Fire in the Lake (25 page)

As an archaeologist might conclude from examination of the NLF’s goods and tools, the guerrillas were attempting not to restore the old village but rather to make some connection between the world of the village and that of the cities. The land mine was in itself the synthesis. Made of high explosives and scrap metal — the waste of foreign cities — it could be manufactured by an artisan with the simplest of skills. A technically comprehensible object, it could be used for the absolutely comprehensible purpose of blowing the enemy soldiers off the face of the village earth. Having themselves manufactured a land mine, the villagers had a new source of power — an inner life to their community. In burying it — a machine — into the earth, they infused a new meaning into the old image of their society. The Diem regime had shown a few of them a way out of the village. The NLF had shown all of them a way back in, to remake the village with the techniques of the outside world. “Socialism” —
xa hoi
, as the Viet Minh and the NLF translated it — indicated to the Vietnamese peasantry that the revolution would entail no traumatic break with the past, no abandonment of the village earth and the ancestors. Instead of a leap into the terrifying unknown, it would be a fulfillment of the local village traditions that the foreigners had attempted to destroy.
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The Origins of the National Liberation Front

In an attempt to justify the American bombing of North Vietnam and the dispatch of American troops to the south, the U.S. State Department in February 1965 issued a White Paper entitled
Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam.
In this paper, State Department officials claimed that the NLF was no more than an instrument of North Vietnam working against the hopes of all the South Vietnamese for peace, independence, prosperity, and freedom. Had these official claims been true, they would have delineated a situation not very different from the civil wars in Nigeria or Pakistan. And a civil war did not, it seemed, always require American intervention — particularly on the weaker side.

But the Vietnam War was not a civil war; it was a revolutionary war that had raged throughout the entire country since 1945. The strength of the revolution had always been in the north, but the Viet Minh had considerable success south of the 17th parallel. In the period of truce following the Geneva Conference the Viet Minh had, in obedience to the military protocols for disengagement, regrouped some ninety thousand soldiers to the north — most of them southerners.
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Still, below the 17th parallel there remained hundreds of thousands of Viet Minh cadres, local guerrillas, and their sympathizers. The majority of the remaining Viet Minh were not Communists — no more were the majority of the northerners. But many of them had, like the northerners, lived for the years of the war within a political and social system very different from that obtaining in the rest of South Vietnam. In certain areas such as the Ca Mau peninsula, the region west and northwest of Saigon, and northern central Vietnam, villages, often whole districts, belonged to the revolution just as others belonged to the sects.
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The people of these regions had firmly expected that the end of the war would bring a unified Vietnam under the government of Ho Chi Minh. When six years later the National Liberation Front was formed, the new movement appeared to them only as the logical continuation of the old one. As one village elder told an American in 1964, “The Liberation grew right up from this place. It happened gradually. Another generation started it. Let us say I am now fifty years old, those who are thirty are now going and those who are twenty come to take their place.”

And there was a strong element of continuity between the two movements: a continuity of people, of war aims, and of operating methods. The leaders of the NLF worked in close cooperation with the north, even during the years just following the truce, but it was not until the intervention of American combat troops that they became dependent on the north for war materials and for men.
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In such a situation the notion of “control” becomes ambiguous. (It is difficult, for instance, to imagine that with its own resources and matériel, the NLF had
no
influence in Hanoi.) But even if the NLF had always been “controlled” by Hanoi, the American official conclusion that it was therefore illegitimate as a southern political movement does not by any means follow. The personnel of the NLF was, with few exceptions, southern. Northern troops did not enter the south until the American troops had already arrived. If the north was indeed trying to conquer the south, it was doing so by politics and culture but not by force. But even this case is impossible to make in a clear-cut manner, for there were southerners within the Politburo of Hanoi. The details are incidental.

The National Liberation Front was founded in 1960, but the guerrilla movement in the south began some two or three years earlier. After the Geneva Conference, the active Communist cadres in the south instructed their followers to disband and wait for two years until the national elections were held and a political settlement made. All official Viet Minh activities stopped except for the “legal struggle” for the elections.
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The NLF leader, Nguyen Huu Tho, later explained this decision of 1954: “There were mixed feelings about the two years’ delay over reunification but the general sentiment was that this was a small price to pay for the return to peace and a normal life, free of foreign rule.”
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Peace did not, however, last very long for most of the southern Viet Minh. In 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem repudiated the Geneva proposals for national elections and began his campaign of terror against the former members of the Resistance. From the accounts of the Viet Minh cadres it appeared that the campaign was largely successful in destroying what remained of the Viet Minh organization and in reducing the villages to subserviency. While some of the Party members fled to Saigon, where they would not be recognized or pursued, others banded together and went into hiding in the jungles and swamps that had served them as base areas during the war.
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As one cadre remembered, “In those days you could say we were ‘based’ in the mountains, but these were ‘bases’ for survival. We had no arms at all and barely the means of existence.… Control was so close that it was impossible for us cadres to live among the people. But we came down from the hills at night to try to make contacts.”
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According to the French historian, Philippe Devillers, the southern cadre at this point pressed for a renewal of the struggle, but the north held back, urging the southerners to give a respite for the consolidation of the DRVN.
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While Hanoi surely supported the aims of the southern cadre, its judgment on the timing and the policy to be pursued may well have conflicted with that of the southerners. Certainly the northerners then and for several years later limited their aid to the most easily procured commodity of advice. Weapons could be much more easily obtained from the GVN outposts and the Americans than from convoys traveling the long trail down from the north.

In the long run, however, the Diemist repressions only advanced the date of a new armed struggle. They persuaded many of the former Resistance members whose one goal had been to defeat the French that they could not live in physical safety under the Diem regime, that peace was not peace but a continuation of the war. Diemist policy in general threatened the sects and convinced certain intellectuals and rural notables that the new regime would not serve their interests or leave them a hope for future success, as the French and the Bao Daiist administrations once had. A highly trained and dedicated group of soldiers and political instructors, the active Communist cadre in the south went to work on these groups. By 1958 they had established a small network of committees in most of the old Viet Minh strongholds: in the U Minh forest at the southern tip of the Delta, in the jungles west of Saigon and in the west of Quang Nam province. In the next two years they moved out rapidly from their base areas, infiltrating the nearby hamlets, overrunning small GVN outposts to supply themselves with weapons, taking over hamlets, and recruiting again. At the same time they expanded the movement politically, taking in the former Resistance members who did not belong to the hard core and the members of the other political factions alienated by the Diem regime. In December 1960, they formed the National Liberation Front and adopted a ten-point program of “peace, national independence, democratic freedoms, improvement of the people’s living conditions, and peaceful national reunification.”

Over the next two years the NLF leaders — men who remained for the moment anonymous to the outside world — molded the loose grouping of committees into a close-knit political and military organization. By mid-1961, so American intelligence indicated, its strength had reached fifteen thousand, and half of the guerrillas were fully armed.
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This military force, known as the People’s Self-Defense Forces, developed by a process known to its cadres as “growth and split.”
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A platoon of experienced fighters would split up to train three platoons of new recruits. The company thus formed would split again to train three new companies, and so forth. In the early years these forces remained dispersed in small units, each unit remaining close to the village that formed its own supply base. The plan for expansion included the carefully coordinated activities of propaganda, recruitment, terrorism against the local GVN officials and soldiers, and the establishment of governing committees and mass organizations within the newly liberated villages.

In February 1962, the Front convened a clandestine congress of one hundred delegates and chose a central committee composed of men of every political color, from Communists to Saigonese intellectuals to religious dignitaries from the various sects, including a Catholic priest. Nguyen Huu Tho, the non-Communist Saigonese lawyer whom Diem imprisoned in 1954 for peace activities, was chosen president. While the makeup of this committee opened the way to a coalition in the event that the United States should withdraw support from the Saigon government, the “hard-core” former Resistance fighters formed the only real political party within it — and thus the controlling element. Until 1962 these men, along with their colleagues among the southern regroupees, belonged to the Marxist-Leninist Party of the DRVN, the Lao Dong. At the time of the congress they formed a new and specifically southern party, the People’s Revolutionary Party, that called itself the “vanguard” and the “steel frame” of the NLF.
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When the United States did not withdraw and the Saigon regime did not disintegrate after the fall of the Ngos, the PRP began to expand inside the NLF, absorbing some of the non-Communists and recruiting new members from the villages. As the NLF members recognized, the Marxist-Leninist Party was what gave the Front the strength and discipline to engage in the second and much more difficult phase of the Liberation war.

By 1962 the NLF had reached an important stage in its development. At the battle of Ap Bac it showed a group of unbelieving American advisers that its guerrilla forces could stand up against a multi-battalion ARVN operation supported by U.S. helicopters and artillery. This military achievement was not an isolated phenomenon. It was the visible expression of an underlying political reality. By 1962 the NLF had a presence in some 80 percent of the rural communities of South Vietnam. Not only had it retaken the old Viet Minh territories, but it had expanded outward from them, and most noticeably into the central regions of the Mekong Delta, where the Viet Minh had never succeeded in raising more than a collection of guerrilla bands. It was obviously not just a regional group or a coalition of special interests, but a national movement with appeal for the great mass of the rural people. The next war would be something more than a repeat of the Viet Minh war in the south.

The last point was significant — and somewhat mysterious because of the very continuity between the Viet Minh and the NLF. The two organizations were more alike than not in organization, program, and technique. The NLF leaders had the advantage of experience, but they had the disadvantage that the nationalist component of their struggle was not at all as obvious as that of the Viet Minh. Apart from racial or cultural opposition, “nationalism” is, after all, a most difficult abstraction. It took a certain amount of political and economic theory to demonstrate that the American role in Vietnam was in many ways equivalent to that of the French — particularly in the early years when there was no American presence in the countryside. As one Front cadre admitted, the peasants did not grasp the national question as well as the city recruits.
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And yet it was precisely the peasants who were joining the NLF in large numbers. One explanation, and perhaps the only possible one, was that there were new social and political issues at stake — or issues that the peasants had never felt with such acuity before.

A Natural Opposition

It was not the habit of Americans in Saigon to consider the enemy’s political program with any seriousness. But there was one issue that the Americans had to confront, over the course of the war, and that issue was land. In 1955 the American ambassador concurred with the French high commissioner that the Viet Minh land reform program posed a significant threat to the future of the Saigon government. That same year the American economist, Wolf Ladejinsky, made a disturbing study of land distribution in the Mekong Delta. According to his survey, 2.5 percent of the people living in the former territory of Cochin China owned fully a half of the cultivated land, while 70 percent of them owned less than 12.5 percent of it. While the pattern of land tenure varied from province to province (the inequality was less severe in such provinces as Binh Duong, Long An, and An Xuyen), two out of three Delta peasants owned no land at all.
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In 1956 the American mission finally persuaded the Diem regime to adopt a national land reform program. The reform failed to correct the situation, and for various reasons that included fear for the stability of the Saigon government and sheer apathy about the subject, the American officials did not renew their efforts for another fourteen years. Still, the issue remained alive in official circles in Washington. Particularly after the entry of U.S. troops into the war, a combination of liberal journalists, social scientists, and congressmen brought pressure upon the U.S. mission every year to implement a new land law. Their argument was that landlordism constituted the prime social evil of the countryside and that reform was necessary to the victory of the Saigon government over the NLF. As General Edward Lansdale explained to the readers of
Look
magazine in 1969, the “common man” of Vietnam has no interest in ideology: “His one real yearning is to have something of his own, a farm, a small business, and to be left free to make it grow as he wishes.” Once the Saigon government gave the people some economic security, the general concluded, the people would have no more interest in the guerrillas.
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