City Residents Hold Viet Political Sway
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has been recuperating from a “pongee stick” wound in Saigon but reported that he has now joined the 1st Cavalry Division at its headquarters in An Khe. Black is in South Viet Nam to cover activities of the division. Following is the second part of an analysis of the current political situation in that country.)
By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
SAIGON, South Viet Nam - If
the real population of Viet Nam had any political voice now, a stable
form of
government in this country would be possible.
The billowing crowds in the
cities (isolated boom towns where crowds of American soldiers are
exploited,
resented and tolerated by necessity) hold political sway because of the
security of their defenses.
They have time for such
matters, and they find demonstrations and coups are heady stuff. The U.S. soldiers in these big headquarters
towns have a different attitude toward the Vietnamese, just as the
Vietnamese
in these towns are different from their country brethren.
There has never been an
urban population in close conjunction with a large military population
where
problems didn’t arise. In Saigon and Da
Nang the problems are exploitable by participants in power plays. The huge concentrations of headquarters and
support activities have at times put five Americans into these areas
for every
one out in the brush.
The schism between resident
and foreigner is inevitable. Resentment
on both sides is equally inevitable.
These problems arose long ago and the decentralizing of
headquarters and
support structures and the moving of those which could go out into the
provinces (and often desperately needed to get out there) should have
been
done.
There is an attitude about
this which defies logic and rationalizes the need for those swollen
headquarters complexes by identifying the mission of the U.S. here as
support
of the Vietnamese government’s effort to survive.
The answer to any question
about moving activities into outlying areas is always there is a
problem of
security and of working with Vietnamese officialdom.
Activities moving to a corps
area, for example, would have left the Vietnamese government structures
it
worked with back in Saigon and would have called for a commitment of
troops to
defend them. One official told me this
when I asked him about it in 1964, when things were going badly on the
military
front but nicely on the political front.
The endless succession of
generals to the ruling position meant little enough as a political
problem at
the time because all of them were generals who would continue to wage
war
against the Viet Cong and work with the U.S. program if they ever got
their
political problems sorted out.
It is not so certain that
the ultimate end of the present political trouble - at a time when
military
matters seem to be very well in hand - will produce a government which
will not
quit fighting, however.
The fact that the U.S. then
was dealing with a power structure which recognized such dependence on
American
aid and was hoping for American troop commitments offered an
opportunity to
force a move of activities out of the swarm areas.
If the U.S. representatives had done it, the Vietnamese
counterparts would have had to do so.
The problem apparently never was recognized, however.
Actually, the U.S. mission
here was always one of helping the Vietnamese people to survive and
develop
their nation free of enforced communism.
Supporting the various governments which have come and gone in
Saigon
was at first simply an expedient which made this job simpler at the
moment. It grew to be a necessity, as
all such expedients do, when the real job here got lost in the shuffle
of events.
We may find ourselves
committed to a huge military effort for a chaotic government which may
well
demand that we cease fire if certain elements seize control in Saigon,
with our
young rifleman still wondering whether he should have burned that last
hut or
fixed the door hinges.
The men who could have
salvaged it all by getting out and working with the people may be going
up to
committee meetings in Washington armed with the imposing statistics,
charts and
project reports which they use now to answer questions about matters in
Saigon.
We simply aren’t doing very well in either the cities or the countryside in activities outside of military occupation specialties and the uniformed men practicing them.
Waiting for some particular
point in military success to begin rebuilding the area isn’t the way to
do it;
they go together from the very start.
They go together in
preparing an operation in a little hamlet or in spotting the frictions
which
can arise in population centers between big crowds of soldiers and
civilians.
They also go together in a
realization that the basic problem in any Viet Nam-type situation is
not so
much dedication to the survival of an expedient power structure type of
government, but dedication to bringing about a change in the conditions
of the
people for the better so that they can form a stable political arena
for real
governments to operate in.
Our problem has been that at
first we did not commit enough military force to secure the countryside
for
pacification programs to survive. Then
we committed such force with no brass-tacks guidance at the operations
level
from pacification program experts and with a huge and unwieldy aid
program
which had grown from its original roots in urban zones like a
skyscraper. It towers high in town, but it
covers little
ground at the base.
Our aid program, in fact,
has turned into a much more efficient supply channel for the black
market or
graft rings than it has for the peasant population which is the target
of the
struggle.
American soldiers have never done a better job in combat, whatever their mission here. It may be that others involved in this struggle have not done as well.
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