Special Report from Vietnam

...The Confucian ethic took strong roots in the sober Vietnamese character...

...On the Communist side, these last nineteen months since the cease-fire have been marked by two general developments: first, an unremitting and now quite formidable buildup of personnel and supplies in the South, and second, a growing morale problem among NVA soldiers which, according to NVA defectors whom I talked to, is seriously interfering with COSVN's strategic plans...

...Unfortunately, many influential Americans have looked at Vietnam with the indefensible prejudice that a government is deserving of popular legitimacy not only to the extent that it is "democratic" (which may be true in some abstruse Hegelian sense), but to the extent that its electoral machinery is in perfect working order...

...Whatever happened to the Viet Cong...

...In the West (as Watergate has shown) however unsightly corruption may appear, it is still regarded as aberrant behavior, something which can always be prevented by tighter laws or stricter separation of powers...

...Government officials are convinced that popular sympathy for the VC has been evaporating ever since their biggest cause celkbre, land reform, was favorably resolved by the Thieu regime...

...military aid...

...The Southern Republic, on the other hand, committed as it is to a decentralized administration and a relatively laissez-faire economy, depends upon the growth of institutional and legal restraints on corruption...

...There is justice, there are laws....We are not communists so we cannot set up people's courts...

...This notion finds no support in Vietnamese history, certainly no support in present-day North Vietnam, nor any confirming evidence at the local level in South Vietnam...

...The Northerners and Southerners are not "just all Vietnamese...

...Even considering the recent rise in the rate of enemy attacks, the government is certain that in some regions entire NVA divisions are resting inactive, waiting...

...Should an emergency arise, the province chief can mobilize the entire province instantly, as he must, without legal or political encumbrances...

...South Vietnamese, from what they know, have come to regard many American social mores as alienating or disorienting...

...They adhere to a traditional and undemocratic dress code which differentiates sharply between soldier and administrator, clerk and farmer, student and wife...

...In other seriously threatened areas, such as the northernmost provinces, Regular Force Marines combined with contingents of resident militia man a permanent line of defense...

...In this respect, as in many others, the republican government is grafting Western political principles onto Vietnamese custom...

...To help move all this, NVA work divisions have been employed during the cease-fire to complete, at great expense, a full-sized, all-weather network of roads (where there once was just a "trail") down the western edge of South Vietnam, in and out of Laos and Cambodia, up to the Mekong Delta...

...The system allows for innovation where conditions warrant...

...At leisure they tend to be introspective, and their art—from poetry to painting—has the cool, understated grace of individuals who think things out in private...

...Incredibly, urban as well as rural Vietnamese have resisted Western dress almost entirely...

...As machines and gasoline grow scarcer, more things are done the way they always were done...

...Medical rescue by air and A-37 tactical support in battle have not been hampered yet, but lower priority missions, such as interdiction of NVA supply routes, are being cancelled as they become increasingly difficult to afford...

...Respect for tradition embraces all aspects of South Vietnamese life...

...Today, in 1975, the intensity of combat has been heightened still further by a Communist offensive in the Third Military Region around Saigon, an offensive which began in mid-December and culminated in the fall of the provincial capital of Phuoc Binh in the first week of January...

...This point bears explaining...

...Such a plan would certainly account for the colossal stockpiling of NVA munitions...

...Coincidentally or not, most American advisors began to notice improving performance on thepart of ARVN in 1969 and 1970, when the United States was pulling out its first divisions...

...As for the much-discussed "political settlement" which would unify the North and South, I doubt that the character of the South Vietnamese people would lend the idea much encouragement...

...It is symbolic of this post-American era that farmers who once used tractors are being forced again back to the reliable,, ages-old water buffalo (which are being imported in great numbers from Taiwan...

...It seems that a well-to-do, recently deceased lady in New York had given her entire fortune to a favorite nurse because her own children had forgotten her and had not seen her in years...

...This battle may decide the fate of the South...

...On several separate occasions, I listened to astonished Vietnamese relate the substance of an article reprinted in the Saigon press from some U.S...

...Against the ARVN counterattack, it would have to defend fixed positions in the cities, a military situation they have always wanted to avoid...

...Russian tanks and artillery have been moving southward in a steady stream (over 500 new tanks and 500 field pieces thus far...

...Some too can be traced back to a certain bitterness—not bitterness that the Americans have left, but bitterness that the Vietnamese allowed themselves to be deluded by American hope and optimism...

...It will not be because the Americans assured, sr even expected success...

...The U.S...

...In time, South Vietnamese society found itself crippled by years of artificial wealth without capital investment, and the bitter fruits of a bloatedservice sector, decreasing inhibitions against corruption, and unreasonable urbanization (from 85 percent to 55 percent rural in less than ten years...

...State Department is hesitant to talk about it, but arrangements have almost assuredly been made, in this case, for a massive U.S...

...Ancestor worship is practiced nearly everywhere...

...In some of the northern cities, such as Hue where two NVA divisions lie barely twenty miles from the city limits, there is a siege-like tension among a people who know that in a matter of hours their streets and homes can be turned into an inferno...

...The South Vietnamese leadership is still concerned with how much gas or how much ammunition the diminishing American aid can buy them, but no longer do they want American advice on how to use that aid...

...Mandarin political philosophy is not especially liberal or democratic, but it still holds wide sympathy among rural Vietnamese...

...including VC and impressed labor, Communist strength is around 500,000 to 700,000...

...The government in recent years has been trying, with some success, to deemphasize this Western-Vietnamese dichotomy and prevent it from compromising Republican political support...

...Perversely enough, the Republic is still around, two years after the withdrawal of the last American combat troops...

...American and ARVN military officers stress the devastating effect of allied firepower throughout the sixties, which over the long run killed old VC off faster than new ones could be recruited...

...But everyone except the black-market kings agree that the South Vietnamese, collectively, have made enormous gains in self-confidence and in a sense of participation in their nation's future...

...He can sum up his views artfully and succinctly, argue for them, work for them—and if need be fight and die for them...

...By making the vast majority of peasants dependent on modern farming methods for increased crop yields and professional organization for public works projects, the government has forced rural South Vietnamese to realize that longterm political responsibility is not necessarily opposed to communal morality...

...air and naval support...

...Worst of all, the NVA, relatively small in numbers, would be burdened with the man-eating chores of occupying and administering crowded population centers without a political infrastructure...

...ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) generals were never really taken by such characteristically American ideas as (1) trying to defend unimportant, "strategic" outposts, (2) keeping all firepower isolated and mobile, and (3) moving large units through insecure territory...

...ARVN generals at the front all agree that the most important determinant of the future of the war is the if, when, and where of the next all-out Communist offensive...

...Again, the outlook is pessimistic...

...As in Taiwan, the South Vietnamese leadership was wise enough to decide that family farming is the only politically feasible way to grow crops, even if it is not the most efficient...

...This is not always convincing rhetoric to a people who still see, in any unpopular political behavior, nothing but a personal crime demanding immediate punishment...

...The current number of NVA troops in the South, depending on whose estimate you choose, is 200,000 to 400,000...

...The answer to this question depended on whom I asked...

...and no matter how exhausted they were at the end of the offensive, there would no longer be any competition, military or political, to worry about...

...If some South Vietnamese once worried that disaster might follow the disappearance of the American aura, few worry any longer...

...RF battalions are allotted in set numbers to all thirty-seven provinces, and their reputations generally rise and fall with the prowess of the province chiefs who command them...

...And again, as is often the case, the Communist "revolution" turns out to be violent traditionalism made fashionable to twentieth-century ideology...

...For all of its seeming lack of definition, the South Vietnamese does not take his politics lightly...

...Government officials are especially satisfied with the self-defense program because it proves, they say, that ordinary Vietnamese can be given weapons and trusted...

...It doesn't worry that the rank-and-file NVA soldiers can see that their cannons are calibrated in Russian, not Vietnamese, letters...

...occupation), and the government, for its part, busies itself trying to thwart enemy troop concentrations...

...But how much time...

...lives are commitment...

...Historically, it is sometimes forgotten that the North, the seat of ancient Vietnamese civilization, completed its conquest of the South only a couple of generations before French rule...

...Though Communist leaders would be loath to admit it to their own cadres, the shift can only be explained by one, painfully obvious fact: the slow but steady obliteration of the indigenous Viet Cong and the necessity that they be replaced by NVA regulars...

...Self-consciousness, combined with a high level of education (80 percent literacy, the highest in East Asia except Japan), offers them a unique perspective from which to judge prevailing twentieth-century custom...

...Reasons abound, but what is not contested is the fact of the diminishment of the Viet Cong...

...The introduction of American ground troops, South Vietnamese now admit for the first time, was a deceptively counterproductive decision because of its devastating effect on the morale of Vietnamese soldiers...

...Ironically, one of the most vexing difficulties for the Republic has been to satisfy American preconceptions of the democratic "form of government," while at the same time to build up a somewhat different, but viable, set of political traditions among the Vietnamese themselves...

...Because the South Vietnamese economy was to be supported only as a brief, interlocutory step to victory, it was kept upright day-to-day by the indiscriminate scattering of U.S...

...On the third tier are the local militia, known as "self-defense" forces, an old idea but a relatively recent success...

...the South, for its part, regards Northerners as an officious, self-righteous, and regimented people...

...On the other hand, it is said, if the NVA goes all the way, they could simply present the world with a fait accompli...

...In fact, some go so far as to say that our use of ground troops was the most tragic mistake of the war...

...Both of these tendencies, however somber, are bound to determine the future just as surely as they have determined the past...

...They lack the firepower, air support, and munition reserves to launch extended offensives and, having tried them for so long with the Americans, have come to doubt their efficacy...

...Marriage and profession are considered too important not to be decided by convention and announced by appearance...

...He is, perhaps at last, weary of the war...

...ARVN, by comparison, is one-million strong, but considering its high proportion of rear-area and militia soldiers, the Communists' number of front-line troops is nearly equal to the government's...

...On the first tier are the "Regular Forces," always the best equipped and supplied, and usually the best motivated troops (the Marines and Rangers, for instance, are all-volunteer outfits...

...Weapons are only means...

...These estimates of Communist strength will have to be revised, of course, if the recent fall of every town in Phuoc Long Province and its capital, Phuoc Binh, proves to be permanent or a prelude to further Communist gains...

...Either way, the expense was unacceptable...

...Of course, the United States still gives the Republic military aid, but the provision of materiel should not be confused with the provision of soldiers...

...Near it a POL (petroleum-oil-lubricants) pipeline stretches through the underbrush the entire length of the road, now ensuring NVA armored squadrons due west of Saigon an uninterrupted flow of fuel...

...To the degree that South Vietnamese mingle the social and political order, they make little distinction between man and office...

...Much of the success the South is enjoying in this long war of attrition is due to the organization of its armed forces, which over the last ten years of trial and error has become increasingly—and effectively—decentralized...

...It has no real power of investigation (one reason why the Canadian delegation resigned on July 31, 1973...

...To a far greater extent than the North, the South is culturally heterogeneous and has always been politically uncentralized (so the Communist charge that the South is a feudal society is nearly correct...

...Today, in the midst of a depression, the government's ministries are finding that it is no simple matter to persuade the Vietnamese public, either by disciplinary law or by audacious promise, to commit themselves once again to the future of their economic well-being...

...The American way of getting work done is admired, but the American way of life is not always envied...

...One indication of the Communists' massive stockpiling of munitions has been the extraordinary intensity of enemy shelling during recent attacks on government outposts—often thousands of rounds in one night...

...the Communists, they say, have decided to move their schedule ahead by one year and are already beginning to apply the decisive pressure...

...newspapers about ARVN troops playing transistor radios in the jungle to keep from surprising the enemy...

...Consider the alternatives...

...Moreover, in both the North and South, Communist propaganda, which hasn't changed much since the heyday of the Viet Minh, is hard put to explain the radical shift in Communist strategy over the last six or seven years: away from the old popular-front, guerilla tactics and toward the mute force of modern weaponry...

...Americans, with their cliches about the apathy of the rice farmer and the carelessness of the Saigon functionary, generally misunderstand this aspect of South Vietnamese character...

...Higher echelon administrators in the North are beginning to wonder out loud why more money cannot be spent to alleviate dismal economic hardship in the North, why all the money must flow south as war materiel...

...The reason why we have been making slow progress," announced Thieu recently in response to corruption complaints, "is that our society is ruled: by laws...

...As for the size of NVA supply reserves, there is unanimous agreement among Vietnamese officers and U.S...

...Government and Communist "areas" are so checkerboarded, intermingled, and contested that a good part of South Vietnam is claimed by both sides...

...Since it was found that firepower is only effective against a concentrated enemy, the allies grew increasingly dependent on aggressive "search and destroy" tactics to concentrate the enemy in battle, or on costly gadgetry to hit him when concentrated out of battle...

...Sometimes, confidentially, they will tell a visitor that they only wish that some of the ammunition dumped so ineffectively into the wilds eight or nine years ago was still around today to relieve their present tight rationing of munitions...

...Little Confucian apothegms show up in boxes in government-leaning newspapers—loyalty above all: first to father, then to family, then to village, then to state...

...As far as the long-term survival of the Republic is concerned, I think it is possible to identify among them two salient tendencies: first, an intense and profound sense of tradition...

...From South Vietnamese leaders, for instance, one hears universally pessimistic predictions about the length of the war...

...The aura, it seems, is dispensible...

...Regular Forces, under the direction of four Military Region commanders, are billeted at special camps in strategic positions throughout the South, and are designed not so much to defend as to counterattack or reinforce, in conjunction with armor and tactical air, any government area in trouble...

...In recent years the conscious presence of tradition has been accentuated by the South's deteriorating economy and the receding American influence...

...The Communist strongholds are scattered along a chain of wild, unpopulated mountains, stretching in a semi-circle north to south on the rim of the Central Highlands...

...Just outside of Saigon, beside the main road leading east, stands a huge piece of stone on which some government mason once chiseled the inscription: "We shall never forget the noble sacrifice of allied lives...

...Corruption means that a leader has abrogated his all-important social obligations...

...airlift from Pacific bases...

...It is generally agreed that the NVA could succeed in a limited offensive...

...Contact with the world at large is making South Vietnamese self-conscious of their own traditionalism...

...The Vietnamese, on the other hand, insists on the importance of some clearly defined social responsibility, the nuances of which are quite beyond the Westerner's depth...

...One sin which the Vietnamese rarely commit unless encouraged is the sin of impatience, and the South Vietnamese in retrospect regret that the terrible impatience of the Americans disrupted their natural equanimity...

...But the government claims that it has not only been unable to replace most aircraft and armored vehicle losses, it has not even been able to keep its heavy weapons sufficiently supplied with ammunition...

...Most Southern soldiers can remain close to their families and near their base-camps, and all the while the government can be rebuilding the economy and strengthening its popular legitimacy...

...Efforts to make the Republic more determinedly democratic are, perhaps rightly, ridiculed by the Communists as a way of forcing Vietnam into a Western mold...

...Unlike the citizens of most "underdeveloped" nations, they are acutely aware of the cultural costs of "developing...

...One frequently hears these days of one lucky son or daughter, having landed a lucrative clerical job, supporting an extended family of eight or ten brothers, sisters, and cousins...

...So most South Vietnamese have drawn a mixed assessment of the American era...

...Only in a few areas, for instance in the north along the Han Ciang River through Quang Tri, has a definite line of -fire" been established which can be "ceased...

...It is clear now that if the South does survive in the long run, it will be because the South Vietnamese government succeeded on its own efforts and with its own methods...

...At present, the Communists (PRG) control, for whatever the figure is worth, perhaps 25 or 30 percent of South Vietnam...

...They tend to resent change even where it is necessary, even where there is no choice but to build new houses for the homeless or find new jobs for the unemployed...

...Moving innocent battalions through unknown forests pushed the total casualty figure beyond any forecast, to 56,000 U.S...

...Such remarks are made in a pointed and skeptical fashion, as if to tell Americans that some problems, like monsoon seasons, are more to be lived with than solved...

...it becomes a vital unit of economic survival...

...This is an age-old Vietnamese dilemma...

...There is the serious possibility that ARVN could simply run out of reserve fuel and ammunition in the face of a general Communist offensive...

...But certainly it was ARVN's inability to respond effectively by air or even to match the NVA's armor on the ground during the recent attack on Phuoc Binh that prompted President Ford in January to ask Congress for $300 million in military aid beyond the $700 million already appropriated for Fiscal Year 1975...

...They justify their optimism by drawing attention to a continuing decline in rear-area terrorist activity, and to several entire provinces in the north where, though half-occupied by the NVA, traditional VC activity has dropped nearly to zero...

...Repeatedly I heard the prediction that it will be an "end-all" effort to take the South in one blow, a series of battles larger in scale than anything previously seen...

...More ominous still,the NVA has built in the northern provinces several good roads, dotted with hardened supply depots, east to the rim of the mountains overlooking such northern coastal cities as Hue, Da Nang, and Quang Ngai...

...It has been suggested, for instance, that the sudden urbanization of the South simply eliminated the VC's demographic base, or that younger generation Communists have rejected their elders' fragmented and traditionalist mode of opposition...

...bombing episodes, that the NVA soldier is frightened...

...Viet Cong are still around, of course, and they supply the NVA with much-needed manpower, but they are in themselves a dangerous threat in only a few areas: a scattering of districts in the Delta and west of Saigon, a few districts in the Highlands,- and the mountainous part of Binh Dinh Province (on the central coast...

...To the South Vietnamese, the stone represents a new sense of attachment to what is now their own country and since monuments vowing never to forgel are always the beginning of forgetting...

...To the South Vietnamese and eventually to the Americans, this seemed a ghastly way to buy time...

...By the end of 1974 the war had returned to what would have been considered, in 1970, a "moderate" level of fighting...

...At work they are intense and inexhaustible, but do not show off their industry like the Japanese...

...It is estimated, for example, that if the Communists wanted to they could take a couple of major Highland cities (say, Pleiku and Konturn), cut the east-west Highland highways, cut Highway One north of Da Nang, lay siege to Hue and perhaps Saigon, and generally overrun government positions in several provinces...

...No one knows what action, if any, the world at large would take if one side suddenly started a major offensive...

...Confucian principles especially form a sort of didactic arsenal into which the government can dip endlessly for support...

...Captured NVA documents have revealed still another, more sinister clue...

...The Geneva Agreement of 1973 calls for a one-to-one replacement of weapons lost on both sides of the war...

...According to government complaints to the ICCS, the North has introduced 100,000 new troops and 30,000 "civilian workers" into the South since the cease-fire...

...To the traditional Vietnamese peasant, electoral democracy stands for (1) impermanence, (2) irresolution, and (3) incessant and destructive criticism of administrators...

...Confucianism and Buddhism, which account for the majority of the people, Catholicism (about 15 percent), as well as the minor, local religions all teach the importance of ceremony and the strong bond between past and present...

...On the one hand, we wanted Vietnam to remain noncommunist for our own interests as a world power...

...withdrawal began five years ago, and this fact alone casts shades of doubt on the effectiveness of our effort during the sixties...

...1. Americans in Retrospect The Republic shows no sign of being any nearer collapse today than when the U.S...

...In 1968 the premature predictions of U.S...

...The government leaders understandably point to the decline of the real "Southern" VC as perhaps the most encouraging, long-term auspice of the war...

...Since the fall of Phuoc Long Province, some are changing their minds...

...What will be the goals of a Communist offensive...

...dollars...

...Total U.S...

...During the 1972 Easter Offensive the NVA used 400 tons of supplies per day, according to one intelligence expert, and by 1975 the NVA will have the capacity to double that rate for a period of six months...

...The North, on the other hand, is believed to be paying dearly for the logistical expense of main...

...The South Vietnamese leadership, according to longtime American residents and observers, has matured miraculously in the time it took them to appreciate their isolation...

...The massive influx of supplies and the reinforcement of NVA divisions is especially worrisome to government leaders because it all but confirms that the Communist command is preparing for a new offensive...

...I am convinced," an Assistant Prime Minister told me, "that the North Vietnamese army will never leave the South...

...Even in the residence of an otherwise Western, urban sophisticate, such a chest in the front room stands as an explanation of where and whom he comes from...

...3. The War While the Paris Agreement signed on January 27, 1973, was a neat way of ending all direct American responsibility for the war (this was, at last, the "peace with honor"), it did little to change the situation among Vietnamese combatants...

...They thought such a thing was incredible...

...unlike the American, he has developed his muscles for endurance rather than strength, and when he has to do a job, he does it bit by bit and thoroughly...

...Dress reflects the care with which life decisions are made in South Vietnam...

...The stone appears to be more than a year old now, and its presence startles the American visitor whose eyes have been numbed by the timeless vista of ricefields, shantytowns, and torn pieces of barbed wire...

...On the other hand, under the RF system the average Vietnamese is assured that his particular area is being protected day-to-day, and that one chosen "figurehead," not just a distant bureaucracy in Saigon, is inescapably in charge...

...Annoying though the war is at a moderate level, life and business in most of the South can go on as normal...

...Allied military strategy, say many South Vietnamese, was so prepossessed by impatience that it committed itself entirely to a short-run, "quick victory" philosophy, and thus doomed itself to failure...

...Conventional warfare, in the form of a general Communist offensive, is what the South fears most at this point...

...Regular Force commanders in the north consistently report that their shell usage is held down to about one third of what it was in 1972...

...Most Americans accepted defeat here six years ago, when President Nixon announced that we could not wait for victory but would settle for "peace with honor...

...If a peasant has in his house anything of value that hasbeen spared the ravages of war, it will be a large chest, exhibited proudly, displaying photographs and memorabilia of the family's departed (often long-departed) members...

...Whatever this unwieldy organization has cost ARVN in the efficiencies of centralization, it has more than benefited the army in popular confidence and flexibility...

...Some secure and well-run provinces on the central coast, for instance, have no Regular Forces near them and have not had to call for their help in years...

...The present Communist solution as practiced in North Vietnam (and in the South by the PRG, Provisional Revolutionary Government) is, for all its rigidity and authoritarianism, typically Vietnamese: (1) ensure that everyone who holds any economic or political responsibility is considered a "good" man, and (2) centralize all political and economic decision-making so that positions of power are closely directed...

...The North Vietnamese leadership (today, the North Vietnam Army is receiving nearly as much foreign aid as ARVN) is careful to observe this distinction...

...The Vietnamese family, in times of hardship, becomes more than a nexus of authority and ceremony...

...On the other hand, we wanted the Vietnamese themselves to want what we wanted, to fight their own war and win their own freedom...

...To me, it was entirely believable, although I recognized too that what in America we approvingly call social mobility would strike these people as gruesomely uncivilized...

...To the Vietnamese, weapons are utterly different from lives...

...Then, of course, there is Tradition spelled with a large T, upheld by the three major religions (one might more accurately say "religious tendencies") in South Vietnam...

...so why should we die...

...total spent for aid and the war since 1962 is $162 billion) and it shows every sign of hitting an asymptotic zero within the next decade...

...By solving ex machina every immediate shortage, the Americans discouraged any long-range economic planning or thinking...

...hence, a good man as a rule makes perfect policy, but a bad man makes intolerable policy...

...How should corruption be eliminated...

...Would American air and seapower be offered again, it is often wondered, if the NVA attempted an armored advance across the northern border...

...Most importantly, the International Commission of Control and Supervision, appointed to oversee the conditions of the Geneva Accord, is an impotent and politically deadlocked organization...

...The allies were not as careful...

...As a general rule, the Republic's most secure areas are the Mekong Delta, the coastal valleys, and the population centers in the Central Highlands...

...The now-completed "Back to the Tiller" land reform act, which recompenses former owners with eight-year loans, now permits only twelve hectares (about twenty-five acres) of rice field per owner...

...As a result we equivocated, keeping both ideas alive and never resolving their inherent inconsistency...

...They would incur world reprobation for breaking all pretense of following the treaty and would risk the reentry of U.S...

...The North, as always, thinks of Southerners as slovenly, fragmented, and uncultured...

...He would recognize the same French bricks peeking up occasionally through the pavement, the same tree-lined boulevards, the same stately mediterranean walls (now often half-covered by barbed wire), the same pagodas and cathedrals, and even the same clothing on the people...

...What did make a difference was the military security of the village and (as one would expect among Vietnamese) the visibility of the authorities in charge...

...The son, if he has the choice, will plow the same ground the same way as his great-great-grandfather...

...newspaper...

...second, a deadly earnestness about politics...

...In physical appearance, the typical Vietnamese is not only small but slight...

...It is true—and it is truer the further you are from Saigon—that the people do not share the Western idea of politics as the workings of an elected organization limited in power and designed according to constitutional principles...

...To myself as an American it signified an improbability, a "post-American" South Vietnam, thepersistence of a republic which we never expected to survive our departure...

...In any case, the Vietnamese are a serious, not demonstrative people...

...It seems that during the late sixties, particularly in the Tet Offensive, NVA commanders deliberately sacrificed certain quality VC outfits so that the NVA would gain undisputed leadership in the conduct of the war...

...As the level of fighting increases, one hears more and more wild conjecturing among South Vietnamese about what will happen militarily in the near future...

...Of course, some of this complaining is just a healthy symptom that ARVN is learning to do without exorbitant levels of U.S...

...But-once the smoke cleared, the NVA would find itself in a precarious situation...

...But it is extremely careful that when foreign personnel are called in (as the Chinese were in great numbers to garrison North Vietnamese cities during the last two offensives), they are kept hidden and are returned as soon as the emergency is over...

...A question, I was told, secretly formed in the mind of the young Vietnamese recruit: "If the Americans think this war is so important that they are willing to die for it, then they simply won't accept defeat...

...troops killed, and the attempt to destroy enemy units by blindly flattening areas of countryside with bombs and shells (this was literally common practice in the sixties) squandered fortunes in material wealth...

...Indeed, nowadays the South Vietnamese can be bluntly to-the-point in explaining where the United States erred in its method of conducting the war...

...True, those who understand the realities of modern warfare regret the disappearance of American firepower and are genuinely grateful for what the United States continues to supply them...

...On the second tier are the Regional Forces, or RF forces, which numerically comprise most of ARVN...

...The Communists started shelling towns and government outposts, and mining the main highways...

...Today it may still be just a matter of time...

...Next month: The Economy, The Thieu Regime, The Outlook for the Future...

...The government is also showing that it can act in harmony with the Vietnamese "political mind" through efforts to initiate popular activities at the village level(e.g., the militia and popular, provincial representatives) and to assuage the fell hand of capitalism...

...The trouble is not, as it was occasionally during the heaviest U.S...

...Dozens of hard SAM missile sites have been installed in the northernmost portion of South Vietnam, captured just before the cease-fire, and one SAM regiment and AA guns of unprecedented caliber have practically doubled the NVA anti-aircraft protection north and west of the Central Highlands...

...The Republic is constrained to grant a fair degree of autonomy to Montagnard, Chinese, and Cambodian subpopulations, as well as several local religions, and the people, in practice if not in principle, prefer that the resultant diversity is preserved...

...Today, ARVN is divided into three distinct tiers...

...the other reason was that two of its delegates had been kidnapped by the Viet Cong), and it has neither the authority nor the means to stop hostilities once they begin...

...Food is transported on poles, working men travel by bicycle or foot, rice is shelled by wooden blocks, and boats are propelled by paddle...

...What followed, naturally, was the gradual disintegration of ARVN's effectiveness and the dismaying reports in U.S...

...Nonmilitary American observers offer more interesting explanations...

...withdrawal but to the plummeting levels of U.S...

...But the South Vietnamese do hold tenaciously to their own idea of politics as the formal and ritualized functioning of the social order...

...The scene is still vividly recollected: giant, strong, well-fed, well-equipped Marines splashing ashore at Cam Ranh with the world's most sophisticated weaponry among them and a tradition of invincibility behind them...

...taining an army in the wilderness hun, dreds of miles from its supply source and suffering the moral problems peculiar to soldiers fighting long wars away from home...

...if he has to build a new house, he will use the old design, and if he has to use corrugated metal instead of thatching, he will be sure the roof slopes at the old angle...

...To this extent the government, because it must identify itself with economic progress, runs against, not with, the instincts of tradition...

...At the root of this peculiar morale problem lay the more profound inability of the United States to determine its own raison d'g'tre in Southeast Asia...

...What we never realized is that no one will try to win in his own interest unless he faces a real possibility of losing...

...So it is understandable, even if it is surprising, that I encountered among loyal South Vietnamese—military included—unmistakable disfavor toward the possibility of reintroducing American troops no matter what the circumstances...

...Air divisions are finding their aircraft grounded much of the time due simply to a lack of fuel...

...The visitor sees them in squad-sized groups all over the countryside, guarding bridges, highway intersections, occasional buildings, and tiny, improbably-placed outposts...

...Much of this criticism is a government attempt to justify its own sense of pride in having taken over from the Americans in such an exemplary fashion...

...It is true that the military autonomy granted to province chiefs, coupled with their civilian administrative powers, offers them wonderful, often irresistible opportunities for corruption...

...The American withdrawal—by telling the Vietnamese that it was no longer important that we win—gave the Vietnamese a chance to lose...

...To the RF forces belong the defensive burden and quotidian chores of the war...

...These practices have since been discontinued by ARVN—and none of the dire consequences feared by the Americans has ensued...

...But victory never came...

...To a degree, tradition is simply the natural instinct of a pious and agrarian people: whatever has been is probably still good enough...

...They invariably live and work in the same hamlet they defend—looking, listening, and keeping long night watches in wait for surprise...

...As went the American military effort, so went the American economic effort...

...These ideas have an unfortunately Western flavor to them, and where Ho Chi Minh could once sound like a warlord in his denunciation of corrupt officials as ''capitalist enemies of the people," Republican President Thieu must sound like a rule-hound bureaucrat...

...they are confident that time is on theirside...

...The purpose of massive firepower was to win the war in a hurry...

...Measured in any way—by the raw number of VC, by the ratio between numbers of VC and NVA, or by the VC influence in command decisions—their strength is waning...

...Should a surprise attack be launched against government territory, the independent self-defense groups provide an almost fail-safe warning system...

...One chief of a southern province complained to me that each of his ten 105 mm field pieces is restricted to four rounds per day—not exactly a fierce barrage...

...Thus, it was only natural that both sides began to commit technical violations of the treaty days after it was signed...

...Where ARVN has suffered has been in its decreasing firepower capability, due not just to the U.S...

...Yet this is a flattering indication of Communist strength since, by anyone's estimate, the PRG does not "control" any more than 4 or 5 percent of the South's population or arable land...

...He knows that the Americans have left, he has heard that a "peace treaty" has been signed which brings no peace, he sees that the Communists have made few permanent gains over the last ten years, and he asks finally, what for...

...But in South Vietnam, where constitutional procedure is still a young idea and where leaders govern their constituencies with the informality and directness you might find in a large family, corruption is more than malfunctioning government—it is illegitimate government...

...To the extent that the future of South Vietnam is now exclusively in native hands, it will be molded by such numberless character traits as these...

...What is important in Vietnamese government—and this again rests on the strength of the classic Confucian model—is to define and idealize the social organ-isn't which already exists, and to duplicate in law its infinitely complicated lines of authority, deference, and privilege...

...This is quite a reversal from the early sixties, when the government feared that any arms given to a militia would eventually find themselves, along with their owners, on the wrong side of the battlefield...

...Helicopter transport and air-dropping of troops is almost unheard of these days, and "airborne" divisions invariably fight on foot like everyone else...

...Government violations consisted generally of patrolling territory that was not unquestionably "theirs...

...2. The People Watching Saigon taxi drivers, I concluded that indifference in the face of peril is a trademark of the Vietnamese character...

...The Communists, on the contrary, draw their support from a pureblooded Vietnamese reaction to every hint of Western political influence (Marx notwithstanding, a point well-made in Frances Fitzgerald's otherwise tendentious study of Vietnamese Communism, Fire in the Lake...

...The Communists themselves, of course, never allow the pretense that real decisions are arrived at through individual political preference...

...Today they nearly over-react against the American approach to problem solving...

...Self-defense soldiers, armed but rarely uniformed, are organized no higher than the hamlet level (there are an average of seven hamlets per village, thousands in all...

...Government chiefs of staff are perfectly content to remain on the defensive, protecting all major population centers, guarding the agricultural districts, and trying to anticipate enemy movements...

...aid for 1974, measured in dollars, is about one-twentieth of what it was in 1968 (aid for Fiscal Year 1975 is $700 million...

...military advisors had been proven false by the Tet Offensive, the mounting cost of war was unsupportable, and it seemed obvious—now that we were leaving—that the collapse of the South was just a matter of time...

...Because the best weather for offensive action is in the early spring, when most of the South enjoys a respite between rainy seasons, many ARVN generals—with the help of enemy intelligence—have long predicted the big attack will come in March 1976...

...Therefore sometimes procedures may be lengthy but provide guarantee for group or individual honor...

...In a landscape which seldom changes, the passing of an era is marked: the Americans, like the French, are gone...

...No one is certain how the relative quality of the Northern and Southern armies has changed in the nearly three years since they had their last large-scale battles in the Easter 1972 Offensive...

...They also take care to distinguish between the last two offensives, between the Tet Offensive, which was successful because of widespread VC infiltration, and the 1972 offensive, which quickly assumed the character of conventional warfare...

...In the cities old ruins are rarely torn down, and if a nineteenth-century French administrator could return today, he might find even Saigon a nostalgic scene...

...Moreover, government leaders have regained a certain measure of poise...

...We must apply justice, the laws, and regulations seriously and equitably...

...They could invoke decades of anti-imperialist propaganda and deride the soldiers in ARVN and the officials in the government, many of whom fought at one time against the French, for their despicable lack of historical principle...

...Most perplexing of all, little is known about the strategy now being drafted in COSVN, the headquarters of the NVA-VC military partnership...

...Barring a voluntary withdrawal of NVA troops, the position of the Republic is not likely to improve dramatically...

...Given this understanding of politics, it is only natural that the primary political issue at stake in most of the debating, demonstrating, and even in the fighting, is the question of corruption versus integrity in government, while other issues (many of which would be of more concern to Westerners—such as election fraud or mismanagement of the economy) go unmentioned even by the most disaffected radical...

...In a discussion with Vietnamese on politics, the Westerner finds himself trying to steer the topic toward some analytical model: politics as the issue of legal precedent or as a response to economic necessity...

...In fact one extensive American study of "pacified" villages revealed no correlation between the degree of "democracy" practiced in a village and the villagers' trust in their leaders...

...Today, NVA battalions everywhere except in the Delta possess the capacity for formidable armored support, and in the northernmost provinces ARVN estimates its armor is outnumbered two to one...

...Also, some clauses in the cease-fire are hopelessly unrealistic, such as the proviso that "all armed forces of the two South Vietnamese parties shall remain in place"—which, obeyed literally, means suicide in guerilla warfare...

...This reasoning is not lost on the South Vietnamese people...

...They fear a Western future...

...Yet now that the Communists possess equipment and large-scale organization that is truly a match for ARVN, they have simultaneously found themselves stymied by an increasingly serious morale problem...

...The cease-fire provisions have proved almost unworkable...

...To the extent that the American presence suffocated Southern morale, I was reminded, it encouraged Communist determination immensely, and gave them an ideal psychological weapon...

...There are, it seems, good reasons to be perplexed...

...All we can do for the next generation is to keep them out of the way...

...the trouble now is that he lacks motivation...

...The people, I have said, are deadly serious about politics...

...interestingly, it seems to find a more favorable home here than it ever did in its native China...

...aides that they are larger now than at any previous time during the war...

...Not much territory is yet changing hands, but the Communists are attacking and sometimes overrunning isolated government bases (most of which, until the New Year's Day attacks, were unimportant holdovers from the U.S...