"I Make War"

INDOCHINA

A short, chunky man with a crew haircut and the face of an Oriental John Garfield walked into butter-colored Gia-Long Palace in Saigon one morning last week and handed to Premier Tran Van Huu a letter bearing the imperial seal of Bao Dai. The letter bluntly deposed Huu and named the bearer, 57-year-old Nguyen Van Tarn, as new Premier of embattled Indo-China.

"This is a sudden blow," muttered Huu, who had been Premier for two of the three years that the Vietnamese have had a conditioned independence from the French. But he obligingly walked out, and in walked Strong Man Tarn, Viet Nam's hard-hitting Interior Minister and its most uncompromising antiCommunist.

Held back by their dislike and mistrust of the French, the Vietnamese had been slow under Premier Huu's regime to join in the life-or-death fight against Red Rebel Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas. The Premier seemed more interested in nailing down Viet Nam's independence than in promoting a fighting partnership with the French. Bao Dai (and the French) thought the time had come for a stronger man, and the Emperor had constitutional power to make the change. The new man is no stooge of the French, but believes that first things come first. Within hours of his accession, the new Premier announced his policy: "Je fais la guerre [I make war]," said Nguyen Van Tarn. Few who knew him doubted that he would.

For 22 years Tarn has been fighting Communists--at the time of the Communist insurrection in October 1930, during a second Red uprising in 1940, and for the last two years as boss of Viet Nam's busy, overworked security police. Two of his three sons were killed by Ho Chi Minh's Reds; the third, Brigadier General Nguyen Van Hinh, a crack pilot, commands the new Vietnamese national army now fighting shoulder to shoulder with the French. Tarn himself is under a standing Viet Minh sentence of death.

Tarn has been ambushed eleven times by Red guerrillas, and escaped with nothing more than a cut finger. In his spare time he hunts tigers by night, writes poetry by day. He is tough with opposition, but he favors a more representative Viet Nam cabinet, and grants of land to Indo-Chinese who fight against the Reds.

"This will be a government of action," he promised. "I will intensify the war effort in all respects, because this war is ours--like our independence."

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