The most important fact about Vietnam over the past thirty-five years has been revolution. And the most important fact about that revolution has been its village base. America, unfortunately, did not wish to recognize the fact of this revolution. And, therefore, the force that we committed in Vietnam never was translated into the power to make policies that we adopted work. Our policies were, in fact, attempting to establish an urban base government as being a legitimate government for a village base people.

Whereas, in fact, the villagers had their own agenda. And that agenda was revolution. And revolution equaled power because the revolution was changing the way the villages related to each other, to land ownership, to political influence, and to participation in the structure of government at the village level. When Americans came into the war they were bringing with them as the went in...

Wait a second. Let's start when Americans came into the war...

Okay.

When Americans came into the war the revolution had been in process for almost two decades. Lines of conflict had been established that we were, for the most part, totally unaware of. It was paradoxical that in our view, progress in bringing a Saigon government into the countryside, into areas it had not been in many years, was in fact a re establishing of a very narrow oligarchy of land owners who were dispossessing people of ownership that they had gotten of their land through the revolution. I say it's paradoxical because the change in land tenure was a very important part of our own revolution. Along the way America was fighting against its own best traditions in Vietnam because we were unprepared to see what, in fact, was the process at work a village based revolution.

Seventy-five percent of the population of Vietnam at that time were villagers. Their whole life was involved in the growing of rice. No other resource in Vietnam counts for as much as growing of rice. I saw this firsthand as a Navy advisor in the Mekong Delta for two years, from 1959 to 1961. I was there at the time that America felt that its greatest success had been achieved in establishing the Ngo Dinh Diem government as the legitimate government throughout South Vietnam.

But that legitimacy was based upon a concept that was not recognized by the villagers themselves. And, therefore, in order to maintain the legitimacy of that government, a alien unsupportable legitimacy as far as the village people were concerned, larger and larger amounts of military power were required.

I think probably the easiest way to, to explain the difference between a revolutionary society that existed from '45 to the present, 1945 to the present, and that which existed before, is to tell you that in 1939, 11,000 French troops were the sole means of establishing French colonial authority throughout all of Indochina, an area half again the size of France itself. In 1968 over a half million American forces plus a larger number of Vietnamese forces was unable, as the Tet Offensive demonstrated, to be able to establish the legitimacy and authority of the Saigon government in only a portion of that territory.

Something drastic had happened. I learned about that not only firsthand, but as a scholar I studied with a French professor, Paul Meusse, who had grown up in Vietnam and with, and through his perspective and experiences as a military advisor to the French high command during the French phase, began to understand the nature of the Vietnamese revolution. That revolution is not so exotic as to he beyond our comprehension.

It's just that we never made the effort to explore what that revolution was all about why it was that we, perhaps inadvertently, joined the side of those opposing the revolution rather than supporting it, to be sure our opposition to Communism was a major part of our decision. But the point of our opposing Communism meant that we had nothing that was relevant to the villagers to put in its place other than increasing levels of fire power. And the more fire power we brought to bear in Vietnam, the more force we brought to bear the less our power became the less authority the Saigon government had because we polarized the villagers, we forced them to make a choice.

That choice between a government that was urban and alien to their experience and background as distinct from a revolutionary force based in villages was a choice that was easy for them to make. This is saying that Vietnam was, has been involved in a revolution is not to say that the revolutionaries have been good and decent people, that they are benign and do not believe violence.

Cut.

Okay, let's take up with..."That's not to say they are benign..."

This is not to say that the revolutionaries were benign. On a basis of morality the revolutionaries were no more moral than...uh were the Saigon government or ourselves as related to their treatment of human beings. But their...

Start again. Start that thought again.

Right now? This is not to say that the revolutionaries were benign or that they were moral in the sense of their treating of human beings, but they were more successful because their view of power their ability to relate to the power needs of the people in the villages was successful. Therein was their morality of their position. They got more people to adopt that morality because they were closer to the people. The basis ah of our attempt to establish power was almost exclusively uh on the basis of military force. We expected to get compliance.

Why would people who were less effectively armed had no air force, no helicopters, stand up and fight against an American backed force. They did it because there was a greater stake in the future for them to he against us than there was to be for us. And they knew exactly why they were doing it. Because no society that they could conceive of that would be dominated by an American backed government could be worth as much to them as could the society that they were building at the village level.

Sure, there were American efforts to bring seeds...water pumps, irrigation. But these never really related to the essential issue who was going to own the land? Who was going to be an authority in the village, and how was that authority going to relate to the future prospects of each and every village person? Because they knew that their...benefits lay on the other side, they were prepared to risk their lives, their fortune, their sacred honor.

When you say benefits lay on the other side, say the revolutionary side, etc.

Okay. Because they saw that their, the benefits for them lay on the revolutionary side; there was greater opportunity for them, greater advantage for their children, even though they like themselves lose their lives, they saw that the future would be more consistent with their own needs, with their own concept of how power and authority would be established in Vietnam.

We have in America a sense of localism that power closer to the people is a better power. The Vietnamese had that tradition, as well. That's why the village has been so important to the Vietnamese. It's also an example of how we were opposing our own best traditions and our effort to establish the power of a government that didn't share those traditions. Why we...

Let's stop for just a second.

You don't expect me to pick up on the last phrase...

No, no.

Okay

There's simply more at stake for the villagers to choose a revolutionary side. As I saw in the Mekong Delta when I served there for two years from 1959 to 1961, the villagers were supporting the revolution for the very practical reason that they wanted to keep land that they had been able to obtain during the revolution that had gone on from 1945 to 1954.

The Mekong Delta was an instance of particularly strong land owning class where only 10 percent of the population, about 500,000 people, owned 90 percent of the land this meant that the other 4 ½ million people of the Mekong Delta, an area about the size of the state of Connecticut, were essentially dispossessed. They were farming their land at somebody else's...uh for somebody else's benefit. When the revolution came along it was not so much...

Could you start that again? You started to say that they were farming their land for somebody else's benefit...

They were farming...

They were farming the land for somebody else's benefit, yet they thought it was their own. The reason they thought it was their own...

Sorry, we're out of film.

Okay the reason they thought...

They thought that they were farming their own land because they had received title to it as a result of the revolution between 1945 and 1954, but with the re-imposition of the Saigon government in the countryside through our support, they were, in fact, losing title to their land in many instances to the previous landowners. Therefore, we unwittingly, became the supporters of a counter revolutionary effort.

This was in the Mekong Delta and particularly, in particular not primarily a question of communism. It was a practical issue for the villagers. They had no other place to turn in order to be able to achieve their own objectives of owning land, of being able to develop wealth and status. The Saigon government's opportunities simply didn't exist to the village level and to the extent that they did frequently that was to counter act the opportunities that had been achieved through the revolutionary efforts that had preceded it. Why, you might...

Okay.

Why, you might ask, did the Saigon government take this posture. Why was it that they were attempting to suppress rather than support a revolution. The answer to that is obviously complex and varied in many instances over the varied areas of the country, but the major reason was that Saigon was not prepared to share power with the villagers. They were not prepared to see the authority of the village units established within an overall structure.

Instead Saigon sought control over the countryside and they persuaded the Americans to aid them in establishing that control. This occurred through such agglomerations as agrovilles where people were drawn in from villages and simply made to live in places that could be more easily controlled. It occurred with places called strategic hamlets which were again seemed to be on our part as means of providing security but were for Saigon a means of establishing control without sharing power.

These subtleties that I speak of were not apparent certainly early on to most Americans but the appearance of more and more people on the side of the revolutionaries undercutting any effectiveness of our military force soon brought the message home. The more power arrayed against the villagers in terms of fire power and heavier weapons the less productive it became in terms of establishing what we thought was a legitimate government, but which...

Okay.

Not only did they not wish to share power...

Look at me. Don't look at Tom.

Not only did they not wish to share power, they didn't even know how to do so if they had in fact wished to share power. The reason they didn't was because they had no village experience. You're gonna say something.

Yes. Start again and say the reason they didn't want to share power was because they didn't have an ability to .

In other words take everything I've said since we started and start over.

Just say the reason they didn't want to share power was because they didn't have any villages .

(clears throat) Excuse me. I'm getting myself boxed up. Not only did they not want to share power, they didn't know how to, and they didn't know how to because they had not had any village experience. The people in the Saigon government that we were supporting were not villagers. They had no village background nor moreover they didn't know how to recruit people who did. They were a an urban people whose culture, whose position, whose status was based upon French and American education, who did not understand how they could at once create a political force that would tie into the village base revolution, use it for their purposes, however those purposes might be served.

Rather they were just totally incapable of being able to mobilize the villagers whereas their opponents, the revolutionaries, were extraordinarily successful in doing so. That mobilization affected American efforts at every turn. How many times have you heard Americans tell you of an experience in Vietnam in which people that worked for them ah were the cooks, the dishwashers in the billets of the Americans were revolutionaries who at the time of the Tet Offensive were actually attacking American billets and positions.