NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
radios in the strategic hamlets so that each would have the capability to sound the alarm and request the employment of mobile reserves when attacked.
F. Differences Begin to Emerge
All of these "program management" activities were based on the unstated assumption that the strategic hamlet program would lead to effective pacification if only Diem would make it work. As it turned out, there was some disagreement between what the U.S. considered needed to be done and what President Diem knew very well he was doing. He was using the Strategic Hamlet Program to carry forward his "personalist philosophy." 99/ As brother Nhu visibly took the reins controlling the program and began to solidify control over the Youth Corps it became increasingly clear that Diem was emphasizing government control of the peasantry at the expense (at least in U.S. eyes) of pacification. lOO/
As awareness in Washington increased that strategic hamlets could serve several purposes, there developed also a divergent interpretation of whether or not the GVN was "winning the war." When General Krulak, SACSA, and Joseph Mendenhall, an ex-counselor in Saigon then at State, visited RVN in September 1963, President Kennedy wryly asked upon receiving their conflicting reports, "You two did visit the same country, didn't you?" 101/ The answer is that they had^ but the general stressed that the military war was going well while the diplomat asserted that the political war was being lost. The argument was not, it should be stressed, one between the generals and the diplomats; experienced diplomats disagreed fundamentally with Mendenhall. The disagreement was between those who pointed to signs of progress and those who held up examples of poor planning, corruption, and alienation of the peasants whose loyalty was the object of the exercise. Criticisms -- frequently accompanied by counterbalancing assertions that "limited progress" was being achieved -- mentioned corvee labor, GVN failures to reimburse the farmers for losses due to resettlement, the dishonesty of some officials, and Diem's stress on exhortations rather than on the provision of desirable social services. 102 /
Those who emphasized that the program, was showing real progress -- usually with a caveat or two that there was considerable room for improvement -- stressed statistical evidence to portray the exponential increase in strategic hamlet construction (Table 2), the declining trend in Viet Cong-initiated incidents (Table 3), the rise in VC defections (Table 4), and the slow but steady increase in GVW control of rural areas (Table 5).
The JCS observation with respect to the establishment of strategic hamlets, for instance, was that since fewer than two tenths of one percent (0.2%) of them had been overrun by the VC, "The Vietnamese people must surely be finding in them a measure of the tranquility which they seek. 103/
RGK Thompson later claimed that the very absence of attacks was an indicator that the VC had succeeded in infiltrating the hamlets. 104/ The point is not Thompson's prescience but the difficulty of reasoned assessment to which this analysis has already pointed. The U.S. course,
