Cutting the Arc

Faced with a Communist guerrilla uprising in Malaya in 1948, the British prepared for a long piecemeal war. While infantry patrols harried the Reds in the impenetrable jungle, the British used a "carpet sweeper" technique on the jungle's edges: gathering up peasants from isolated huts and hamlets and concentrating them in walled "strategic" villages protected by troops and home guards.

Deprived of peasant sustenance and supply, the Red guerrillas withered away.

With Operation Sunrise, the South Viet Nam army, aided by U.S. and British military advisers, last week sought to apply the lessons of Malaya against the Communist Viet Cong marauders in the jungles and paddyfields of South Viet Nam. The situations are not precisely identical: in Malaya, the Red terrorists were Chinese who got support mostly from Chinese peasants and were generally opposed by Malayans. But the system of creating strategic villages offered the best hope yet of reducing the Red threat in the Viet Nam countryside.

Dusty Halt. A long column of army trucks drove 27 miles north of Saigon, straight into an arc of Red-controlled territory that provides a safe Communist 50-mile "supply corridor from the Cambodian frontier to the province of Phuoc Thanh. As the first light of dawn slanted down through the thick forest in the district of Ben Cat, the truck column came to a dusty halt, 600 troops of the Vietnamese 5th Division poured over the tail gates and fanned out across the harvested rice fields and rubber plantations to flush out Communists. Typically, the Viet Cong faded away before the massive sweep.

But the dispersal of the Viet Cong prepared the way for Phase 2 of Operation Sunrise--the rounding up of Ben Cat's peasants. In each hamlet, the assembled farmers were told that they were being moved to a nearby strategic village called Ben Tuong, to be equipped with a school, clinic, market, deep wells, and a defense force of soldiers. They were promised a down payment of $25 and a free daily ration of rice and dried fish to tide them over the first three months.

Seventy families agreed to the move, but 140 other families had to be convinced at gunpoint. Leading their cows and water buffaloes, with their belongings piled on ox carts, the 1,200 displaced peasants filed into the jungle clearing of Ben Tuong to be greeted by a banner bearing the somewhat ironical message: "We will root out all the Viet Cong who destroy our villages." A concrete administration building and clinic is already standing at Ben Tuong, but the peasants must erect their own thatch-roofed houses, dig a protective ditch around the site, and crown it with a dirt wall and barbed wire. The 70 families that "volunteered" were given land already cleared by bulldozers; those who had been reluctant to leave were moved into barrack-like structures at the edge of the forest.

Western observers noticed that the peasants were either very old or very young--the men and women between 17 and 33 had gone into hiding or were serving with the Viet Cong. Said a Vietnamese officer: "We hope they'll rejoin their families when they see that life in the strategic village is good.'' TIME Correspondent Jerry Rose asked a peasant volunteer if he preferred Ben Tuong to his former hamlet. He answered: "I had a nice home with a garden before." Why had he come here? "We were told to come by the chief of the province." Why had he been moved? "I don't know." Had the Viet Cong harmed him? "No, no. I saw them, but they never bothered me." Night Attack. The peasant's answers indicate the enormity of the problem facing President Ngo Dinh Diem's government. Dependent on peasants' help, the Viet Cong often work with them in the fields to win their loyalty. All too often, this approach works wonders.

As in Malaya, the aim of the strategic villages is to isolate the Viet Cong guerrillas in the countryside and deprive them of food, shelter and rest in peasant homes.

Nearly a hundred of the villages are already under construction, and last week General Lyman Lemnitzer. chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, made his third visit to South Viet Nam to examine them on the spot, and to promise that the U.S. would provide "whatever is needed" to defeat the Communists.

Ben Tuong is unusual in that it is the first strategic village to be built in the heart of Communist-controlled territory.

But it is like the others in depending on U.S. funds for all its equipment, from medical supplies to schoolbooks. loudspeakers to farm tools. A U.S. military mission will recruit, train and arm a local militia to take over in three months when the 5th Division moves on to another area. If in that time administrative corruption has not canceled out the promised benefits, and if the standard of living is obviously higher, in all probability the peasant militiamen will fight to defend what they have. The Viet Cong last week gave clear indication of its own uneasiness at this new development by launching a night attack on Ben Tuong and wounding two soldiers before being driven back into the forest.

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