SOUTH VIET NAM'S OTHER WAR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000200130010-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 30, 1999
• Sequence Number: 10
• Publication Date: February 18, 1966
• Content Type: MAP

flCI"DP75-00149R000200130010-8
STATINTL
.P ui Bai
.4, a .. I CORPS,
TilUA TRIER'
Danant;~' F~6,834 v 16 2 ,4 I
CPYRGHT
SOUTH VIET NAM'S`e- -
OTHER WAR
(Nonmilitary personnel)
r--1
Priority area
L-"1
GOVERNMENT Total: 22,838
Political Action (PATs), Census,
and other
U. S. A I D Total: 179
(Agency for International Development)
V Prov. advisers and staff 106
Education 11
Agriculture 4
Public Works and other 19
Public Safety (39 in all provinces)
" Medical teams 16
International Volunteer
/`a Service 45
`Nhilippmc?C`
g,
6hilippincs
BINH DINH
Konturn A.
Plet{ u? 3 I*:ui Nhon
N
PLEIKU II COR.PS,..P
'2~ry
Australia ," DINII 1-60t4 ,1!
a
t oMr~ K I E N
VINH
BINH
Viet Cong control
t.,
or influence i
Government control
? or influence
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 ll\'::W3'VVi .\
FEB ; 1 1966
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7HE WAR IN VIETNAM
CPYRGHT
The Second Front
\\'hcn he flew into Saigon last wee
Vice President Hubert H. Ihunphre
carried with him a whole bundle of ii
spirational proposals freshly minted in
the Declaration of Ionolulu (page 24).
At the direction of President Johnson,
Ilumphrey was charged with the task
of. publicly launching a U.S.-backed pro-
gram of social, economic and political
reforms at the rice-roots level through-
out South Vietnam. Characteristically,
he took to his task with over-flowing en-
thusiasm. On a visit to an experimental
animal-husbandry station established
with American aid money, he spotted a
brand-new pigpen full of Berkshire
Blacks, cleared his throat and let out a
Minnesota hog call, "Ilooece, hooece,"
bellowed the Vice President of the
United States. "That's the best call for a
hog there is," he added. "Hoocce is a
universal language." Then, in a more
serious vein, he told NiwswELK's Wil-
liam Tuohy: "There's a social revolution
talking place hero. I'm i'oully impressed
with what they are doing."
To old Vietnam hands, however,
Humphrey's assumption that an officially
sponsored social revolution was already
under way in South Vietnam seemed ar-
guable at best. And any implication that
the Vice President's much-heralded mis-
sion represented, some kind of break-
through in military-political strategy in
Vietnam seemed slightly meretricious.
Indeed, one of the great cliches of the
Vietnamese war is that it is more a
political than a military conflict. And
everyone from South Vietnam's Premier
Nguyen Cao Ky to U.S. lieutenants out
in the boondocks has long paid at least
'lip service to the need to "win the
hearts and minds of the people."
Diverse Interests: This need stems
from a variety of factors. For one thing,
South Vietnam is not really a nation in
the modern sense of the word, but
rather a conglomeration of 15 million
people of diverse ethnic, religious and
economic interests. For another, the
country's peasants, who comprise 80 per
cent of the population, have never been
given any reason to feel a sense of loy-
alty to the Saigon government. Though
most of South Vietnam's political leaders
are staunchly anti-Communist, it is often
for the wrong reason-to perpetuate the
closed social system from which they
derive their wealth and influence. This,
of course, scarcely commends the fight
against Communism to the peasantry-
especially in view of the fact that since
the end of World War II the Commu-
nists have shrewdly fed on the wide-
spread rural discontent by promising a
swcepirAp> abvedtfor Release
To counter the Communist c ha lenge,
snccessfve rulers of South Virtn>mm irnve
come up with a variety of reform meas- The "new" program publi; i7rd at Ili'
arcs. Before they were finally expelled Honolulu meeting was fashion d '>.?
from Indochina in 1954, the French, 1;chv sJ G,._-Lansdale, a 1i
using U.S. ai unc s, iauiiciiuu aviur, 1, -, __ <
sanitation projects-but these were de- officer - lip is now Ambassador I Trr,;
ly to iinnrove the lot of Cabot Lodge's chief adviser on pac French settlers. Subsequently, the late
plan is designed to a r;r'' 'hc Vii
President Ngo Dinh Dien set about
erecting a string of so-called agrovilles- Gongs control of the
replace it with a politic-al base ni.u
self-sufficient agricultural towns created
hich a strong national government. re-
by merging a number of scattered vil- which
sponsive to the people, can he built.
into larger and presumably more
Tactics: To. accomplish this ambititr>s
viable economic units.
the U.S.. and South Vietnamese
Perhaps the most ambitious of the g-65
governments have borrowed a pxgc from
efforts was the "strategic hamlet" govern
Communist tactics. Over the past two
program, a more sophisticated variant
Saigon has trained a poi ;
on the agroville scheme started by Diem years,
15,000 politically motivated "rural con!
in 1962. This aimed at isolating the Viet
f
-
Vietnamese peasants tour pig breeding farm: `A universal language'
Cong from their source of peasant sup-
port by first relocating entire villages
behind the wooden walls of fortified
stockades, then organizing their occu-
pants into local defense forces. Though
more than 5,000 hamlets were built, the
program was a failure because it was
pursued in a haphazard fashion. In most
cases, no attempt was made at identify-
ing and eliminating Viet Cong agents
and their supporters, and as a result
none of the hamlets was ever secure.
After the fall of Diem, the program col-
lapsed and has never been resumed.
Aid Program: Since then, however,
the U.S. has experimented with a whole
series of programs under different names
-"civic action," "nation-building," "paci-
fication." American civic-action teams,
for instance, have traveled from village
to village, handing out schoolbooks,
building wells and dispensing medicine.
And' under one U.S. aid program three
years ago, $2 million was spent to dis-
CIA, thesemeri are. paid about $25_.a
ino'nt h plus. a family allowance, and are
given a basic ten-week course in mili-
tary tactics and political action at train-
ing centers in Vung Tau and Pleiku. By
the end of this year, the South Viet-
namese Government hopes to have
30,000 men trained.and ready to go to
work in their home provinces
There, they will ' be assigned by their
province chiefs to more than 2,000 ham-
lets-some of which are supposedly al-
ready "pacified." Operating in 59-man
groups, the cadres' first task will be to
try to establish a working relationship
with the hamlet's existing government.
Next, Political Action Teams will begin
organizing the hamlet's defenses by
building fortifications, trenches and
warning systems. While this is going on,
Civil Affairs cadres will organize groups
of four to ten families into "interfamily"
units, and New Life Development
000 South Viet- Teams will survey the need for repairs
tribute pigs to some 5
,
?9 i li?w lie~p, u)wpof g?~ 9 e~~ ~anging loans to
1rm income whic i however, gore R
went up in smoke for free.. family feasts. The key to the success or failure of
Ctiiiit.I taitiAtj
 Approved For Release 1999/09/17 : CIA-RDP75-00149R000200130010-8
CPYRGHT
the rural construction effort, however,
Nvill be the so-called Census Grievance
Team. After surveying a hamlet and
plotting each house on a map, this team
will begin its real work of "population
control." Every ten days, each adult
member of the hamlet will be inter-
rogated in a private booth by a member
of the team. Ile will be asked such
questions as which government officials
he likes and dislikes, what evidence he
has of corruption on the part of officials,
what changes he would like to see
made. More important, he will be sys-
tematically quizzed about the Viet Cong
-how often they visit the hamlet, who
cooperates with them, when they plan
their next attack.
Cooperative: The hope is that once
the peasants see that something is actu-
ally being done about their grievances,
they will become increasingly coopera-
tive in exposing Viet Cong agents and
their sympathizers. Pro-Viet Cong vil-
lagers will be offered the chance to
renounce their ties or act as double
agents. If they refuse to cooperate, they
can, in the last resort, be denounced to
the Viet Gong as government agents or
otherwise "eliminated."
As carefully as all this has been
thought out, there is, of course, no guar-
antee that it will work. True, the census
grievance approach has been tried with
notable success in Kien Hoa Province,
south of Saigon, and the former chief of
that province, Col. Tran Ngoc Chau, has
been put in charge of all rural construc-
tion cadres. Beyond that, Saigon has al-
located no less than 10 per cent of its
budget to the Ministry of Rural Con-
struction under Gen. Nguyen Due
Thang. And at Honolulu, President
Johnson placed his personal prestige-
and some $500 million this year alone-
on the success of the program.
Nevertheless, some Americans in Viet-
nam remain skeptical. To begin with,
they doubt that pacification can be
made to work except in areas where
U.S. or Vietnamese Government troops
have unchallenged military control. And
even in such areas, it is not always pos-
sible to assure the safety of those who
cooperate with the government; in one
group of villages near Da Nang, a small
Viet Cong assassination squad managed
to keep local officials intimidated long
after the marines held ostensible con-
trol of the area. Moreover, even under
the relentless urging of Lyndon Johnson,
United States and Vietnamese officials
will have trouble staying focused on re-
form measures when, out of necessity,
they must give priority to military mat-
ters. It was by no means an expression
of undue pessimism when one knowl-
edgeable American in Saigon last week
remarked: "At this point, I don't give
the program more than a 50-50 chanco
for success."
FES u1 196
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 N E JS`XEl" (
FEB 9 1 1966
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CPYRGHT
Rabbits and Elephants
T One of two U.S. correspondcnts to
itn s the launching of Operation
1 ashc three weeks ago in thc-cotrsfal
rlee Telta of South Vietnam was NEws-
WEEK Senior Editor Arnaud de Borch-
grave. Last -week 'de-B"orcligrave'cabled
Though th ecial~Force__s _men knew
they were on a suic~te mission they
ham Teen-Tee to elieve that tT ere
would be a quic cFfol1ow=t1irougl1 by 'the
First Cav. Instead, th_ c Trst_Cav allowed
the following appraisal of the disap- itself- {o be diverted by_ die-
he Viet Cong's
paintingrc5t~lts of thesecoridphac rear_ uard action outside'"Bong "Son-
O ciation Masher-which was christened g
f?~' ~_ - . Then, bad weather set in, hampering
Oration White Winger mobility. By the time the First Cav fi-
pally descended into the valley, nine
After skirmishing with rear-guard Viet days had passed, fully half of the Spe-
Cong squads in the coastal plains around cial Forces troops had been wiped out-
Bong Son, the First Cavalry Division had and the enemy had disappeared.
high hopes of catching the guerrillas' At Special Forces headquarters in
main force in the lush green An Lao_ Nha Trang, 200 miles northeast of Sai-
u"ey1_15. miles to the north. As early as gon, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the
Jan. 26, five Special Forces teams of five commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam,
men each had been dropped into the last week personally debriefed the sur-
valley to find and "fix" the enemy. Inm- vivors of the An Lao Valley. "Those boys
mediately, these teams came under were real bitter, and they didn't pull any
enemy fire and radioed back that they punches with the boss," reported one
had found at least a battalion-and pos- U.S. officer. "They expected heavy
sibly an entire regiment-of Viet Cong. casualties, but after finding and fixing
The First Cavalry Division moves in; `The boys were bitter'
Cav wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
For one thing, the First Cav's helicopters
can be reduced to semi-paralysis by a
low cloud ceiling in a mountainous area.
For another, the division's hundreds of
choppers require a staggering amount of
logistical support. Capt. Joseph L. Spen-
cer, the man responsible for supplying
Operation Masher/White Wing, rattled
off some of the major items he had to.
furnish daily: an average of 1,000 air-
to-ground rockets, 3,300 rounds of artil-
the enemy and fighting like lions for
several days, the least they expected
was that their sacrifice would be ex-
ploited. Next time, we'll make damn
sure we have our own back-up force"-
by which he meant one that would re-
spond directly to Special Forces orders.
Cloud: Part of the problem was that
the much-vaunted mobility of the First
lery, 40,000 gallons of jet fuel.
Somewhat disheartened by the per-
formance of his unit, one First Cav
colonel conceded: "We're like elephants
chasing rabbits: What he didn't -say,
however, was that the U.S: s rabbits-
the Special Forces teams-found the en-
emy rabbits, but that the elephants
were unable to follow through""'-"~
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