Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting

2. Rice-Roots Reporting

39 2 Rice-Roots Reporting Our lives are at the mercy of the gods! Farmer I interviewed in a Mekong Delta hamlet, 1962 Counterinsurgency, the way I figure it, is mostly being nice to the goddam people. U.S. advisor, 1960s A rice farmer grumbles that he is too afraid to leave his home in a government -held zone in the Mekong Delta and cross over to his paddy land controlled by the Viet Cong. A riverboat peddler of rice, fruit, and textiles grimaces that the war has reduced the waterways that he can safely travel to earn his living. A saintly looking villager tells me people in his Dong Nhi hamlet are too terrified to go out at night. “The government soldiers think we are Viet Cong and will shoot us,” he laments. “The population is caught in the crossfire.” A sickly man bitterly exclaims: “There are two vermin in the country—the government and the Viet Cong. They are the same.” These voices of fear and helplessness introduced me to the plight of Vietnam’s rural families when in the spring of 1962 I first visited the Mekong Delta province of Kien Phong, abutting the Cambodian border southwest of Saigon. Stopping in the shade of trees or their thatch-roofed homes, these villagers also revealed some early problems besetting the 40 rice-roots reporting Saigon government’s fledgling efforts to pacify them. The Mekong Delta was home to about six million, or 46 percent of South Vietnam’s rural population,1 and produced a surplus of the country’s rice and other agricultural necessities. The Viet Cong concentrated their attacks in this rice bowl area, controlling great swathes of land and those on it with an estimated fifty thousand fighters of all kinds—hardcore, province guerrillas , saboteurs. These fighters faced off with eighty thousand government army, civil guard, self-defense corps, and village militia. 10. The United States, hoping to win the hearts and minds of the people, heavily funded the South Vietnamese government’s strategic program that fortified hamlets with barbed wire, bamboo-spiked trenches, and watchtowers like this one. (B. Deepe Collection) rice-roots reporting 41 I decided that villagers in such a pivotal region would be ideal for interviews using the grassroots, public opinion polling approach I had learned in New York. Four years after I initiated my project, U.S. government officials began polling Vietnamese nationwide about their attitudes toward the war and the United States, but the White House stopped the project when negative results became public.2 I selected Kien Phong Province for my interviews so that I could visit some “strategic hamlets” that the South Vietnamese government had launched to counter the homegrown Communist-led insurgency. Proclaiming 1962 as the “Year of the Strategic Hamlet,” President Ngo Dinh Diem launched his ambitious program to provide security in the countryside by encircling hamlets with U.S.-supplied barbed wire and building watchtowers and then to uplift the area with social and economic developments.3 The United States heavily funded the program, envisioning it as a dramatic way to win the hearts and minds of the people.4 Diem developed his program to counter Mao’s fish-in-the-water strategy . As one counterinsurgency expert advised Diem, his program had to “get all the ‘little fishes’ out of the ‘water’ and keep them out; then they die.”5 At first Diem’s program alarmed the Viet Cong. They feared that it would cut their connections to villagers, or as one wrote, the guerrillas would become “fish on the chopping block.”6 To fly to Kien Phong, I squeezed into the seat behind the pilot of a two-seater l-20 aircraft at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport. Within five minutes we were soaring above the vast lushness of the Mekong Delta, a chaotic spiderweb of canals, rivers, and streams. Along the delta’s waterways were scattered some of South Vietnam’s 16,398 hamlets, where rural families lived in a cluster of houses surrounded by rice paddies or thick vegetation, rather than being isolated from each other like families were in my native Nebraska. Each hamlet ranged in population from four to seventeen thousand villagers, with half containing a population of only five hundred or fewer.7 Three to five hamlets in turn made up each of South Vietnam’s three thousand or so villages, which was the most...