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Of course no leaflet is as effective as a personal contact, and many of the defectors, who are welcomed under the government's Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) amnesty program, go to work at once trying to persuade their former colleagues to give up. Other defectors become Biet Kick, a special force of irregulars who hunt the Viet Cong at night, stalking the enemy with V.C. methods. They take a deadly toll.
Three Stages. The pacification plan calls for three stages. First, U.S. troops will seek and smash Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in selected areas. Next, the South Vietnamese army will move in and mop up what is left of the enemy. At that point, exit the army and enter the region's own police force and popular forces, ready to defend themselves. A key to making this phase work will be the white-uniformed national police force ("the white mice") under Colonel Pham Van Lieu, who are already showing promise of developing into an effective countrywide law-enforcement agency. As one American says: "If the mayor of Cedar Rapids has a crime problem, he calls the cops, not the army. We want every village headman to be able to do the same."
Guiding the program will be the new Rural Construction Cadres, which are simply an expanded form of the PATs. Some cadres will conduct a census of the village, issue identification cards and weed out Viet Cong suspects. Meanwhile, other cadres will start schools, provide medical services, help farmers get crops of rice and corn planted, organize local government and help train leaders. The final, far-off stage calls for free elections and handing the village governments over to local people.
In all this, the Vietnamese will be helped by a band of young Americans who are already risking their lives to bring aid and know-how to the countryside. So far, two AID men have been kidnaped and eight have died-in ambushes and assassinations-on this unsung duty. One new arrival is Steve Shepley, a 27-year-old New Yorker, who is USAlD's action representative in the Delta province of An Xuyen. Puttering unarmed in a 35-h.p. boat through the Viet Cong-infested paddies, he visits village after village, chatting with the people in fluent Vietnamese, assessing their needs, hauling in food and building supplies and organizing emergency housing and rations for refugees.
Another is Robert Resseguie, 25, a native of Madison, N.J., and a former Peace Corps worker in Thailand. He is now an assistant AID representative in Quang Ngai province, 300 miles northeast of Saigon. After the U.S. Marines had cleared an area of Viet Cong in last summer's Operation Starlight, Resseguie led nearly 20,000 refugees back to their deserted homes, helped provide them with food and building material. Unfortunately, as soon as Starlight winked out, the V.C. winked back inan evidence of ineffective follow-through that has plagued pacification efforts all along.