A Nonheroic Non-Death

Viet Nam's Communists suffered one of their most embarrassing propaganda setbacks of the war recently when a Viet Cong named Nguyen Van Be turned up in a South Vietnamese jail. Though he did not know it, Be, 21, had been made a Communist hero in both North and South for having destroyed 69 of the enemy--and himself--by blowing up a mine in their midst after they had surrounded his unit (TIME, March 17). U.S. psychological-warfare men were delighted when they confirmed that the boyish prisoner in the jail at My Tho was the same Be who is held up for emulation to Communist cadres in mass-produced Communist poetry, songs and stories.

The Communists at first insisted that the Be in jail was a fake touched up with expert plastic surgery to look like the real Be, and kept up the flow of adulation for their martyred hero. Now, stung by the way in which the Americans spread word of Be's nonheroic non-death--he hid in a river while the battle raged--they have switched to a terror campaign to silence those who can prove his identity.

Millions of Leaflets. Be's own mother and father have identified him as the man that the Communists have been crowing about, and Be has revisited his native village. Last week the U.S. reported that three Viet Cong defectors, one of them Be's cousin, have identified Be as the Communist hero. The U.S. has dropped millions of leaflets aimed at the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, showing a healthy Nguyen Van Be holding Hanoi newspaper accounts of his vaunted end, have sent planes over Viet Cong areas broadcasting Be's voice. It was after such a plane passed over him that Be's cousin, Nguyen Va Ba, decided to defect. "I put my shovel down," he says, "and listened to the voice very carefully. I found it to be Be's true voice."

Faced with the mounting proof of their error, the Viet Cong last week issued grim orders that "anyone saying that Nguyen Van Be is alive will be shot on the spot." Meantime, Be's name has been put at the top of a list of those marked for death, and a price of 2,000,000 piasters (about $17,000) has been put on his head. Viet Cong agents have been caught bugging the phones at the security house in Saigon to which Be has been transferred under heavy guard. Be's home village of Kim Son in the Red-infested Mekong Delta has become the scene of recurrent terror.

Several people who recognized Be on his return visit vanished after an investigating team headed by a North Vietnamese officer entered the village. The hamlet chief was blown to bits when he stepped on a mine outside his office. Another mine, detonated from ambush, killed eleven persons riding in a Lambretta minibus. Among the passengers: another cousin of Be's.

Discontent & Disillusion. The Be affair marks the first time that the Communists departed from their policy of ignoring claims made from South Viet Nam. They have reason to be jittery. Six Communist guerrillas who defected because of the revelations about Be report discontent and disillusion among those who heard of Be's miraculous emergence. "The soldiers will fight very hard for an ideal," says Nguyen Va Ba, "but Be's being alive shows that the ideal has untruth in it, which makes it harder for them to fight."

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