Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix: A Personal Account by Stuart Herrington

Author:Stuart Herrington [Herrington, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307823809
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-21T22:00:00+00:00

VIII

Still More Revolutionary Justice

One should never argue with results, and so I returned from Bien Hoa persuaded that Tim Miller’s Trang Bang experiment had shown the way to attack the Vietcong organization in Duc Hoa district. Hunting down illegal cadre in their bunkers as we had done in Tan My village had been effective, but this was simply not the way to defeat an organization that consisted overwhelmingly of legal cadre. It was these apparently upstanding citizens who were the eyes and ears of the covert village revolutionary committees. If this structure of legals could be compromised and rolled up, the hard-core bunker residents would be helpless without their support. Furthermore, in an environment where the enemy’s military profile was becoming higher, it was imperative to neutralize Duc Hoa’s Communist apparatus, since a goodly number of the Vietcong agents were military intelligence and military proselyting cadre. These men were the most dangerous to us in the short run, for it was they who recruited traitors in our militia units and gave the enemy detailed sketches of our outposts’ defenses.

Colonel Bartlett haunted Colonel Thanh with reminders of how seriously our units were threatened by Communist legal cadre agents. He also strove to sell Thanh on the political dangers posed by the shadow government. In the event of a cease-fire, these cadre would certainly surface and attempt to challenge and embarrass the government. If this happened, the Communists could very well win by sheer organizational superiority what they had failed to win on the battlefield. The name of the game, Colonel Bartlett urged Colonel Thanh, was to stamp out this covert organization while it was still open season on Communists. With the Paris peace talks under way, there was no telling how much time we had left before our military hands would be tied.

Colonel Thanh was quick to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Convinced by Colonel Bartlett that time was not on our side, he began to take steps to wage war on the legal cadre apparatus. One of the first was the establishment of closer ties between Colonel Thanh and Colonel Sinh’s interrogation center. Sinh’s people had begun to turn out some first-rate interrogation reports as his officers began to rely more on psychology and less on force to procure cooperation. Thanh began to rely more and more on this asset at Bien Hoa, and Colonel Sinh himself began to pay regular liaison visits to Bao Trai. In time, the two men developed a close personal and working relationship. The “Bien Hoa connection” begun by Tim Miller had developed into a productive partnership.

With Colonel Thanh’s support and a break or two, we felt that we could clean out Duc Hoa by the end of the summer. Not coincidentally, this was also the scheduled end of my extended tour. If we could make the kind of inroads against the Duc Hoa apparatus that Tim had made in Trang Bang, I could rotate home with a sense of mission accomplishment. The key to success was Colonel Thanh.

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