Life with the Viet Cong

Akihiko Okamura is a courageous, persistent Japanese photographer who set out last April to see what the war in Viet Nam is like from the Communist side. Armed with six cameras, 182 rolls of film and a Vietnamese dictionary, Okamura, 36, simply boarded a northbound bus out of Saigon and sat tight. He did not have to wait long. Some 500 yards beyond Bencat, a government stronghold 27 miles from the capital on Route 13, five Viet Cong in dark green government uniforms boarded the bus. Two miles later, they ordered the driver to stop and invited the photographer to go with them. Said one: "If you want to see how it is with the people, we will show you."

As Okamura describes his experiences in the current issue of LIFE, the next few weeks were like passages from an Oriental Kafka. The villages he visited changed hands with maniacal rapidity. Once he saw a convoy sweep by, heavily guarded by U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers who protected themselves from ambush by spraying the jungle on each side with machine-gun fire. No sooner had the convoy passed than 500 Viet Cong on bicycles emerged from the jungle and pedaled madly in pursuit until it was out of sight. On his devious journey to guerrilla headquarters, Okamura was escorted at a killing pace through the jungle by a 73-year-old woman guide, then was taken in hand by a Viet Cong commissar who wore a cowboy hat, an orange shirt, and had a police whistle strung round his neck.

"Do Not Kill Me." His destination, deep in the jungle, was a camp sur rounded by mine fields and 16 barricades of barbed wire. The Viet Cong held Okamura a prisoner there. They insisted that he was an American, despite his Japanese passport, press accreditations, and a miniature Japanese flag on his knapsack with an inscription in Vietnamese: "I am a Japanese correspondent. Mr. Okamura. Please do not kill me." He learned later that six G.I.s, two Australians and one Filipino were also imprisoned on the post, though he was not permitted to see them. Clusters of artillery shells dropped near headquarters day and night, usually landing 500 to 1,000 yards away. U.S. Skyraiders and jet fighters also made bombing and strafing runs near by several times a week. Almost harder on Okamura's nerves were the scorpions, mosquitoes and perpetual clammy cold.

The man Okamura most wanted to meet was Huynh Tan Phat, No. 2 man and chief strategist of the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Viet Cong. After repeated messages, Phat finally arrived at the camp after Okamura had languished there more than a month. He was a short, wiry man with piercing eyes, a thin mustache and a crew cut, wearing a well-tailored khaki shirt and trousers, plus the standard "Ho Chi Minh sandals," cut from old tires. When Okamura complained that he had been robbed of his cameras, lied to and starved, Phat replied: "You have been lucky. We allow you five piasters (6 1/2-c-) a day for your food. For our own soldiers it is two piasters."

Phat, a onetime Saigon architect and, like Photographer Okamura, a Buddhist, insisted--for what it was worth--that he was a Socialist, not a Communist. He said that the Viet Cong had initially followed the guerrilla tactics of Nguyen Giap, the victor of Dienbien-phu, but "now Giap's lessons are outdated. Times have changed. American weapons are different. Now, except for tanks and planes, we have everything we need. Our weapons are as good as the enemy's."

Most of the Viet Cong weapons seen by Okamura were either homemade or of U.S. manufacture, with a sprinkling of identifiable Communist bloc arms. Phat scoffed at sizable outside aid, saying, "You don't understand the logistics. If we needed to supply only small units, it would be easy to get enough from Hanoi. But we have to supply a million people--V.C. political cadres as well as soldiers. We grow our own food. We have ordnance depots in the jungle where we make weapons--crude but serviceable." Besides, as he put it, "we get stronger every time there is a coup in Saigon and more and more military men are put in jail or flee the country."

"Desperation Measures." The Viet Cong, Phat said, try to brainwash U.S. prisoners. "We talk to them repeatedly, try to convince them they are being used as cat's-paws of imperialism." He followed the regular Viet Cong line by dismissing U.S. bombing raids in North Viet Nam as "desperation measures" that have "no effect on us." As to the ground war, he upped the usual Communist propaganda: "If the Americans want to fight us on equal terms, they'll need at least 4,000,000 men."

Okamura, 22 Ibs. lighter as a result of his ordeal, was finally released after 53 days. The Viet Cong returned all his possessions except two films with pictures of the photographer in conversation with Phat, which were forwarded to him later. Among the Communist's last words to Okamura was a warning that the Viet Cong planned to intensify terrorist reprisals such as the vicious bombings that killed 42 people aboard a floating restaurant in Saigon last week (see THE NATION). These will continue, he threatened, until "every single American is gone." As to the ultimate outcome of the war, Phat allowed jovially: "The Americans have been calling themselves 'advisers' to the Saigon forces. But soon there will be no Saigon forces and the Americans will be needing Vietnamese 'advisers.' When that happens, half the Vietnamese 'advising' the Americans will be our own Viet Cong agents."

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