Free Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald Page A

entitled
Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam.
In this paper, State Department officials claimed that the NLF was no more than an instrument of North Vietnam working against the hopes of all the South Vietnamese for peace, independence, prosperity, and freedom. Had these official claims been true, they would have delineated a situation not very different from the civil wars in Nigeria or Pakistan. And a civil war did not, it seemed, always require American intervention — particularly on the weaker side.
    But the Vietnam War was not a civil war; it was a revolutionary war that had raged throughout the entire country since 1945. The strength of the revolution had always been in the north, but the Viet Minh had considerable success south of the 17th parallel. In the period of truce following the Geneva Conference the Viet Minh had, in obedience to the military protocols for disengagement, regrouped some ninety thousand soldiers to the north — most of them southerners. 1 Still, below the 17th parallel there remained hundreds of thousands of Viet Minh cadres, local guerrillas, and their sympathizers. The majority of the remaining Viet Minh were not Communists — no more were the majority of the northerners. But many of them had, like the northerners, lived for the years of the war within a political and social system very different from that obtaining in the rest of South Vietnam. In certain areas such as the Ca Mau peninsula, the region west and northwest of Saigon, and northern central Vietnam, villages, often whole districts, belonged to the revolution just as others belonged to the sects. 2 The people of these regions had firmly expected that the end of the war would bring a unified Vietnam under the government of Ho Chi Minh. When six years later the National Liberation Front was formed, the new movement appeared to them only as the logical continuation of the old one. As one village elder told an American in 1964, “The Liberation grew right up from this place. It happened gradually. Another generation started it. Let us say I am now fifty years old, those who are thirty are now going and those who are twenty come to take their place.”
    And there was a strong element of continuity between the two movements: a continuity of people, of war aims, and of operating methods. The leaders of the NLF worked in close cooperation with the north, even during the years just following the truce, but it was not until the intervention of American combat troops that they became dependent on the north for war materials and for men. 3 In such a situation the notion of “control” becomes ambiguous. (It is difficult, for instance, to imagine that with its own resources and matériel, the NLF had
no
influence in Hanoi.) But even if the NLF had always been “controlled” by Hanoi, the American official conclusion that it was therefore illegitimate as a southern political movement does not by any means follow. The personnel of the NLF was, with few exceptions, southern. Northern troops did not enter the south until the American troops had already arrived. If the north was indeed trying to conquer the south, it was doing so by politics and culture but not by force. But even this case is impossible to make in a clear-cut manner, for there were southerners within the Politburo of Hanoi. The details are incidental.
    The National Liberation Front was founded in 1960, but the guerrilla movement in the south began some two or three years earlier. After the Geneva Conference, the active Communist cadres in the south instructed their followers to disband and wait for two years until the national elections were held and a political settlement made. All official Viet Minh activities stopped except for the “legal struggle” for the elections. 4 The NLF leader, Nguyen Huu Tho, later explained this decision of 1954: “There were mixed feelings about the two years’ delay over reunification