(2 of 2)
Defectors. At a special Chieu Hoy (Open Arms) Camp twelve miles east of Saigon, where defectors are gathered for rehabilitation, TIME Correspondents Frank McCulloch and James Wilde talked to six former Communist infiltrators. Born and raised in South Viet Nam, all had been exposed to the harangues of political commissars in their home villages and joined the Communist movement before 1954. They moved to the Communist north after the Geneva partition, mostly out of sheer hero worship for the conquerors of the hated French. Former Viet Minh Infantry Captain Huynh Due That, 35, joined the Viet Minh as a civil guard when he was 20, after partition was taken to Hanoi aboard a Polish troopship. Nguyen Thao, 32, joined his local Young Communist movement even earlier, at twelve, and walked to North Viet Nam.
In the north, all received years of intensive military, technical and political training—and eventually all were selected by the North Vietnamese government to return to the south. The trip home began at a camp south of Hanoi where units of infiltrators were assembled, then driven south by automobile to within 15 miles of the border. There, they set out on foot, following the spidery footpaths of the Ho Chi Minh trail west into Laos, then southeast across the mountainous border of South Viet Nam. The march was slow—five to seven weeks. Before they crossed into Laos, the whole band changed from their Viet Minh uniforms into the khaki of the Pathet Lao, and at the South Viet Nam border they changed once again—into the black of the Viet Cong.
Disillusion. Each unit was made up of men from the same area, and once back in South Viet Nam, they headed for their home regions. Some went to fight alongside or instruct the local Viet Cong, but others had more specialized tasks. Nguyen Thao actually built a complete small-arms factory under the South Viet Nam army's nose.
All six were hardened, highly trained Communists when they arrived. Their reasons for eventually defecting were much the same. One factor was homesickness: "It is harder to hide and fight in the hills near your home and not be able to go to it than it is to be far away from it." More important was their disillusionment with Communism. As one defector put it: "They told us the Americans were running all of South Viet Nam and that living was very bad there. When we had a chance to see for ourselves, we learned that the Vietnamese were still running Viet Nam, and things in the south were better than in the north."