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efficient than other Civic Action leaders. His troops had just chopped down a large section of jungle (we proceeded through it in convoy, wearing bullet-proof vests and bristling with rifles and machine-guns, because of the VC), which was going to be turned into a New Life Hamlet for resettling refugees. They had also built a school, which we stopped to inspect, finding, to the general’s surprise, that it had been taken over by the local district chief for his office headquarters.

    The Filipino team, possibly because they were Asians, seemed to be on quite good terms with the population. Elsewhere—at Go Cong, in the delta—I saw mistrustful patients and heard stories of rivalry between the Vietnamese doctor, a gynecologist, and the Spanish and American medical teams; my companion and I were told that we were the first “outsiders,” including the resident doctors, to be allowed by the Vietnamese into
his
wing—the maternity, which was far the cleanest and most modern in the hospital and contained one patient. Similar jealousies existed of the German medical staff at Hue. In the rather squalid surgical wing of the Go Pong hospital, there were two badly burned children. Were they war casualties, I asked the official who was showing us through. Yes, he conceded, as a matter of fact they were. How many of the patients were war-wounded, I wanted to know. “About four” of the children, he reckoned. And one old man, he added, after reflection.
    The Filipinos were fairly dispassionate about their role in pacification; this may have been because they had no troops fighting in the war (those leftist elements in the Assembly!) and therefore did nothave to act like saviors of the Vietnamese people. The Americans, on the contrary, are zealots, above all the blueprinters in the Saigon offices, although occasionally in the field, too, you meet a true believer—a sandy, crew-cut, keen-eyed army colonel who talks to you about “the nuts and bolts” of the program, which, he is glad to say, is finally getting the “grass roots” support it needs. It is impossible to find out from such a man what he is doing, concretely; an aide steps forward to state, “We sterilize the area prior to the insertion of the RD teams,” whose task, says the colonel, is to find out “the aspirations of the people.” He cannot tell you whether there has been any land reform in his area—that is a strictly Vietnamese pigeon—in fact he has no idea of
how
the land in the area is owned. He is strong on coordination: all his Vietnamese counterparts, the colonel who “wears two hats” as province chief, the mayor, a deposed general are all “very fine sound men,” and the Marine general in the area is “one of the finest men and officers” he has ever met. For another army zealot every Vietnamese officer he deals with is “an outstanding individual.”
    These springy, zesty, burning-eyed warriors, military and civilian, engaged in AID or Combined Action (essentially pacification) stir faraway memories of American college presidents of the fund-raising type; their diction is peppery with oxymoron (“When peace breaks out,” “Then the commodities started to hit the beach”), like a college president’s address to an alumni gathering. They see themselves in fact as educators, spreading the American way of life, a new
propaganda fide
. When I asked an OCO man in Saigon what his groups actually did in a Vietnamese village to prepare—his word—the people for elections, he answered curtly, “We teach them Civics 101.”

    The American taxpayer who thinks that aid means help has missed the idea. Aid is, first of all, to achieve economic stability within thepresent system, i.e., political stability for the present ruling groups. Loans are extended, under the counterpart fund arrangement, to finance Vietnamese imports of American capital equipment (thus aiding, with the other hand, American industry). Second, aid is
education
. Distribution