(2 of 2)
Overtly Menacing. In the year-long Chieu Hoi program, other messages are more overtly menacing, including the display of the body or rotted skull of a dead soldier and the lists of dead North Vietnamese. Facsimiles of North Vietnamese piasters are regularly dropped with the warning that "as the war goes on, there will be less and less to buy. Prices will go higher and higher. You may lose all of your wealth, fruit of your sweat and tears." Propaganda teams deliver personal letters by the thousands to homes of suspected Viet Cong, some frankly designed to so compromise a Viet Cong that he is forced to defect to save his life. Broadcasts carry 20 messages in local dialects over South Viet Nam. During Tet, radio and television appeals will be beamed out 18 times a day.
Some 70 cultural-drama teams will be on the road in villages around the nation, acting out and singing the message of "Come home; your loved ones miss you." To Viet Cong families will go 200,000 almanac horoscopes, illustrated with pictures of rebuilt villages, the Manila Conference, schools and a diesel train. The Chieu Hoi men will even distribute 100,000 games played with dice to V.C. families. In the game, both sides try to get all their pawns to the defection centers through such obstacles as the Ho Chi Minh trail and monsoon rains. Players are sometimes required to start over because of fatigue, worry and air strikes (see box).
Playing Lysistrata. In command of Chieu Hoi is Colonel Phan Van Anh, a stocky, spirited veteran who was himself once a member of the Communist Viet Minh. Anh makes quick inspections of the country's 44 Chieu Hoi camps, followed by a notary public who dishes out piasters for the rewards and rations that in the past have too often been skimmed off by corrupt administrators. "You know," says Anh, "the enemy of yesterday may be very good men."
They are also a bargain: the average cost per defector is $125, v. an estimated $400,000 expended to kill one enemy soldier, and 70% of those coming over so far have been combat soldiers. For all the success of Chieu Hoi, though, it is still far from winning the war. To date there have been only 200 defectors from the North Vietnamese forces, and no matter how many war-weary Viet Cong come over the line, there will be yet more Northerners to replace them. Still, Saigon feels that the defection rate has reached a turning point, expects this year to more than double the number of defectors to 50,000. To that end, no technique of seduction or coercion is out of bounds. One American psy-war expert produced 50 defectors by a method that would have pleased Aristophanes: he persuaded the wives in a Central Highlands village to play Lysistrata to their Viet Cong husbands, refusing to sleep with them unless they deserted. They did.