Daniel Endsley's Vietnam Journal letters

Up early to catch the 0730 Air America flight to Can Tho in the Delta, along with Gar Godwin. A cup of coffee and a sweet role would have been nice, but the Central Palace is not a boarding house, just a flop house. No food.

A driver was supposed to pick us up at 0630, and he actually did. Air America, which must be the world's oddest airline, uses a strange conglomeration of aircraft, including twin-engine Beechcraft and single-engine Porters with room for eight passengers. The Can Tho flight used a Flying Boxcar, with canvas seats set sideways; that is, 90 degrees different from the standard passenger plane setup. There's a row against each side of the fuselage and another in the middle, a total of 48 seats.

There were few passengers on this early flight. As you may remember, the flying Boxcar is a cargo plane which, inside, looks like its name. The whole rear end opens up to accommodate big loads, such as tanks. On this flight the rear end was left half open, so out the back we watched a continuous panorama of rice paddies disappearing astern. The flight to Can Tho took about 45 minutes.

I'd better explain why Air America is so odd. It's financed by AID, and exists only to ferry Americans around Vietnam - and also people who have some claim to our consideration. No fares are charged, and tickets, while issued at the bigger airports such as at Saigon and Can Tho, are not really necessary - all it takes is your name on the flight manifest. It's a necessary and useful venture, intended only for those traveling on official business, but of course there are abuses.

In our files I have come across a complaint about a Vietnamese lieutenant colonel at the ministry of Information who got his name on the manifest on the pretext that he had pressing government business to transact in a city to the north. On the day of his flight, however, he showed up at the airport with wife and children, brazenly insisting that the reservation had been for them. Air America arguments didn't move him and they finally let the wife and kids fly just to avoid a scene. A protest was made to the ministry but you can imagine how far it got.

Can Tho is a village which is now swollen with almost 150,000 people. It is headquarters for DMAC (Delta Military Assistance Command) and appears to be just about as secure as anyone could wish. We have no ground combat troops left in the Delta, but we have several thousand advisors of various types as well as air and logistical forces, and some U.S. Navy as well, headed by an admiral who knows Dick Guinn, and told me that Tex has just received his third star.

We were met at the airport by a young major in civilian clothes who took us to the Psyop office where we met a mixed bag of people, all friendly - a Nisei lieutenant colonel from Hawaii who run the support battalion (printing, etc) a major who is administrative officer, another in charge of technical support, a local employee who speaks excellent English (he should because he's the interpreter but that doesn't always follow), a couple of enlisted men who do the paper work, and an FSIO-5 who handles special projects and moans constantly about the cruel fate that separated him from his wife and sent him to Vietnam. I think he's a little ashamed that he didn't either refuse the assignment or quit.

All of this I experienced in the half hour between 0830 and 0900, while sipping coffee brought to me by a smiling Vietnamese woman who does cleaning work.

Just before 0900 the boss breezed in, a fellow named Jerry Novick of the Pennsylvania coal mining Novicks, a tall and rugged - looking red-head who is only a few days short of his 50th birthday - and far from resigned to it.

Jerry gave a big hello and said we were going to Chan Doc together, by jeep, but first he wanted to hear the Nixon speech scheduled to start in a few seconds. He roared for a radio, got it, and we listened carefully. nobody got very excited about it because there was nothing new except for clever rearrangement, and the N.V.A. and UC have already demonstrated that they are not going to sign anything that doesn't give them what they want. A square shot at winning the votes of the electorate is not at all attractive to them because they know perfectly well that they would loose. (That's a pretty broad statement, but I hope to clarify and justify it as I go along.) Nixon's five points were well presented from a debating point of view, even though Lyndon Johnson offered or implied the offer of all these things as far back as the Johns Hopkins speech. Unfortunately, though, whatever this thing out here may be, it is not a debate, and scoring debaters' points will not end it. However, it will end, and the debating tactics may create and maintain a climate in which it can end. (people should go back and read that Johns Hopkins speech, which might have ended the war but instead put the term "credibility gap" into the language.

Novick is a kind of wild man. He has a massive contempt for the entire operation of JUSPAO in Saigon (Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office, a marriage of inconvenience between the military and USIS) and is not least bit shy about expressing it. We are used to the cheerful defiance of a [unintelligible] Fisher when the Embassy pulls one of its normal idiocies, but alongside of Novick, Fisher is a moderate. As Jerry says in a few days he'll be eligible for a retirement stipend of better than $1,000 per month, and he's already in Vietnam - so what can they do to him. Fire him/ Send him to Vietnam?

What I got in Saigon was constant bleating about how bad the Vietnamese Information Service is - untrained, unresponsive, lazy, profligate, dishonest. According to this view, if we could only whip VIS in shape and make it responsive to the Ministry of Information, we would be well on the way to success. According to Novick, however, the MOI is never going to make it, JUSPAO is virtually useless and the parts of it that are supposed to serve the field are worse than useless. As a matter of principle i never believe either side in an argument like this because the truth usually turns out to be very different from what either side claims we shall see.

Novick is an interesting fellow, and we talked constantly during the jeep ride to Chan Doc of more than three hours. he pointed out that much of the Delta was virtually a fief[dom?] of the VC only a few months ago, and that the change had been starting. There were several false starts and rooting out the VC with programs that didn't work. Probably the worst was the one of taking the people off the land and putting them in new, protected hamlets. This, of course, merely concealed the countryside to the VC. Now the government encourages the people to inhabit the land and to protect themselves.

The way it works, ARVN troops go into an area and clean it out. This is not hard because the opposition is only half a dozen or so people who are armed. These arms may not be much, but a rusty old single - shot rifle that actually fires bullets gives a VC quite an advantage against an unarmed hamlet dweller who is entirely on his own. Except in a few areas, cleaning the VC out is pretty easy, even though, relatively the VC were infinitely more powerful than the villagers and able to work their will.

Of course this kind of clean out has been done before, but after it was done the government troops would leave and the VC would come back and take over, dealing out vengeance to anyone they felt had betrayed them. now the government stays, the ARVN troops leave, but now there are Regional forces (mobile strike companies) and Popular Forces (static defense platoons), recruited in the area and given arms, who are doing sturdy job in spite of fears that they would bug out and leave their arms to the VC - or actively join them the first time things got rough. The people have no love for the VC, who are mow trying to tax them at a rate of 50%, or for the people in Saigon. They want to be left alone to grow their rice, they want peace, and they will accommodate to any force if it will result in their being left alone. The fact that they are now siding heavily with the government seems to me very revealing. Of course a change in the realities of power could still change allegiances, but the farther the process goes the more difficult this becomes, because old Nguyen out there in the rice paddy is committing himself now in ways he scrupulously avoided before. He is burning his bridges, committing himself, protecting himself. It's his ass, and he's serving it.

To me, all this sounded much more like a community taking on the Mafia than a war, and I said as much to Novick - a large group of people held in line by enforcers who are able to function because victims are afraid to turn them in, or don't think it will help because the cops were in the bag and just do as they're told. T o overcome them, you just about have to identify and cope with each enforcer individually, or supply around the clock protection until the people can see that it will be safe to take care of the jobs themselves - they know who the enforcers are. When these conditions are met, the claims that "the people" are on the side of the Vietcong is exposed as only a myth. It turns out that the people, as usual, are only on the side of the people, and on no one else's side save coincidentally.

Novick doesn't much like being told any thing, especially by a newcomer, so he started to put me in my place but, when he thought about it, conceded that my Mafia comparison was apt and that maybe he use it.

The trip was pleasant, the people smiling, friendly, and prosperous (later I'll try to explain how people who live in mud and filth can be prosperous), an we got to Chan Doc without incident except for use of the 4-wheel drive in a couple of wet spots.