Fire in the Lake (26 page)

The difficulty of this argument was that although it seemed to make common sense — the NLF were in fact making political gains with their land reform program — it did not seem to hold as an explanation for the causes of the insurgency. With all their land reform programs the Viet Minh had found their greatest support in those regions of Vietnam — the north and the center — where the land was the most equally distributed. Where they found the least response was in the Mekong Delta, where the greatest inequality lay. With certain variations the NLF seemed to be repeating the same pattern: their strongest base areas lay in the center and in such Delta provinces as Binh Duong, Long An, and An Xuyen, where landlordism was much less prevalent. In apparent contradiction to Lansdale’s theory, most of the early NFL recruits (later, the “hard core”) tended to be not agricultural laborers or indebted tenant farmers, but small tradesmen, schoolteachers, clerks, and peasants who owned, or could look forward to owning, some land. These facts — quite evident to anyone with a history book and a map — were elaborated in a most tortuous manner in 1967 by a RAND Corporation economist armed with linear regression analysis and six independent variables. According to this study, the ideal province from the point of view of GVN control would be one where the inequality was the most severe, where there had been no GVN land reform, and where the population density was the highest and communications the poorest.
³

After the failure of the land reform and all the years of inertia on the issue, American officials in Saigon and Washington naturally seized upon the RAND study as proof that land reform did not matter politically, that, if anything, it was a merely humanistic issue to be settled after the war — along with all the other humanistic issues. The liberals for their part countered by attacking the study as inaccurate and pointing out that the land reform issue was indeed an important source of NLF support.
⁴

In point of fact both arguments were much too narrowly drawn to bear upon the causes of the insurgency. In concentrating exclusively on the problem of land tenure, both the liberals and the officials overlooked the more general political and economic problems that had plagued Vietnam since the colonial period: the shift from a subsistence to a market economy, the breakdown of the traditional village government and economy, and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few. The advocates of land reform failed to see that even if the Saigon government did promulgate a land law, the peasants, without access to credit and without political power in Saigon, would remain as chronically indebted and oppressed as ever. The U.S. officials, on the other hand, did not acknowledge that the peasants throughout Vietnam had economic grievances. The difference in response between the landed and the landless peasants merely indicated that economic grievances alone do not determine the course of a revolution. As to the reason for that difference, the suspicion was that it had to do less with economics than with local government.

It is easier to approach the whole issue of the political success of the NLF by looking at it in reverse from the point of view of what opposed it. After 1960 this question became completely mysterious to American officials because they came to believe their own propaganda that the forces of stability and order — as well as “revolutionary” change — reposed in the Saigon government. During the French war, however, the Saigon government had been almost totally ineffective for good or ill; political opposition to the Viet Minh had been mounted almost exclusively by the local governments and parties. The most obvious of these were the sects — the Catholics, the Cao Dai, and the Hoa Hao. But there was another important source of opposition that most European observers overlooked: the landlords.

It was natural for Europeans to think of these landlords simply as a class. In fact, the Vietnamese landlords were more like a government, for since their first settlement in the south, they had exercised almost total authority over the people who worked in their domains. With hardly any regulation from the colonial regime, they possessed a complete economic hold over two-thirds of the population.
⁵
They had the power to assign rents and to sell their tenants’ produce to the city merchants. At the same time, because the French did not provide any local government, the landlords took over many of the functions of the old village oligarchies. They arbitrated disputes among the peasants, assisted them with money for the ceremonies of birth and death, kept order among them, judged, fined, and punished them, often with the help of their own private militia forces. As one landlord described their role in the 1930’s:

The landlord acted not only as owner and lessor of land but as an informal administrator, like chief of a small state.… The relationship between the landlord and his tenants was paternalistic. The landlord considered the tenant as an inferior member of his extended family. When the tenant’s father died, it was the duty of the landlord to give money to the tenant for the funeral; if his wife was pregnant, the landlord gave money for the birth; if he was in financial ruin, the landlord gave assistance; therefore the tenant
had
to behave as an inferior member of the extended family. The landlord enjoyed great prestige
vis-à-vis
the tenant.
⁶

The manorial system of the south did not represent good government, for if surplus labor was available, the landowner could replace his tenant — his “sons” — or drive them into ruin at will. At the same time it represented
a
government, a
system
of domination based in economic reality and on the traditional model of government such as did not exist for the small peasant proprietors after the passing of their communal village institutions.

Since the French Indochina War, however, these local governments — landlord and sect — had been on the decline. As a conscious political policy, the Viet Minh had assassinated or driven into flight a great number of the large landlords. The Diem regime in its turn attacked the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai, thus crippling the two most powerful non-Communist organizations in the south. The Diemist officials supported the landlords in their attempts to retake their domains, but they could not absolutely restore the old landholding patterns or traditions any more than they could erase all the other socially disruptive effects of the French war. With some foresight, many landlords remained in Paris, Saigon, or the provincial capitals, and hired agents or bribed officials to collect their rents. As this system was not very efficient, and rents never again reached their prewar range in those areas the Viet Minh had controlled.
⁷
Then, in 1956, the Americans finally pushed through a land reform program limiting all landholdings to one hundred hectares and fixing a rent ceiling at 25 percent of the value of the year’s crop. The Diem regime never actually managed to implement either the land law or the rent ordinance, but the very fact that Diem attempted such a reform gave the landlords a renewed sense of their insecurity.
⁸
Many of the larger landlords now tried to sell out, though it meant prejudicing their position in the community. It was left to the NLF only to deliver the last blow with a really efficient land reform program that directly or indirectly affected some 90 percent of the villages in the Delta.
⁹

With the disappearance of the powerful landlords and the sects, the entire political picture of the Delta changed. The effects were noticeable even before the NLF achieved their land reform program and even in those areas that were the most highly garrisoned by the Saigon government.

Harsh as their rule might have been, the landlords had at least some interest in maintaining their authority over the peasants on a basis other than that of coercion. Known, and in a Confucian sense “respected” by their tenants, they constituted a truly conservative force. When the new officials came from the “out there” of Saigon (as opposed to the “in here” of the village), they brought the instability of the national government down to the most parochial of the rural districts. Because they were
not
the established leaders of the village to which they were assigned, the villagers received them much as they might have received proconsuls from a conquering foreign power. The change from the landlords to the bureaucrats demonstrated in concrete terms the change from a subsistence to a mercantile economy, and — or so it seemed from the villagers’ reports — brought that awareness of the outside world, that rise in “political consciousness” that the NLF otherwise had to take pains to achieve through political education. In attempting to establish their rule over the villages, the government-appointed village chiefs sometimes gained support from a few of the villagers (often those who hoped to use them and were capable of paying the necessary bribes). But in doing so they almost automatically alienated all of the other villagers. Their very presence in the village touched off a disturbance that spread like the ripples around a flung stone. In telling how he came to join the NLF one young defector described this process perfectly:

In 1956–7 life was pretty easy, villagers had motorcycles. Then came law 10/59. Under this law Diem was given the right [
sic
] to cut off heads of persons suspected of being VC sympathizers. This actually happened in hamlets near mine. Many people were worried. In March 1960 there was a big football game between my team and another team. The two teams fought and were mad with each other. Because the families of some of the boys worked for the government, I really believed they would take revenge on me. I was afraid and tried to hide. I went home. The VC knew that I had won the game, and they came to propagandize me. They said, “Look at you, you have got to hide, but you can’t really hide. You have no arms. The people will catch you and hurt you.” The VC dug a shelter for me to hide in.
¹⁰

The initial conflict did not have to be all that serious. A game of football would do for those who did not play games except as a matter of life or death, for those who did not indulge in limited conflicts. As one Chinese proverb went, “If the small things are not taken care of, then there will be confusion and great plots.” In other words, whatever the Diemist officials did or did not do, their very presence in the village would almost certainly, in the “natural order” of things, create opposition. When the NLF came to a village, they had but to look for a man within this opposition group who could, with training, recruit others. Then the Saigon government would take its turn. Hearing of a “Viet Cong presence” in the village, the province authorities would send more officials and recruit a platoon of “Self-Defense Guards” from that village or one of its neighbors — the result being that the disturbance would spread and a new group of people would become available for recruitment into the NLF. After a while the NLF would assassinate one or two of the Diemist officials or informers, drive away the defense guards, and take over the village. When the government reacted by sending its regular troops to punish the offenders and reassert control, the NLF and their supporters would have the villagers lay punji sticks and snipe at the troops, calling forth GVN fire upon the whole village. By a simple building of action upon reaction, the village would then belong to the NLF.
¹¹

After the disappearance of the landlords, the process of NLF recruitment was almost mechanical. Even the lowliest of the NLF cadres understood that the more men the Saigon government drafted, the more men would become available to them. In a sense the political success of the NLF did not depend upon the failures and inhumanity of Diemist policy — though Law 10/59 certainly helped — as much as it did upon a simple law of opposition. The NLF was the counterbalance without which the society would not have been complete — the Yang to the Yin of the government — except, of course, that neither force represented stability. In 1961–1962, as the government sent its officials into all parts of the country, the NLF grew from a series of committees, based in the jungles, mountains, and swamps, into a national organization that controlled perhaps a third of the rural population. In 1962–1964, as the GVN developed the Strategic Hamlet Program, the NLF began its shift from a relatively loose political movement into a formal replacement regime. In the succeeding two or three years, while the GVN doubled its armed forces from three hundred thousand to six hundred thousand, the NLF attained the strength that would make the Tet offensive possible. Like the government of India that in the early 1960’s built a road through Nepal towards Tibet, the GVN had by all its vast efforts at “nation-building” and “rural construction” succeeded only in building an invasion route for the enemy.

And yet the success of the NLF was not merely a matter of action and reaction. The Diem land program had the negative effect of frightening the landlords and leaving the peasants without any local government. But the NLF program actually worked to the benefit of the landless. Instead of drafting a national law limiting the landholdings and rents, the NLF simply went about making as equitable as possible the distribution of land and rents in every village. Taking account of the extremely varied social and landholding patterns in the different parts of the Delta, they worked not so much to minimize the abuses of the existing system as to maximize the economic position of all the peasantry by every possible means, including that of terror. If a landlord refused to cooperate, or if the NLF felt his death would serve a political purpose, he would be assassinated — and usually in public. The use of violence against landlords seems, however, to have been quite rare — in any case, nothing like that used against GVN officials. In most cases the very large landlords had already fled the countryside. As for the smaller owners — those who worked some of their land and rented the rest out — the NLF had strict orders to conciliate them. Often in the process of negotiation the small owners were allowed to keep all of their land as long as they charged “reasonable” rents — in the area of 5 to 15 percent of the current yield.
¹²
The NLF did not distribute land titles. (Probably for two reasons: first, because it had not formally set itself up as a government; secondly, because the titles would create unnecessary conflict when the soldiers and the refugees eventually returned home.) But it did give the peasants in a large part of the Delta a right to the crops they produced and a sense of their own bargaining power, their equality vis-à-vis the landlords.