The American military advisor for Quang Nam Province, a lieutenant colonel, interrupted the comments of the education section chief.
“During Pacification Phase 1, which ran from 1962 to 1963, we and USOM concluded a rural revival agreement, and under its terms we promoted the strategic hamlet program. At that time around sixty hamlets in Quang Nam Province had already been inspected and approved by the provincial government. The approval criteria were six: defense facilities; organization of the local militias; training and armaments of the militias; identification and expulsion of Viet Cong elements; administration of elections in the hamlet; and completion of organizing counterinsurgency capability among friendly forces.
“An agreement for support of Quang Nam Province projects was drawn up by the US — Vietnam Joint Investigation Commission who visited here in November 1962. The commission team was composed of the Vietnamese governor, the chief American military advisor, and USOM dispatch personnel. All the plans were reviewed and approved by the governor and his staff, and the American side held a veto right on economic matters. Our objective with the nationwide strategic hamlet program was protective segregation of the farmers from the Viet Cong, but gradually we extended it to other goals. In particular, the An Hoa project was being promoted around the same time.
“The higher goal at the time was to provide better schools, health programs, and agricultural aid on the village level so as to implant a new image of the government in the minds of the people by increasing the government’s welfare activities on a national scale. It was expected that the strategic hamlet program would bring a real change, a revolution, socially as well as politically, in village life. We supplied wire mesh for fencing, pipes and cement, money for training the agents who actually would implement the project on the ground, wages for the farmers working on the construction, and resettlement allowances. The advisory group was also in charge of training allowances for the militia and their weaponry.
“The concentration of the population in these hamlets situated in defensible zones made it very convenient to control the residents. Viet Cong sympathizers were revealed and we generated detailed histories recording which families had ever had members join the Viet Cong in the past. Soon afterwards, however, a problem erupted. The truth was that most residents never received their wages for work on building fences and only half of the cement and piping arrived at the hamlets. The resettlement allowances were never paid, either.
“According to our investigations, most farmers had to borrow money to move their households, and the interest on these loans was as much as five percent per day. The farmers who never received materials to construct fencing and dwellings had to cut bamboo and wood instead, which turned out to have eaten up more than ten dollars of each farmer’s very limited wealth. The provincial government gave some reasons for the suspensions of supply, citing transportation difficulties and incompleteness in claim documents. As for the weapons, as somebody already mentioned, about two-thirds of the guns and ammunition was siphoned off into the black market.”
“I’ll add a comment on that, OK?” piped up the chief of the agricultural section, once more wiping the sweat from his receding hairline.
With a patient smile, the AID mission representative said, “Yes, fine.”
“I had plenty of exposure to these problems in the Philippines and Hawaii. My comments are only intended as self-examination so we can minimize such discrepancies in planning the phoenix hamlet project. In its aid administration, America has always been emphasizing corruption in the recipient countries. Due to poverty and pre-modern political systems, most aid recipient countries are prone to corruption. If so, don’t you think there is also a basic problem on the part of the donor country?
“Even now, under the procurement programs, we’re buying the products of the donor country with aid grants in the form of subsidies. When Vietnamese importers place an order for the needed goods, America pays dollars directly to the American suppliers. Vietnamese importers running normal commercial operations pay for their goods in piasters. These piasters are put into settlement accounts, which the American government then has our government use for paying military and civilian support personnel. As I understand it, eighty percent or more of this money has been used for defense support like the strategic hamlets program.
“For almost twenty years the Americans have been giving an enormous amount of aid to Vietnam. The first, as I recall, was military aid given to the French under the 1949 Mutual Assistance Agreement. America then was giving military aid to the newly formed NATO, and to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. France received about two million dollars in the first year. The money was given to strengthen NATO, but France, desiring to recover her colonialist strength, ingeniously earmarked a portion of the grants for Indochina.
“The following year, Secretary of State Acheson announced that America was providing aid to France in order to relieve some of the direct costs incurred in confronting the Viet Minh. Weapons began to be shipped in by air to Saigon. A month later, President Truman’s military aid advisory group arrived and started handling the distribution of bombers, tanks and ammunition used by the French to kill Vietnamese. From then until the defeat of the French in 1954, over four years, America supplied military equipment valued at 2.6 billion dollars. To assist the French colonialists who dreamed of restoring their imperial dominion in Indochina, America took upon itself 80 percent of the war expense.
“The Vietnamese people could not understand why the Americans, on one hand, were helping them by building roads and supplying food and medical supplies, and on the other hand were at the same time trying to kill them by giving cannons and guns to the French. After their defeat at Dien Bien Phu, France lost its suzerainty over Indochina. In an attempt to avoid criticism for colonialist intervention, America went on granting aid under the rubric of SEATO, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization.
“Once the Diem regime came into power, America gave annual aid of 270 million dollars, covering more than 80 percent of the entire budget of the South Vietnamese government and military. By also underwriting an annual trade deficit on a scale of 178 million dollars, America provided perfect support for the Diem regime. However, today there is not a single Vietnamese who doesn’t know that this fortune was never spent on any worthy causes. Diem and his family opened secret accounts at a Swiss bank and used the money to increase their personal wealth.
“Diem’s younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, stashed huge sums off money and used it to run his own personal secret police agency, expanding the prisons and political concentration camps, thus giving birth to the NLF. He made vast sums of money through the drug trade. Another brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, embezzled relief funds under cover of the church, and the third brother, Ngo Dinh Can, hoarded treasure of his own by controlling disposition of various maritime licenses and trading monopolies.
“Diem appointed his youngest brother ambassador to England and Madame Nhu’s father was the ambassador to the United States. Only when the crisis reached a crescendo did America realize how foolish it had been to support the Diem regime. The so-called ‘aid dividend’ was a term used quite openly and, as I understand it, the loss through corruption of about 200 million dollars in military aid was discussed in the US Senate. Therefore, as we promote this modest and precious program, we hope that the utilization of the aid will be decided by the residents themselves. We should let the villagers sit down together and decide for themselves whether the available funds should be used for wells, for agricultural projects, or for other things.”