“They usually stayed at least three months, gaining the trust of the peasants because they worked without demanding pay. Depending on the season, they helped the farmers out with all kinds of agricultural labor, tilling, sowing, weeding, and harvesting, and they even cleaned the house and cared for the children, engaging in constant discussion with the man of the house. They tried to understand all the minute details of the farmer’s existence and especially when they heard of troubles and hard times, they showed great concern and sympathy.
“Soon the farmers came to trust them instinctively and bared their hearts to them. In the end the agents enter deep into the farmer’s soul and drag out his hatred for the landlord who is, in effect, their own personal foe. Through this process the farmers become ready for the class struggle. The agents call these farmers ‘roots’ and the process ‘sprouting roots.’ All their social reforms were made with the roots sprouting in the hearts of the people themselves.
“Therefore, our phoenix hamlet project likewise must start from the actual living conditions of the farmers. If it is done from the standpoint of military conveniences, it will certainly fail. To have a sanctuary from terror and hunger is not enough, they need to be able to choose their own leaders and also to denounce those leaders when their trust has been betrayed. At the outset, the Developmental Revolution Committee should have set up structures at the township level, the administrative front line, as well as at the level of autonomous villages, through elections in which the residents themselves can vote.
“That we were not mere puppets is certain, but then our government did not exactly have the stature of an independent nation. The Americans criticized us for lacking a highly developed government structure, but they should realize this is a situation in which people in Saigon still find it natural to refer to the American ambassador as the ‘Governor General.’ We were a colony until the French armed forces were defeated and withdrew, and even if there are no longer any interventions by the French, we’re now going through a war with the colonial elements still intact in many ways. Today, without the economic support of America, we can’t carry on the war for a single day.”
“Just a minute, that’s only natural. America has the responsibility to protect Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia from communism. Isn’t the American army the shield of the whole Free World?”
The division commander interrupted the impassioned remarks of the chief of the agricultural section. Then the AID mission chief spoke with a gentle smile.
“Well, I find the criticisms of the section chief very useful. The insight to look straight into a problem is also quite important for the success of our pacification settlement project.”
That idiot, Pham Quyen thought worriedly, he does not realize that even when individually the Americans seem lenient toward criticisms and infinitely sincere in accepting them, the American organizations will drive the millions of teeth in their saw blades home and American corporations will leave not a single screw loose when their interests are at stake.
Pham Quyen had been entertaining a plan to seek endorsement of a bold expansion of his own mandate. If the atmosphere of the meeting continued to unfold along the same lines, he would seize the moment to propose more autonomous execution of the project plan. Autonomy! What a seductive and beautiful word! It would mean laying his hands on power reaching from distribution to consumption of the full range of goods. For instance, if the task is one necessitating a payment in good old green US dollars, in the name of autonomy you can have a briefcase full of clean, crisp freshly printed mainland US dollars brought straight from the window at the Chase Manhattan Bank in Saigon to the provincial government office. The ultra-sincere chief of the agriculture section, his face flushed by the encouragement he had received by the AID mission representative, resumed his lecture with renewed emphasis.
“The support we’re receiving at present has too many strings attached. These conditions, indeed, can aggravate corruption in the course of utilization of the support. We have the chief of the education section here today, and we all know that a large quantity of milk is being received for the grammar school children. In this case, for example, the price for the milk is supposed to be paid in dollars from our allotments of hard currency aid, but milk procurement has become very complicated because of two factors. First, due to the contract arranged by the US government, the milk is shipped from the east coast of the US instead of the west coast. That makes the transportation expense extremely high. What makes it even more intriguing is that we can easily buy the same quality milk from Singapore at about half the price.
“Even if the American government will not let us use dollars to buy the goods from Singapore, they could at least let us buy at a cheaper cost from the west coast. I’m inclined to think we are looking here at the results of manipulations by American businessmen of the US Congress. Problems of this nature should be closely examined when we plan procurements of necessary supplies with aid funds for the phoenix hamlets project.”
Pham Quyen had a feeling that the section chief was trying his best to make a strong impression on the AID mission, hoping the Americans would be favorably impressed with him as a conscientious government official. But Pham Quyen knew very well that neither the Americans nor the Vietnamese would touch on the deeper and more fundamental issues. He cleared his throat and spoke.
“The section chief’s comments are so candid and pertinent that I feel my mind unburdened. I am not sure how many candid opinions must be exchanged and impediments discussed in order to promote the pacification resettlement project. Due to time pressure, in any case, we must move on to the main topic. From now on, please restrict yourselves in your remarks to the phoenix hamlet project. Does the chief of the education section have any other comments to make?”
“Yes, I’d like to reflect on a few points of trial-and-error I observed in the past with the strategic hamlets program. I’m a man who is fond of comedies at the movie theater, but I have no wish to be a fool myself. At the time of the Diem regime, the American secretary of state boasted that seven million Vietnamese people were living in over a thousand strategic hamlets and that his plan was to erect three thousand such villages by the mid-1960s. In reality, not many of the strategic hamlets were of any use. Some were little more than symbols marked on the maps in undefended zones and a great number of the strategic hamlets existed only on paper.
“The resettlement funds that were supposed to be distributed to the farmers disappeared on the way and usually never reached their hands. Sometimes not even the weapons for local militias to be raised in the supposedly self-defending strategic hamlets were supplied. Large quantities of these weapons found their way into the black market.
“When high government officials and their US advisors paid visits to model strategic hamlets, the local authorities would go to another area and dig up lots of orange and papaya trees and bring them back hastily to set up an attractive plantation. As soon as the inspection party was gone, the trees were dug up again and returned to their owners. It was around then that the people in the cities started calling the strategic hamlets ‘America Towns.’
“The US military flew their helicopters in from all directions and dropped all sorts of things. White ceramic toilet bowls, chocolates, and even thousands of condoms to use for birth control. They gave marbles and yoyos to children suffering from nutritional deficiencies, and delivered comic books. . Anyhow, they visited the hamlets to check the results of the advisors’ policies, distributed the fundamental freedoms described in their own informational pamphlets on pacification, then returned and reported to their superiors that they had secured the friendship and goodwill of the villagers and that they were now on the side of America.”