The National Liberation Front was founded in 1960, but the guerrilla movement in the south began some two or three years earlier. After the Geneva Conference, the active Communist cadres in the south instructed their followers to disband and wait for two years until the national elections were held and a political settlement made. All official Viet Minh activities stopped except for the “legal struggle” for the elections.4 The NLF leader, Nguyen Huu Tho, later explained this decision of 1954: “There were mixed feelings about the two years’ delay over reunification but the general sentiment was that this was a small price to pay for the return to peace and a normal life, free of foreign rule.”5
Peace did not, however, last very long for most of the southern Viet Minh. In 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem repudiated the Geneva proposals for national elections and began his campaign of terror against the former members of the Resistance. From the accounts of the Viet Minh cadres it appeared that the campaign was largely successful in destroying what remained of the Viet Minh organization and in reducing the villages to subserviency. While some of the Party members fled to Saigon, where they would not be recognized or pursued, others banded together and went into hiding in the jungles and swamps that had served them as base areas during the war.6 As one cadre remembered, “In those days you could say we were ‘based’ in the mountains, but these were ‘bases’ for survival. We had no arms at all and barely the means of existence.… Control was so close that it was impossible for us cadres to live among the people. But we came down from the hills at night to try to make contacts.”7
According to the French historian, Philippe Devillers, the southern cadre at this point pressed for a renewal of the struggle, but the north held back, urging the southerners to give a respite for the consolidation of the DRVN.8 While Hanoi surely supported the aims of the southern cadre, its judgment on the timing and the policy to be pursued may well have conflicted with that of the southerners. Certainly the northerners then and for several years later limited their aid to the most easily procured commodity of advice. Weapons could be much more easily obtained from the GVN outposts and the Americans than from convoys traveling the long trail down from the north.
In the long run, however, the Diemist repressions only advanced the date of a new armed struggle. They persuaded many of the former Resistance members whose one goal had been to defeat the French that they could not live in physical safety under the Diem regime, that peace was not peace but a continuation of the war. Diemist policy in general threatened the sects and convinced certain intellectuals and rural notables that the new regime would not serve their interests or leave them a hope for future success, as the French and the Bao Daiist administrations once had. A highly trained and dedicated group of soldiers and political instructors, the active Communist cadre in the south went to work on these groups. By 1958 they had established a small network of committees in most of the old Viet Minh strongholds: in the U Minh forest at the southern tip of the Delta, in the jungles west of Saigon and in the west of Quang Nam province. In the next two years they moved out rapidly from their base areas, infiltrating the nearby hamlets, overrunning small GVN outposts to supply themselves with weapons, taking over hamlets, and recruiting again. At the same time they expanded the movement politically, taking in the former Resistance members who did not belong to the hard core and the members of the other political factions alienated by the Diem regime. In December 1960, they formed the National Liberation Front and adopted a ten-point program of “peace, national independence, democratic freedoms, improvement of the people’s living conditions, and peaceful national reunification.”
Over the next two years the NLF leaders — men who remained for the moment anonymous to the outside world — molded the loose grouping of committees into a close-knit political and military organization. By mid-1961, so American intelligence indicated, its strength had reached fifteen thousand, and half of the guerrillas were fully armed.9 This military force, known as the People’s Self-Defense Forces, developed by a process known to its cadres as “growth and split.”10 A platoon of experienced fighters would split up to train three platoons of new recruits. The company thus formed would split again to train three new companies, and so forth. In the early years these forces remained dispersed in small units, each unit remaining close to the village that formed its own supply base. The plan for expansion included the carefully coordinated activities of propaganda, recruitment, terrorism against the local GVN officials and soldiers, and the establishment of governing committees and mass organizations within the newly liberated villages.
In February 1962, the Front convened a clandestine congress of one hundred delegates and chose a central committee composed of men of every political color, from Communists to Saigonese intellectuals to religious dignitaries from the various sects, including a Catholic priest. Nguyen Huu Tho, the non-Communist Saigonese lawyer whom Diem imprisoned in 1954 for peace activities, was chosen president. While the makeup of this committee opened the way to a coalition in the event that the United States should withdraw support from the Saigon government, the “hard-core” former Resistance fighters formed the only real political party within it — and thus the controlling element. Until 1962 these men, along with their colleagues among the southern regroupees, belonged to the Marxist-Leninist Party of the DRVN, the Lao Dong. At the time of the congress they formed a new and specifically southern party, the People’s Revolutionary Party, that called itself the “vanguard” and the “steel frame” of the NLF.11 When the United States did not withdraw and the Saigon regime did not disintegrate after the fall of the Ngos, the PRP began to expand inside the NLF, absorbing some of the non-Communists and recruiting new members from the villages. As the NLF members recognized, the Marxist-Leninist Party was what gave the Front the strength and discipline to engage in the second and much more difficult phase of the Liberation war.
By 1962 the NLF had reached an important stage in its development. At the battle of Ap Bac it showed a group of unbelieving American advisers that its guerrilla forces could stand up against a multi-battalion ARVN operation supported by U.S. helicopters and artillery. This military achievement was not an isolated phenomenon. It was the visible expression of an underlying political reality. By 1962 the NLF had a presence in some 80 percent of the rural communities of South Vietnam. Not only had it retaken the old Viet Minh territories, but it had expanded outward from them, and most noticeably into the central regions of the Mekong Delta, where the Viet Minh had never succeeded in raising more than a collection of guerrilla bands. It was obviously not just a regional group or a coalition of special interests, but a national movement with appeal for the great mass of the rural people. The next war would be something more than a repeat of the Viet Minh war in the south.
The last point was significant — and somewhat mysterious because of the very continuity between the Viet Minh and the NLF. The two organizations were more alike than not in organization, program, and technique. The NLF leaders had the advantage of experience, but they had the disadvantage that the nationalist component of their struggle was not at all as obvious as that of the Viet Minh. Apart from racial or cultural opposition, “nationalism” is, after all, a most difficult abstraction. It took a certain amount of political and economic theory to demonstrate that the American role in Vietnam was in many ways equivalent to that of the French — particularly in the early years when there was no American presence in the countryside. As one Front cadre admitted, the peasants did not grasp the national question as well as the city recruits.12 And yet it was precisely the peasants who were joining the NLF in large numbers. One explanation, and perhaps the only possible one, was that there were new social and political issues at stake — or issues that the peasants had never felt with such acuity before.
A Natural Opposition
It was not the habit of Americans in Saigon to consider the enemy’s political program with any seriousness. But there was one issue that the Americans had to confront, over the course of th
e war, and that issue was land. In 1955 the American ambassador concurred with the French high commissioner that the Viet Minh land reform program posed a significant threat to the future of the Saigon government. That same year the American economist, Wolf Ladejinsky, made a disturbing study of land distribution in the Mekong Delta. According to his survey, 2.5 percent of the people living in the former territory of Cochin China owned fully a half of the cultivated land, while 70 percent of them owned less than 12.5 percent of it. While the pattern of land tenure varied from province to province (the inequality was less severe in such provinces as Binh Duong, Long An, and An Xuyen), two out of three Delta peasants owned no land at all.1 In 1956 the American mission finally persuaded the Diem regime to adopt a national land reform program. The reform failed to correct the situation, and for various reasons that included fear for the stability of the Saigon government and sheer apathy about the subject, the American officials did not renew their efforts for another fourteen years. Still, the issue remained alive in official circles in Washington. Particularly after the entry of U.S. troops into the war, a combination of liberal journalists, social scientists, and congressmen brought pressure upon the U.S. mission every year to implement a new land law. Their argument was that landlordism constituted the prime social evil of the countryside and that reform was necessary to the victory of the Saigon government over the NLF. As General Edward Lansdale explained to the readers of Look magazine in 1969, the “common man” of Vietnam has no interest in ideology: “His one real yearning is to have something of his own, a farm, a small business, and to be left free to make it grow as he wishes.” Once the Saigon government gave the people some economic security, the general concluded, the people would have no more interest in the guerrillas.2
The difficulty of this argument was that although it seemed to make common sense — the NLF were in fact making political gains with their land reform program — it did not seem to hold as an explanation for the causes of the insurgency. With all their land reform programs the Viet Minh had found their greatest support in those regions of Vietnam — the north and the center — where the land was the most equally distributed. Where they found the least response was in the Mekong Delta, where the greatest inequality lay. With certain variations the NLF seemed to be repeating the same pattern: their strongest base areas lay in the center and in such Delta provinces as Binh Duong, Long An, and An Xuyen, where landlordism was much less prevalent. In apparent contradiction to Lansdale’s theory, most of the early NFL recruits (later, the “hard core”) tended to be not agricultural laborers or indebted tenant farmers, but small tradesmen, schoolteachers, clerks, and peasants who owned, or could look forward to owning, some land. These facts — quite evident to anyone with a history book and a map — were elaborated in a most tortuous manner in 1967 by a RAND Corporation economist armed with linear regression analysis and six independent variables. According to this study, the ideal province from the point of view of GVN control would be one where the inequality was the most severe, where there had been no GVN land reform, and where the population density was the highest and communications the poorest.3
After the failure of the land reform and all the years of inertia on the issue, American officials in Saigon and Washington naturally seized upon the RAND study as proof that land reform did not matter politically, that, if anything, it was a merely humanistic issue to be settled after the war — along with all the other humanistic issues. The liberals for their part countered by attacking the study as inaccurate and pointing out that the land reform issue was indeed an important source of NLF support.4
In point of fact both arguments were much too narrowly drawn to bear upon the causes of the insurgency. In concentrating exclusively on the problem of land tenure, both the liberals and the officials overlooked the more general political and economic problems that had plagued Vietnam since the colonial period: the shift from a subsistence to a market economy, the breakdown of the traditional village government and economy, and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few. The advocates of land reform failed to see that even if the Saigon government did promulgate a land law, the peasants, without access to credit and without political power in Saigon, would remain as chronically indebted and oppressed as ever. The U.S. officials, on the other hand, did not acknowledge that the peasants throughout Vietnam had economic grievances. The difference in response between the landed and the landless peasants merely indicated that economic grievances alone do not determine the course of a revolution. As to the reason for that difference, the suspicion was that it had to do less with economics than with local government.
It is easier to approach the whole issue of the political success of the NLF by looking at it in reverse from the point of view of what opposed it. After 1960 this question became completely mysterious to American officials because they came to believe their own propaganda that the forces of stability and order — as well as “revolutionary” change — reposed in the Saigon government. During the French war, however, the Saigon government had been almost totally ineffective for good or ill; political opposition to the Viet Minh had been mounted almost exclusively by the local governments and parties. The most obvious of these were the sects — the Catholics, the Cao Dai, and the Hoa Hao. But there was another important source of opposition that most European observers overlooked: the landlords.
It was natural for Europeans to think of these landlords simply as a class. In fact, the Vietnamese landlords were more like a government, for since their first settlement in the south, they had exercised almost total authority over the people who worked in their domains. With hardly any regulation from the colonial regime, they possessed a complete economic hold over two-thirds of the population.5 They had the power to assign rents and to sell their tenants’ produce to the city merchants. At the same time, because the French did not provide any local government, the landlords took over many of the functions of the old village oligarchies. They arbitrated disputes among the peasants, assisted them with money for the ceremonies of birth and death, kept order among them, judged, fined, and punished them, often with the help of their own private militia forces. As one landlord described their role in the 1930’s:
The landlord acted not only as owner and lessor of land but as an informal administrator, like chief of a small state.… The relationship between the landlord and his tenants was paternalistic. The landlord considered the tenant as an inferior member of his extended family. When the tenant’s father died, it was the duty of the landlord to give money to the tenant for the funeral; if his wife was pregnant, the landlord gave money for the birth; if he was in financial ruin, the landlord gave assistance; therefore the tenant had to behave as an inferior member of the extended family. The landlord enjoyed great prestige vis-à-vis the tenant.6
The manorial system of the south did not represent good government, for if surplus labor was available, the landowner could replace his tenant — his “sons” — or drive them into ruin at will. At the same time it represented a government, a system of domination based in economic reality and on the traditional model of government such as did not exist for the small peasant proprietors after the passing of their communal village institutions.
Since the French Indochina War, however, these local governments — landlord and sect — had been on the decline. As a conscious political policy, the Viet Minh had assassinated or driven into flight a great number of the large landlords. The Diem regime in its turn attacked the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai, thus crippling the two most powerful non-Communist organizations in the south. The Diemist officials supported the landlords in their attempts to retake their domains, but they could not absolutely restore the old landholding patterns or traditions any more than they could erase all the other socially disruptive effects of the French war. With some foresight, many landlords remained in Paris, Saigon, or the provincial capitals, and hired agents or bribed officials to collect their rents. As this system was not very efficient, and rents nev
er again reached their prewar range in those areas the Viet Minh had controlled.7 Then, in 1956, the Americans finally pushed through a land reform program limiting all landholdings to one hundred hectares and fixing a rent ceiling at 25 percent of the value of the year’s crop. The Diem regime never actually managed to implement either the land law or the rent ordinance, but the very fact that Diem attempted such a reform gave the landlords a renewed sense of their insecurity.8 Many of the larger landlords now tried to sell out, though it meant prejudicing their position in the community. It was left to the NLF only to deliver the last blow with a really efficient land reform program that directly or indirectly affected some 90 percent of the villages in the Delta.9
With the disappearance of the powerful landlords and the sects, the entire political picture of the Delta changed. The effects were noticeable even before the NLF achieved their land reform program and even in those areas that were the most highly garrisoned by the Saigon government.
Harsh as their rule might have been, the landlords had at least some interest in maintaining their authority over the peasants on a basis other than that of coercion. Known, and in a Confucian sense “respected” by their tenants, they constituted a truly conservative force. When the new officials came from the “out there” of Saigon (as opposed to the “in here” of the village), they brought the instability of the national government down to the most parochial of the rural districts. Because they were not the established leaders of the village to which they were assigned, the villagers received them much as they might have received proconsuls from a conquering foreign power. The change from the landlords to the bureaucrats demonstrated in concrete terms the change from a subsistence to a mercantile economy, and — or so it seemed from the villagers’ reports — brought that awareness of the outside world, that rise in “political consciousness” that the NLF otherwise had to take pains to achieve through political education. In attempting to establish their rule over the villages, the government-appointed village chiefs sometimes gained support from a few of the villagers (often those who hoped to use them and were capable of paying the necessary bribes). But in doing so they almost automatically alienated all of the other villagers. Their very presence in the village touched off a disturbance that spread like the ripples around a flung stone. In telling how he came to join the NLF one young defector described this process perfectly:
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