When Ong Tao, the Spirit of the Hearth, returns home each year after his call on the Heavenly Jade Emperor, all Viet Nam takes a holiday from war and erupts in the festival of Tet to welcome the Lunar New Year. It is a time of dancing and dragon masks, of firecrackers rigged from snail shells and gunpowder, of feasting on roast pork and sugared apricots. It is also a time of homecoming. This week, as the Vietnamese greet the Year of the Ram under cover of the four-day truce agreed to by both sides, some 100,000 Viet Cong are expected to take leave of their units and slip back to their native villages and families for a brief reunion.
Many of them will find waiting a small gift from the government of South Viet Nam: a compact do-it-yourself defection kit. Wrapped in vinyl, it contains all that a faltering Viet Cong needs to defect, including a safe-conduct pass and a map of the local district showing precisely where—and how—to find the Allied side. Throughout the country, the kits will be hand-delivered to Viet Cong families by an extraordinary assembly of postmen: former Viet Cong who, as Hoi Chanh (returnees), have become members of the government's armed propaganda teams. The kit will be only one more reminder—along with the Tet songs on the radio, the broadcast planes overhead and the millions of leaflets —that the government's Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) extend everywhere.
Apricot Bouquets. To those of the enemy who come home to stay, Saigon offers amnesty and retraining to aid the Allied side. Last year the joint U.S. and South Vietnamese Chieu Hoi program induced a record 20,242 of the enemy to come over. So far this year, the rate has been running double last year's. For the "psywar" planners, Tet is far and away the best time to turn the enemy's head and heart. This year's Tet campaign is a mammoth, ingenious saturation of the whole nation, far bigger than last year's effort.
Some 310 million leaflets will shower enemy areas, more than 1,000 for every Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldier. The theme of this year's campaign is aimed at the enemy's softer instincts, and is embodied in the official Tet poster of maidens carrying bouquets of apricot flowers. One local leaflet elaborates on the theme by tying it to Operation Cedar Falls, which razed V.C. farms and granaries in the Iron Triangle last month. "Are your rations scarce?" it asks. "Three hundred of you have rallied, and they are now where they can be well fed and secure. How about you?" Another quotes Ho Chi Minh: "Remember Uncle's own words as you consider your fate: 'The war may last five, ten, 20 years or longer.' "