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Binh Ba was a
village which held a strange fascination. Probably this was
due to its well cultivated and highly developed appearance
which contrasted so sharply with our tents and holes in the
ground carpeted by mud at
Nui Dat. We had flown over Binh Ba on several occasions
and had been tantalised by the acres of smooth green lawn
surrounding the French villas, by their gardens laden with
exotic flowers, by the cream plastered elegance of the large
houses with their flood-lit lawn tennis courts and by the
almost suburban character of the village as a whole. The
plantation workers' houses had been built by the French in a
style far better than any native built village house. Each
was constructed of brick with cream plastered walls and roof
of red tile. Great brown wooden shutters were hinged back
from the windows by day to let the cool air of the rubber
plantation blow gently through the rooms. The houses were
built in pairs, each dwelling the size of a small Australian
suburban house, set in an enclosure of garden which was used
both for vegetable growing and ornamental shrubbery. The
whole village was laid out on a strict rectangular pattern
of intersecting streets, all of which were lined with green
hedges of thick-leaved shrubs which produced red, pink, gold
or white flowers at different times of the year.
The village
itself was like a delicate piece of impressionist design set
within the broad frame of rubber trees, whose regular
pattern and even colour served to focus one's attention on
the rich reds, browns and yellows of the village. In our
early days in Phuoc Tuy as we flew over the village,
watching the pits creep slowly across the Binh Ba airstrip,
our sense of apprehension that this conglomeration of
buildings and people beneath us was controlled by the Viet
Cong was heightened by the state of the village's
development. The factories, the plantation and the houses
were symbols of power---power which had passed in recent
years from the Vietnamese Government to the Viet Cong.
The
importance of Binh Ba to either side in this struggle was
its contribution to the local economy. Not only was the
plantation a direct source of wealth, which could be tapped
by taxation, but it was a source of good employment for
several hundred Vietnamese, and it was the main source of
maintenance for some three thousand persons. Whoever
controlled the plantation had the first claim on the
services and support of the people. Binh Ba had known many
masters over the previous twenty five years. The French had
been displaced by the Japanese in 1941 and had lost the
output of the plantation until they were able to resume
control in 1946. During the Indo-China war, the French had
built a triangular fort, surrounded by a high mound at the
western end of the village. Occupied by a company of
Vietnamese troops who were commanded by a French officer,
the fortification had maintained French authority until the
pressure of the Viet Minh in the north and in the Central
Highlands grew too great for the French to be able to afford
the men who manned the Binh Ba post. The strongest local
influence then became the Viet Minh, who introduced
Communism and dissent against the Saigon Government and its
local representatives. The ending of the war in 1954 did not
bring the influence of Communism in Binh Ba to a finish for
villages like Binh Ba were too far away down the chain of
command foe the Diem Government to do more than exhortation
and occasional visits. When the war began to build up
against the Viet Cong in the early nineteen sixties, the old
French triangular mound was taken over by Government troops.
The people of Binh Ba were compelled to convert their
village into a strategic hamlet. They dug a ditch several
feet deep around the village and raised a corresponding
mound on the inward side of the ditch. Barbed wire obstacles
were placed around the perimeter and watch towers were
placed in the important corners and at the village gateways.
Huge steel gates with spikes were hung from brick pillars to
close off Route 2 at the northern and southern ends of the
village. But all these works went for naught because the
Viet Cong came by night and compelled the people to
dismantle the fortifications, and most of the materials that
went into the construction went to the Viet Cong.
Viet Cong
Cadres came into Binh Ba in 1961 and began accumulating
popular support, both by conducting political meetings and
by assisting the villages with education and agricultural
advice. By 1964 the Viet Cong had taken control of the
village and they set about intimidating any opposition. They
tortured the former head man of the village to death and
terrorised the local police and teachers so that they
departed to safer areas. Strangely, the Viet Cong did not
take much deliberate action against the Catholic Priest or
the French plantation managers. They were well aware that
they could not let the plantation fall into disuse, for then
the village would disintegrate and they would be to blame.
Initially, they attempted to humiliate the Frenchmen by
making them work as rubber tappers and by subjecting them to
some public brutality. The management of the Soci'ete
Indochinoise de Plantation d'Heveas (S.I.P.H.), the group
who owned the Gallia Plantation at Binh Ba decided to
attempt to weather the storm, reasoning that whoever was to
control Vietnam in the long run would need to keep the
rubber industry working. Hence the losses entailed by the
interruptions of war might be offset at a later date. At
least there was the possibility of compensation to be paid
by a nationalising government if the French owners held on,
while to quit their holdings without receiving a cent for
their vast investments seemed foolish. Hence the local
plantation managers had to coexist with the Viet Cong as
best they could. The French were allowed freedom of access
to their plantations through Viet Cong controlled areas,
but it was expected of them that they would reveal nothing
of intelligence value to the Government. When called upon to
provide medical assistance for the Viet Cong sick and
wounded they were expected to open their hospital which they
maintained for the plantation workers. If, as in February
1966, an allied force visited the village, the French were
expected to give the Americans no co-operation in matters
such as permission to use the plantation water supply. While
the Viet Cong were the local masters, these conditions had
to be upheld by the French, both for their own personal
safety and for the health of the rubber trees, which could
be quickly ruined by indiscriminate slashing of their bark,
should the Viet Cong have desired to put the plantation out
of business.
Whether the
Viet Cong taxed the S.I.P.H. directly through Paris as they
did with other firms who were lucrative sources of income
for the Communists, I do not know. However, the Viet Cong
did not hesitate to take a local tax from the plantation
workers, consisting of one day's pay and two litres of rice
per month in normal circumstances. At special times, 'acts
of patriotic and heroic solidarity' were called for, when
the contributions expected were far greater than these
amounts. Of course the village had to fill its quota of
young men for military service with the Viet Cong. Those who
declined such service were required to take a special course
to eliminate 'reactionary tendencies'. If they failed to
show the desired amount of reformation they were taken off
and never heard of again.
Father
Joseph, the village priest, was from North Vietnam. He had
been able to leave the north in 1956 and he had come to Binh
Ba. Although nearly three quarters of the people of Binh Ba
were nominally Buddhists, there were still some hundreds of
Catholics to be cared for. The Catholics were not in a
strong enough position too prevent the growth of Viet Cong
power, but they were sufficiently numerous to present a
special problem to the new controllers of the village in
1964. The Viet Cong knew that Catholic teaching was against
them, but they did not attempt to close the church or to get
rid of Father Joseph. Probably confident that they could
deprive the church of the support of the youth of the
village, they reckoned that they would save themselves a
great amount of trouble by tolerating the Catholics,
provided that the Catholics did not become too militant
towards them. The Catholic Church was placed in a similar
position to S.I.P.H.--- it had to coexist in the hope of
better things to come, or lose all that it had built up.
Occasionally the Viet Cong carried out measures against the
Catholics, such as forbidding services, or preventing Father
Joseph from travelling to his bishop at Xuan Loc.
It was fairly
obvious that Binh Ba would have to be one of our first goals
in Phuoc Tuy. Not only was it the most important village in
Viet Cong hands in the province, but it was blocking road
access for the Government to the Duc Thanh outpost, and
preventing 5,000 people of Binh Gia, the nearby Catholic
village, from getting into the Ba Ria markets. Furthermore,
Binh Ba was well sited for the Viet Cong aggressive action
against the Nui Dat
base. Not only could the Viet Cong collect intelligence
through the people of Binh Ba, but the village was a useful
staging point for any big attack which might be made against
the base. The attack of which we had been warned for the
night of June 12th had been dubbed by
Captain Bob Milligan,
second in command of C Company, 'the Binh Ba Ten Thousand',
and whenever Intelligence suggested an attack on the base
was likely, it was sufficient merely to pass the word, 'the
Binh Ba Ten Thousand is on tonight', and the appropriate
precautions would be taken. |
