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19: an american or vietnamese program? (1966) ifought strenuously to change the thinking of CIA representatives involved in the pacification cadre program. I tried my best to convince them that the census and grievance elements needed to play the leading role in each pacification cadre team and that this could not be done successfully with just fifty men. I explained again how the census and grievance elements would work together to canvass all the members of every family in every hamlet to be pacified. They would come to know the religious and political affiliations of every family, their economic status and living conditions, as well as specific matters than concerned each family. This approach would have two benefits. First, it would provide information on local Viet Cong supporters and their activities . Second, collecting grievances from people on the conduct of local government and military personnel would provide a truer picture of what goes on in hamlets than ever before available. All earlier intelligence-gathering efforts had relied solely on the police and military security. No attempt had been made to involve the local populace, especially peasants, in any way until I set up the grievance program in Kien Hoa. My previous five years of experience in various local governments had convinced me that the old method, using personnel and techniques inherited directly from the old French, had long since proved to be corrupt and counterproductive. This colonial and postcolonial legacy led to the assumption that everyone with any sort of ties to the Viet Minh during the fight against the French and their Vietnamese puppets were automatically suspected of being Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers. As a result, village populations were divided into three groups. One group included all of those affiliated with the government: political officials, civil servants, the police and intelligence agents, and military personnel. The vast majority of these were holdovers from earlier French and French-Vietnamese regimes. Viet Cong and their sympathizers made the second group. Those in neither camp made up Vietnam’s “silent majority.” In most villages the first group controlled the local government, collected taxes, and passed judgment on what villagers were Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers. Those who really were Viet Cong made their own demands on the villagers, harassed local officials and Vietnamese and U.S. troops in the area, or joined other enemy units in larger military operations. Those in the middle adopted a two-faced attitude in order to maximize chances of survival. During the 1940s and 1950s, most of the people not affiliated with the govern- 237 an american or vietnamese program? ment had either joined the Viet Minh in the fight against the French and its puppet Vietnamese or had supported the Viet Minh to varying degrees, so government, police, security, and military officials regarded this silent majority with suspicion. Most peasants, the very people whose hearts and minds we wanted to win, were thus the objects of discrimination and oppression. Too often, as I’ve mentioned earlier, officials also had personal axes to grind, accusing people of Viet Cong activities to get revenge or for other personal reasons. Recognizing these truths and acting on them should have been the key to winning the hidden “silent war,” a new and radical solution to winning politically as opposed to simply conducting the usual war of guns and soldiers. I had learned in Kien Hoa and elsewhere that 95 percent of those who had supported the Viet Minh against the French were nationalists, not Communists. In fact, they knew little or nothing about communism. I had made it a point in Kien Hoa to make the police, security, administrative officials, and the military observe and understand the consequences of automatically assuming that all former Viet Minh supporters were enthusiastic Viet Cong supporters. Our goal should be to reconcile the silent majority of the people with those who had served directly or indirectly under the French in the previous war, and rally all factions to the new South Vietnam cause. Although no one else had understood this simple concept and put it to work before, I had achieved remarkable successes in Kien Hoa province.1 I believed that what happened in Kien Hoa could be expanded nationwide. This would cause the Viet Cong to lose their rural bases and resources, undermining Vo Nguyen Giap’s “people’s war” and the “fish and water” strategy. Thus, the first two phases of the “revolutionary war” would not be possible and...

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