The Firing Line
In the midst of his speech on the Berlin crisis, President John F. Kennedy took time to remind his listeners that the West faced an equally dangerous Communist challenge 5,000 miles away on the other side of the world--in Southeast Asia, where, said the President, "the borders are less guarded, the enemy harder to find, and the dangers of Communism less apparent to those who have so little."
Every night furtive little bands of Communist guerrillas, dressed in black peasant pajamas or faded khakis, splash through the marshes of the Mekong Delta or dart silently along jungle paths of South Viet Nam, pursuing their intent, murderous missions. On the road from Banmethuot last week, one band melted into the shadows as two members of the National Assembly approached in their Jeep. Then, at a signal from their leader, they raised their ancient rifles, clubs and swords and pounced with bloodcurdling cries. Seconds later, the two assemblymen lay dead, and the grim struggle to keep the Communists from winning South Viet Nam had claimed two more victims.
Booby Traps & Bridges. It is an ugly, elusive war, fought with all the clever stunts in the guerrilla's handbook, not all of them deadly. Gangs disguised as official mosquito-spray teams walk into villages to confiscate farm equipment in the name of the government; sometimes they tear up peasants' identity cards to disrupt local administration; the Communists even managed to sabotage the national census by substituting falsified lists in some areas. The Viet Cong, which is what the Communist Vietnamese are called, are everywhere: tossing grenades into isolated villages in the rice fields in the south, sowing unrest among the border tribesmen in the thickly wooded Annamese highlands to the north. By day Saigon, a city of 2,000,000, is safe enough. But no one willingly sets his foot outside town after dark.
Fueled by Communist North Viet Nam with supplies and men smuggled through Laos over the clandestine Ho Chi Minh Trail, this wasting war has been going on for seven years. Its object is the destruction of South Viet Nam's stubby, stubborn President Ngo Dinh Diem, 60, who runs the war, the government, and everything else in South Viet Nam from a massive desk in his yellow stucco Freedom Palace in Saigon. President Diem had fought the Communists in his country long before World War II. At war's end, he was arrested by them; his brother was shot by them. He has stood in their way ever since.
As he is acutely aware, the current guerrilla war might get worse before it gets better. Unlike Berlin, where the crisis so far has been only words, South Viet Nam is the arena of East-West confrontation where men are dying in large numbers. The struggle is savage. Just since January the dead on both sides total 2,500--roughly triple the total casualties of all eleven months of fighting in Laos.
With the disintegration of the West's position in Laos, most areas along the South Viet Nam border are now held by the Pathet Lao, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail has become an almost open thoroughfare through which Communist reinforcements pour into Diem's beleaguered country. Already the Communists are hard at work enlarging camps and even building airstrips in southern Laos for the rising struggle against South Viet Nam's harassed 150,000-man army.
The Decisions. Faced with this Communist challenge, the U.S. has made a major decision: South Viet Nam must be defended at all costs. While all Asia watched, the U.S., by fumbling unpreparedness and the lack of a dependable local fighting force to attach itself to, last spring abandoned Laos to its fate. South Viet Nam has been U.S.-sponsored from the start; its government is militantly antiCommunist, and its soldiers are willing to fight. If the U.S. cannot or will not save South Viet Nam from the Communist assault, no Asian nation can ever again feel safe in putting its faith in the U.S.--and the fall of all of Southeast Asia would only be a matter of time.
Once the decision was made that the line must be drawn at South Viet Nam, the Kennedy Administration acted vigorously. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was dispatched to Saigon to assure President Ngo Dinh Diem that the U.S., though it had retreated in Laos, could be depended on to help South Viet Nam defend its freedom. In Washington, a special Viet Nam task force was set up in the State Department. Last week a committee headed by Stanford Research Institute Economist Eugene Staley, back from a four-week study of South Viet Nam, submitted an inch-thick secret report to President Kennedy containing a detailed set of recommendations on just what needs to be done to buttress and shore up South Viet Nam for the imminent battle. Most immediate was a recommendation for funds to increase South Viet Nam's forces by another 20,000 troops. Overall, the report would commit the U.S. to the most detailed program of economic and social reform that the U.S. has ever undertaken in Southeast Asia.
Exposure for Two. The stakes are high. The collapse of Laos exposed two other nations to the threat of Communists on their borders--Thailand and Cambodia. Both will be closely watching the U.S. performance in South Viet Nam.
Thailand, a land of green canals, gilded pagodas and 20-ft.-high poinsettias, is headquarters for SEATO. Although the Thais are gentle people and not famous for stalwart struggle in the face of adversity (they surrendered to the Japanese with embarrassing speed in World War II, soon switched sides and happily declared war on the U.S.), they are bossed by tough Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who has built a strong 100,000-man army with the help of $550 million in U.S. aid. A popular dictator, Sarit made his country prosperous, faces no serious domestic discontent, and has kept his few domestic Communists well in hand.
In Cambodia, Neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk has turned neat profits by taking aid from both sides in the cold war, including $300 million from the U.S. But he is wary of the threat the Communists pose. "In order to remain on good terms with my Communist friends, we prefer not to have a common frontier with them," he said recently. Since the West's default in Laos, he has become frankly pessimistic. "I am trying to prevent Cambodia from going Communist, but I do not think that the free world can stop the movement of Communism," he said last week. It was part of the U.S. task to demonstrate to Sihanouk that Communism indeed could be stopped.
The Leader. In committing itself to the defense of South Viet Nam, the U.S. has also committed itself to the support of President Diem, who has long had a common border with the Communists, has never mistaken them for friends, and thinks they can be stopped.
His achievements are impressive. From a desk in his big, yellow stucco Freedom Palace, he has fought the Communists 16 hours a day for seven years. In that time, he has built a nation from the wreckage of the Indo-Chinese war. His critics were sure he would fall within six months after he took office in 1954. Instead, he and his country have survived and thrived. Rice exports have quadrupled and currency reserves are at a record level. To Diem's credit is a successful land-reform program, lower rents for peasants, a boom in light industry; with the help of almost $2 billion in U.S. aid, he has built a network of roads, irrigation projects, power plants and rail lines.
But Ngo Dinh Diem is no democrat by instinct; he remains aloof from the masses in the tradition of a mandarin who follows the ancient Confucian code of a divinely guided prince. "A sacred respect is due the person of the sovereign. He is the mediator between the people and heaven as he celebrates the national cult," he once wrote. A chain-smoking bachelor, he runs things his way, taking advice only from a few aides and his tight-knit family; his closest adviser is a brother who has an office in the palace. All departmental reports go to Diem's office for scrutiny; no battalion commander in the field would dare mount a major attack without his personal O.K.; until recently, in fact, no South Vietnamese passport could be issued without the signature of the President himself.
Diem is an obsessive talker who can hypnotize a visitor with four and five hours of monologue. One recent visitor arrived at 4 p.m., rose to leave at 8, pleading a dinner engagement. "Call them and tell them you will be late," said Diem, and talked on for another two hours. He breakfasts on bouillon, rice and pickles. "I am no aristocrat. I eat like a peasant," he says.
Diem operates under a democratic constitution, and holds elections; they are always carefully controlled. When one outspoken critic ran for the National Assembly and won, he was denied his seat on the ground that he had made "false promises" in his election campaign. Bitterly, Ngo Dinh Diem's critics label his system "Diemocracy" -- democracy in form but not substance. Diem merely shrugs. The U.S., concerned with his rigid inflexibility atop an insecure nation, also presses for a change in policy. But Diem is a stubborn man, and the U.S. is wary of the charge of "interference in internal affairs."
Gauze Trousers. Curled like a shrimp around the Indo-Chinese Peninsula, South Viet Nam is washed by 900 miles of the South China Sea. Behind the sandy dunes of the north are tiers of flat plains leading back to the highlands where 300,000 Moi hut dwellers search the thick forests for white elephants as good-luck charms. In the south are the hard-working Annamese peasants, squatting under conical hats of palm leaves in the brimming Mekong Delta marshes to plant the rice that is South Viet Nam's chief source of sustenance and a major export. The delta's deep black soil is some of the world's richest, could produce still more food if developed with roads, modern farming techniques. It is this great food potential that makes Ho Chi Minh and his hungry North Vietnamese press southward toward the sea.
Near the southern coast is the port city of Saigon, with its teeming, clamorous, shop-filled alleyways, its broad, treelined, Frenchified boulevards overflowing with beautiful fragile girls, like exotic moths in their flowing skirts split at the waist over trousers of silken gauze. Saigon's wealthy exporters deal in rice, and in the rubber, tea, cinnamon and copra that pour onto the docks from plantations in the nearby countryside.
Viet Nam (land of the south) has long been a magnet for conquerors. First came the Chinese, who drove south in the 2nd century B.C. to grab control for a thousand years, labeling the area Annam (pacified south), exacting tributes of pearls, precious stones, elephant tusks and valuable woods for the Emperor. Cleverly, the Annamese took the best China had to offer--the Chinese classics, the ethics of Confucius, and Mahayana Buddhism. But they fought fiercely and persistently to regain their independence.
At one stage, women led some of their most spectacular revolts. In A.D. 40, Trung Trac, whose husband had been beheaded by the Chinese governor, gathered an army of 80,000 Vietnamese to storm the governor's fort and set up her own kingdom, which lasted for two years. One of Trung Trac's army commanders was a stanch female who went into the fray nine months pregnant, gave birth on the battlefield, then rose to lead her troops in a futile last assault against the avenging Chinese. When the Chinese withdrew in 939, the Annamese turned conquerors in their turn. For nearly a thousand years, the Annamese armies terrorized neighboring Cambodia and Laos. (Laos' King Savang Vatthana still considers the attack on his country as not Communist but rather a renewed threat from the warlike Annamese.)
Mandarin in the Marshes. But the Annamese warriors were no match for the French, who arrived in the mid-19th century to cut roads and rail lines through the jungle, introduce rubber and expand the rice area for the profit of Paris. But the conquerors were not suffered docilely. As early as 1912, an anti-French nationalist organization called the Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi (Association for the Restoration of Viet Nam) was operating from Canton.
It was in this atmosphere of smoldering resentment that Ngo Dinh Diem grew to manhood. His father, Ngo Dinh Kha, was a cultured, educated mandarin whose family had been converted to Catholicism by missionaries in the 17th century. He was called to serve as administrative adviser to Emperor Thanh Thai in central Viet Nam's imperial capital of Hue, but quit in a huff when the French, interfering constantly in the affairs of the court, decided to depose the Emperor. Penniless ("We did not even have enough to pay for school," recalls Diem), Kha resigned himself to life as a farmer, borrowed enough money to rent some rice fields from neighbors, who were awed at the thought of an aristocrat and his family working beside them in the paddy fields.
Leaflets in the Haystacks. At first, young Diem seriously considered the priesthood. But the example of his scholar father soon led him to the local French school of law and administration in Hue (where he graduated first in a class of 20), then into government service as a district administrator.
In China, in the middle '20s, the youthful Vietnamese Communist, Ho Chi Minh, had formed his "Young Vietnamese Revolutionary League," was sending agents and propaganda south to foment trouble in Viet Nam itself. Soon Ho's products were showing up by the bushel in Diem's area. Diem himself was already a fervent nationalist, but he was shocked by the extremist cries for violence. Energetically he went to work arresting local Communists, gathering material for a 15-page anti-Communist booklet, which he distributed throughout his area. Rising rapidly to become a provincial governor at 28, Diem went to work on the French, hoping to alert them to the Communist threat; but they would listen neither to Diem's warnings nor to his persistent pleas for better living conditions for the peasants and a little more freedom.
"Don't Argue." The French were interested only in holding power. When Diem was invited to become Minister of the Interior, he demanded assurance that the French would agree to a strong nationalist voice in the promised new legislature. "You have a difficult character," he was told. "Take the job and don't argue so much."
Sure enough, the French-designed "democratic" assembly proved to be a rubber-stamp affair dominated by a French chairman. Ngo Dinh Diem resigned, and the French indignantly branded him a revolutionary, stripped him of all his academic titles and government decorations. "Take them," retorted Diem. "I don't need them. They are not important."
That was in 1933. For the decade that followed, Diem steered clear of politics, mostly read and studied at his home in Hue. It was a crucial time, for the revolutionary spirit was incubating swiftly. While developing the country, the French were extracting every possible sou in profits; every salt worker had to sell his output to the French-controlled monopoly, which sold the salt back to the Vietnamese at a handsome markup; each village was required to buy its rice liquor at fixed prices from the French distillers; as for reform and freedom, there was not a word. "I saw the danger from the Communists," said Diem. "We had to have democratic reforms or it was clear even then that the Communists would win."
Murder Mistake. When World War II came, Ngo Dinh Diem withheld his support from all three of the forces tusseling for control of the country--the Japanese, the French and Ho Chi Minh's Communists, although they all sought his cooperation. At war's end, Ho's agents arrested Diem and hauled him off to the mountains of the north. For good measure, they shot Diem's older brother, Khoi, a provincial chief who had fought the Reds. Months later, Ho personally summoned Diem, demanded that he take a post in the new national government that Ho had set up in defiance of the returning French colonial administration. "Why did you kill my brother?" asked Diem. "It was a mistake," replied Ho. "The country was all confused. It could not be helped." Angrily, Diem turned on his heel and walked out.
Fitfully, Diem once again began playing on the fringes of politics. After the Communists and the French had started their Indo-China shooting war in 1946, he formed a resistance movement against them both; it never amounted to much. The French offered to back him as head of a provisional government at one stage, but they balked when he demanded dominion status for Viet Nam. Finally, amid the bloody fighting, Ngo Dinh Diem packed up and left with an older brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, a Catholic priest, for a trip around the world. Reaching the U.S., Diem paused to rest and meditate at Maryknoll Junior College in Lakewood, N.J. While there, he made trip after trip to Washington to harangue Congressmen and Government officials in the cause of Vietnamese independence. "The French may be fighting the Communists," he insisted, "but they are also fighting the people."
A Few Friends. But the U.S. could not drop its French allies in the midst of a shooting war. Disheartened, Ngo Dinh Diem departed for Belgium to take up a monk's bleak life as a lay member of a Benedictine monastery in Bruges.
Then came disaster at Dienbienphu. Suddenly the defeated French needed peace--and desperately reached for an "independent" who could rally the demoralized Vietnamese and perhaps salvage something out of the shambles. Diem already had moved down to Paris from Bruges, took a hotel room and began dickering with Bao Dai, the young puppet Emperor who was lolling on the Riviera. Finally Premier Joseph Laniel's government authorized Bao Dai to meet Diem's basic demand: independence for Viet Nam.
Within days Diem was bound for Saigon with France's sanction to form a Cabinet. It would be no easy task. Diem had been out of the country for four years, had become a virtual unknown among the mass of his countrymen. Perhaps the sum total of his national support was at Saigon's airport when he stepped off the plane: five hundred personal friends, Catholic priests, village dignitaries and former colleagues in the old French colonial government.
A Few Friends. The war-ravaged land that Diem took over was hardly a nation at all. Two weeks after he was installed as Premier, Viet Nam was carved in half at the Geneva bargaining table by the weary and discouraged French, who agreed to hand over the north, with its coal and iron, to the Communists. That left Diem's amputated south to go it alone. The economy was in tatters, and almost immediately the roads from the north were clogged with the flow of refugees who were to total 880,000 within a year. To cope with his problems, Diem had no cohesive civil service, could not even depend on a loyal army, since his French-trained military chief. General Nguyen Van Hinh, was personally hostile and forever plotting to take over the reins of government himself. A private gang, the notorious Binh Xuyen, actually operated the national police, having bought the "concession" from Puppet Emperor Bao Dai for $1,000,000. On top of all this, two powerful quasi-religious sects, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, controlled large parts of the countryside, opposing Diem's regime and enforcing their will with well-armed private armies of their own.
Gangbuster. In this crisis, Diem got little help from the French, who were alarmed at his independence, secretly backed the Binh Xuyen, and yearned for the day when they could restore to power the pliable Bao Dai. But the U.S. backed Diem to the hilt. U.S. Special Emissary General J. Lawton Collins supplied ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet to help evacuate the hungry refugees, made it clear to troublesome General Hinh that the U.S. would grant no aid to any army that opposed the Premier. Diem whittled at Hinh's power by wooing important subordinate commanders, and when the showdown came, Hinh fled to exile in France.
With the army behind him, Diem could at last crack down on the Binh Xuyen and the sects. The Binh Xuyen's power was smashed when Diem closed the opium dens, gambling halls and bordellos, from which it drew its revenues, then fought the gangsters with armed force. To crush the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, Diem sent his troops out again with orders to shoot; bullets whistled through Saigon's streets and in the delta swamps before the sect leaders caved in.
Soundproofed Brother. One task remained. Diem was determined to remove Emperor Bao Dai, who still technically held his position as Chief of State. In October 1955, Diem organized a referendum to that end. The results: 5,722,000 votes for Diem, 63,000 for Bao Dai. The Republic of South Viet Nam was proclaimed, and Premier Ngo Dinh Diem became its first President.
Diem's first 15 months were his finest. He survived against all odds. He split up large landholdings and sold them off to landless farmers; he expanded rice production and encouraged light industry.
But the months of battling against intrigue and betrayal had left him more wary and distrustful than ever. Always stiff and aloof, he was almost totally out of touch with the people, remained in his palace constantly. Even onetime admirers began to grumble about the influence of 51-year-old Brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. From a soundproofed office inside the palace, Nhu operated his own political party, the Can Lao, an elite group of 70,000 that was under orders to spy on the citizenry. There were also mutters about Nhu's wife, a pretty, dynamic feminist who carried on her own battles as a member of the National Assembly. She irritated many by ramming her "Family Code" through the legislature, forbidding divorce except by presidential decree, and making adultery a prison offense.
Another brother, a short, fortyish bachelor named Ngo Dinh Can, controls central Viet Nam from the family's hometown of Hue. He has his own network of secret police, holds sway over the government's provincial chiefs in the region. Reputedly owner of vast tracts of land, he is wealthy, contributed heavily to the construction of a new cathedral in Hue where Brother Ngo Dinh Thuc is now Archbishop.
Telephone Coup. Grumbling had begun among the army officers over Diem's inflexible leadership, his refusal to introduce democratic reforms. And no one was happy with the way the anti-Communist war was going. Last fall the Viet Cong opened its new campaign, boosting the killing to an average 800 a month. Many soldiers blamed Diem for keeping political officers in command, refusing to allow even a company to move without his sanction. Along Saigon's Rue Catinat, the sidewalk cafes buzzed with rumors of assassination or a coup d'etat.
In the dawn hours one morning in November, three crack paratroop battalions moved out of their barracks in trucks, surrounded the presidential palace and opened fire on the surprised guards. The rebels had no intention of removing Diem, wanted only his promise to dismiss his cabinet, form a provisional military government, guarantee freedom of the press and step up the fight against the Communists. Diem agreed to all this as he dickered by telephone with the rebel leaders outside. But when loyal army units arrived to break the siege. Diem blandly watered down his promised reforms, sniffing, "It was nothing . . . a handful of adventurers." Over Saigon Radio, he broadcast, ''The government continues to serve the nation."
Had Diem learned any lessons from his close escape? The fear of U.S. officials on the spot was that the soldiers might revolt again--this time with tougher ambitions. "The army has lost its virginity,'' suggested an old political hand. "Next time it will be easier."
But the greater worry was the peasantry. After all the years of struggle, Diem had still not won the remote farmers to the government side. Fully one-fourth of all the villages were in the hands of the Communist guerrillas, and often this was more voluntary than forced. The fact was that hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese, naive and illiterate, thought of the rebels not as Communists but as resistants continuing the nationalist battle first started against the French. To these peasants. "Uncle" Ho Chi Minh is still a hero, and under the influence of Viet Cong propaganda, they have become convinced that the U.S. has simply replaced the French as their overlords. All too often, local officials have been appointed by Diem or his brother because of their personal loyalty rather than their efficiency, and all too often they have taken advantage of their position to extort money from the peasants, throw local merchants into jail, nominally on suspicion of Communist sympathizing, in order to extract ransom. Thus, when the Viet Cong contrive the murder of some local official, the villagers frequently hail them as liberators.
New Starts. In the past Diem has stubbornly refused to accept U.S. advice in dealing with his countrymen. But the lesson of Laos and the new urgency of the U.S. Administration seem to have changed him. Every recommendation in the Staley report has already received his concurrence in advance.
On the military side, the U.S. program is as tough as Diem could wish. Kennedy's task force is headed by Sterling J. Cottrell, 47, a career State Department officer who is a "hardline" man on Southeast Asia, wanted the U.S. to take tougher action in Laos. Cottrell is willing to use rough, unorthodox methods to stop the Communists, works closely with Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, the Pentagon's guerrilla warfare expert who helped Magsaysay crush the Huks in the Philippines and advised Ngo Dinh Diem in his battle against the Binh Xuyen gang.
Under the new plan, modern weapons will be furnished to the Self-Defense Corps, the village guards who now make do with clubs and ancient muskets. The Civil Guard, an armed police auxiliary, will be doubled. Eventually, the Civil Guard will be trained to take over many of the static defense jobs that now tie much of the army down. The U.S. also wants to raise the army from 150,000 to 170,000 men, drill more and more of it in the stealthy jungle tactics that the Viet Cong itself uses.
Already U.S. military advisers in Viet Nam have trained 6,500 native troops in the new, mobile Ranger tactics designed to out-guerrilla the guerrillas. At Nhatrang eight new Ranger companies are learning the tricks: scaling cliffs, making wild leaps on cable pulleys, walking noiselessly in jungle undergrowth, learning how to kill swiftly. It is no secret that the Ho Chi Minh Trail is now a two-way street, for the South Vietnamese now use it to travel north, and Ranger patrols are probing into North Viet Nam to give Ho a taste of his own medicine.
Vietnamese troops are also getting lessons in psychology: do not kill farmers' pigs or rape their daughters; military misconduct has been one of the biggest peasant complaints against the government. To make their point, the instructors unabashedly quote Mao Tse-tung himself on guerrilla tactics: "You are fish in the water, and the water is the people." To knit the villages together, give them some sense of contact with Saigon; villagers will be equipped with radio transmitters to permit fast report to headquarters when guerrillas attack. Diem's growing Youth Corps is being trained to run the transmitters, act as an intelligence network throughout the country.
The U.S. will also push Diem's agroville scheme. Under this program, scattered farm families were brought in from dangerous outlying areas to live in specially constructed developments where they could be more easily defended. Diem completed 26 agrovilles last year, but reaped nothing but antagonism when overzealous Diem men yanked peasants away from their fields just at harvest time, put them to work at forced labor to build the new agrovilles. To compound the peasants' anger, it frequently turned out that there was not enough room for them in the agrovilles that they had been forced to build. But Staley concluded that the basic idea was good, hopes the U.S. will finance the construction of at least another 100 in the next twelve months.
Parallel with such military and defense plans, the U.S. wants to train many more Vietnamese administrative officers, give them authority to act independently without the present minute, hamstringing scrutiny from Saigon. To educate illiterate villagers to the Communist threat, mobile movie units will roam the countryside and lecturers will constantly tour the towns. On a long-range basis, new efforts will be made to increase rice production still further, encourage greater capital investment in industry.
It was late in the game to salvage Southeast Asia and drive the Reds back within their own borders. But given resolve, hard work, and the cooperation of the longtime Communist fighter in the yellow stucco palace, the U.S. hoped that it was not too late. "If we belong to the free world," says President Diem, "we must act. If not, why belong to the free world?"
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