Terrorism—Weapon of Warfare

A Psywar (psychological warfare) captain who has been in Vietnam off and on for five years remarks that the role of terrorism in Vietnam is not understood in the West. It is axiomatic in the West, he believes, that terroristic methods outrage the entire community, not only the community involved, but the wider community of those who look on. At a daily press briefing given by the U.S. Mission, it was matter-of-factly announced that that morning the Vietcong had entered the town of Quang Tin and assassinated the schoolteacher there. The same morning another detachment of the Vietcong tossed out a grenade on highway No. 1 killing two South Vietnamese civilians. Again that same morning, a hand grenade was tossed into a small assembly of civilians on the outskirts of Saigon, killing three, wounding six. The figures for the week—incomplete figures, one supposes, since some people die anonymously—34 killed, 55 wounded, 131 abducted. That, of course, is the kind of thing that has been going on for over eight years, and one would think that such atrocities would have generated the kind of community opposition that, say, the persecution of Anne Frank did during the Second World War or, on a different scale, the liquidation of Lidice. Not so, Psywar insists. The Vietnamese attitude is different. If one of the people killed, tortured or abducted is his brother, sister or aunt, the Vietnamese will predictably pledge eternal hostility to the Vietcong. That works both ways: the stray napalm bomb dropped by an American plane will drive the immediate relatives of the afflicted parties into the ranks of the Vietcong. But what is absent is the sense of community outrage. Those in the hamlet who are unrelated to the assassinated schoolteacher are not galvanized by a desire to avenge her death, or to prevent such a thing from happening to her _ successor. They view the episode simply as indicative of the relationship of forces. If the Vietcong can kill a_ schoolteacher while the Americans and South Vietnamese cannot keep her from being killed, why, that is how things stand; and practical considerations require cooperation with the killers, rather than with those who failed to keep the killers at bay. That is one of the reasons why, in Vietnam, terrorism has been productive even as, it is supposed, terrorism would be counter-productive in the West, where it would serve only to unite the community in opposition. The young Psywar captain is no doubt correct, and it therefore makes sense that, above all, our propaganda leaflets and our broadcasts to the Vietnamese countryside should emphasize the relative advantage of siding with us against the Vietcong, inasmuch as we are winning, and they are losing. But the captain is probably a little romantic about the effects of terrorism on the West. Terrorism is abhorred. In Western moral textbooks, sure. But the successful terrorists don’t have very much difficulty in making their way comfortably among the cosmopolitan elements of the Western world. It was only a matter of months between the time the Algerians swept a machine gun across the bodies of men, women and children bathing at a public beach, and their commander’s arrival on an official visit to New York City where he was warmly embraced. Castro used to chop people up pretty much for the sake of it while at the Sierra Maestra, and when he first came to America a few months later he was treated like St. Francis of Assisi. John Steinbeck is in Saigon and his moral conscience is nowadays absolutely secure. He writes about VC atrocities wonderingly, with that refreshing sense of shock which makes one wish that years ago he might have visited a few of the labor camps in the Soviet Union. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge told a visitor that without the terror, it would all have been over a long time ago. And now the VC, according to captured documents, have lost control during 1966 of one million Vietnamese. Their response? More terror, in all probability. But it is increasingly difficult to conscript young peasants into the VC army. Recently a hamlet leader known to be unsympathetic to the VC was, while still alive, publicly disemboweled and then, while yet alive, his eyes were punctured by bayonet points. That’ll do it every time. It would be enough to make an unwilling Democrat join the Republican Party. There are those who believe that the answer is to bring the VC into a coalition government, which suggests the true nature of the effect that terrorism has had on the new Western mind, which the Psywar captain knows so little about.