Viet Cong - The Organization and Technique of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam

Douglas Pike

The MIT Press

1966

490 páginas

16h 20m

ISBN-13: 9780262160148

Datelined Saigon, appearing under the byline of a USIA foreign service officer, this is the first extensive study of the Viet Cong. Based on some 800 documents captured in battle and on interviews with 100 ex-Viet Cong, much of the primary source material is reproduced, and all of it is interpreted in the light of the author's broad knowledge of Vietnam and its people. Douglas Pike has for the past six years been attached to the U. S. Embassy in Saigon; previously, he spent thirteen years in Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.

Described by The Reporter as a “definitive study of the National Liberation Front,” the book examines all aspects of the Viet Cong: its place in the context of Vietnamese cultural patterns, antecedents in the Viet Minh, history and development, organization and internal structure, policies and personalities, strategic and tactical aims and methods, means of communication and subsistence, and relations with the countryside, the North, the world.

Pike traces the Viet Cong to its roots in the Vietnamese tradition of clandestine organizations and regional ties. The sects—religious, criminal, and fraternal—have for centuries operated virtually autonomous enclave governments in the countryside, levying taxes, raising armies, and controlling the villages. The Viet Cong is simply the latest of these enclave powers. And although the whole of Vietnam represents a 1,500-mile-long “chain of unity” that has steadfastly resisted political domination and cultural assimilation by the Chinese, the French—and others—over the years, it is to the region, not to the nation, that the Vietnamese give their primary allegiance.

In comparing the Viet Cong with its father, the Viet Minh, and its grandfather, the Chinese Communist revolution, Pike notes many similarities but points out that whereas the essence of the Chinese Communist victory was strategy, and that of the Viet Minh victory was spirit, such successes as the Viet Cong achieved derived largely from organization. Pike finds that the Viet Cong remains essentially non-ideological: “Americans and others often assumed that the NLF [National Liberation Front] army members were fanatics. Because they performed well in combat, it was argued, they were highly motivated, which meant dedication to an ideological cause. Thus the search was for the essence of this belief. It proved illusive, largely because it did not exist." And “the strength of the NLF was the result of careful organization building, not the product of some unique spirit or élan.”

Although marked by care, detail, and accuracy, this is not a scholar's or specialist's book in the usual sense; rather, it is written to inform the general reader—the concerned American—who needs all the reliable and readable guidance he can find to make his way through the policy jungles and moral thickets of the endless confusing and frustrating Vietnam situation.