Background For War: REPORT ON INDO-CHINA

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There are some capable Vietnamese administrators, and one of these is Nguyen Huin Tri, governor of Northern Viet Nam. A dapper, dark-eyed man, Nguyen Huin Tri has at least got the machinery of government turning with reasonable efficiency in his area. Hadong, a poor, rice-growing province in the governor's domain, typifies the country's needs. "Last year 40% of our rice fields were uncultivated, but this year only 30%," explained Nguyen Van Thanh, chief of Hadong Province. "Many of our young men and our buffaloes have been taken by the Communists. Sometimes the women pull the plows through the mud. In the villages where the Vietminh still comes at night, the villagers are taxed 35 piasters ($1.75) a head. But though things are bad, we are working, and there is big improvement. In many villages our militia provides security at night. Security is the great thing."

What the People Want. In the last two months, 400 Communist soldiers who knew they would find security with the Vietnamese forces went over to the government side in Hadong. Nguyen Van Thanh put the surrendered Communists to work in a youth camp. Nguyen Ba Cue, a 26-year-old youth with shaggy eyebrows, deserted two weeks ago. "I couldn't stand the Communist dictatorship," he explained to me when I visited the camp.

That sounded a bit parrotlike. "How did the dictatorship affect you?" I asked.

"I was poor, and they made me pay heavy taxes. They did nothing for independence, that is all empty talk."

Many of the villagers are pathetically primitive in their political views. But in the village of Thanh Liet an old farmer gave me an excellent definition of their foes: "The Communists suffice unto themselves. They need neither god, nor parents, nor love, and I need all three."

Nguyen Van Thanh summed up: "Ninety percent of the Vietnamese live on the land. For years they have been torn between French, Japanese, Chinese and Communist masters. Above all they want peace now. They have no liking for Communism, which is contrary to their traditions. If the West can bring them security and a little improvement in their lives, they will be happy."

Halfway House. Through IndoChina's political jungle the French move warily, paying a heavy penalty for past mistakes. Viet Nam is in a sort of halfway house on the road to self-rule—a self-rule principally limited by membership in the new French Union, of which France is very definitely the senior partner. French unwillingness to take generous chances and the French legalistic mind have combined to give the Union a rigidity which threatens it with strangulation at birth.

Nevertheless, French force in Indo-China is buying time for the West, and the first axiom of U.S. policy here, therefore, must be aid for the French army. It is sometimes suggested that the French ought to hand over total independence to Bao Dai and get out. But two weeks after the French left, a Communist government would rule in Saigon.