Volume 8, Number 9 · May 18, 1967
Report from Vietnam III: Intellectuals
By Mary McCarthy
'Il faut une REVOLUTION!' Major Be said, letting the r roll like a cannon ball in the school at Vung Tau. The Italian general listened with an air of dawning surprise. The short broadfaced Vietnamese major was not a military chief of the NLF, but the head of the government school for Revolutionary Development, training anti-Communist cadres. The former Italian Chief of Staff and I were being briefed in French by Major Be in a small classroom, while in the next room a group from NBC was being briefed in English by his assistant, Mr. Chau. Thin, slight Mr. Chau, dressed in flowing black calico trousers and a tight black tunic resembling an alb, had taken a degree in English literature at the Sorbonne—he had done his doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf. Major Be, less at home in foreign languages, wore a black shirt open at the throat and black trousers cut like Army fatigues. Their costumes were symbolic of the aims of the program. The 3000 cadres now in the school (a cadre is one person), when they graduated, would start 'constructing' hamlets in teams of fifty-nine, wearing the black-pajama garb of the Viet Cong, which itself had been copied from the dress of the poor peasants. Actually, the peasants today in government-controlled areas wear a medley of clothes, including baseball caps, shorts, and tee-shirts; and the RD get up, I heard from a Vietnamese medical student, was regarded as ludicrous in the hamlets he had been staying in—'If they would only take off those silly pajamas, the people might not laugh at them.'
Feature, 7321 words
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