This had been successfully — very successfully — done elsewhere in Asia, most obviously in the case of a Japan that was now lifted off on an extraordinary trajectory that would make her a world economic power, but also with South Korea and Taiwan. Colonization was not part of the programme: on the contrary, the American ambassador was expected to be avuncular and helpful, not domineering, and as a sign of this the embassy itself was not much protected — easy access and no bombproof windows. ‘Hearts and minds’ programmes taught English and showed Hollywood movies; a famous photograph showed a very slender Vietnamese boy wielding a baseball bat almost his own size at the behest of a protein-stuffed and well-intentioned soldier. Dollars flowed into Vietnam; so did advisers with the latest wisdoms of political science (in 1966 they staged a constitutional convention, as the country fell to pieces around them: some of the people present had even designed three constitutions and Samuel Huntington immortally remarked upon the ‘consensus-making bodies… viable institutions for power-sharing which would gradually lead to the legitimation of the entire governmental framework’). In all of this, security of body and soul naturally came first, and the Vietcong would have to be contained and defeated, the Americans helping where necessary. But some means to gain the peasants’ loyalty was also of elementary importance.
At the time, influential writers were saying that the central problem of ‘Third World’ countries was the great imbalance in land ownership — huge estates, downtrodden peasants. The peasants, dirt-poor, could not buy anything, so native industry did not develop; the rich just imported goods via some comprador class. Such was Sicily in the nineteenth century, such was Latin America in the twentieth (Barrington Moore is an outstanding writer on these subjects). The answer was for governments to intervene and give land to the peasant. Japan and Taiwan had had land reforms, for political reasons, and these were thought to have been successful, in that societies with an element of equality had emerged. There was much more to this story than met the eye. The most successful agriculture was practised (outside the great empty plains of America) in England, which even in 1930 had more land under the cultivation of great estates than Tsarist Russia in 1916. But in the decolonizing era, landowners were an obvious target for expropriation, and the contented, picturesque peasant made for good propaganda. In South Vietnam the growers of rice for export had thrived in the French period, and they were influential in Saigon. That they were Catholics, and the peasants generally not, mattered; the prevalence of the Chinese minority in the whole trade also mattered; and sometimes there was not even a language in common between lord and peasant.
Diem knew the complications, but his Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was ragtag and his writ hardly went beyond Saigon. Efforts at land reform went slowly and badly, and the Vietcong, launching guerrilla attacks, made matters far more difficult. Peasants were herded into agrovilles and had to walk for hours to reach their plots; there was much bribery in the sale of, for instance, rat poison, and it was sometimes difficult for peasants to stop squatters from occupying their land. Surrounded by barbed wire, but badly defended, the peasants became demoralized, and the Vietcong knew how to exploit the situation. One of their first acts was to murder people who had the peasants’ confidence, such that, leaderless, they would be an open target. The reform programme, never enthusiastically pursued, was largely abandoned, and in Long An province only 1,000 tenants out of 35,000 received any land at all; many were expected to buy it whereas the Vietcong ‘gave’ it. Diem, surrounded by relatives — half of his cabinet — hardly knew what to do, beyond keeping the old system going, however bad, on the grounds that anything else would have been worse. The rural scene would no doubt have got better, as peasants moved to towns, reduced overpopulation and sent money home, as happened in happier climes. That was not to be. As the journalist Neil Sheehan says, ‘the Americans… were not gaining the communities of controlled peasants they sought. They were instead fostering temporary encampments of peasants motivated as never before to support the Vietcong.’
How were Americans to deal with assassins, clutching an old rifle, waiting for hours in ambush, their feet rotting in the rice paddy slush? Guerrillas who moved with great cunning to terrorize peasants in their huts? There were very good American officers, and one such was Lieutenant-Colonel John Vann, who had made his mark in Korea, and went to Vietnam as adviser — a man of enormous energy, a good organizer and brave without being foolhardy. He knew only too well what was going wrong in Vietnam. He had to deal with a Colonel Huynh Van Cao in the Plain of Reeds, the north-western corner of the Mekong Delta. It was close to the Cambodian border, where the Vietcong had sanctuary, and was a vile place to fight — swamp, waist-high reeds, clumps of bush and woods, stretching over two provinces. There were concrete blockhouses at the bridges, with rusting barbed wire, among fields of sprouting sugarcane, with canals, ditches and, in the season, a steady downpour. It was easy enough for the Vietcong to hide, where necessary in the water, breathing through a hollow reed; and they could come and go, noiselessly, on flat-bottomed boats. They would wait patiently, suddenly emerging to fire. The Saigon government had in effect lost the southern delta, and the northern delta, with its 2 million people, supplied much of the country’s food.
Colonel Cao had written a novel and talked windy French ideology; the French had not trained Vietnamese officers until late in the day and the soldiers, paid ten dollars per month in Saigon piastres, were not enthusiastic for the cause. On night patrol, for instance, they would cough, to warn Vietcong to keep away. If trouble came, American air power would be used, and the peasantry suffered from such indiscriminate firing. Vann became especially angry when a battle went hopelessly wrong at a village, Ap Bac, in the eastern part of the Plain of Reeds, early in 1963. The Vietcong had suffered from American helicopters in particular, but wished to show the peasantry that they had not been beaten. They had studied the situation, and worked out that, if they aimed in front of a passing helicopter, they would hit it; and they used captured American machine-guns. Now, holding a well-camouflaged zigzag line along irrigation ditches, which had small embankments and a dike on the outer edge, they threatened the South Vietnamese positions. On that side, what could go wrong, did — artillery firing inaccurately, American helicopter pilots resenting direction by South Vietnamese, landing in the wrong place, there to be shot to pieces; armoured vehicles pushed across impossible swamp; napalm dropped on peasant straw huts; Colonel Cao going into a huff and refusing to fight at all. A total of 350 Vietcong defeated four times their number, at that with fighter bombers, and five helicopters were lost. Reuters and Associated Press had been present to see the mess, and John Vann, in private, briefed them. He had been especially dismayed at the remoteness and serenity of the senior Americans — General Paul D. Harkins, swagger stick, gold braid, impeccable uniform, playing the part in a Hollywood movie about the Pacific war; the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, extraordinary two — dimensional energy, suit, writing down every figure he could in a little notebook for transfer into some machine that would mathematize everything (and produce the inevitable conclusion that the United States would win).