Newscasting: Glimpse of the Viet Cong

By now, TV watchers are familiar with the sight of U.S. and South Vietnamese troops; even shots of North Vietnamese militiamen in Hanoi are hardly a novelty. Only the Viet Cong have remained largely invisible. But that defect will be remedied next month when CBS runs a film made by French Freelancer Roger Pic, 47. Already broadcast in France, the 25-minute documentary gives a glimpse of Viet Cong life at a clandestine camp operating under the shadow of U.S. military might only 60 miles from Saigon.

Pic, who had already done three sympathetic documentaries on North Viet Nam, plus others on China and Cuba, had little trouble winning Viet Cong cooperation. After contacting N.L.F. representatives abroad, he made his way to a base camp in the province of Tay Ninh, northwest of Saigon. How he got there, he says, is a military secret. But "after a march through mud and dense jungle," he wrote in Figaro, his first night at the guerrilla encampment seemed "marvelously comfortable"-even though he slept in a ditch under a corrugated iron roof in a driving rain.

He awoke next morning to see a base camp that was probably the best the Viet Cong had to show. He shot footage of dormitories for the guerrillas, a third of whom are women these days, a school, a laundry, an underground kitchen, an infirmary. At the camp's auditorium, he watched song-and-dance acts as well as movies. For refreshment, there was a daily delivery of U.S. beer from Saigon.

When Pic accompanied the Viet Cong on their forays out of the camp, he was struck by the fact that although they carried Chinese automatic weapons, antitank guns and bazookas, in the three weeks he was with them, they never used them once. They did not attack an enemy outpost or hamlet. They did not even take a shot at the several reconnaissance planes that flew over daily. If they did, they knew there would be almost certain retaliation from U.S. bombers—and the very real chance of losing a friendly TV cameraman.