The Other War

...There is more anti-Americanism here today than there was before...

...assistance in Vietnam" and formed "a significant part" of a development that was "indispensable to military success...

...Would that Mr...

...But the White House, with its enormous capacity for self-delusion and self-righteousness about the war, seemed unconcerned...

...it was making them more dependent upon the United States...

...Unlike so many celebrities from the States who sojourn in Saigon and take an afternoon helicopter ride over the jungle, these committed men have lived and eaten and worked with the peasants of South Vietnam—and in the process have developed deep personal attachments that have enabled them, in Luce's words, "to help people in such a way that our assistance would be useful to them no matter what the political future of this country may be...

...No matter what sympathy he professes for the terrible ordeal of the Vietnamese, he has added to their suffering by backing up the U.S...

...One of the four, Don Ronk, Areata, California, a former military policeman who has been the IVS leader in the Danang area, wrote: "As much as I love these Vietnamese who have gathered with me, as much as I desire to be here as some form of shelter and solace in these times of horror, as much as I realize their personal hurt if I must go, I must \veigh it against speaking out against the cost of so much of their anguish and the anguish of all Vietnamese...

...The testimony of these volunteers, whose unit has been in South Vietnam since 1958, has special significance...

...Rutherford Poats, our former AID director there, told the House subcommittee that a large part of the $200 million in commodities imported annually from the United States goes to prosperous Vietnamese commercial interests to buy their continued support...

...The South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) has no will to fight and feels it has no stake in the conflict into which the United States has poured half-a-million men and nearly $30 billion a year...

...Luce, who has devoted the last nine years to working with the South Vietnamese peasants he loves, resigned his leadership of the IVS program with deep regret...

...action to turn over final settlement of the war to "an international peace commission...

...policy diminished and then turned to revulsion in the two years since the Johnson Administration began to Americanize the war in 1965...

...And, they added, the suffering of the Vietnamese people is "greatly intensified by today's American presence...

...policies in Vietnam and concern for the Vietnamese people who, in the last analysis, bear the brunt of these policies...

...In spite of military and pacification efforts in the villages, "we have not seen any increase in security in the past year," they told the President...

...In their joint letter to the President, the four resigning officials and forty-five other IVS volunteers wrote: "We have seen enough to say that the only monuments to this war will be the dead, the maimed, the despairing, and the forlorn...

...Ambassador to South Vietnam, has acclaimed the work Mauldin in The Chicago Sun-Times "After We're Liberated, We'll Be Pacified" of the IVS...

...The achievements of these dedicated volunteers, he said two years ago, constitute "one of the success stories of U.S...

...Thanh was released after seventeen hours when the Saigon government realized it had made a political and public relations blunder of international proportions...

...The Saigon government provided an example of its devotion to freedom when Ky's police pounced on Au Truong Thanh—the respected Vietnamese economist who might have defeated Thieu in the election if the generals had not had him excluded from the contest—and hauled him off for questioning...

...The new year brings a cold, clutching fear...

...generals might claim in the military arena, "the other war," the effort to improve the wretched lot of the Vietnamese people and to "win their hearts and minds," is headed for disaster...

...Prostitution increases, corruption increases, crime in the streets increases...

...The Other War' As American casualties in the Vietnam war—killed, wounded, and missing—passed well beyond the 100,000 mark last month, there was growing evidence that no matter what "progress" U.S...

...Each of the four IVS officials who resigned submitted a separate statement they signed in the form of a letter...

...We know these 'enemy' are not all combat soliers committed to one side...

...I believe that my protest is in the best interests of my Vietnamese friends and is intended to say \vhat they are largely unable to say: Stop this war...

...They recommended a halt to the bombing of North and South Vietnam, de-escalation, no further defoliation with herbicide sprays (which bring suffering to "children, old people, and the sick" rather than to the Vietcong), recognition of the National Liberation Front, and U.S...

...In a letter to The Progressive, Luce emphasized that his and his colleagues' resignations "issue out of basic disagreement with U.S...

...The trend has been escalation of the war...

...The unpopularity of the Saigon military junta is such that the rigged election of Lieutenant-General Thieu as president and Nguyen Ky as vice-president narrowly missed being invalidated by the Constituent Assembly...

...Donald Luce, IVS director in South Vietnam, and three of his key staff members resigned from the agency because the evidence of their daily lives in the hamlets of Vietnam convinced them that in escalating the war the United States is destroying almost everything it claims it is fighting for in that tragic country...

...Vietcong terrorism is real," they said, but "so are the innocent victims of U.S...

...This fatal contradiction was exposed —not for the first time but most dramatically—as the result of recent action taken by members of the International Voluntary Services...

...The bitter truth is that intensification of the war guarantees the failure of the so-called pacification and development programs of the United States and the Saigon government and condemns the people we say we are liberating to a life of mounting misery...

...The war will continue to grow more agonizing as long as President Johnson misreads the Vietnam situation and the history of our Southeast Asia "commitment" as well...

...Newsmen in Saigon reported that the U.S...

...Many are old men, women, and young boys who ran when a helicopter hovered, who were hiding from the bombs in an enemy bunker, or who refused to leave their farms...

...The repression of civil liberties continues...

...A dedicated, shy, soft-spoken servant of the needy, he confessed to newsmen that he had been "quite hawkish" for a time after the destruction of the Diem regime in 1963, but his support of U.S...

...In their work of helping the peasants build schools, improve agricultural methods, and feed refugees, IVS officials have "probably been closer to the Vietnamese people than any other group there," said Representative William Ryan, New York Democrat...

...Mission there was stunned by the resignation of the dedicated volunteers of the IVS...

...Together with forty-five other IVS members—teachers, agricultural specialists, and social workers who had been working at the "rice-roots" level far from the air-conditioned hotels and office buildings of Saigon—the four IVS officials sent an open letter to President Johnson condemning the war as "an overwhelming atrocity" and urging immediate steps to de-escalate the conflict...

...The rice fields turn brown...

...Senator Ernest Gruening, Alaska Democrat, noting that newspapers opposed to the junta were being closed down in South Vietnam, in violation of the country's constitution, remarked: "Nothing has changed in South Vietnam since the elections...

...Poats, who ran "the other war" for three years before going to Washington as aid's deputy director, said our Vietnam civil effort was not making the people there self-sufficient...

...1 scandal of the war...

...Even so bellicose a hawk as Henry Cabot Lodge, then U.S...

...Asked by Representative Donald Riegle, Michigan Republican, if this meant that without the payoff "the political instability is such that the country might fly apart," Poats answered, "Exactly...

...The performance in the non-military phase of the struggle is equally scandalous...

...While military actions on both sides bring desolation to Vietnam and its people, and tragedy to an increasing number of American families, the Saigon government and its army show little appetite for fighting and no real desire to win over the people or reduce widespread corruption...

...He had sought an exit visa to visit the United States, apparently a "crime" in the military's opinion...

...Congressional investigations, which have received little attention in the press, have exposed large-scale corruption, denial of some of the most elementary civil and political rights— and perhaps most destructive of long-run goals, the failure to move forward in any meaningful way with the long-promised program of land reform...

...The National Observer, sister publication of The Wall Street Journal, recently concluded a study of the ARVN by describing it "as the No...

...The American volunteers warned that the war as presently waged is "self-defeating...

...Johnson heard, as one member of the International Voluntary Services did last winter, the old woman in a refugee village who said: "These days of sorrow are filled with napalm, hate, and death...

...Joint Chiefs of Staff's crusade for more bombing...

...He said Americans and other foreigners were obliged to provide an increasing share of the development and stabilization effort...

...We read with anguish the daily body count of 'enemy' dead...

...bombing and strafing and shelling...

...Secret testimony given to a House Appropriations subcommittee last May and only recently declassified discloses the degree to which our Aid to International Development program has accepted—even contributed to—moral decay in Vietnam...

...We say the trend should be de-escalation...