WAS SITUATION IN VIETNAM A CIVIL WAR?

Senator MORSE. What is your opinion as to whether or not the conflict in Vietnam, prior to United States intervention, was a civil war?

Mr. SALISBURY. Well, I am not a very good witness on that, Senator, because I was not following it too closely.

My impression was that it was of the nature of a civil war or guerrilla operations of some kind.

Senator MORSE. His articles will have to speak for themselves, but I recall, the articles that Neil Sheehan has been writing ever since he went to South Vietnam from time to time point out what the situation was, that the situation was a civil war. Incidentally, he also points out that many of the leaders of the now South Vietnamese Government were, to use his language, mandarins from the north. Is that your understanding?

Mr. SALISBURY. Well, Neil is a good reporter, and he knows more about it than I do. I will accept his testimony.

Senator MORSE. I think in support of my position and in fairness to Mr. Sheehan, Mr. Chairman, I will ask to insert in the record two articles, which appeared in the New York Times, on April 27, 1964, and October 9, 1966, to which I allude.

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, so ordered. (The articles referred to follow :)

[From the New York Times, Apr. 27, 1964]

CRISIS IN VIETNAM: ANTECEDENTS OF THE STRUGGLE

The following assessment of developments in South Vietnam is by Neil Sheehan of United Press International, who recently returned from two years there. The second Indochina war began early in 1957, not with the crash and thunder of a Pearl Harbor, but with the midnight assassination of a few South Vietnemese officials. The killers were black-garbed men called "terrorists."

Since those assassinations, the fighting has spread to the point where casualties are running in the thousands each month.

From a few scattered armed bands backed by a fairly extensive secret political organization, the Communist Vietcong have built a formidable fighting force estimated at 40,000 men. These are organized into 45 battalions throughout the country and armed with modern infantry weapons. They are supported by well over 100,000 less well armed but still effective local and regional guerrillas. In the vital Mekong delta, where most of South Vietnam's population and economic resources are concentrated, roughly 80 per cent of the peasantry now live in one form or another under a Communist shadow Government. This Government maintains its own schools and dispensaries and collects taxes, like a legitimate administrative organization.

AID OF $1.5 A DAY

The United States has sent in 15,500 military personnel and is spending more than $1.5 million a day in economic and military aid to prevent the South Vietnamese Government from collapsing.

On the average, an American is killed in every three days' fighting beside Government troops. This year the United States will pump in an additional $50 million in an effort to retrieve a steadily worsening situation.

The question many Americans are asking themselves these days is, "How did things get this way?"

One of the major problems during most of the first four years of the war was that the now-defunct Ngo family regime and high-ranking American officials refused to admit that a war was actually being waged.

The official Vietnamese position was that the rule of President Ngo Dinh Diem had restored "peace, prosperity and progress" to the country after the ravages of the war against the French colonial rulers, which ended in 1954.

Anyone who warned that Communist guerrillas had began the first stage of a full-fledged revolution was accused of fabrications.

AMERICANS GAVE SUPPORT

High American officials went along with the Ngo family's position and asserted that the growing Vietcong bands were simply "last remnants" of the Communist Vietminh guerrillas, who fought the French. These were rapidly being wiped out by the South Vietnamese police and armed forces, it was said.

As the assassination of officials steadily increased, a Saigon newspaper warned at the end of 1957:

"Today the menace is heavier than ever with the terrorists no longer limiting themselves to the notables in charge of security. Everything suits themvillage chiefs, chairman of liaison committees, simple village guards and even former notables."

The newspaper was suspended by the Government on a charge of having spread false rumors.

The fiction that nothing was amiss in South Vietnam was preserved through 1959 and well into 1960. President Diem assured his people in a major speech in 1959 that his rule had brought a "countrywide return to peace and security." Attacks by armed Vietcong bands on Government outposts and assassinations of village officials soared in 1960. According to official reports, the Government suffered 7,526 casualties and lost 4,853 weapons that year.

The Government claimed to have inflicted 14,535 casualties on the Vietcong and captured 921 weapons in return. The figures were not released for publication until late in 1962.

EXTERNAL THREAT SEEN

The Pentagon had decided, on the basis of the Korean war, that the most likely threat to South Vietnam was an invasion from the Communist north. Despite warnings that this might later prove a disaster, United States military missions in South Vietnam since 1955 had thus trained, organized and equipped the South Vietnamese Army to meet such an external threat.

When the invasion did not materialize and the threat came instead from steadily growing guerrilla forces, the Vietnamese regular army, organized into conventional divisions and corps and roadbound through its thousands of United States supplied vehicles, was at a loss.

A visit to South Vietnam in May of that year by Lyndon B. Johnson, then Vice President, brought promises from President Diem of administrative and political reforms to win support for his regime in the countryside. In return, the United States promised more aid.

American aid increased but the promised reforms did not come. The corruption, unpopularity and administrative ineptitude of the Ngo regime continued. By the fall of 1961, the situation had deteriorated to a point that was considered critical.

A high-level mission under Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived at the end of September 1961. President Diem again promised major political and administrative reforms and the United States committed itself to massive economic and military backing for the war against the Communists.

Thousands of American officers and men to advise infantry units, Air Force pilots to fly helicopters and bombers into battle and United States Army helicopter companies to give the Vietnamese greater mobility against the elusive foe began to flow into Vietnam. Once again the promised political and administrative reforms did not materialize.

As the United States military buildup that followed the Taylor mission gained momentum, high-ranking American officials began to express "cautious optimism". Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara said on his first visit to Vietnam in May, 1962, that he had seen "nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future."

A series of sizable military victories over the guerrillas in the Mekong delta that summer and early fall inflated official American optimism.

The series of Government military successes was mainly due to the fact that the Vietcong had not yet learned to cope with the increased mobility afforded

Vietnamese troops by American helicopters. It was a failing the Communists later overcame.

The stunning defeat of Government troops by the Vietcong at Ap Bac, a hamlet 40 miles south of Saigon, on Jan. 2, 1963, failed to reduce official optimism.

REDS BEAT BIGGER FORCE

A vietcong battalion, outnumbered nine to one by attacking Government troops, supported by helicopters, fighter-bombers and artillery, fought off the superior forces all day, shot down five helicopters and slipped away that night.

Sixty-five Government soldiers and three Americans were killed and 100 Vietnamese wounded. Forty-seven of the Vietcong were killed and an unknown number wounded.

Angry American field advisers attributed the defeat to bungling and moral cowardice by Vietnamese commanders. These commanders were poltical ap

pointees of the Ngo regime.

United States military chiefs in South Vietnam assured reporters that Ap Bac had been a Government "victory."

Growing popular discontent with the Ngo family began to come to an issue after Government troops opened fire and kill eight Buddhist demonstrators in the former imperial capital of Hue on May 8, 1963.

The crowd had been protesting a ban by President Diem, a Roman Catholic, on the flying of Buddhist flags. The incident set off a major crisis between the leaders of South Vietnam's Buddhist clergy and the Ngo family.

By that time the military advantage given to the Government by the massive American buildup had been overcome by Communist political and administrative gains in peasant villages.

VIETCONG STRENGTHENED

Throughout the spring, summer and fall of 1963 the Vietcong steadily increased their political, administrative and military strength in the countryside, especially in the key Mekong delta.

As the Buddhist crisis deepened, several monks burned themselves to death in protest. A massive crackdown on Buddhist and other dissidents brought United States support for the Ngo regime to an end.

In two days of shooting, Nov. 1 and 2, 1963, the Diem regime was overthrown. Both President Diem and his brother and principal adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated. A military junta under Gen. Duong Van Minh took over.

Taking advantage of gains they had made and the dislocation after the coup, the Vietcong then began a major offensive in the northern Mekong delta.

When the United States military buildup began in South Vietnam in November, 1961, the situation had been considered "critical" because the Vietcong had become strong enough to initiate no fewer than 1,782 attacks and smallscale incidents in that month.

But in November 1963, after two years of massive American military and economic aid, the number of Vietcong attacks and incidents jumped to 3,182 for the month.

Last Jan. 30, Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khanh seized power in a bloodless coup d'etat.

Secretary of Defense McNamara arrived in March with a high-ranking American group, promising complete United States support for General Khanh and increases in military and economic aid.

[From the New York Times, Oct. 9, 1966]

NOT A DOVE, BUT NO LONGER A HAWK
(By Neil Sheehan)

Americans, because they are Americans, arrive in Vietnam full of enthu siasm and with the best of intentions. After a prolonged period of residence, they leave with their enthusiasm a victim of the cynicism that pervades Vietnamese life and with their good intentions lost somewhere in a paddy field. I am no exception. When I first walked across the tarmac of Saigon's Tansonnhut Airport on a warm evening in April, 1962, nervous that the customs officers might

not accept the journalist's visa I had hurriedly obtained from the South Vietnamese consulate in Hong Kong, I believed in what my country was doing in Vietnam. With military and economic aid and a few thousand pilots and Army advisers, the United States was attempting to help the non-Communists Vietnamese build a viable and independent nation-state and defeat a Communist guerrilla insurgency that would subject them to a dour tyranny. This seemed to me a worthy cause and something that needed to be done if other Southeast Asian peoples were to be allowed some freedom of choice in determining their course in history. Although I often disagreed with the implementation of American policy during my first two years in Vietnam, I was in accord with its basic aims.

I remember distinctly the thrill of climbing aboard a U.S. Army helicopter in the cool of the morning and taking off across the rice fields with a South Vietnamese battalion for a day's jousting with the Vietcong guerrillas. There was hope then that the non-Communist Vietnamese might win their war. I was proud of the young American pilots sitting at the controls in the cockpit and I was grateful for the opportunity to witness this adventure and to report it. We are fighting now, I used to think, and some day we will triumph and this will be a better country.

There were many disappointments those first two years, but when I left Vietnam in 1964, I was still, to use the current parlance, a hawk. I returned to Saigon in 1965 for another year. Now I have left again, and much has changed. There were 17,000 American servicemen in Vietnam at the time of my first departure and there are now 317,000 and I, while not a dove, am no longer a hawk.

If I had been wiser and could have foreseen the present consequences of that earlier and relatively small-scale American intervention in the affairs of this country, I doubt that I would have been enthusiastic during those first two years. I realize now, perhaps because this past year has impressed upon me more forcefully the realities of the war and of Vietnamese society, that I was naive in believing the non-Communist Vietnamese could defeat the Communist insurgency and build a decent and progressive social structure.

At a farewell dinner before my second departure from Saigon, the conversation drifted to the endlesly discussed but never resolved problem of gaining the sympathy of the peasantry. My host was a Vietnamese general, involuntarily retired through the vagaries of Saigon politics. To amuse us, he recounted an episode that had occurred in mid-1953 while he was commander of Franco-Vietnamese troops in the province of Buichu in what is now Communist North Viet

nam.

That year, the Vietminh guerrillas, as the Vietcong were formerly called, accelerated their land-reform program. Communist cadres began confiscating the rice fields of landlords and dividing them up among the peasantry. To compete with the Vietminh and to arouse some popular support for the cause of his feeble Government and for France, the pro-French Emperor, Bao Dai, issued a decree reducing land rents from the traditional 40 to 50 per cent of the rice crop to 15 per cent.

Buichu was a predominantly Roman Catholic province. The two principal landlords there were the Catholic Bishop and the father of the Interior Minister in Bao Dai's Government. My host knew he would have to gain the Bishop's cooperation if he was successfully to enforce the decree.

"Impossible," said the Bishop. "How can I feed 3,000 priests, nuns, seminarians and coolies on 15 per cent of the crop?"

"I agree, Your Excellency," said my host, "it will be difficult. But perhaps it is better to make sacrifices now while there is still time. If we don't do something to win the sympathy of the population, you may lose more than your rice. You may lose your Bishopric, your land and perhaps even your head."

"Impossible," said the Bishop. "I will write to the Interior Minister."

Three months later, for attempting to implement the decree despite the Bishop's opposition, my friend was removed on the initiative of the Interior Minister. By the following summer, the Vietminh were so strong in Buichu that the French decided to evacuate the province. The Bishop, his priests, nuns and seminarians fled to Hanoi and thence to South Vietnam when the Geneva accords shortly thereafter sealed France's defeat at Dienbienphu and divided Vietnam at the 17th Parallel.

Over the 13 years since 1953, the United States has supplanted France in Vietnam. Yet among the Vietnamese themselves, the two opposing sides have changed little.

Precolonial Vietnam was administered by mandarins drawn from the merchant and land-owning families. When France colonized the country in the 19th century, much of this native aristocracy became, in effect, colonial civil servants, intermediaries between their own people and the foreigner. During the First Indochina War these Vietnamese, with a stake in the traditional society which a French presence would preserve, cooperated with France. Now the same Vietnamese, for identical reasons, cooperate with the United States.

Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, the current Premier of South Vietnam, was a French pilot. On occasional visits to the countryside he appears before the peasants in a trim black flight suit with a lavender scarf around his neck and a pearl-handled pistol at his waist-a kind of Asian Captain Marvel.

The Deputy Premier, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Huu Co, and other generals in the Saigon military junta, were officers or sergeants in the French colonial forces. Their fondness for French cuisine, snappy uniforms and cocktail parties and receptions creates a pale but faithful reflection of the social round of colonial days. They are the Vietnamese who have inherited the worst of two culturesthe pretentiousness of the native mandarins and the rigidity of the French colonial officers and administrators. Premier Ky and the earlier successors of Bao Dai have also promulgated rent-reduction and land-reform laws at the urging of American advisers eager for social progress. All of these measures have been sabotaged because the regimes were and are composed of men who are members of, or who are allied with, mandarin families that held title to properties they have no intention of renouncing. While there are some patriotic and decent individuals among them, most of the men who rule Saigon have, like the Bourbons, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They seek to retain what privileges they have and to regain those they have lost.

In Vietnam, only the Communists represent revolution and social change, for better or worse according to a man's politics. The Communist party is the one truly national organization that permeates both North and South Vietnam. The men who lead the party today, Ho Chi Minh and the other members of the Politburo in Hanoi, directed the struggle for independence from France and in the process captured much of the deeply felt nationalism of the Vietnamese people. Perhaps because of this, the Communists, despite their brutality and deceit, remain the only Vietnamese capable of rallying millions of their countrymen to sacrifice and hardship in the name of the nation and the only group not dependent on foreign bayonets for survival.

It is the tragedy of Vietnam that what began as a war of independence from France developed, as a result of its Communist leadership, into a civil conflict. Attempts to describe the current war as a geographically based struggle between North and South Vietnam breaks down almost immediately when it is recalled that Premier Ky and several other important members of his Government are North Vietnamse by birth, who fled south after the French defeat, while Pham Van Dong, the Premier of North Vietnam, was born in the South. The war is, rather a struggle between different elements of the Vietnamese people as a whole.

The division of the country into two separate states at the 17th Parallel in 1954 was a provisional arrangement ending one scene in the drama. Vietnam's larger political realities extended then and still extend now in both directions across the demarcation line. North Vietnam controls and supports with men and matériel the Vietcong guerrillas in the South because the Vietcong leaders, although native Southerners, are members of the Vietnamese Communist party and obey orders from the Politburo in Hanoi.

In 1958 the late President Ngo Dinh Diem organized a Committee for the Liberation of North Vietnam, and since 1960 the Saigon Government, with American connivance and aid, has been smuggling saboteurs and commando teams into the North in a so-far vain effort to instigate a guerrilla movement among the Northern Catholics and mountain tribesmen. The opposing sides, in short, have never recognized the 17th Parallel as a permanent boundary and have violated the frontier whenever it suited them.

Communist leadership of the anti-colonial movement led to the involvement of Vietnam in the larger context of the cold war and brought the intervention of the United States, first to aid the French and then to develop and support a non-Communist administration and army in the South. For its own strategic and political ends, the United States is thus protecting a non-Communist Vietnamese social structure that cannot defend itself and that perhaps does not deserve to be defended. Our responsibility for prolonging what is esesntially a