Miracle at Hoaimy

The beleaguered government of South Viet Nam and its U.S. advisers last week regarded the village of Hoaimy (appropriately pronounced Why Me) with incredulity. In hundreds of other similar villages, the people have resisted Communism only reluctantly, under government prodding, if at all. Many Americans and Vietnamese have concluded fatalistically that the West really has nothing much to offer these poor and frightened peasants, that the Viet Cong alone know how to reach the villagers of Viet Nam. Hoaimy disproved all this--at least as far as its own people are concerned. The phenomenon so astonished the Americans on the scene that pilots flying along the coast will point down and say: "There it is. Did you ever see anything like that?"

Buffalo Appetite. An untidy collection of eleven hamlets with a population of 16,000, Hoaimy lies in central Viet Nam on the banks of the Lai Giang River just before it flows into the South China Sea. There are no roads in or out of the village. There is no bridge across the river. For centuries, Hoaimy has asked nothing of the world beyond the mountains and the sea except that it provide a market for the village's rice crop, which realizes some $400,000 a year.

The Diem government ruled Hoaimy lightly. There was a small garrison of civil-defense troops and a grammar school. But Hoaimy had no clinic, no high school, no agricultural assistance, no real return for taxes, and no official attention that was more than passing. Then last November, after Diem's overthrow, the Communist Viet Cong arrived. They drove off the garrison, and when the new government made a feeble effort to recapture Hoaimy, the Viet Cong ambushed and whipped an army battalion.

To the people of Hoaimy, the Communists must have looked like winners, but the Viet Cong detachment blundered from the start. It levied taxes even heavier than those of Saigon--up to 50% of the rice harvest. The Reds preached class war, urging the poor peasants to hate the rich in a village that had no rich peasants and very few poor. The Communists also repeated the familiar line that helped bring down Diem: Roman Catholics discriminate against Buddhists. Since the few Catholics in the village lived just like everyone else, this argument got nowhere either. Next, the Reds closed the village school and carted away the desks, benches and blackboards. Over a hundred young men were drafted into the guerrilla band. The Viet Cong billeted themselves on the villagers without payment. One housewife complained later that they "ate like water buffalo."

Own Initiative. Last month government troops, under a young new district chief named Truong, launched a massive clear-and-hold operation against Hoaimy. As the Viet Cong fell back into the foothills, Truong was scarcely 200 yds. behind his advancing firing line, handing out leaflets pledging that the government had come back to stay. Vietnamese and U.S. medics went in with the troops to treat sick civilians. Several thousand villagers, who had been told by the Viet Cong that they would be disemboweled as "collaborators" by the government troops, also fled to the hills. But when the government dropped leaflets and sent out helicopters equipped with loudspeakers urging the villagers to come home, they soon returned. Other villagers went out and recovered the classroom furniture. The government troops offered free transport to anyone who wanted to go north and live under Communism (there were no takers), began handing out cloth, cooking oil, medicines and tools.

Then suddenly and, as far as anyone can tell, on their own initiative, 10,000 villagers--all except the sick, the aged and the very young children--turned out for 27 straight days and dug a ten-mile ditch around the elongated village. The moat begins at the riverbank, marches through rice fields and coconut groves, curls around the spurs of two foothills, across a marshy neck of the sea, and returns again to the riverbank. With their hefty hoes, the villagers dug 10 ft. down and 20 ft. wide. The earth, lifted up in round bamboo baskets, became a wall, 20 ft. wide at the base, 4 ft. at the top. The sides are porcupined with thousands of closely sown bamboo slivers sharpened to a needle point. Atop the wall the villagers strung two strands of barbed wire on steel stanchions. Then the moat was filled with water lifted from the river by paddle-wheel scoop, and last week water lilies floated above the mantrap of bamboo spikes.

Village Key. Stunned observers are unable to account for Hoaimy's energy. The answers are not simple and cannot yet be precise. Hoaimy is a singularly cohesive community, and was occupied by a singularly inept Viet Cong detachment. Truong is an exceptionally good district chief who lived and worked alongside the villagers, and the government troops made clear this time that they really meant business.

Still, reports TIME Correspondent John Shaw: "There is something mysterious and mystical about the great wall at Hoaimy. The spectacle of 10,000 villagers building it voluntarily and without payment, the phenomenon of their will to resist so suddenly and spectacularly revealed, gives both sides much to think about. While it may not be possible to wall and moat every village in South Viet Nam, the spirit of Hoaimy matters. In this may lie a partial answer to how to compete with the Viet Cong--perhaps even how to defeat them."

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