In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

169 chaPTer 9 Another Chance in the Countryside By the end of 1965, the Johnson administration had sent nearly 200,000 American troops to Vietnam. Together with GVN forces, some of which were fighting well, they had blunted the Viet Cong–North Vietnamese Army advance. It might be argued that at this point the question of pacification strategy had become moot, that escalation by Hanoi followed by a Washington response in kind had rendered rural political loyalties irrelevant, or at most tangential, to the outcome. But the communists had always relied heavily on peasant cooperation for manpower, materiel, and intelligence, and the introduction of North Vietnamese Army combat forces only increased the need for local support.1 The accelerating casualties inflicted by superior U.S. firepower after mid1965 forced Hanoi to take another look at its commitment to early victory. But the hard-liners prevailed, and the Twelfth Plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee, held in Hanoi in late December, made only a ritual bow to the “strategic formula” of “protracted war” while it reaffirmed the drive for “decisive victory during a relatively short period of time.”2 A substantial body of evidence suggests that the Southern peasants’ disposition to support this drive was fading even as U.S. forces slowed the North Vietnamese momentum in battles like the one in the Ia Drang valley in November 1965. Ground combat had also intensified in and near populated areas, and this reinforced a climate in which popular sentiment seems to have been shifting away from the insurgents. Except for a few “thoroughly indoctrinated revolutionaries,” nearly all of more than 200 VC defectors and prisoners inter- VIETNAM DECLASSIFIED 170 viewed for one study cited this trend, which they attributed not only to allied sweep operations and B-52 bombings but also to an easing of popular hostility toward the GVN. The study concluded that “memories of persecution or corruption by local officials during the Diem regime are fading, and the successor governments have been able to enforce somewhat better standards of behavior.”3 By these accounts, relatively benign GVN comportment and increasingly onerous exactions by the Viet Cong had launched this trend even before the conflict escalated with the commitment of North Vietnamese and then U.S. combat forces. The concerted effort to win voluntary cooperation that characterized the VC program during the nine years of Ngo Dinh Diem’s rule had largely given way, by late 1965, to a military draft and “strict, even abusive, discipline.” Many peasants, seeing the GVN as militarily stronger than the VC, wondered why ARVN commanders did not do more to reestablish a GVN presence in the villages rather than merely attack them for harboring VC guerrillas. Interviewers from the Rand Corporation saw the GVN’s failure to do more for refugees as abdicating an opportunity to exploit VC antagonism toward peasants who returned to their villages after fleeing into GVN territory. Furthermore , both uncommitted peasants and devoted VC activists were beginning to see the outcome as more likely to be determined by the struggle between Hanoi and the United States than by local Viet Cong resistance to the Saigon government . In localities where U.S. military power had extinguished the communist organization, the villagers seemed disposed to “accept U.S. ‘control’ as part of the price for peace.”4 None of this meant that the villages of the South had ripened for easy picking by a more enlightened GVN. Whether operating under the military protection of the North Vietnamese Army in Annam or relying on indigenous forces in the Delta, the Viet Cong civilian and military cadre structure was still intact, and could still hold most draftees in their units. Some deterioration of quality had occurred in the lower ranks, and the effectiveness of local National Liberation Front (NLF) chapters varied, but on the whole Viet Cong cadres remained “dedicated, well-disciplined, and able to preserve good morale.”5 The pervasiveness and tenacity of the VC organization were conspicuous only a few miles west of Saigon, in Hau Nghia Province. A late-1965 Defense Department study judged more than half the population there to be under VC control and 42 percent more as under communist “influence.” The authors attributed this dominance to VC exploitation of peasant grievances and kinship ties, supplemented where necessary by coercive measures. The CIA officer in Hau Nghia reportedly believed that nearly all the VC in the province were native to the area, and he considered them self-sufficient even...

Share