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JOSEPH ALSOP: Matter Of FactThe Viet Cong Plight In DeltaBEN THE, South Vietnam — This used to be the prettiest of all the pretty province towns in Vietnam’s southern delta. It was made a sad mess by the Tet offensive, and it is still a mess today. Furthermore, this rich and populous province of Kien Hoa is where the Viet Minh began, and also where the con-tinuators of the Viet Minh, the Viet Cong, began.It is a useful corrective to come to battered Ben Tre. You are warned that where they are really strong and deeply implanted, as in Kien Hoa, the VC are far from being near the end of their tether.One symptom of that fact is a recent captured document showing that a score or more of Kien Hoa’s high-level VC cadres — members of the provincial apparatus, company and battalion commanders, district chiefs and the like ~ have just been drafted out of this province for service elsewhere inthe Delta. Evidently the VC military region bosses considered that Kien Hoa still had good leaders to spare.Yet the very fact that leaders from here had to be transferred to other provinces points to another aspect of the VC situation in the Delta that deserves exploration. For the first time in this war, members .of what the Saigon jargoneers call the VC infrastructure' are in dairy clanger.Leadership NetworkThe VCI (for short) is the whole leadership network, extending upward from the VC hamlet chiefs to the VC provincial committees and, in the end, to the Communist GHQ in South Vietnam. Ever since Hanoi’s partial retreat from the big-unit war, Gen. Creighton Abrams has redirected the main thrust of his effort to put utmost pressure on the VCI.In the northern province, where there are greater military resources, they use an expensive but effective device known, for some lunatic reason, as the “soft cordon.” When I go north, soft cordons will be examined in detail. Here, it is enough to say that the first soft cordon just about completely uprooted the VC from their ancient strongholds in the countryside around the city of Hue.(This seemed hardly credible when first claimed by Gen. Abrams’ staff. But the point demanded reconsideration when a leading member of Premier Huong’s government, himself a Hue man, spontaneously remarked: “It’s a queer thing, but there really are no more VC where I come from. My family in Hue writes me you can go anywhere now. even by night.”)Intelligence EffortHere in the delta, meanwhile, where whole brigades of troops cannot be spared for soft cordons, the chief instruments in use against the VCI are the Phoenix program and the provincial reconnaissance units.Phoenix is simply a belatedlyorganized but massive and efficient intelligence effort, combining all possible means to identify, locate and otherwise put the finger on all members of the VCI.The PRUs, as the provincial reconnaissance units are usually called, are the main finger. PRU teams are even capable of sneaking into VC-liberated areas by night to pluck out or to kill, a well-guarded VC district chief.Here in Kien Hoa, the effort is just beginning, and it has not as yet picked up great momentum. Last month, for instance, only 59 of Kien Hoa’s VCI were accounted for. But 111 the delta as a whole, it is a different story.The delta, with its total population cif 6 million, is believed to contain rather more than 9,500 VCI. (The category carefully excludes mere hamlet guerrillas and other small fry. Having some sort of real leadership position is the criterion.) And of the delta’s 9,500-plus VCI, no less than 585 were pulled in or killled while resisting arrest in October.Leaders Lost A rate of loss of about 6 per cent per month may not seem dire, but there are two things to be said about this. In the first place, their trained leaders are the most valuable, least easily replaceable assets the VC possesss. And in the second place, a monthly loss rate of 6 per cent amounts to an,annual loss rate of 72 per cent.© IMS, The Washington post Co.
Newspaper Details
Freeport Journal Standard
Freeport, Illinois, US
Fri, Nov 29, 1968
Page 4
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