The Real Revolution

For 20 years the 1,000 villagers of Tau Nghia off the South China Sea had been the helpless pawns of war: used and abused, taxed and conscripted, sheltered and then shelled by first one army and then another in the march and countermarch of Viet Nam's wars. Only last fall Saigon troops recaptured the hamlet after it had been in Viet Cong hands for six months. Tau Nghia's fortunes abruptly changed. First the Korean Tiger Division arrived and set up its headquarters in nearby Qui Nhon, providing a visible and powerful shield of security. And last January a 66-man Vietnamese pacification team rolled in to bring Tau Nghia back to life.

It was a team with teeth: every man was armed and trained to fight. But it was something else as well. "At first it had to be hamlet chief, schoolteacher and doctor," says a U.S. official, "a surrogate government in effect." A census of the villagers' grievances and needs was taken, and within weeks they were being met. Roads were repaired, loans granted to fishermen for larger boats, new motors, new nets. A school was set up, a health center built, fertilizer trucked in, a new sewing machine sent from Saigon after the women were organized into sewing groups.

Nobody Talked. Gradually the village was organized to protect itsef in a way that gave every villager a sense of participation. Old women went to work constructing punji sticks and booby traps for protective barriers around the village. Teen-age boys manned klaxon alarms. Should they sound at night, the women were taught to gather in the center of the village with flaring pitch torches, while the men held back in the shadows with their guns to ambush Viet Cong intruders. Last March a small Viet Cong propaganda team came, and nearly every villager went to his assigned post. The Reds asked who the leaders were. No one would talk to them, and the baffled and frustrated V.C. organizers withdrew. So, too, has the pacification team, its mission accomplished, with Tau Nghia now a village thriving, alive and ready to kick hard at any Communist attempt to reinfiltrate it.

The example of Tau Nghia is a model of what pacification ought to be--of the goal of "social revolution" to which President Johnson pledged the skills and resources of the U.S. last February in the Honolulu Declaration. It represents the real revolution, recapturing not only real estate but people, which alone can make military victory in Viet Nam meaningful. Last week in 76 villages, scattered among all 43 provinces of South Viet Nam, the first post-Honolulu 59-man teams of "revolutionaries" were out to create Tau Nghias everywhere.

Plus 14%. Officially called the Revolutionary Development Cadre, its teams were recruited from the regions in which they were working, and were trained for 13 weeks in the arts of "self-defense, self-help and self-government" at seaside Vung Tau. Skilled in everything from using a grenade launcher to digging a well and administering first aid, they are Saigon's--and the U.S.'s --first wave of shock troops in elemental nationhood. Already, 5,000 more cadremen are in training; by the end of the year hopefully 15,000 will be in the field. Some will be old hands at pacification retrained to bring new skill to their job. They are the manpower legacy of previous programs, from President Diem's Strategic Hamlet Cadre through the New Life Cadre to the highly competent, current Political Action Teams (TIME, Feb. 18), which already comprise some 16,000 workers in rural areas.

But where once the programs were fragmented under provincial control, the activities of all the "revolutionaries" today are coordinated from Saigon under able, energetic General Nguyen Due Thang, the Minister of Revolutionary Development, with the aid and advice of the U.S. For 1966, Saigon has allotted Thang nearly $9,000,000, and the U.S., through AID, plans to spend some $400 million. The year's tangible targets: securing 987 hamlets, building 2,500 classrooms, resettling 41,000 families, building 150 bridges and 600 miles of road, and adding an additional 14% of South Viet Nam's population to the 50% now securely held by Saigon.

One-Man Gang. When a team fresh from Vung Tau in their black pajamas and black berets arrived in Binh Phuoc, an inland hamlet of rice and manioc farmers, they started from the ground up--and slowly--to win the confidence of the villagers. First project: drawing a crude map of the village, its homes and road accesses. They ate in the local restaurants as a means of getting acquainted, took guard duty at night, began a census, used part of their first paychecks to buy cigarettes to give away. Working in three-man cells, they visited huts during the day, passing out sewing needles to the women, or went out to work beside the men cutting manioc root in the fields. The medical cadre, with white armbands, distributed aspirin, nose drops, scrubbed down children. Within a month the team will feel sufficiently part of the village to call its first formal town meeting to mobilize against the Viet Cong.

The best measure of the promise of the new pacification effort is that the Viet Cong is worried--and reacting. In the village of Binh Nghia, the team from Vung Tau got off to a fast start thanks largely to the support of Police Chief Nguyen Van Lam, 35. After the villagers, many with blood ties to Viet Cong guerrillas, held a meeting in which they enthusiastically burned a Viet Cong and a North Viet Nam flag and pledged allegiance to the Saigon government, the Viet Cong machine-gunned Police Chief Lam as he sat at tea. In Binh Dinh province, where 14 teams have already secured 14 hamlets, got 34 village self-help projects under way and resettled 6,500 people, five officials have been assassinated by the Communists. But, says former U.S. Marine Major Richard Kriegel, the spark behind Binh Dinh's pacification thrust: "The reaction of the people now is that this is going to happen, but they're ready to live with it, accept it --and fight back."

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