Free Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald

“faces” — and put them in banks. 1 They destituted the villages, and though they thought to develop the economy and to put the landless to work for wages in their factories and plantations, their efforts made no impression upon the villagers. What assets the French actually contributed to the country in the form of capital and industrial plants were quite as invisible to the villagers as the villagers’ souls were to the French. At a certain point, therefore, the villagers went into revolt.
    Ngo Dinh Diem and his American advisers, however, did not, or could not, learn from the French example. Following the same centralized strategy for modernization, they continued to develop the cities, the army, and the bureaucracy, while leaving the villages to rot. As it merely permitted a few more rural people to come into the modern sector in search of their souls, this new national development constituted little more than a refugee program. For those peasants with enough money and initiative to leave their doomed villages it meant a final, traumatic break with their past. For the nation as a whole it meant the gradual division of the South Vietnamese into two distinct classes or cultures.
    Of necessity, the guerrillas began their program of development from the opposite direction. Rather than build an elaborate superstructure of factories and banks (for which they did not have the capital), they built from the base of the country up, beginning among the ruins of the villages and with the dispossessed masses of people. Because the landlords and the soldiers with their foreign airplanes owned the surface of the earth, the guerrillas went underground in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. Settling down among people who lived, like an Orwellian proletariat, outside the sphere of modern technology, they dug tunnels beneath the villages, giving the people a new defensive distance from the powers which reigned outside the village. The earth itself became their protection — the Confucian “face” which the village had lost when, for the last time, its hedges had been torn down. From an economic point of view, their struggle against the Diem regime with its American finances was just as much of an anticolonial war as that fought by the Viet Minh against the French — the difference being that now other Vietnamese had taken up the colonial role.
    As an archaeologist might conclude from examination of the NLF’s goods and tools, the guerrillas were attempting not to restore the old village but rather to make some connection between the world of the village and that of the cities. The land mine was in itself the synthesis. Made of high explosives and scrap metal — the waste of foreign cities — it could be manufactured by an artisan with the simplest of skills. A technically comprehensible object, it could be used for the absolutely comprehensible purpose of blowing the enemy soldiers off the face of the village earth. Having themselves manufactured a land mine, the villagers had a new source of power — an inner life to their community. In burying it — a machine — into the earth, they infused a new meaning into the old image of their society. The Diem regime had shown a few of them a way out of the village. The NLF had shown all of them a way back in, to remake the village with the techniques of the outside world. “Socialism” —
xa hoi
, as the Viet Minh and the NLF translated it — indicated to the Vietnamese peasantry that the revolution would entail no traumatic break with the past, no abandonment of the village earth and the ancestors. Instead of a leap into the terrifying unknown, it would be a fulfillment of the local village traditions that the foreigners had attempted to destroy. 2
    The Origins of the National Liberation Front
    In an attempt to justify the American bombing of North Vietnam and the dispatch of American troops to the south, the U.S. State Department in February 1965 issued a White Paper