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The intricate collecting and disbursement system runs right up the organization ladder to COSVN, and vouchers are required for all expenditures, adding to the snowstorm of paper circulating inside the V.C. administration. Corruption is dealt with severely, but it is persistently present. At least one tax collector in Dinh Tuong told the Allies that he was chosen "because my family was rich and the Front did not have to worry about whether I would flee with the cash."
1,000,000 Americans. It is on just such thorough control of the peasants that the Communists are counting for ultimate victory. Well aware that they no longer have any hope of winning the war militarily, the North Vietnamese strategists in Hanoi still insist that they will triumph. They are sure that the U.S. cannot wage conventional war against Red regulars and secure the countryside as well. "If the enemy tries to oppress the People's Movement in South Viet Nam," said General Vinh, "he will not be able to stop our reinforcements from North Viet Nam. If he concentrates all his forces to defeat us on the battlefield, he cannot protect his rear areas. To fight and secure his rear areas at the same time, he must have 1,000,000 troops."
Convinced that the U.S. is hardly likely to commit so many men to the defense of South Viet Nam, Hanoi is determined to keep the U.S. forces that are there as busy as possible on the battlefield so that they cannot harass the Viet Cong operating in the countryside. North Viet Nam's recent aggressiveness along the DMZ, for example, is viewed by U.S. intelligence sources as an attempt to tie down large U.S. Marine forces in static defense, in order to relieve pressure on the local Viet Cong in populous contested areas where the Marines' pacification efforts have been succeeding all too well for Red taste.
At the same time, Hanoi now talks constantly of a war of decades, a war that will last until the U.S. loses patience with lack of tangible progress, with victories measured in mere numbers of enemy dead, with big-unit operations that leave unaltered the balance of control between the government and the Viet Cong in rural hamlets.
Freeing ARVN. General Vinh's assessment of U.S. limitations in fighting a double war in Viet Nam are largely correct. But the U.S. never intended to tackle both the front and the rear of the struggle. From the beginning, Washington defined the American mission as a holding action in the cities and populous coastal zones; then, as the U.S. buildup provided the forces, to lash out into a big-unit war against Communist regulars. The South Vietnamese were to hold the countryside against the Viet Cong and pacify it. Just as Hanoi employed North Vietnamese troops to take the pressure off their men in the countryside, so the U.S. was to free the South Vietnamese for counterguerrilla civic action.
So far the formula has not worked as well as it should have. The South Vietnamese army has taken to pacification duty only reluctantly; it contains pockets of corruption and indifference toward the peasants. Saigon's Revolutionary Development Teams formed to carry out pacification in hamlets behind the ARVN shield have had hard going, largely because the Viet Cong have killed nearly 1,000 team members.
The Crossover Point. But there are hints that the