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But the greater worry was the peasantry. After all the years of struggle, Diem had still not won the remote farmers to the government side. Fully one-fourth of all the villages were in the hands of the Communist guerrillas, and often this was more voluntary than forced. The fact was that hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese, naive and illiterate, thought of the rebels not as Communists but as resistants continuing the nationalist battle first started against the French. To these peasants. "Uncle" Ho Chi Minh is still a hero, and under the influence of Viet Cong propaganda, they have become convinced that the U.S. has simply replaced the French as their overlords. All too often, local officials have been appointed by Diem or his brother because of their personal loyalty rather than their efficiency, and all too often they have taken advantage of their position to extort money from the peasants, throw local merchants into jail, nominally on suspicion of Communist sympathizing, in order to extract ransom. Thus, when the Viet Cong contrive the murder of some local official, the villagers frequently hail them as liberators.
New Starts. In the past Diem has stubbornly refused to accept U.S. advice in dealing with his countrymen. But the lesson of Laos and the new urgency of the U.S. Administration seem to have changed him. Every recommendation in the Staley report has already received his concurrence in advance.
On the military side, the U.S. program is as tough as Diem could wish. Kennedy's task force is headed by Sterling J. Cottrell, 47, a career State Department officer who is a "hardline" man on Southeast Asia, wanted the U.S. to take tougher action in Laos. Cottrell is willing to use rough, unorthodox methods to stop the Communists, works closely with Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, the Pentagon's guerrilla warfare expert who helped Magsaysay crush the Huks in the Philippines and advised Ngo Dinh Diem in his battle against the Binh Xuyen gang.
Under the new plan, modern weapons will be furnished to the Self-Defense Corps, the village guards who now make do with clubs and ancient muskets. The Civil Guard, an armed police auxiliary, will be doubled. Eventually, the Civil Guard will be trained to take over many of the static defense jobs that now tie much of the army down. The U.S. also wants to raise the army from 150,000 to 170,000 men, drill more and more of it in the stealthy jungle tactics that the Viet Cong itself uses.
Already U.S. military advisers in Viet Nam have trained 6,500 native troops in the new, mobile Ranger tactics designed to out-guerrilla the guerrillas. At Nhatrang eight new Ranger companies are learning the tricks: scaling cliffs, making wild leaps on cable pulleys, walking noiselessly in jungle undergrowth, learning how to kill swiftly. It is no secret that the Ho Chi Minh Trail is now a two-way street, for the South Vietnamese now use it to travel north, and Ranger patrols are probing into North Viet Nam to give Ho a taste of his own medicine.