Word: thao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...after the Geneva partition, mostly out of sheer hero worship for the conquerors of the hated French. Former Viet Minh Infantry Captain Huynh Due That, 35, joined the Viet Minh as a civil guard when he was 20, after partition was taken to Hanoi aboard a Polish troopship. Nguyen Thao, 32, joined his local Young Communist movement even earlier, at twelve, and walked to North Viet...
Last week Thao grimly counted an election-week total of 60 Communist dead, killed in some dozen jungle skirmishes. Though the Communists warned that they would shoot any "traitor" who voted, Thao got 83% of his voters to the polls. "We tried a little propaganda of our own," he admits. "We told the people that if they did not vote, they would have trouble getting jobs or help from the government...
Educated as a civil engineer in Saigon, Thao fought nine years with the Communist Viet Minh against the French. But he quit the Viet Minh shortly after the Geneva peace conference in 1954, partly because he is a Roman Catholic (his brother is still a Communist and currently North Viet Nam's Ambassador to East Germany). And when his former comrades-in-arms started terrorizing South Vietnamese villages, Thao joined the army against them...
Quick Action. In Kienhoa, Thao found the local security chief had been extorting money from the villagers by threatening them with prison. Thao arrested him. He also freed 1,200 political prisoners held in the local jail without evidence. Said Thao: "If a peasant sabotages a road, he's obviously under Communist pressure, and if he's under Communist pressure, that means he's not getting government protection. Why should he go to prison?" Dismayed to learn that Kien-hoa's 1,500 crack troops waited days for orders before going to the help of besieged...
...just four months, Thao has recaptured about half of the 75 villages once controlled by the Communists in Kienhoa. He has driven the surviving 800 guerrillas into a 130-sq.-mi. pocket and hopes to have them cleaned out within a year. He has torn down most of the jails in the province, built hospitals and schools, and he is now training 370 schoolteachers to replace corrupt village officials. Says Thao: "It is a long, slow process. We cannot win unless the people are on our side...