Free Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald Page B

but the general sentiment was that this was a small price to pay for the return to peace and a normal life, free of foreign rule.” 5
    Peace did not, however, last very long for most of the southern Viet Minh. In 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem repudiated the Geneva proposals for national elections and began his campaign of terror against the former members of the Resistance. From the accounts of the Viet Minh cadres it appeared that the campaign was largely successful in destroying what remained of the Viet Minh organization and in reducing the villages to subserviency. While some of the Party members fled to Saigon, where they would not be recognized or pursued, others banded together and went into hiding in the jungles and swamps that had served them as base areas during the war. 6 As one cadre remembered, “In those days you could say we were ‘based’ in the mountains, but these were ‘bases’ for survival. We had no arms at all and barely the means of existence.… Control was so close that it was impossible for us cadres to live among the people. But we came down from the hills at night to try to make contacts.” 7
    According to the French historian, Philippe Devillers, the southern cadre at this point pressed for a renewal of the struggle, but the north held back, urging the southerners to give a respite for the consolidation of the DRVN. 8 While Hanoi surely supported the aims of the southern cadre, its judgment on the timing and the policy to be pursued may well have conflicted with that of the southerners. Certainly the northerners then and for several years later limited their aid to the most easily procured commodity of advice. Weapons could be much more easily obtained from the GVN outposts and the Americans than from convoys traveling the long trail down from the north.
    In the long run, however, the Diemist repressions only advanced the date of a new armed struggle. They persuaded many of the former Resistance members whose one goal had been to defeat the French that they could not live in physical safety under the Diem regime, that peace was not peace but a continuation of the war. Diemist policy in general threatened the sects and convinced certain intellectuals and rural notables that the new regime would not serve their interests or leave them a hope for future success, as the French and the Bao Daiist administrations once had. A highly trained and dedicated group of soldiers and political instructors, the active Communist cadre in the south went to work on these groups. By 1958 they had established a small network of committees in most of the old Viet Minh strongholds: in the U Minh forest at the southern tip of the Delta, in the jungles west of Saigon and in the west of Quang Nam province. In the next two years they moved out rapidly from their base areas, infiltrating the nearby hamlets, overrunning small GVN outposts to supply themselves with weapons, taking over hamlets, and recruiting again. At the same time they expanded the movement politically, taking in the former Resistance members who did not belong to the hard core and the members of the other political factions alienated by the Diem regime. In December 1960, they formed the National Liberation Front and adopted a ten-point program of “peace, national independence, democratic freedoms, improvement of the people’s living conditions, and peaceful national reunification.”
    Over the next two years the NLF leaders — men who remained for the moment anonymous to the outside world — molded the loose grouping of committees into a close-knit political and military organization. By mid-1961, so American intelligence indicated, its strength had reached fifteen thousand, and half of the guerrillas were fully armed. 9 This military force, known as the People’s Self-Defense Forces, developed by a process known to its cadres as “growth and split.” 10 A platoon of experienced fighters would split up to train three platoons of new recruits. The company