Rural Government Advisers in South Vietnam and the U.S. War Effort, 1962–1973

In the mid-1960s, as the U.S. effort to bring widespread change to the social, economic, and political fabric of rural South Vietnam was getting under way, a representative of the United States Official Mission (USOM) in that country stumbled across evidence of large-scale corruption among officials of the South Vietnamese government (known in U.S. terminology as Government of Vietnam, or GVN). The USOM official was stationed in the Mekong Delta, which crammed some 70 percent of the South Vietnamese population into 25 percent of its land area and was a key base of support for the Communist insurgents that made up the National Liberation Front (NLF). The official worried that the corruption he had uncovered “had implications all over the Delta,” but he did not feel he had the authority to intervene directly in the GVN’s affairs. Instead he made discreet inquiries to try to learn the facts and report them to his superiors in USOM. One night, after being invited by the local chief of police to take a ride to inspect a pro-government outpost, he felt a gun pressed against the back of his neck. The police chief, far from wanting to uproot corruption, wanted to intimidate the U.S. official and put an end to his questions. Afterward, the U.S. mission in Saigon took no action against the police chief and instead offered to transfer the badly shaken representative to another province. This episode was typical of U.S. attempts to transform a foreign society in which loyalties were opaque, power dynamics were never quite as they seemed, and individual U.S. reformers often found themselves alone.