Charlie, Come Home!

When Ong Tao, the Spirit of the Hearth, returns home each year after his call on the Heavenly Jade Emperor, all Viet Nam takes a holiday from war and erupts in the festival of Tet to welcome the Lunar New Year. It is a time of dancing and dragon masks, of firecrackers rigged from snail shells and gunpowder, of feasting on roast pork and sugared apricots. It is also a time of homecoming. This week, as the Vietnamese greet the Year of the Ram under cover of the four-day truce agreed to by both sides, some 100,000 Viet Cong are expected to take leave of their units and slip back to their native villages and families for a brief reunion.

Many of them will find waiting a small gift from the government of South Viet Nam: a compact do-it-yourself defection kit. Wrapped in vinyl, it contains all that a faltering Viet Cong needs to defect, including a safe-conduct pass and a map of the local district showing precisely where--and how--to find the Allied side. Throughout the country, the kits will be hand-delivered to Viet Cong families by an extraordinary assembly of postmen: former Viet Cong who, as Hoi Chanh (returnees), have become members of the government's armed propaganda teams. The kit will be only one more reminder--along with the Tet songs on the radio, the broadcast planes overhead and the millions of leaflets --that the government's Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) extend everywhere.

Apricot Bouquets. To those of the enemy who come home to stay, Saigon offers amnesty and retraining to aid the Allied side. Last year the joint U.S. and South Vietnamese Chieu Hoi program induced a record 20,242 of the enemy to come over. So far this year, the rate has been running double last year's. For the "psywar" planners, Tet is far and away the best time to turn the enemy's head and heart. This year's Tet campaign is a mammoth, ingenious saturation of the whole nation, far bigger than last year's effort.

Some 310 million leaflets will shower enemy areas, more than 1,000 for every Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldier. The theme of this year's campaign is aimed at the enemy's softer instincts, and is embodied in the official Tet poster of maidens carrying bouquets of apricot flowers. One local leaflet elaborates on the theme by tying it to Operation Cedar Falls, which razed V.C. farms and granaries in the Iron Triangle last month. "Are your rations scarce?" it asks. "Three hundred of you have rallied, and they are now where they can be well fed and secure. How about you?" Another quotes Ho Chi Minh: "Remember Uncle's own words as you consider your fate: 'The war may last five, ten, 20 years or longer.' "

Overtly Menacing. In the year-long Chieu Hoi program, other messages are more overtly menacing, including the display of the body or rotted skull of a dead soldier and the lists of dead North Vietnamese. Facsimiles of North Vietnamese piasters are regularly dropped with the warning that "as the war goes on, there will be less and less to buy. Prices will go higher and higher. You may lose all of your wealth, fruit of your sweat and tears." Propaganda teams deliver personal letters by the thousands to homes of suspected Viet Cong, some frankly designed to so compromise a Viet Cong that he is forced to defect to save his life. Broadcasts carry 20 messages in local dialects over South Viet Nam. During Tet, radio and television appeals will be beamed out 18 times a day.

Some 70 cultural-drama teams will be on the road in villages around the nation, acting out and singing the message of "Come home; your loved ones miss you." To Viet Cong families will go 200,000 almanac horoscopes, illustrated with pictures of rebuilt villages, the Manila Conference, schools and a diesel train. The Chieu Hoi men will even distribute 100,000 games played with dice to V.C. families. In the game, both sides try to get all their pawns to the defection centers through such obstacles as the Ho Chi Minh trail and monsoon rains. Players are sometimes required to start over because of fatigue, worry and air strikes (see box).

Playing Lysistrata. In command of Chieu Hoi is Colonel Phan Van Anh, a stocky, spirited veteran who was himself once a member of the Communist Viet Minh. Anh makes quick inspections of the country's 44 Chieu Hoi camps, followed by a notary public who dishes out piasters for the rewards and rations that in the past have too often been skimmed off by corrupt administrators. "You know," says Anh, "the enemy of yesterday may be very good men."

They are also a bargain: the average cost per defector is $125, v. an estimated $400,000 expended to kill one enemy soldier, and 70% of those coming over so far have been combat soldiers. For all the success of Chieu Hoi, though, it is still far from winning the war. To date there have been only 200 defectors from the North Vietnamese forces, and no matter how many war-weary Viet Cong come over the line, there will be yet more Northerners to replace them. Still, Saigon feels that the defection rate has reached a turning point, expects this year to more than double the number of defectors to 50,000. To that end, no technique of seduction or coercion is out of bounds. One American psy-war expert produced 50 defectors by a method that would have pleased Aristophanes: he persuaded the wives in a Central Highlands village to play Lysistrata to their Viet Cong husbands, refusing to sleep with them unless they deserted. They did.

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