World: The Real Revolution

For 20 years the 1,000 villagers of Tau Nghia off the South China Sea had been the helpless pawns of war: used and abused, taxed and conscripted, sheltered and then shelled by first one army and then another in the march and countermarch of Viet Nam's wars. Only last fall Saigon troops recaptured the hamlet after it had been in Viet Cong hands for six months. Tau Nghia's fortunes abruptly changed. First the Korean Tiger Division arrived and set up its headquarters in nearby Qui Nhon, providing a visible and powerful shield of security. And last January a 66-man Vietnamese pacification team rolled in to bring Tau Nghia back to life.

It was a team with teeth: every man was armed and trained to fight. But it was something else as well. "At first it had to be hamlet chief, schoolteacher and doctor," says a U.S. official, "a surrogate government in effect." A census of the villagers' grievances and needs was taken, and within weeks they were being met. Roads were repaired, loans granted to fishermen for larger boats, new motors, new nets. A school was set up, a health center built, fertilizer trucked in, a new sewing machine sent from Saigon after the women were organized into sewing groups.

Nobody Talked. Gradually the village was organized to protect itsef in a way that gave every villager a sense of participation. Old women went to work constructing punji sticks and booby traps for protective barriers around the village. Teen-age boys manned klaxon alarms. Should they sound at night, the women were taught to gather in the center of the village with flaring pitch torches, while the men held back in the shadows with their guns to ambush Viet Cong intruders. Last March a small Viet Cong propaganda team came, and nearly every villager went to his assigned post. The Reds asked who the leaders were. No one would talk to them, and the baffled and frustrated V.C. organizers withdrew. So, too, has the pacification team, its mission accomplished, with Tau Nghia now a village thriving, alive and ready to kick hard at any Communist attempt to reinfiltrate it.

The example of Tau Nghia is a model of what pacification ought to be—of the goal of "social revolution" to which President Johnson pledged the skills and resources of the U.S. last February in the Honolulu Declaration. It represents the real revolution, recapturing not only real estate but people, which alone can make military victory in Viet Nam meaningful. Last week in 76 villages, scattered among all 43 provinces of South Viet Nam, the first post-Honolulu 59-man teams of "revolutionaries" were out to create Tau Nghias everywhere.