forces operated in dispersed units and concentrated only when they decided to take offensive action – which was not often, because, as our study discovered, the main function of these forces was to provide a deterrent by their mere existence. Even when they were successfully attacked, they were usually able to reconstitute themselves fairly quickly.

The Rand Memorandum “Pacification and the Viet Cong System” argued that because the strength of the “Viet Cong system” lay in the synergies of coordinating its component parts, that a single minded pursuit of one or another dimension of the system by pacification or large scale attacks on main force units would be ineffective, and the GVN simply did not have the resources for a continuous simultaneous assault on every element of the system. In order to neutralize the “system” it would be necessary to focus on the key links between its various components; the district level connecting the villages and the higher leadership, the local forces which stood between the village guerrillas and the large main force units, and which were essential to the strategy of concentration and dispersal of revolutionary units, and the key nodes in the system of bases and supply routes. (See schematic map above).

Belatedly, the U.S. military caught on to the possibilities of using this more targeted approach even while pursuing a shotgun strategy of blanketing the province with a continuous flurry of small unit operations. As my August 1971 report noted, “Time magazine’s feature article of February 1971 stressed that General Abrams views the NLF as a “system.” But Abrams defined the system primarily in military terms. Time noted that “In massing troops near the Ho Chi Minh Trail last week, the U.S. commander was obeying his long-felt instinct to strike at the very heart of the ‘system.”‘ The concept of a “Viet Cong System” started to appear frequently in MACV publications starting in 1970, and it is quite possible that this was at least in part, influenced by my Rand Memorandum of 1969.

If, in fact, the MACV concept of a Viet Cong was based on the Dinh Tuong study, it reflected a rather selective borrowing from it. While the integrated and mutually reinforcing nature of the “Viet Cong system” was recognized, the “system” was reified and cast largely in organizational terms (or geographical terms, as in Abrams’ characterization of the Ho Chi Minh Trail). In consequence, the political substance of the NLF appeal seems to be ignored, and the relationship of the “civilian subsystem” (MACV’s term) to the larger “system” is given lip service but no extended analysis.

While MACV recognized that the strengths of the NLF were diverse, in practical terms they focused almost solely on the NLF “infrastructure,” and its logistics and liaison system. The critical question of the nature of civilian support, which is closely related to the area of MACV’s concern, was largely neglected. This became an issue in the legal confrontation between General Westmoreland and CBS over an allegation made in the documentary “War of Numbers” that MACV had deliberately undercounted the strength of the Viet Cong, partly by eliminating an entire category from the Order of Battle listing of components of enemy strength. “General Westmoreland testified that he removed the self-defense forces – then newly estimated at 120,000 – because they were inconsequential militarily and their inclusion in the order of battle at a high figure would mislead Washington and the press. He said he also wanted, in 1967, to ‘purify’ the order of battle by ’separating the fighters’ – such as North Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerrillas – from what he called the ’nonfighters,’ such as the self-defense units.” The CIA’s top expert on the Viet Cong, George Allen, testified that “the Vietcong’s self-defense forces may have been responsible for as much as ‘40 percent of American losses’ in Vietnam.”²⁴ I had been peripherally involved with the CIA analyst Sam Adams, who uncovered the deception over Order of Battle figures in part through his examination of Rand documents. I later wrote an affidavit supporting his position in CBS-Westmoreland.

By ignoring the paramilitary component of the revolution and implicitly accepting the “organization theory,” MACV assumed that it would be possible to cripple the revolutionary movement by attacking the logistics and liaison networks (as my Rand RM had suggested), assuming also that this would eliminate the “infrastructure” and thus the revolutionary movement. In the trial set in motion by his defamation suit against CBS “General Westmoreland testified that he removed the self-defense forces – then newly estimated at 120,000 – because they were inconsequential militarily and their inclusion in the order of battle at a high figure would mislead Washington and the press. He said he also wanted, in 1967, to ‘purify’ the order of battle by ‘separating the fighters’ – such as North Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerrillas – from what he called the ‘nonfighters,’ such as the self-defense units.” In the same trial, the top CIA expert on the Viet Cong testified that the Vietcong’s self-defense forces may have been responsible for as much as “40 percent of American losses” in Vietnam.

What we discovered in our 1971 research was that that the revolutionary movement was deeply embedded in the society which produced it. The organization grew out of the movement, it did not generate the movement. It was not a self-generated “machine” imposed on the society in which it operated. Thus, even very serious damage to the key elements of the revolutionary organization such as the disintegration of the village and hamlet popular associations, and even the Party chapters which had provided the leadership in the villages would not eliminate the revolutionary movement itself. We documented how extensive the damage was to the revolutionary organizations in Dinh Tuong in 1971.

In earlier years we would have considered this a decisive victory for the Saigon government. As events soon demonstrated, it was merely a setback, another low point in the historical trajectory of the revolutionary movement from which it ultimately recovered. Of course the infusion of North Vietnamese forces in the later years of the war, and the collapse of the GVN military position in central Vietnam played a decisive role in the rebound of the revolutionary forces in the Mekong Delta, but that simply underlines the point that in its broadest terms “the Viet Cong System” was based on a complementary balancing of strengths against weaknesses, military victories in central Vietnam which would relieve pressure from the Mekong Delta and allow a resurgence of the guerrilla forces there. The North Vietnamese forces were part of that “system.”

My preliminary report in August 1971 came to the following conclusion: “There are two aspects of the larger situation. One is the question of whether the stand-down of large military units is owing to necessity or choice. Order-of-battle information shows that the NLF still has units available, though nothing like the strength deployed in 1968. But they are still there, many of them in Cambodia, and constitute a hovering presence over the GVN in Dinh Tuong. How much of the retreat of these units can be attributed to U.S./GVN success in disrupting ‘the system’ in its narrow sense of base structure and liaison supply activities is open to question. The interviews do not shed much light on this, since they have been concentrated largely on the civilian cadres.”

“The second aspect to the relative quiescence in the Delta is that the Delta’s role has always been supportive to the other areas. In 1965, it supplied manpower and materiel resources to the military units engaging U.S. troops in the Central Highlands. Earlier, during the 1963-64 period, the widespread political control of the Delta was a major factor in impressing the urban population (and the U.S. government) of the political precariousness of their position.”

“At present, the role of the Delta is to pin down forces that would otherwise be deployed north of Saigon or in Laos and Cambodia. During 1970, the major priority was on keeping the civilian cadre structure intact, but recently there have been signs of a more aggressive guerrilla posture. Its purposes appear to be twofold; (1) to contest GVN territorial control and (2) in so doing, to make greater efforts to force the GVN to expand its resources in coping with a growing guerrilla problem in the Delta.”

“Even if the current stand-down is exclusively due to the incapacity of the NLF to respond militarily to the GVN, it does not mean that the Delta is not fulfilling its role in overall NLF strategy. As long as the GVN is forced to expend large amounts of manpower in the Delta, the NLF’s overall ‘three region’ strategy [delta, cities, mountains and forest] is vindicated. And as long as a nucleus of NLF cadres remains at the village and hamlet level and there is a significant reservoir of civilian sympathy toward the NLF, the fusion of cadres and villagers into a rebuilt organizational structure could be accomplished relatively easily given a major deterioration of events elsewhere in Vietnam (or in Cambodia and Laos).”²⁵

Directive 01 which had filtered down to My Tho by early 1971 was an indication that a more aggressive strategy was being formulated, which would mark a major shift from the “laying low” conservation of forces strategy of Resolution 9 in 1970. One event that contributed to this more active approach, as I later found out long after the war was over by reading memoirs of the revolution leaders in the central Mekong Delta, was the near capture of the top military commander in Military Region 2, as he attempted a reconnaissance in an area of the province blanketed with posts. This narrow escape made him realize that operating at close quarters with the GVN was a hazardous task, and convinced him to attempt to enlarge areas controlled by the revolutionary forces to give them some breathing room. Eventually this more aggressive stance evolved into the Spring Offensive of 1972.

I interviewed the Viet Cong defector who nearly brought about the capture of Tám Phương, the top Viet Cong military commander in the central Mekong Delta. Even before the final plan for the 1972 Spring Offensive had been formulated, preparations for a major military push were underway in Dinh Tuong. At the end of 1971 top commanders from Military Region 2 came to the province to take direct charge of military operations and ‘prepare for a new phase of activities.’ Tám Phương, military commander of Region 2, led this group. He was accompanied by Sáu Phú, commander of the 261st Battalion in the early 1960s and now the deputy chief of staff for the military region. The destination of this group was the 20/7 zone in the heartland of My Tho. When they reached the critical juncture of this journey, the dangerous crossing of Highway 4 at Hội Cư village, the group awoke to find that they had been surrounded by GVN troops. They quickly realized that they had been betrayed from within their own ranks.” “Mười Tân was a native of Hậu Thành village in Cái Bè District, on the fringe of the Plain of Reeds. He came from a revolutionary family. His brother rose to become the head of the My Tho province committee office before being killed in 1970, and his wife’s brother became a member of the Cai Be district Party committee in 1956. Mười Tân had been a member of the province armed propaganda team in 1959, and had risen through the ranks because of his boldness and leadership ability, eventually becoming the deputy commander and chief of staff of the province unit. However, the long conflict took a heavy psychological toll on him. By 1970, the year of his brother’s death, Tan realized that although many of the original eleven members of the province armed propaganda unit had risen to battalion commands or positions of province-level leadership, he was the only one who had survived intact. The others had all been killed, crippled, or had lost their health. The war dragged on and the revolution seemed stymied in My Tho. Seeking some solace in an otherwise bleak situation, Tan started a liaison with a younger woman, and was severely criticized by his superiors. Finally he contacted the GVN province authorities and laid out a plan to capture Tám Phương’s group as they traveled to the 20/7 zone. The plan almost succeeded. Although completely surrounded, Tám Phương kept his wits about him and avoided the trap set for him by his quick response to the situation. Although the GVN forces came within a stone’s throw of Tám Phương, they missed their target. A providential downpour and the expert guidance of a local guerrilla allowed Tám Phương to slip through the encirclement.

Not long after this I had the chance to do an extensive interview with Mười Tân, who filled in many details about the growth of the guerrilla movement in My Tho during the so-called “Concerted Uprising” period of 1959-61, when he was a key cadre in what became the world-famous 514^th Battalion (see the discussion about this in “The Faceless Viet Cong’). Mười Tân was a handsome, modest and self-assured person, whose command presence was evident in the way he carried himself. Because I no longer had a house in My Tho, we lived together for a week in a My Tho hotel while he related his life story. I developed a deep sympathy for him, as someone who tried to do his best for his chosen cause until circumstances pushed him in a different direction. After the war I was saddened, but not surprised, to learn that he had been arrested and executed for his treachery.

Mười Tân in My Tho, 1972. Photo DE

Many years later I met a former combatant in My Tho who had encountered Mười Tân not long before his defection. Mười Tân had requested that this leading cadre in a North Vietnamese unit turn over to him a map indicating its operational routes and hiding places. After the war, this officer remarked, “I have a quirk—I’m not sure whether it is good or bad—which is that I am not very trusting. In this case it stood me in good stead.” The North Vietnamese officer replied that he only answered to his own region command channels, and would comply only if ordered to by them. Mười Tân dropped the issue.²⁶

This close call reinforced Tám Phương’s belief that self-protection would require a more aggressive approach to the conflict. “Following this narrow escape, Tám Phương began to lay the groundwork for a military comeback in the province. Some of the Tet Offensive thinking began to resurface as the top Party leaders began to devise a plan to reverse the setbacks of the previous years. Tám Phương wrote, “The Mekong Delta and the delta in Region 5 [central Vietnam] were the main targets of the attack on pacification and a big expansion [of territory]. The main target in the Mekong Delta was Military Region 8 [Region 2]. In attacking pacification we would use the approach of a ‘comprehensive attack’ campaign [tien cong tong hop]. This attack and uprising would be the largest strategic offensive since the Tet Offensive. In this offensive we would coordinate three spearheads of attack: a blow from the main forces, attacks on pacification, and the urban movement.” The difference between this and the Tet Offensive, of course, was that the main forces would not be attacking the cities, which would be left to the political forces of the “urban movement.” The primary task was to use the main forces to disperse the ARVN and begin the process of fighting back against “pacification.”²⁷

Wrapping up the Dinh Tuong Study and Transitioning to Dissertation Research

By August 1971 we had essentially completed our research. I sent Rand the preliminary report on our findings, and moved back to Saigon to write a more comprehensive final report, though I had received no guidance from Santa Monica on this. The only indication I received that reflected any interest in what was going in Vietnam was a request to submit a memo on the Phoenix program, which had suddenly become topical and controversial in mid-1971. I sent back a relatively brief (for me) memo, which was quite critical of the program

Mai’s history of Rand in Vietnam gives the following account of this episode. “At the request of Frank Hoeber, Elliott also prepared a seven-page memo, dated July 12, 1971, giving his comments on the Phoenix program. In it, he pointed out many of its abuses. Elliott was careful to note that he was presenting his own personal observations, but he added that his view of the program stemmed from the analytic work he had performed for the Dinh Tuong project. However, he thought that many of his comments could be supported by data in other areas of the country. To Elliott, the most telling comment he frequently heard from the Vietnamese with whom he spoke was the comparison of Phoenix to President Diem’s disastrous ‘To Cong,’ or ‘Anti-Communist Denunciation,’ campaign in 1957–1959, which victimized many Vietnamese, created resentment, and built popular support for the insurgents. In his cover letter, Elliott added that ‘at best’ the Phoenix program contributed marginally to pacification because it had not led to the capture of cadres who played a vital role in the Viet Cong village infrastructure. In the long run, Phoenix would increase popular hostility among the common people and turn those who were arbitrarily arrested into NLF sympathizers.”

“…Steve Hosmer passed the letter Elliott addressed to [Frank] Hoeber and his memo to William Colby [who was still the director of CORDS and in charge of the civilian side of the war] on August 5, 1971, as well as to Robert Komer [Colby was initially Komer’s deputy at CORDS] on August 6, 1971. In his cover letter to Colby, Hosmer wrote, ‘Given Mr. Elliott’s unique expertise on the Viet Cong in Dinh Tuong, we feel his views should be taken seriously,’ even though— as Elliott pointed out himself in his letter to Hoeber—the comments he offered on the Phoenix program were ‘impressionistic’ and based only on his ‘own personal experience.’ In his own cover memo to Colby, Komer wrote that ‘Dave is a most perceptive young Vietnamese speaker,’ and added that his conclusions were disturbing. Komer asked Colby to pass along Elliott’s papers to Colonel George Jacobson, the Chief of Staff for Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and the Mission Council coordinator, whom Komer was certain would be interested. Recognizing the sensitivity of Elliott’s conclusions and his position in Vietnam, Komer wrote that Jacobson would know how to handle the documents, adding that, ‘The last thing we want is MACV’s clamping down on Elliott.’”²⁸

“From Elliott’s memo on Phoenix, Komer drew three ‘operational conclusions.’ The first was that the government in Saigon should instruct the district chiefs in no uncertain terms to stop harassing and interfering with the village chiefs. The second conclusion was that Phoenix quotas had led to widespread abuses. Komer suggested that the GVN issue a directive that only genuine Viet Cong be arrested, that inspections be carried out to enforce this, and that quotas be reduced sharply and maybe even abolished. Komer urged the banning of arbitrary arrests of marginal adherents and communicating these reforms to the population. The third conclusion was that Komer recommended a major effort to root out corruption at the local level. It is not clear whether Komer’s suggestions were followed. It is clear, however, that corruption and abuses were not eliminated.”²⁹

At some point in the fall of 1971 the Rand funding expired, and I lived off a dissertation research grant from the Ford Foundation, which David Mozingo had been instrumental in securing. I began a series of interviews with North Vietnamese defectors based in Saigon, assisted again by Vuong Bach. Over the next six months I managed to complete around forty lengthy interviews, including a massive interview with the most interesting respondent I encountered during all my years in Vietnam during the war.

I spent nearly two months of extensive interviewing of this former province cadre from North Vietnam, thanks to the gracious hospitality of Vu Quy Ky, a friend who was himself intensely interested in learning more about the forces that threatened his future and that of educated non-communist professionals like himself (and Mai’s family). On his own, Ky, a telecommunications official, had written several perceptive analyses of the war situation. I met with X daily at Ky’s house and spent a full day talking with him, taking time off for lunch and sharing a large wooden platform in Ky’s living room for taking a siesta. My role was merely to suggest the topics I was interested in and move his incredibly precise and detailed historical reconstruction of his life and times along, while recording it for future transcription. (When Mai subsequently transcribed it and typed it out on legal sized paper in 10 point type, the transcript ran to several hundred pages). His description of the rural origins of the revolution in Thai Binh province, the August Revolution, the anti-French Resistance, the Land Reform and (the focus of my research) the early years of establishing governing institutions in North Vietnam after 1954. It is my hope to translate and publish what I believe will be one of the most enlightening historical accounts of the early phase of the revolutionary movement in North Vietnam.

Prior to embarking on this research full time, I spent several months – September and October of 1971 if I remember correctly – writing up an expanded final report for Rand. My queries back to Santa Monica were less for guidance than for reassurance that someone was still interested in such a report (as well as a subtle query about whether or not I would continue to get paid while writing it). Silence from the other end suggested to me that the answer was no on both accounts. I guess I was still not aware of the fact that Bob Sansom had left the NSC and that I had thus lost my audience of one. So I forged ahead and produced a 160 page document, which was essentially an elaboration of the points I had made in my August report, updated with information from more recent interviews.

Mai’s Rand history chronicles the fate of this report. “In November 1971, Elliott completed the draft of his final report. According to Elliott, he asked Frank Hoeber several times what he intended to do with the draft and whether he wanted to go through the regular process to turn it into an official RAND report. However, he never ‘got a clarification or response.’ His impression was that it was sent to Steve Hosmer and possibly somebody else for review, but ‘nothing further was ever heard about it.’ When asked about this, Hosmer said he did not have any recollection. In Elliott’s estimation, his follow-up Dinh Tuong project ended ‘with a whimper and not a bang.’ He does not know whether the draft of his final report was transmitted to the National Security Council or what the response was. According to Bob Sansom, he left the National Security Council in April 1971 and consequently never saw Elliott’s report—even if it was circulated to the NSC. The timing of Elliott’s final report was unfortunate. By June 1971, the Pentagon Papers controversy had erupted and RAND was reeling in its wake. With its own survival at stake, RAND’s attention was focused elsewhere. The last major field project conducted in Vietnam simply got lost in the turbulence.” ³⁰

In a way, my interviews with North Vietnamese defectors met the same fate. I tape recorded the forty interviews and had them transcribed. When we left for Hong Kong in early 1972 I boxed up all these materials and sent them back to the States in two large cardboard shipping boxes through the APO, confident that I would start in on this material when I returned to Cornell. To my chagrin, I discovered that only one of the two boxes arrived. I had my suspicions about the fact that of the ten or so boxes I sent back, only the one with the handwritten transcripts of the interviews was missing. Fortunately another box with the tapes of the interviews did arrive, but in the event it would have been too laborious to transcribe them all over again, so the interviews were set aside and I wrote my dissertation with only the guidance of my general impressions of the interview, but mainly on more conventional documents.

Broadening My Horizons

My first hand knowledge of Vietnam was largely based on my work in Saigon in the Army, with some brief excursions into the field, and my intensive exposure to a single Mekong Delta province during my work with Rand. Living in close proximity to the major news bureaus in our apartment on Tu Do street, next to the Continental Hotel, I was able to stay in touch with the leading American journalists of the time; Nick Profitt and Ron Moreau of Newsweek, Craig Whitney, Fox Butterfield, and Joe Treaster of the New York Times, Peter Osnos of the Washington Post, Dan Southerland of the Christian Science Monitor, and Peter Kann of the Wall Street Journal, when he came in from his base in Hong Kong.

The most important connection was with Jacques Leslie of the Los Angeles Times. Jacques was the junior member of the LA Times Bureau, led by its chief George MacArthur. The fact that MacArthur took all the supposedly “big” and obvious stories gave Jacques considerable latitude to seek out the under reported aspects of the Vietnam war which would not compete with MacArthur. This led to several of the great “scoops” of the war, including a major corruption scandal and the first trip by an American reporter into a Viet Cong controlled zone after the January 1973 cease fire. I would often socialize with Jacques and discuss possible new story angles. It gave me an appreciation for the extremely challenging task of reporting on a war of such staggering complexity, and the difficulty of finding a new “angle” every day.

Starting in early 1972 I began travelling with Jacques around the country. For me it was a chance to see more of Vietnam than had been possible when I was tied down to a single location with my Rand work. His reporter’s credentials gave him broad access to many places and situations which would be inaccessible to an ordinary civilian. In return, I served as his interpreter.

Our first trip to the tranquil Mekong Delta at the end of January, 1972 proved unexpectedly eventful. Jacques’ article on the trip stated that “At one point, our driver did not see a partially concealed sign barring his entry onto a bridge and continued ahead. When the car was about 10 yards across the bridge, we saw a South Vietnamese soldier who seemed, incredibly, to be aiming his rifle at us. Two shots later, we were rapidly backing up.” Jacques continued, “It took a while to comprehend I had just been shot at. The dominant emotion was not fear – there was not time for that – but rather indignation. People were standing behind. Any of us could have been hit.”³¹

I certainly concur that there was not enough time to register fear because it all happened so quickly, but there was certainly an adrenaline rush when the GVN soldier pointed his weapon and, without hesitating, shot. It looked like he was aiming directly at us, but our car was on an elevated ramp where the bridge was being repaired and he was standing below the ramp with his rifle pointed up, so his shots sailed over our head. The elevation of the ramp was the reason we had not seen the soldier, who suddenly appeared in front of it as we reached the crest of the ramp. My reaction was slightly different from Jacques’. Whereas he was indignant, I was merely incredulous at the recklessness of this action. It was only later that I reflected on the callous disregard for innocent passengers and bystanders that did not bode well for winning hearts and minds. We would have easily been persuaded to back off at the mere sight of the soldier, without the added encouragement of being shot at.

After a stopover in Can Tho we proceeded on to Cho Moi in An Giang province, a stronghold of the strongly anti-communist Hoa Hao Buddhist sect. An American advisor told us “This is what Vietnam would be if it weren’t for the Communists.” Jacques observed that the placid beauty of the province seemed to be due less to the anti-Communism of the Hoa Hao and more to “the absence of American military forces. There are no garbage heaps of rusting beer cans, no forced urbanization as a result of bombing, no large army installations.”³² Thinking back on this observation as I re-read these words many years later, I recall driving George Kahin along the Bien Hoa highway some months before our trip to Cho Moi to show him the Long Binh military base. After we had driven about ten miles along the frontage of this massive American installation, which seemed to go on forever, George finally could take no more, and indicated that he had seen more than enough to get a sense of the American presence in Vietnam even at this time of military drawdown.

A poignant counterpoint to the shantytowns and dilapidated refugee shacks which lined the roads, were the few isolated enclaves of a prior Vietnam, untouched by the war. We looked for one such place in Cho Moi on the basis of conversations with locals about what the notable landmarks of the district were. Jacques was impressed by the prevalent anti-Americanism that we encountered, mostly in the form of taunting comments by small kids as we walked past – not exactly hostile, but certainly not friendly or complimentary. I translated for him. He wrote “The closer we were to big cities, where Vietnamese have more chance to make contact with Americans, the more we were called Meo [Mẽo], the Vietnamese equivalent of ‘nigger’ or ‘kike.’ But an American advisor in An Giang says, ‘I’ve never run into the slightest resentment that I could detect.’”³³ In a way I could see his point. Vietnamese anti-Americanism was not an embittered seething hatred, but a kind of casual xenophobia that indicates that they did not trust American professions of benign intentions. It wasn’t that Americans were the Great Satan – the emotional tone was less the Hitler version of anti-Semitism and more the casual snickering version of disdain for The Other (the Vietnamese have similar terms for the Chinese [Chệt, Tẫu[ and French or Westerners in general [Tẫy]. The derogatory taunts directed at us were their way of showing it, and the children were less inhibited in disguising this sentiment. Out of the mouths of babes. But, it should be noted, there were genuine friendships with Americans on an individual basis, and visceral hatred or blanket hostility was rare.

Lull Before the Storm

Toward the end of 1971 American analysts had begun to see signs of preparation for a major communist military offensive. Although this did not shake the general conviction that things were going well, and the GVN could handle the challenge, it provided a disquieting backdrop to the general confidence and complacency of American officials in Vietnam throughout 1971. Although some versions of the theory of an impending offensive predicted that it would happen in early 1972, perhaps in February, when nothing happened, complacency reasserted itself. When the offensive finally did commence in late March, American intelligence officials admitted that they had been mistaken in thinking that when their initial target date of February came and went that they had wrongly assumed there would be no offensive. And when it did come, finally, they congratulated themselves on having at least warned of the possibility, even though they got the time and place wrong. “It was enough, many intelligence people feel, that an attack of large proportions was clearly seen in advance. Thus the Administration was able to prevent the American public from being taken by surprise as it was during the Lunar New Year Offensive.”³⁴

The New York Times reported that “Intelligence officers have been forecasting a North Vietnamese offensive since the beginning of the year. On the basis of the reports, American and South Vietnamese officials had issued statements declaring that the enemy would attack sometime in February, probably either during the Lunar New Year holiday or about the time President Nixon was in China. When February passed quietly some analysts began saying that the anticipated attacks would be most likely to come in middle or late summer in an attempt to influence the Presidential election campaign in the United States.”³⁵

I was a frequent visitor to the Newsweek Bureau on the second floor of the Continental Hotel, just around the corner from our apartment, and passed on to Nick Profitt, the bureau chief, my view that the American intelligence community line on an impending offensive was mainly a CYA attempt to avoid getting blamed if something did happen, and based on an erroneous view that North Vietnamese strategy was primarily geared to make an impression on American public opinion. I felt that if an offensive came, the timing would be based on internal factors within Vietnam and, based on the situation in the Delta, concluded that more preparation would be needed. Nick had his own suspicions about the motives of American intelligence in promoting the idea of an impending offensive. When it didn’t happen in February he was even more persuaded by my skepticism. When the offensive did happen at the end of March, Nick, who was taken by surprise like everyone else, adroitly revised his Newsweek story which was about to go to press, almost in mid-sentence. What had started out as a reiteration of the “no-offensive” message seamlessly transitioned into an explanation of why the offensive had just happened and why it had been inevitable. I was impressed at Nick’s formidable journalistic finesse in carrying this off.

MACV had also been lulled by the failure of the offensive to occur in February. On March 2, 1972 “The United States command ended today the special alert that had confined to barracks all American troops not on essential missions for the last three weeks. South Vietnamese forces, however remained on partial alert. United States intelligence officers who had warned of a possible enemy offensive during that period still say they expect one this year. But they have revised their predictions to July, August or perhaps November to coincide with the Presidential campaign in the United States.”³⁶

A New York Times reporter visiting an ARVN Second Division unit in Quang Tin province in early March 1972 reported a growing confidence among the ARVN and their American advisors that they could handle any challenge from the North Vietnamese army. However, “It seems apparent that at some point the American bombers will have to leave, and that is a matter of concern to some military observers. Others, however, are confident that the legacy of automatic rifles, howitzers and jet aircraft left to the South Vietnamese will sustain them” and the “the South Vietnamese soldiers have more firepower than the North Vietnamese. And even though the South Vietnamese have fewer helicopters and jet planes than when the Americans were here in full force, the North Vietnamese have no such equipment available to them in South Vietnam.”³⁷ The U.S. was confident enough to accelerate the withdrawal of its few remaining combat troops in mid-March 1972.³⁸

With the offensive story apparently off the table, Jacques Leslie decided to go to Hue in search of a story about aspects of life in Vietnam that had been overlooked by the war correspondents. I went along as his interpreter. Jacques reported that “Hue, Vietnam’s cultural center seems to have achieved an uneven calm.” The Tet damage had been repaired, he noted, and the fact that Hue was off-limits to US troops preserved its tranquility. But, Jacques cautioned, “The calm in Hue could break quickly, for the city has always played a central role in the ups and downs of Vietnamese politics and the war.” Even the traditional student turbulence seemed somewhat subdued. “Political activity in Hue is as intense as ever, but now it seems slightly restrained. When, for example, high school students protested the arrest of a popular teacher here early this week, they and their adversaries, the police did not seem totally intent on facing off with each other. …Both police and the several hundred students taking part in the demonstration seemed aware of the implicit ground rules. The students lined up in the middle of the street holding banners, but dispersed each time the police came close. They then reformed their ranks further down the street.” There was sporadic rock throwing and tear gas response, but the students seemed “to regard their participation as a kind of game – provoking the police,” while the police “took time out from their duties to smoke cigarettes or buy refreshments from sidewalk vendors. Bystanders walked or drove through the middle of this demonstration as if it did not exist. Several hours after it started the protest broke up quietly.”³⁹ Two weeks later this uneasy calm was shattered by the Easter Offensive.

Jacques Leslie observes student demonstration in Hue, March 1972. Photo DE

Jacques then arranged an interview with the Queen Mother, the mother of Vietnam’s last Emperor Bao Dai, living in obscurity in the outskirts of Hue in a kind of internal exile, having long ago been evicted from the royal compound. “Practically ignored since South Vietnam forsook royalty republicanism, Queen Mother Tu Cung lives quietly with her seven servants in a large house which she takes pains to emphasize is no palace.”

Queen Mother in full regalia Queen Mother in 1974

I had no idea how to use the proper forms of address for royalty in Vietnamese, and had great difficulty understanding Madam Tu Cung’s distinctive Hue accent, filtered through what Jacques described as her “low, grinding voice.” So we conversed through two intermediaries. I would pose questions to Madame Tu Cung’s aide, and he would relay the question to her using the appropriate deferential forms of address. She would answer, the aide would repeat what she just said, and I would translate for Jacques. Nothing earth shaking came of the interview. The Queen Mother was aggrieved that she had received no compensation for the damage to her previous villa inflicted by American troops during the Tet Offensive.⁴⁰ The Queen Mother was by that time an exotic remnant of Vietnamese history, preserved in a time capsule while that history passed her by. It was a perfect antidote to the steady diet of up-to-the-minute war reportage which all but a few of Jacques competitors were churning out daily. We had no inkling that within days we would be on the front lines while Jacques covered one of the biggest stories of the war.

A potential story of the overlooked dimensions of Vietnamese life was one that ended up being a non-story. It was so elusive that we could never track down its most basic elements. While we were travelling through the Mekong Delta in January 1972 inquiring about anything that might provide distinctive local color, we were told of an eccentric holy man, who spent his days in recumbent contemplation. Not surprisingly he was known as “The Recumbent Monk.” [Đạo Nằm] The more we tried to track down the Recumbent Monk, the more elusive the story became, and we couldn’t even clarify whether he was dead or alive, let alone where his traces might be found. Finally we had to abandon the quest. With the aid of Google, we can now clarify his story. He built an elaborate temple in 1952 and died in 1954. His solemn and contemplative demeanor impressed all who encountered him and the legend grew that wherever he went illnesses were cured and wild beasts subdued. He got his sobriquet not only because of his habit of recumbent Zen contemplation but because of the manner in which he reclined. “His manner of lying down was unusual; he lay on his right side with his head facing North.”⁴¹

Painting of Đạo Nằm, the Recumbent Monk

The “Recumbent Monk’s” boat and his colorful Peugot 203 – for those moments where he was not recumbent

.

As the photos illustrate, he was hardly an ascetic, with a colorful and extravagant automobile and a formidable pleasure boat.⁴² These traces shouldn’t have been hard to find as indicated by a photo of the large and garish complex The Recumbent Monk built in the early 1950s to ensure the preservation of his legacy. How we could have missed this large and garish structure is a complete mystery to me. South Vietnamese, especially rural south Vietnamese have an allusive speaking style which often drops pronouns, and sometimes simply leaves out the subject of a sentence, making it unclear who or what is being discussed. In My Tho, Col. Phuoc had once brought in a province employee to discuss the affairs of the day. His rambling account of a meeting of civil servants with the province chief ended with the excited affirmation that the meeting left everyone in attendance “pale with fear.” From what he had told us I didn’t hear anything that could possibly have caused this reaction. Afterwards, I asked Phuoc what it was that left everyone “pale with fear” and he, a native southerner, thought for a moment but admitted he didn’t know. So my incomprehension was not entirely due to missing linguistic cues.

It may have been the same thing here. My inquiries took the search for the Recumbent Monk down a rabbit hole, and left me dizzy with confusion. On a small island in a remote district, we couldn’t track down the basic information on its only claim to fame. I’m afraid I wasn’t of much use to Jacques as an interpreter in this instance and unfortunately for us, this was the story that got away. Perhaps the real story here would have been how this episode reflected the futility of foreigners trying to uncover the internal dimensions of Vietnamese life.

Shortly after this I did, however, encounter a similar, if only slightly less exotic personage in the Delta – the Coconut Monk. So did many other people. For one thing he was still alive. For another his exotic island retreat on the Mekong River was only a short boat ride from the easily accessible town of My Tho, 35 miles south of Saigon. Đạo Dừa was popularly known as The Coconut Monk because, some said, he was a French-trained engineer who resigned his position and spent years in Zen contemplation at the top of a coconut tree. A more plausible but less widely circulated explanation was that his name was actually Đạo Vừa [The Monk of Moderation] but because in South Vietnamese dialect the two names sound identical, it was mistakenly assumed that “moderation” was “coconut” and the tree-top story was grafted onto his legend.

The Coconut Monk’s island was a favorite hangout for American hippies passing through (like John Steinbeck Jr., who was a devotée) as well as Vietnamese youth dodging the draft and posing as acolytes of the Coconut Monk. The Coconut Monk was a peace advocate. The centerpiece of his artificial island, constructed on a wooden platform held up by pilings sunk in the river, was a symbolic bridge linking Saigon and Hanoi. Every day the Coconut Monk would traverse the bridge, connecting the two power centers of the divided country.

With no big political stories in Saigon, or major military action elsewhere, Jacques looked around for an angle that his competition was overlooking. He decided to go to the most remote and strategically insignificant place he could think of. Thus it was that I found myself accompanying Jacques on a trip to Cheo Reo in Phu Bon province in the central highands. Jacques described Cheo Reo as “ a backward mountain town we’d chosen to visit precisely because it was so remote – we wanted to see what impact the war had in such a strategically insignificant place. Cheo Reo was so calm, in fact, that it invited relaxation: the Viet Cong hadn’t rocketed the place in eight months and the whole country was enjoying a military lull anyway.”⁴³

“We’d just said good night to Ed Sprague, an American economic development official who’d been showing us around Cheo Reo, and we were undressing in the guest room adjoining his quarters in the province adviser’s compound. Suddenly we heard explosions just outside our room. On instinct, we dove to the floor. It sounded like shells, but we couldn’t tell whether it was incoming our outgoing. Another round landed, audibly spraying gravel. No more doubt: incoming.”⁴⁴

“Dave and I ran out the door, looking for a bunker, but on the way we ran into Sprague, whose head was covered with blood. He said the wound was superficial: he was more concerned about his secretary, who’d been wounded in the face. I was terrified now: I desperately wanted a bunker. Dave and I finally found one, but after rushing inside it, we were engulfed in smoke – it took us another minute or two to realize that the building above us was in flames. In the haze and confusion I felt certain that my life was in danger; it was the first time since I’d arrived in Vietnam that I fervently wished to be someplace else.”⁴⁵

It turned out that this was an isolated shelling, and the not the prelude to an attack, as we had initially feared. We grabbed some buckets of water and assisted in putting out the flames. “Sprague’s secretary was the only serious casualty of the shelling. She lost some skin below her nose. One building burned down. The attack was so insignificant that it wasn’t mentioned at the daily briefing in Saigon, and I wrote nothing about it.”⁴⁶

Instead, Jacques wrote a story about Ed Sprague, a former Special Forces soldier who had become a passionate advocate for the Montagnards, whom he feared were on the brink of extinction. For him saving the Montagnards from this fate became more important than the war itself.⁴⁷ Jacques wrote a story on a Jarai spiritual leader, the King of Fire. Ed Sprague drove us along a bumpy road to visit him. “The king’s visitors were expected to give him an animal for sacrifice, so we stopped at a marketplace to buy a live chicken,” Jacques wrote. “Back in Saigon I took pleasure in filling in 1.25 on my expense account for a ‘sacrificial chicken.’”⁴⁸ I’m sure the LA Times didn’t advertise this “when in Rome” act to the animal rights activists among their readers (they couldn’t certify that “no chickens were harmed in the reporting of this story”). The previous visitors had brought along a jar of homemade fermented rice wine to reinforce his plea for the king to cure his sister of craziness. “Her misfortune became an occasion for festivity: we’d all take part in the chief Montagnard actvitity, wine-drinking. The jug filled with wine and leaves was tied to a pole in the center of house’s main room, and we sat on the floor around it, taking sips through a long reed passed from person to person. Sprague said some men could lower the jug’s contents by a foot in a single intake through the read,” Jacques recalled, “but an inch was all I could manage and, considering the taste, more than I desired.”⁴⁹

“The king looked anything but regal,” Jacques observed. “An old man, he wore only a loin cloth, and a stroke had left him half-paralyzed. His face was alert, though, and his spirits were high; when Sprague showed him a pocket lighter, presumably an interesting object to a King of Fire, Sui Anhot giggled and asked where he could get one.”⁵⁰ One wondered if the mojo of an easily obtainable zippo might eventually undermine the role of the King of Fire among his people.

King of Fire Jarai tribe in Cheo Reo with Ed Sprague. Photo DE

Photos DE

There were signs that the backwash from the American presence were having the corrosive effect on the traditional tribal way of life that Sprague feared would lead to the extinction of their distinctive culture. On this trip, we observed the counterpoint of a graceful Jarai girl playing her traditional flute, with the posting of a collage of Playboy centerfolds in entry way to the biggest long house in the village. We returned to Saigon with the prospect that Jacques would have to wrack his brains for another color story to fill the void in the action.

A Strategic Pivot: the 1972 Easter Offensive

We did not have long to wait. Despite the Coconut Monk’s best endeavors not only was peace not on the horizon, the war suddenly escalated when, unexpectedly, the long-predicted offensive finally occurred. In the last week of March 1972, as the North Vietnamese Army was beginning its preparatory shelling below the DMZ, the US was still convinced that if a major offensive was launched, it would be in central Vietnam. The New York Times reported that “American analysts here. … were saying that the Communists might be concentrating their attacks in Laos and Cambodia because it is easier for them to succeed there now than it is in South Vietnam.” However, intelligence reports noted an infiltration of up to 80,000 North Vietnamese troops into South Vietnam, but reported that most of these forces “appear to be aimed towards the Central Highlands… where South Vietnamese forces are most vulnerable to attack. …” Intelligence sources did note, however, that “The North Vietnamese are also building three new airfields just above the Demilitarized Zone. Would they use them to send bombers beyond their borders against their enemies? ‘That,’ one source said, ‘would be an entirely new phase of the war.’”⁵¹ In the event, the North Vietnamese sent only ground troops, not bombers, but the size and intensity of the offensive did indeed mark “an entirely new phase of the war” at an unexpected time and place.

A retrospective Vietnamese account of the offensive stated that “At a time when the enemy believed we did not have the capability of large attacks on their lines of defense to penetrate into the cities and populated areas, but only could mount moderate scale operations in the Tay Nguyen battlefield and attack pacification in the deltas, on March 30, 1972 our forces launched a concerted crushing attack on the enemy defense line along Route 9 in Quang Tri, the northern part of the Tay Nguyen [Central Highlands], the delta of Region 5 [central Vietnam] and the Mekong Delta. … The enemy was completely taken by surprise about the timing, targets, and scale of our offensive and were therefore passive and confused in reacting.”⁵²

In fact, the original plan had been to focus the offensive on the upper Central Highlands, but it was changed at the last minute to achieve strategic deception. “The meeting of the Central Military Committee (at the end of February 1972) decided, based on the evolution of the battlefield situation, to shift the strategic direction of the offensive to the Tri Thien [Quang Tri and Thua Thien] battlefield. Eastern Nam Bo and the Central Highlands were changed to an important [eg. not primary] point of emphasis, and were to be prepared to send some of their forces to penetrate deep into the delta when the opportunity arose. This change conformed to the reality, because the Tri Thien battlefield was adjacent to the strategic rear base of the North, and we could mobilize forces and guarantee supplies for a large scale, long-lasting campaign. Moreover, right up to that point the American Military Command in Saigon still believed that the primary strategic objective of our offensive would be the Tay Nguyen battlefield, so they had shifted a large part of the Airborne Division (the general reserve force) and the main forces of Miltiary Region to up to Gia Lai [Pleiku] and Kontum.”⁵³

Jacques wrote “We weren’t sure what to make of it until the fourth day, by which time the North Vietnamese had sent 15,000 troops across the DMZ and toppled twelve firebases. By then we understood; the Offensive was underway.” So as Nick Profitt hastily rewrote his Newsweek posting to appear as a prescient forecast of the offensive along the DMZ, he and Jacques made preparations to cover the story, but with varying degrees of enthusiasm. “Nick was elated,” wrote Jacques. “Nineteen-seventy-two had been transformed from just another year in the war to a watershed, or 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive. Nick envisioned cover stories week after week, but I was worried – I hadn’t contracted for a convulsion. All I’d hoped for was to survive a quiet year in the war and then make my escape. Now I was in for it.”⁵⁴ For me it was a chance to see the big-unit war close up, after years of poking around the edges of the guerrilla war in the Mekong Delta. And, I had the sense that we were moving toward the critical end game, and that this might, at least be the beginning of the end that we would witness.

Jacques recalled the trip in his memoir. “On Monday, Nick, Dave Elliott, and I took an Air Vietnam flight to Hue, about an hour’s drive south of Quang Tri city. Until a few days earlier we could have flown to Quang Tri, but all flights were cancelled, and for all we knew Quang Tri airstrip was under North Vietnamese control. Hue was as taut as a trip wire; already thousands of refugees from Quang Tri were seeking shelter there. The streets were gorged with people, buses, cars, trucks, bicycles, everything loaded down with household possessions from electric fans to live chickens.”⁵⁵

We rented a Citroen taxi and set out for Quang Tri. “Compelled forward by military trucks, troops, and armored personnel carriers, we were bucking the tide of refugees. Some were in buses packed to standing capacity; others rode bicycles or walked, carrying toddlers on their backs.” Jacques wondered , “Why was I advancing toward what they were so swiftly fleeing?” When we reached Quang Tri it had become a ghost town. The American advisors we encountered were not happy to see us. They “weren’t excited about helping us cover a military defeat and threatened to throw us out.” To add the our problems “the North Vietnamese were presumably advancing toward the city and might cut off our escape route by morning.” Nick and I rolled out our sleeping bags in a large room, but Jacques wanted something more secure. He found a cramped bunker, but it was so uncomfortable that he grudgingly rejoined Nick and me towards morning.⁵⁶

Refugees in Hue, April 1972 Photos DE

Tuesday morning we set out for Dong Ha, despite our apprehensions. “We’d heard that the North Vietnamese advance had been halted at Dong Ha, a town ten miles northwest of us, so we decided to hitch a ride there. A jeep was our first conveyance; words among the solemn South Vietnamese soldiers who shared it with us were as sparse as the vegetation over the expanse in negotiated. We were deposited at an ARVN intelligence center , which we weren’t allowed to enter: unlike American officers, who felt some obligation to speak to us, the ARVN command had no use for reporters. Considering that the ground was shaking because of nearby 130-mm shell explosions, I thought the ARVN officers were unreasonable. ….. Instead we headed toward the front. We got another ride on a half-track, then discovered it was loaded with ammunition. One bullet could kill us all, I thought. The low hanging clouds had robbed the surrounding terrain of color, the world in front of us varied only in its shades of gray. We were within mortar range of the North Vietnamese now. …”⁵⁷

Jacques continued, “ On the outskirts of Dong Ha we joined a column of South Vietnamese marines marching single file into the town.” I took a black and white photo of this column, which captured only the drab gray of the sky and what looked to be casual soldiers out for a stroll. When we returned to Saigon I saw David Burnett’s striking photo of the same scene, which beautifully captured the drama that we felt as we approached the danger zone. I guess I was not cut out to be a combat photographer, though Newsweek did publish a photo I took of Nick in Dong Ha to accompany a brief personal sketch of their man on the spot in their “notes to the reader” section .

“A terrible rumble emanated from the north side of Dong Ha, followed by a rising cloud of white smoke over the low clouds preventing strafing, but nothing held back the B-52s.” smoke: the low clouds prevented strafing but nothing held back the B-52s. Further on was the ruin of a bridge, blown up by two American advisors to halt the North Vietnamese advance.” Jacques wrote, “As we walked by, I saw my first corpses, of four North Vietnamese soldiers who had apparently charged across, and then were gunned down. Bloated and fly-ridden, with indistinct features and blotchy skin, they were frozen into awkward poses that distinguished them from anything alive. Some of the South Vietnamese soldiers in our column pointed at the bodies in derision, but I was filled with wonder, even awe: what made those men charge across the bridge when they knew they faced death at the other side?” Jacques mused.⁵⁸

A Reuters correspondent prominently featured these dead North Vietnamese in his coverage of the entry into Dong Ha. “Pigs, sniffing around the corpses of North Vietnamese soldiers, were the only things moving today in the middle of the North Vietnamese offensive below the demilitarized zone. Overhead, rockets sped southward and shells north. At the edge of the town was a South Vietnamese marine battalion whose job was to stop any northerners trying to cross a branch of the Cua Viet river.

Dong Ha, until four days ago a prosperous town of 18,000, is considered to be ‘holding out.’ But no humans move inside it. Any who do are killed by the marines here on the south bank of the river. Three dead North Vietnamese soldiers lie beside the wreckage of the river’s main bridge, which an American adviser blew up yesterday after enemy tanks approached the town and threatened to cross the river.”⁵⁹

“The North Vietnamese were killed by the marines at dawn as they tried to cross the river. Their topee-style helmets lay beside them. The silence is broken every few minutes by the eerie passage of rockets in the air from the northern bank of the river; then there are sharp explosions and the ground shudders.”⁶⁰ I paused long enough to get a photo of the gruesome sight, somewhat concerned that this might be construed as war-tourism. My purpose was to record the real face of war in order to remember the human cost of this tragic conflict. Like Jacques, I was impressed with the courage they had shown in attempting to carry out their mission. I knew from the Rand interviews that there was a phrase current among North Vietnamese soldiers in the South, “born in the north to die in the south.” [sinh Bắc, tử Nam]

A Vietnamese postwar account of the Easter Offensive wrote “many soldiers who set out on the road [to the south] in the summer of 1972 were youths from thirty universities and institutes in Hanoi, totaling nearly 10,000 troops made up of students and even young instructors. At present, in the Truong Son cemetery in the old citadel of Quang Tri, there are many graves of soldiers of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam, which record birth dates of 1953 or 1954,” which would have made them 17 or 18 years old in 1972.⁶¹ Of course the politically correct use of the term Liberation Army of South Vietnam is negated by the fact that whole point was that these were not southerners but young educated North Vietnamese soldiers, mostly from Hanoi, who had sacrificed their lives in the South.

Despite this ominous portent, Jacques wrote “Entering Dong Ha calmed me a bit, just as a boxer might feel more relaxed after entering the ring. I had an idea of the danger now, and it wasn’t as severe as I’d expected. Fighting was confined to the river bank in the center of town, at least half a mile from where we stood; aside from that the chief danger was mortars which had blown the rooftops off a few houses around us. For now, though, it was quiet: the inhabitants had fled leaving behind boarded-up houses which the marines were breaking into, looking for lucre. Some found beer or soft drinks, which they drank with their rations. A few played harmonicas or guitars. Down the street a looted alarm clock went off.”⁶²

“Nick, Dave and I walked closer to the river bank, ignoring soldiers who whispered urgently to us, ‘VC!’” Jacques recalled that “I was ready to turn around but Nick wouldn’t stop. He said he wanted to see combat; I couldn’t understand how we could see it without becoming a part of it. Noticing that one of the tallest houses in Dong Ha had been broken into, we entered and climbed to the top to see where the North Vietnamese positions were. The house was like a museum display; we even found a child’s opened schoolbooks on the dining room table. From the top floor we watched South Vietnamese jets making strafing runs, and then we heard the chilling rumble of another B-52 strike across the river. A voice from the propaganda plane advised the Communists, ‘No place is secure.’ Did they have to be told?”⁶³

B-52 strike across the Thach Han river. Dong Ha town is in the foreground. April 1972. Photo DE

Even from a distance of about a kilometer, a B-52 strike is awesome. One can only imagine what it would be like to be in the bullseye of this devastation. We waited for about an hour to see if any further action might develop. Finally Jacques, nervous about being cut off from a return to Quang Tri city, managed to persuade Nick that we had seen enough.

“We hitched a ride out of Dong Ha, then walked for a long stretch along the crater-pocked road. Dave and I practically trotted, wondering if we’d be able to get out of Quang Tri before the North Vietnamese blocked the road to Hue,” Jacques wrote. My concern was more immediate. We had to cross long stretches of no-man’s land, and I was quite apprehensive, fearing that we might by caught in the open by North Vietnamese 130s. “Dave and I practically trotted, but Nick trudged behind, laughing at our haste and yelling, ‘Half step, you guys. Half step!’”⁶⁴ We finally managed to make it to Quang Tri, then to Hue and then back to Saigon. Jacques and Nick had their stories and I had a first-hand exposure to one of the landmark events of the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile…in the Mekong Delta

In mid-April 1972 I accompanied Jacques to the Mekong Delta which was, as he wrote, “the most populous of South Vietnam’s four military regions and the only one where no major battle was being fought or imminently expected. Dave’s theory was that despite the relative calm there the Delta was key to the offensive; he believed that the Communists’ strategy was to divert ARVN troops there to the big battles while they rebuilt militarily and politically in the Delta, where they had been weak for several years. …The theory explained how the Offensive might work to the Communists’ advantage even if they became mired on the major fronts, as now seemed conceivable.”⁶⁵ Although Jacques was not entirely persuaded by this theory, he decided that it would be interesting to see what was happening there.

We travelled through eight provinces in four days “staying in the usual scabrous hotels.” Jacques found that it was pointless to seek information from South Vietnamese officials, who were deeply suspicious of American reporters. So we talked with Americans instead. Some were optimists, others pessimists. The most candid were the pessimists.

“The most open official we found was a debonair colonel whose reward for candor appeared to be his tour in the remote province of Chuong Thien. His comments happened to coincide with Dave’s theory. An ARVN division had been relocated from Chuong Thien to reinforce An Loc, and in the resulting upsurge of Communist-initiated combat, the remaining ARVN forces in Chuong Thien had been ‘set back considerably.’ My story, which illustrated Dave’s theory with the example of Chuong Thien, was cut in half and run on an inside page, while McArthur’s more prosaic analyses ran day after day on the front page.”⁶⁶

It was only after the ceasefire in January 1973 that this theory was put to the test. Jacques pulled off one of the major scoops of the war by being the first foreign journalist to enter a liberated zone in the new situation. This is his story, not mine, so I refer the interested reader to his account in The Mark.⁶⁷ He was surprised by the extent of Viet Cong control in areas that were so close to the main highway that most outsiders assumed it would be impossible for them to operate so close to the GVN center of gravity. “We were in Binh Phu, a 100 percent Viet Cong-controlled village of seven square miles and 6,800 people. We were amazed that the Viet Cong occupied territory so close to the main road through the Delta – from where we stood at one point, we could see cars plying it. I’d driven that stretch many times without suspecting the Viet Cong were that close.”⁶⁸ At least some of this expansive Viet Control was probably due to a resurgence made possible by the Easter Offensive.

Spurred on by Jacques’ coup of entering a Viet Cong zone to report on the impact of the cease fire, a swarm of reporters tried to retrace his steps to match the story. “Everyone tried to duplicate the feat, but it was ten days before anyone succeeded, and then in quick succession half a dozen people did it, just as we did, by walking into Binh Phu village in Dinh Tuong. … Oanh finally told the journalists to stop coming, as he had other things to do.”⁶⁹

I accompanied Jacques to a press briefing at Camp Davis in the Tan Son Nhat airbase complex. This had been the base of the Third Radio Reconnaissance Unit where I was stationed when I first arrived in Vietnam in September 1963, as described in my chapter “The Sun is Spinning.” We sat down among the correspondents to hear the litany of complaints and accusations of the Provisional Revolutionary Government spokesperson. During the conference, the PRG security men caught on that I was a Vietnamese speaker translating for Jacques, and came over to take my picture, presumably to find out more about me, but also by sticking a camera in my face to send the message that they were on to me. Jacques wrote, “For an hour or two we listened straight-faced to a Viet Cong colonel’s dreary propaganda harangue, translated into English by a monotone North Vietnamese soldier, until at last we were handed soft drinks and invited to chat with the officers. I gave them my written request to return to Viet Cong territory and enclosed copies of my Dinh Tuong stories.”⁷⁰

At another press conference a few weeks later Jacques got his response. His proposal had been approved. “The delegation’s information officer gave me a letter instructing me to appear on a specified afternoon at a canal in the Delta province of Kien Tuong, where an intermediary would guide me to nearby Viet Cong territory. It made no sense to jeopardize Long on another Viet Cong journey, so I cabled Dave Elliott, who’d expressed enthusiasm about interpreting for such a trip and he flew in from Hong Kong.”⁷¹

By this time Mai and I had moved to Hong Kong, where I was doing research on my dissertation topic, comparing the different routes taken by China and North Vietnam in establishing a government after gaining power. “On the scheduled day Dave and I drove to Kien Tuong only to discover that the directions in the letter were maddeningly vague. For hours we searched along the canal for our intermediary, all the while wondering if we were already in Viet Cong territory and therefore resisting arrest. We even crossed the designated canal by boat to look for the intermediary on the other bank, but we found no one.” In fact we were shot at by someone who appeared to be a GVN militia soldier, either to chase us off or attempt to compel us to stop and be inspected. We didn’t wait to find out which, but kept moving. I was impressed that there was still a GVN presence this deep into the traditional Viet Cong base area in the Plain of Reeds after the ceasefire.

“As our frustration increased, the questions Dave asked villagers became more and more blunt, until we were stating outright our desire to enter Viet Cong territory. We finally gave up and returned to Saigon.” Jacques phoned the PRG information officer who was apologetic, and said he would provide another letter. “This time our instructions were to go to An Xuyen province, at the southern tip of Vietnam, so far from Saigon we’d have to fly. Ten days after the Kien Tuong fiasco we took an almost empty Air Vietnam plane to Quan Long, An Xuyen’s tiny province capital. Quan Long was so small it lacked taxis, so we hired motorcycle drivers.”

Uncomfortably perched on the motorcycles’ rear wheel fenders, we headed down a bumpy road toward our destination. Again the directions were vague. Worse, we could see that a battle was taking place near the apparent rendezvous area. We continued on passing a few wounded ARVN soldiers and a unit firing mortars at Viet Cong troops. We found no that Viet Cong soldiers had been told to look out for us, which meant that if they did find us they might regard us as their enemy and try to kill us. Furthermore, even if we surmounted that hazard, gaining entry into Viet Cong territory might signify only that we’d earned the distinction of being ARVN targets.” In his later account of this trip, Jacques remembered “passing a few wounded ARVN soldiers.”⁷² My memory, faded over time but once vivid, is of a mound of ARVN corpses along the road ahead which, along with the fact that there was a firefight in the distance, prompted us to turn back.

We tried another route, approaching the rendezvous point from the other side, via canal. We hired a boat and set out, while I tried to decipher the army map of the area I had brought along. A GVN militia post at the junction of two canals hailed us. “What are you doing out here?” they shouted. “Oh, we’re just taking a spin for fun,” [đi một vòng chơi] I replied, trying to sound casual and putting on my best attempt at a south Vietnamese accent. The soldiers were so taken aback by our presence in this remote area that they let us pass without further discussion. The alternate route didn’t prove to be the answer either, and we again turned around and returned to Saigon empty-handed. In retrospect, that was probably just as well. At any rate, Jacques already had his story. “After returning to Saigon Dave wrote a letter to the Tan Son Nhut delegation in Vietnamese, explaining the foul-ups and requesting one more attempt at a liaison. I delivered the letter at the next press conference and never got a reply.”⁷³

Phuong Nam, the jovial PRG information officer who was the intermediary for Jacques also served this function for other reporters (he later did an interview for the first PBS Vietnam War documentary series⁷⁴). I was not impressed with his organizational skills when it came to setting up clandestine contacts, and the experience put an even bigger dent in my former impression of the Viet Cong as a smoothly oiled organization machine. Of course it must be understood that he and the entire PRG delegation, living in the heart of Saigon, were under blanket surveillance, and there was probably not much incentive to take unnecessary risks just so that foreign journalists could get a story.

“Looking back,” wrote Jacques, “I consider my failure to return to Viet Cong territory a blessing in disguise. The day after our attempt in An Xuyen, Ron [Moreau], who unbeknownst to us had been prowling the same terrain, made contact with Viet Cong soldiers there and spent eleven days with them. His experience, however, was considerably less exhilarating than mine; the soldiers he accompanied were surly, verging on brutal, possessing nothing of the grace of Oanh [Jacques’ Viet Cong contact in Binh Phu]. My quest was for something beyond politics, and my Dinh Tuong journey helped fulfil it. An experience like Ron’s would not have furthered my search.”⁷⁵ Even though I missed by chance to observe the object of my years of study “in native habitat,” I concur with this sentiment.

As it turns out, Ron also had rough directions given by Col. Vo Dong Giang, head of the PRG delegation in Camp Davis.  “He took us aside and drew us a map of a road running south out of the capital of the south’s southernmost province, Ca Mau.  Travel down that road for 10 miles or so and you’ll run into a National Liberation Front roadblock, he told us. He said he’d send orders to the unit there to guide us around their ‘liberated’ territory. …When we arrived at the rendezvous point we were stopped at a Saigon military check-post, not a VC picket. The place bristled with 105 mm artillery pieces and M-48 tanks. Saigon’s forces had pushed out the VC days before. We returned to Ca Mau City and rented a motorized sampan on a major canal. We would just troll along the canal in the hope of spotting some VC flags. But after a couple of hours we spied no flags other than Saigon’s.   On the verge of giving up, I decided to stop at a Saigon local forces’ outpost at a bend in the canal. A young and friendly Saigon army lieutenant asked what were we doing. I just came out with it. ‘We want to make contact with the VC,’ I said.‘That can be arranged,’ was his quick, matter of fact, and surprising reply. He summoned an elderly local farmer and told him to contact the local VC element, saying that three foreigners wanted to visit. I hoped this local unit had heard the VC’s own radio broadcasts announcing that foreign correspondents were welcome. The farmer returned.  The VC had agreed. The old, white-whiskered man asked us to follow him.”⁷⁶ So that was it. Instead of elaborate cloak and dagger maneuvers, one had only to ask the nearest ARVN soldier! Col. Giang was no more effective than Phuong Nam – the final nail in the coffin for my inflated view of the miraculous underground network of the Viet Cong.

But I did not know that at the time. I gave it one more try, this time with Fox Butterfield of the New York Times. We went into a village in Central Vietnam that we figured would be far enough from a GVN post to allow us to make contact with the Viet Cong, but after hanging around for a few hours, no likely intermediary appeared, and Fox decided to abandon the attempt.

Unsuccessful attempt to enter a Viet Cong zone in Binh Dinh with Fox Butterfield of the New York Times following the 1973 ceasefire

With three failures to my credit, I finally concluded that making clandestine assignations with the Viet Cong was not my strong point. If I had only thought to ask the nearest ARVN soldier. These attempts to “cross over” from the Saigon zone of control to Viet Cong territory also illustrated that the boundary between the two during the early period of post-cease-fire was real, and in some cases marked by posts and sentries, but making the transition from one zone to the other was complicated.

I proved to be slightly more useful to Jacques on one of our last collaborations. I accompanied him to a topless restaurant in Saigon, and his story effectively captured the cultural disintegration of Saigon in the last days of the American epoch. One of Jacques’ productive American sources, a USAID economist, tipped him off to a new story. Jacques discovered that “Saigon was now graced by a restaurant whose waitresses went topless for Sunday brunches. A topless restaurant was a first for Saigon, so I figured I might be in on another, albeit minor story. According to Banks, the place was striving to be ‘high-class’: this meant, among other things, that Vietnamese weren’t allowed to enter except as employees. The restaurant didn’t even have a street number, as if it were some kind of secret code.”⁷⁷

“Dave Elliott and I went there on a Sunday morning. We walked in and nearly disappeared: thick clouds of cigarette smoke and a shortage of windows obliterated the day. It was like entering a seedy cocktail lounge: the walls were covered with bordello-red wallpaper, and the waitresses were topless, as billed. They didn’t look happy about it, though: one had long hair which she arranged to cover her modest breasts. The customers were the sort of men Banks would be comfortable with, most of them paunchy or aging or both, attracted to Saigon because it satisfied a lifetime of lustful longing.”⁷⁸ Jacques’ tipster was a perfect illustration of my theory that the libido of the middle aged Americans who staffed the vast American neocolonial enterprise in Vietnam gave them a strong incentive to report that their presence was vital, and that all would be well as long as they stayed at their posts. As Jacques noted “Dave Elliott theorized that if Vietnamese women hadn’t been so attractive, if they had worn, instead of the graceful and seductive national costumes known as ao dais, say rings in their noses, the Americans would have quit the war years earlier.”⁷⁹ This was, of course, long before wearing rings in noses became a trendy fashion in the U.S.

“Even if our waitress lived in Saigon, she was far from home now, and when Dave said something to her in Vietnamese, she looked startled. From then on she treated us as her allies; members of an ill-defined Resistance, and she gave us a summary of her life story.” She had come from the Delta hoping to make money to support her family, and had fallen into prostitution. Now she was disillusioned and wanted to return to the Delta but was afraid to because she had disgraced herself but hadn’t managed to save any money. “As she contemplated her ignominy, she began to cry. Here was the underside of the American strategy of luring Vietnamese into the cities: as a result of the American withdrawal, thousands and thousands of Vietnamese women now had stories like the waitress’.”⁸⁰

My journalistic collaboration with Jacques concluded on this depressing note. He was later expelled from the country for having exposed a massive scandal involving the Saigon government making vast profits off shipping empty artillery shell casings to Singapore at a time of an acute global shortage of brass. I did manage to provide Jacques with information on a tiny but important piece of the puzzle; I had learned from a Vietnamese friend that the smuggling enterprise went all the way up to the Prime Minister.⁸¹ Reporting this story put Jacques in considerable danger, because the South Vietnamese governmen was not anxious to have the United States discover that they were recklessly expending artillery at a time of acute shortage, in order to stockpile more brass shell casings. As I researched the final chapter of The Vietnamese War, I reflected on the consequences of this profligate expenditure of artillery at a time when U.S. support had dwindled to a trickle and ammunition was increasingly scarce. In little over a year artillery ammuniton shortage significantly contributed to the crisis. By mid-1974 “The enemy appears to have accurately assessed ARVN’s recent reluctance to expend large quantities of artillery to support small isolated outposts under attack, and has exploited this situation by sharply increasing attacks on such positions. Lack of reactive fire support combined with sharply reduced air support has had a noticeable effect on the morale of RF/PF [Regional Forces / Popular Force] defenders. RVNAF intentionally abandoned many smaller outposts of marginal value. Each loss of an outpost, whether by intention or force, expands the enemy’s area of influence.”⁸² By 1975 “the ‘poor man’s war’ had considerably limited Saigon’s ability to rely on its traditional tactics of countering attacks with massive air and artillery. The DAO reported in February 1975 that ‘artillery support for outposts under attack was limited to two rounds, after which permission for additional support had to be requested from higher headquarters.’”⁸³ The Saigon government had done itself in by its own greed and short-sightedness. For the brass scandal story and others, Jacques finally was expelled. His reward was to cover the even more tragic end-game in Cambodia.

Prior to leaving My Tho, I went to visit Col. Phuoc in Kien Tuong province, next to Dinh Tuong in late May 1973. After the failed assassination attempt instigated by corrupt GVN officials who were incensed that Phuoc would not participate in their systematized graft and turn over a percentage of the monthly budget for the Ben Tranh Regional Forces Training Center, Phuoc was transferred to take command of another Regional Forces Training Center in Cao Lanh, Kien Tuong province. For some reason he was allowed to run this center on his own terms. We observed a cache of weapons captured by his trainees on operation, and visited the nearby grave of Ho Chi Minh’s father, which was accorded solemn respect by all present.

After April 30, 1975 Phuoc was forced to turn himself in for “reeducation.” Because of his rank, Col. Phuoc received especially hard treatment in a North Vietnamese camp where he was deprived of medicine for his severe diabetes. The next time I saw him was in Saigon in 1982, looking haggard and depressed following his recent release from incarceration.

Col. Phuoc and staff – Kien Tuong Regional Forces Training Center May 29, 1973 –  Col. Phuoc and his wife after release from a “reeducation camp in North Vietnam.” Saigon, August 1982. Photos DE

We travelled to Da Lat with our new friend Tran Tuong Nhu and her fiancée Tom Miller, my classmate at Yale, and a lawyer who was active in supporting humanitarian medical aid to Vietnam. After a few days in Da Lat we continued on to Phan Thiet via the little-travelled and scenic route down the mountain to the provinces of lower central Vietnam. As the road reached the bottom of the mountain, we were greeted with the hanging effigy of a Viet Cong – not a promising indicator of national reconciliation in the post cease-fire period.

Road from Dalat to Phan Rang 1973

 Photos DE

Nhu was a friend of Father Gérard Moussay, a specialist on Cham culture, who had established a Cham Cultural Center in Phan Rang dedicated to preserving what remained of the language and literature of one of the most tragically abused groups in Vietnam. My Cornell classmate Jay Scarborough received a grant to photograph the precious and rare items of Cham literature that Father Moussay had managed to preserve so they would not be lost in the final chaotic days of the war. Unfortunately Jay ran out of film and, while waiting for a fresh supply to arrive from Saigon, decided to visit a friend in Ban Me Thuot. He was there when the North Vietnamese opened their final offensive in 1975. Jay and a group of captives were marched through the jungles to Hanoi, where he spent an arduous year in confinement.

Young Cham woman at Father Gérard Moussay’s Cham Cultural Center in Phan Rang. Father Moussay and locals. Photos DE

On a drive from Danang to Phu Yen along Highway 1 the evidence of the destruction incurred during the Spring Offensive was evident, with houses along the highway reduced to hollow shells. A superfluously ominous skull and cross bones had been painted on a large rock in order to illustrate the perils of living in this area.

Destroyed house along Highway 1 1973 Skull and crossbones warn of perils along Highway 1 1973 Photos DE

Our friend Hai Nien came up from Vinh Kim village to bid us farewell in Saigon. The next time I saw him was in 2006. He had survived two years of harsh confinement in a “reeducation camp” in the Plain of Reeds, but managed to pick up his life, and was living comfortably in his native village. Vuong Bach promised to continue sending updates from My Tho, and we continued to correspond until the final month of the war. Nothing in his letters or short interviews suggested that the end would come as abruptly as it did.

In the summer of 1973 we concluded our stay in Hong Kong and stopped over in Vietnam on our way back to the United States to say farewell to friends and family. It was a melancholy visit, because we were uncertain if we would ever see them again. Surprisingly, most of the people we met were relaxed and confident about the future. Mai’s brother Luong had become a successful lawyer. He and his family were prospering and he was optimistic about the prospects ahead. Most of the others in her family were also doing fine. Mai wrote in Sacred Willow that “when I went home for a visit, Saigon had looked strong. …[T]he mood that Dave and I found on our visit in 1973 was not as downbeat [as Kissinger’s private forecast, unknown to us at the time, that the Saigon government would fall within two years of the American departure]. My relatives certainly did not believe that the communists could defeat Saigon so quickly. Like me, they suspected deep down that the communists would win sooner or later, but for now, looking at the balance of forces, they were optimistic.”⁸⁴

Even so, Mai said farewell to her family with some foreboding. The next time she would see her father was in Camp Pendleton as a refugee following a harrowing escaped from Vietnam as the communists swept in to take control of Saigon. With concern for friends and family, but no clear picture of how events would unfold in Vietnam, we returned to Ithaca.