Vietnam at War by Bradley Mark Philip;

Author:Bradley, Mark Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2009-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Some refugees were eventually impressed into military service, but most remained unemployed and the camps some became a primary source of recruitment for the communist insurgency.

Along with these massive civilian dislocations, perhaps no other group in wartime South Vietnam suffered more in terms of sheer numbers than the enlisted men serving in the ARVN and their families. The ARVN forces reached 685,000 in 1967 and over 1 million after 1969; one in six adult males served in the ARVN by 1968. The age of conscription shifted from 20–25 in 1964 to 18–34 in 1968, with the upper age for support personnel as high as 45. Three-year tours of duty during the initial years of the war were replaced by unlimited service in 1968. With most ARVN recruits drawn from peasant families, the rapid build-up of the army and length of required service posed severe problems for household agricultural production. As one Mekong delta farmer recalled, ‘We lived through French imperialism, war against the fascists, a liberation war with the French, and never had we known such problems. In the days before the ARVN draft, if families needed labor they could always hire from local families with more sons. The draft took all our sons and made farming almost impossible.’9

Corruption and abuse in the deferment system further alienated rural peasants. ARVN desertion rates were exceedingly high, in large measure because of inadequate leave to meet family obligations, low rates of pay, and substandard medical care and food. With massive and escalating inflation the norm in southern Vietnam, an ARVN private saw his real pay drop from $77 per month in 1964 to $30 per month in 1972. Over time, as tours of duty became unlimited and the destruction of war made lives more difficult for their families, desertion numbers dropped and ARVN troops increasingly brought wives, children, and parents to live with them or in nearby base camps in makeshift shanty towns. With little investment in the aims of the South Vietnamese state, ARVN soldiers increasingly took refuge in efforts to ensure family survival.10 In a further survival mechanism, and as the outcome of the war looked increasingly murky, it was not uncommon for families to send one son to serve in the ARVN and another with the NLF’s armed forces.

American assistance to South Vietnam further widened levels of social and economic inequality and compounded the fragility of the state. Although the United States had provided exceptionally high levels of economic assistance to the Ngo Dinh Diem government, the sums became truly staggering as the war accelerated after 1964. The American economic aid programme in Vietnam accounted for one-quarter of the total aid the US provided throughout the world. Dollars were pumped into the Vietnamese economy at a much faster rate than it could absorb, severely distorting the domestic economy, prompting exceptionally high levels of inflation and ever wider forms of corruption. As much as 80 per cent of the budget of South Vietnam came to be funded through American aid and a US-financed import initiative known as the Commercial Import Program (CIP).

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