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★ chapter eleven “live hour, live minute” In My Tho, the evolution of temporal as well as spatial categories was marked by abrupt and confusing shifts. The starting point was hardly tranquil, as revolutionary and government clock times diverged, the co-belligerents imposed time disciplines that were out of step with the agrarian cycle, and solar and lunar calendars uneasily coexisted. Just as it had done with space, U.S.sponsored modernization “compressed” time. When it speeded up the pace of warfare, the Front was compelled to adopt slow-down tactics that frustrated the Americans but also impeded villagers in their daily rounds. The present chapter analyzes these instabilities in the measure and control of time. time disciplines During the war, clock time in the Republic of South Vietnam was one hour ahead of clock time in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The NLF followed the northern rather than the southern clock, so that the watch worn by a GVN official would have been set one hour ahead of the watch worn by a Front cadre. In some contexts this disjuncture seemed no more than an oddity , as when a soldier said, “One day, after I finished my training course for the day, at 4 pm (Hanoi time), I went down to the river to take a bath.” But, then, consider this report, from a liaison agent: “Normally, I started for Long Hung at noon (Saigon time) on my working days because the period of time from 12:00 am to 2:00 pm is the GVN soldiers’ rest time. There were no patrols on the ricefields and no movement of troops.” Benefiting from the lull, he said, “I crossed back over the open ricefields and arrived at my hamlet at about 2:00 pm. It was an easy job, with little risk or difficulty.” Here and in other situations, completion of assignments and personal safety depended on a knack for switching back and forth between two clocks.1 The government and the Americans functioned within an urban environment where work was done in office time, and so, when defectors passed through the no-man’s-land between NLF and GVN zones, they sometimes chapter eleven 194 arrived in My Tho or a district capital in the evening or on a weekend, when Chieu Hoi Centers were closed. One rallier who showed up outside of business hours was warned, “If you wander around here tonight and run into some policemen you will be put in jail.” An informant who had gotten a job as a salesgirl in Saigon recalled that work was confined to a fixed number of hours per day. When asked how the Americans treated Vietnamese employees , she replied: “I didn’t hear much about working conditions. I only heard that the workers had a fixed time schedule.”2 Some responded positively to this novelty. “Americans are behaving nicely and are paying the workers well,” testified an informant. “Having to work only during office hours is also very much appreciated by the people.” Others were nervous about work by the hour and about wage labor more generally, so different from the routines of smallholders who oscillated between periods of idleness and intense exertion and whose land provided for their subsistence . When itinerants returned to My Long and were asked about life in Saigon, they reported “living from hand to mouth. They would have nothing to eat if they didn’t work daily.” Looking at the problem from another perspective , the Rebel noted that “in the GVN schools, the teachers quit right after the end of the classes and they never stayed in the schools late to help the students who did poorly in the classes.” It was, she thought, an inefficient practice. “Unlike the Front teachers, the GVN teachers didn’t try to save time for the people by teaching whenever they were free.” What must have seemed rational time management from the perspective of a school administrator resulted in time lost for others.3 In workshops, offices, and armed forces, the Front imposed its own regimen . Regroupees, who had gotten used to a “fixed time schedule for work and rest” in the DRV army, were sometimes “dissatisfied” after returning to the South, where “their life was no longer that good and well regulated.” But for southern peasants, by-the-hour discipline in the PLAF was experienced as a break from village practice. Soldier-informants reported that...

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