Combat Profit

The bountiful stockpiles of PX goodies and military equipment have disappeared in South Viet Nam, along with U.S. troops. This has left corrupt South Vietnamese officers without their usual black-market revenues. But the continuing war offers other opportunities for the unscrupulous, as TIME Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand learned last week. His report from Saigon on the latest twists of turpitude:

Q. Why would a hundred Saigon soldiers, outnumbered 5 to 1 and facing two T-54 tanks, fight ferociously to hold the strategically unimportant town of Phuoc Tan?

A. Money. As one of the many hubs of illicit trade between Communist and government zones, the dingy little town northwest of Saigon near the Cambodian border provided extra earnings to the underpaid local soldiers (less than $30 a month for privates). They collected bribes whenever a merchant carrying such items as gasoline and medicine headed into the Communist zone, and again when he returned bringing back fruit or fowl.

Corruption does not usually increase fighting tenacity, as it did for the Saigon troops; they killed 300 Communist soldiers. More often Saigon's fighting effort is being bled by industrious attempts to make a buck out of the war, according to a secret report by psychological-warfare officers that was recently submitted to President Nguyen Van Thieu.

Some of the current ways:

> Charging fees to evacuate wounded soldiers by helicopter. Chopper pilots frequently ask for--and get--$8 for an enlisted man, $16 for an NCO and $25 and up for an officer.

> Charging for artillery support. Two years ago, it was common practice to fire off 20 artillery rounds for every one round fired by the Communists, thus generating a salable mountain of brass shell casings. With the reduction of American military aid, the Saigon command usually limits each big gun to four or five rounds a day. Still, there is profit to be made, and some artillery officers are most likely to offer fire support to battalion commanders who pay. The going rate is $1 or $2 per round.

> Selling space in military aircraft to civilians. The Vietnamese air force has made so much money through this practice that the civilian line, Air Viet Nam, has filed numerous complaints. Not only does the air force have more cargo planes (80 to Air Viet Nam's 16), but its pilots generally charge 50% less than the airline.

> Collecting salaries for phantom troops, an old stand-by that still nourishes. One battalion in Dinh Tuong province carries 360 men on the pay book, but psychological-warfare investigators could count only 68 actual soldiers. Phantom troops show up only on pay day, turning over all or part of their pay to the commander before heading back to safe civilian jobs.

Such corruption is a political as well as a military problem for Thieu. In June 301 Catholic priests signed a strong manifesto charging that corruption "neutralizes every effort to build the country." They are leading a program to form a "people's campaign against corruption." But so far Thieu has not taken any strong action, perhaps because he fears that by eliminating the military's traditional involvement in corruption, he would cause unrest among his most powerful supporters.

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