Fire in the Lake (31 page)

After the meeting at which they declared the “illegal government” dissolved, the Front cadres called another meeting and asked the villagers to choose a man who was “talented, virtuous, clean, and capable,” to act as chairman of an administrative committee to manage the affairs of the village. Under Front direction the villagers unanimously elected Mr. Buu and approved the appointment of Front cadres to a council to take charge of security, finance, education, and propaganda in the village. Not long afterwards they called yet another meeting to ask the villagers to join a series of associations: one association was for farmers, another for youth, a third for women, and a fourth for old people. Over the next two months the Farmers’ Association became an active force in the life of the village. Organized into cells of seven to nine people, the farmers took turns doing the farm labor that required a collective effort and helped each other to increase the harvest.

At the same time the Front cadres gave great attention to political instruction. During the frequent association and hamlet meetings and in the course of the collective activities, they explained that the people of the village “belonged to the Very Poor Class and so they should stand up to lead the proletariat class to struggle against the governing capitalist class, which was the Americans, and their lackeys who called themselves Nationalists.”
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When Mr. Buu was asked whether the people of the village understood the doctrine of the class struggle, he replied that he did not know, but that since the cadres used appealing words and supported their arguments with concrete facts, the people liked to listen to them: they remembered how corrupt the area chief had been and they began to feel hatred for the class that oppressed both them and the landless peasants all over South Vietnam.

The propaganda campaign and the activities of the Farmers’ Association bore tangible fruit when the Front cadres began to exact “contributions” in food from the villagers to feed their troops. Most of the villagers did not make the contributions with enthusiasm, but they at least understood, as few of their compatriots had ever understood of the government taxes, that there was a reason for the exactions. Moreover, they could not suspect favoritism or injustice in the collections. Thanks to the rotation of duties within the Farmers’ Association, most of the farmers knew exactly how much food each family produced, and they saw that the Front cadres levied it from each family in fair proportion.

Within the space of three months the Front cadres had — despite the comings and goings of the government troops — managed to bind the villagers to them by a series of fairly strong ties. Rather than substitute one bureaucracy for another, they set up an organization that brought the villagers into a new relationship with government authority and with each other. Through their constant meetings, their private talks with the villagers, and their organization of collective work, they had established a network of personal contacts much more dense than the village had ever known. If only because they dared not break the balance of intelligence, the villagers protected both the Front cadres and each other from the government troops. To the extent that they kept this trust, they increasingly boxed themselves into a series of obligations, one of which led to another. They voted in the Front elections, worked on the Front’s projects, and made contributions to the upkeep of the Front troops. They might not have wholeheartedly supported the Front, but they were at least committed to it by occupation. Mr. Buu and others served on the administrative committee, and some of the young men helped the local guerrillas. Who then was a “member of the Front” and who was not?

Certainly the government authorities could not make the distinction. After three months of running fruitless operations through the village, the Allied command sent out a group of helicopters to strafe one of the hamlets where, as it happened, there were no Front guerrillas. In twenty minutes the pilots managed to burn down thirty-five houses and kill nine of the villagers, including two children and three old people. When the Front organized a committee from among the villagers to go to district headquarters and demand reparations for the damages, the delegation was turned away by the district chief. Six months later a large force of government troops swept through the village and took all of the remaining families away with them to a government-controlled area. The GVN had removed the villagers in order to remove the NLF.

The Front controlled Ich Thien village for only a few months, but there were many scores of villages in Vietnam where it maintained control for over a period of years. The development of these villages followed essentially the same lines that the cadres had drawn in Ich Thien village. The end product of this development was a complex, specialized organization capable both of defending itself and of supporting the weight of a regime at war.

For the ordinary people of the village, Front control meant a gradual change in the patterns of daily life. Before the focus of life had been the family; now it was the hamlet and the village. In villages more secure than Ich Thien, every person over the age of seven would belong to a community organization and participate in community projects. Each household belonged to an interfamily group and a hamlet association; each individual belonged to a Liberation Association. Of these last, the Farmers’ Association continued to be the most important. Its members organized the collective work of digging irrigation ditches or constructing the village defenses. They also arbitrated land disputes and assessed taxes on rice crops. The Women’s Association took care of the Front soldiers who passed through the village and helped those families whose sons had joined the regular forces. Certain young women were specially trained to proselyte the young men of the village and the local GVN troops. Members of the Youth Association — many of whom would later join the Front forces — carried messages and acted as guides to the regular Front troops. Where the defense of the village or the hamlet was concerned, men, women, and children participated either by collecting intelligence on the local GVN troops or laying out primitive defenses such as punji sticks and nailed boards. Each hamlet had a squad or more of self-defense forces and each village an armed militia.
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In addition, the village would probably have a small factory or workshop for the production of Front uniforms, medicines, or small arms.

The Front village was a cooperative agricultural center and military base. It was also a training camp for the new members of the revolution. In every village the cadres formed schools, classes for illiterates, and centers for the dissemination of news and propaganda. In most of them they would begin small theatrical and singing groups or bring in groups of entertainers from the outside to enliven the continual round of political education meetings. The secure Front village would usually possess its own mimeograph newspaper or information center to relay the news of the war and to bring the villagers into contact with the outside world. In these villages the Women’s Association would organize health education classes and set up small maternities and medical dispensaries. The youth groups would engage in sports programs and train their members to enter the regular guerrilla forces.

The government of the villages remained in the hands of Front cadres — most of whom were, after 1964, members of the People’s Revolutionary Party. In the beginning, these cadres would retain strict control over the administrative committee and in particular over the security, finance, and propaganda sections. The government of the village was unquestionably authoritarian, but it worked in a very different manner from the government of the GVN villages. While the GVN village chiefs pursued their impossible task of ruling the villages as they were, the Front attempted to remake them so that they might rule themselves.

As was the case in Ich Thien village, the first act of the cadres in taking over a village was usually to call a meeting and have the villagers elect one of their number as chairman of the administrative committee. These elections were not free, for the cadres chose the candidates. At the same time, the cadres took care to choose people whom the villagers respected. The cadres continued to control the committee and to initiate policy, but they would gradually train local men to take over the day-to-day work of administration. At first they would train farmers for the simple tasks of gathering villagers for a meeting or handing out propaganda leaflets. After a while they would turn over to them the more complicated tasks of collecting taxes, making speeches, recruiting new partisans, and administering the informal welfare program. As the villagers proved themselves competent to perform these tasks, the cadres retreated further and further into the background. For the NLF, the creation of a local administrative staff served an important function. It slowed, if it did not stop, the whole chain reaction of fear and hostility that the presence of any one bureaucrat would have set off in the village. The Front cadres
were not
the hereditary village chiefs, any more than were the Diemist officials, but they at least did not take on the position of supreme paternal authority. Partly concealed behind the administrative staff, they intervened in village affairs only indirectly — to initiate programs and policies, to direct the education and propaganda work, to see to village security, and to arbitrate disputes that could not be resolved by the villagers. By holding themselves above the relationship between the villagers and their “elected” officials, they could arbitrate between both parties while continuing to develop the Front organization in the village.

The obvious question of whether or not the villagers “liked” the Front government is impossible to answer directly. The villagers under Front control were engaging in an extremely complicated process, the end of which they themselves could not visualize. More importantly, the question did not pose itself to them in abstract terms. When asked whether they liked the Front, the low-level defectors and prisoners would usually reply in terms of whether or not the war had gone badly for them. Many peasants, for instance, objected to the Front taxes, which became increasingly high after the arrival of the American troops. Others objected to having their time taken by labor on the tunnel and fortifications. Still others objected to the Front government because of their concern that the GVN or the Americans would reoccupy the village, and a great many objected to having their houses bombed or shelled by the Americans. These same people, however, welcomed the Front when it appeared to be winning. Beyond them were the loyalists who looked upon the Front as the only true system. Because of this diversity of opinion, it is perhaps more useful to look at what internal changes the Front made in village life.

American officials and scholars have always emphasized the coercive aspects of the Front government. And the Front was in many respects coercive. When the Front cadres came into the village, they gave the villagers very little choice in the matter of whether or not they would join Front organizations and accept their authority. With the sanction of armed force behind them, these highly trained political cadres could, and often did, put pressure on recalcitrant individuals by keeping them under surveillance, by threatening them with “re-education,” or some other form of isolation from the community. Often the Front would assassinate a GVN official as an “example” to the villagers of what might happen if they decided to work for the government. Violence, and the threat of violence, was, however, most frequently employed when Front control was weak: that is to say, when the Front took over a new village or when a contested village came under heavy attack and the villagers threatened to leave for a more secure area. In these situations the villagers could, and often did, protest to the cadre in a way that they never would have dared to protest to a government village or district chief. In the end, though, they had only the resort of collective noncooperation and passive resistance. With the Front this tactic often worked, as it did not with the GVN officials when they had sufficient military support.
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But American charges of coercion reached beyond the war policies of the Front and extended to the system of government itself. American officials spoke of the lack of freedom in Front elections, the secret control of the Front cadres responsible to higher echelons, and the oppressive nature of the collective institutions. Much of this talk was sheer propaganda deduced from the official premise that all South Vietnamese hated the Communists, and that the Front operated by terror alone. (The question of who was to terrorize the terrorizers made this premise illogical as well as inexact.) Still, not all of the talk was propaganda. Much of it was the result of American attempts to assess the Front system in American terms without reference to Vietnamese values. Many American officials simply assumed that the Vietnamese would oppose the Front system because it was “not democratic,” that is, because it did not operate by majority rule. But if they had looked about them, they would have noticed that no Vietnamese government or political party had ever operated by majority rule. To most Vietnamese of the twentieth century the idea that a government ought to give the people a choice on its very makeup appeared quite absurd. If a government did not know what it was and what it wanted, then it was no government at all. Of course, if it made the wrong choices, then it would be a bad government, but majority rule meant nothing more than chaos and “confusion.”

With all of its political education programs and its organizational work, the Front was attempting to create the conditions for a new unanimity — and a unanimity not of passive acceptance but of active participation. In a sense the anonymity of the Front apparatus in the village was less of a deception than an explanation of what the Front was trying to do. Rather than take the villages for their own personal fiefs, the cadres were creating a system that operated by a set of impersonal standards. The aim of their work in the village was to train local people and to educate local sentiment to the point where the villagers could govern themselves, and they, the teachers, could actually leave the village. The “election” of the administrative committee chairman demonstrated that intention to the villagers from the very beginning. To the villages the Front offered not majority rule, but an equal opportunity for advancement by merit — or what the Confucian sovereigns had offered only the mandarin class. Besides that, they offered all of the villagers a system of predictable rewards and punishments that applied to everyone equally, including themselves. And many villagers understood that. While they referred to the GVN officials by their names or titles, they usually spoke of the Front cadres as an organization (“the Front cadres,” “the Liberation men,” “the Viet Cong”), the implication being that
whoever
the cadres were, they would treat the villagers impartially, that the village would be run not by private whim but by public policy. (As one government-sponsored study showed, the villagers, when they criticized the Front, would usually criticize Front policy rather than the cadres themselves, whereas the reverse was true of their criticisms of the GVN.)
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