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By any standard, the U.S. has taken on an enormous task. U.S. aid will be needed for everything from installing social justice in the hamlets and combatting inflation to improving farm practices and-most important-inspiring in South Viet Nam's 16 million war-weary people a sense of nationhood.
Actually, it is an art in which the U.S. should excel, considering its success in revitalizing the war-scarred Western European nations and Japan. The difference is that those countries were already mature national states with well-developed economies.
Viet Nam lacks political and economic adhesiveness. Its 2,600 villages mean 2,600 separate economies. It is poor even by Asian standards. Annual per capita income is only $92 v. $ 3 00 in nearby Malaysia. Though plagued by almost every type of tropical disease, Viet Nam has only 69 hospitals and only one doctor for every 28,-000 people (v. one to every 645 in the U.S.). It has only 684 miles of railway, and much of that is now unusable. Piled on top of Viet Nam's other miseries are 442,000 refugees from Viet Cong-dominated areas who are crammed into reeking makeshift camps across the country.
Unfriendly to Foreigners. Nor has Viet Nam historically taken kindly to nation builders, most of whom were colonialists at heart. For more than a thousand years the Vietnamese stub bornly resisted assimilation into a Chi nese kingdom, finally drove out the hated invaders from the north in A.D.
940. The French tried after World War II to mold Viet Nam into a tractable nation by vesting authority in a central government and playing off one village against another. Instead, the Viet Minh imposed a harsh unity in the country side that broke the French grip. In South Viet Nam, President Ngo Dinh Diem hoped to form a nation that was safe from Viet Cong influence by gathering the peasants into fortified hamlets. That idea died behind the barbed wire of the hamlets in 1963-along with Diem.
What hope is there that the present Vietnamese government and its U.S. backers will fare any better? For one thing, the military situation, thanks to the American buildup, has improved, so that the South Vietnamese government can now provide security to at least a fraction of its citizens. And security is the stuff of which loyalty is made. Says one U.S. expert: "The man behind the water buffalo wants above all to know that he's going to wake up alive tomorrow." Another thing is the positive attitude on the part of the government. Declares Premier Ky: "We can take this revolution away from the Communists. We can show the people that we can give them more and better things than the Communists-not only material things, but things the Communists do not even understand, like justice and personal integrity."