South Viet Nam: A Time of Doubt

In Saigon, there lived a willful wife who had long refused to let her husband indulge his fancy to possess a prize nightingale. But after the Viet Cong attacked the city, bringing destruction and frightening the people, she took her savings and went to the bird market. There she bought the best rossignol to be had. Returning home, she then presented this symbol of love to her surprised husband with the words: “I have denied you in the past, dear husband, but now that we have no future, we must live for today.”

That story, typical of the bittersweet confections so beloved by the Vietnamese, was being told all over Saigon last week. It dramatizes the feeling of fatalism that has been growing among many city dwellers since Tet—and thus represents a threat to the Vietnamese government that is second only to North Viet Nam’s General Giap. The South Vietnamese, urban and rural alike, now find themselves caught in a violent new period of doubt—about whether the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky can endure, whether the U.S. is able to protect the population and even whether the U.S. really wants to.

Cunning Window Dressing. The sense of despair is deepened by the growing realization of just how destructive the Communist Tet offensive really was to South Viet Nam’s life and institutions. To houses, schools and hospitals, the damage is far greater than from any single action during almost three decades of nonstop warfare. The country’s budding industrial economy is all but shattered. The number of new homeless refugees now clogging city slums stands at 650,000 and is still climbing; and there were already 800,000 refugees pre-Tet. Saigon has not even begun to calculate its civilian dead, and the countrywide figure, when complete, may well exceed 10,000.

Outside the cities, the pacification program lies in ruins. In I Corps and the Delta, some 50% of the Revolutionary Development Teams have been pulled into cities for their own safety and to aid the urban refugees; few of those remaining are able to move out on pacification tasks. In some areas, supposed pacification has been exposed as cunning window dressing. The fortified villages outside Hué, which until Tet were considered showplaces of pacification in I Corps, last week resupplied the North Vietnamese defenders inside the city. So hostile has rural Viet Nam turned that last week the International Voluntary Services, whose teachers and agricultural advisers have scrupulously tried to work independently of the war, regretfully announced that it was withdrawing more than 100 of its fieldworkers (out of 155) because of “security conditions.”

Widely Followed. The U.S. first saw in the uncertainty and chaos a silver-lining chance for the Thieu government to galvanize the energies of the country. The Viet Cong, it argued, had shown their true nature to the cities, which had long been relatively sheltered; the shock and resentment might at last create genuine national unity. But after a promising response in the first week after Tet, the government seems to be slipping alarmingly back toward more talk than action. In addition, it is torn with even more internal strife than it was before the battle of the cities began. Last week Vice President Ky abruptly resigned his chairmanship of the three-week-old National Recovery Committee, turning over the scarcely begun task of rebuilding the country’s shattered economy to Premier Nguyen Van Loc. Ky privately—and unconvincingly—explained that the post had thrust him more into the public eye than he liked. Saigon assumed that in fact the post had been more public and powerful than Thieu liked. The rivalry between Ky and Thieu is so widely followed in Saigon that many residents mistook the first enemy attacks for the long-expected coup attempt by Ky.

Preposterous Rumor. In one area, the government acted with alacrity, and not much to the liking of the U.S. In a series of arrests throughout the country, the national police picked up as many as 500 South Vietnamese lawyers, professors, labor leaders, monks and intellectuals that they feared could constitute or help form a coalition government with the Communists. Among them were militant Buddhist Leader Thich Tri Quang, runner-up Presidential Candidate Truong Dinh Dzu and former Economics Minister Au Truong Thanh. As a counternote, the government approved the formation of a front of its own, called the “Front for the Salvation of the Nation,” to “face and combat the N.L.F.” Headed by former Lieut. General Tran Van Do, the Salvation Front includes several of the other defeated presidential candidates and representatives from South Vietnamese religious and political organizations.

A rumor was widespread in Saigon that the U.S. was prepared to abandon South VietNam in negotiations with Hanoi or the National Liberation Front. One variant of the rumor, which is taken seriously even by government people, has it that the U.S. actually had made a deal with the enemy. The deal: to stand aside for 24 hours to give the Viet Cong their chance to prove that the people supported their revolution. If indeed a general uprising had occurred, many Saigonese believe, the U.S. would have recognized the V.C. as South Viet Nam’s legitimate government. The theory was, of course, preposterous, but its circulation was a symptom of Saigon’s unease and suspicion.