Prouty on Lansdale

[Greg Burnham]

This mission was not in Saigon. It was not military, and its job was subversion in Vietnam. Its biggest job was that it got more than 1,100,000 northern Vietnamese to move south. 660,000 by U.S.Navy ships and the rest by CIA airline planes. These 1,100,000 north Vietnamese became the "subversive" element in South Vietnam and the principal cause of the warmaking.

This seems really absurd. How could Lansdale convince a million NV to go south to become the core of the VC. Am I misreading this?

The Viet Cong were actually SOUTH Vietnamese natives who had been displaced by the 1.1 million Northern Tonkinese Catholics that had been trans-migrated to the South by the CIA. The Northerners were promised land, farms, homes and other perks for making the trip...plus the assurance that they would be able to practice their religion without persecution from the communists. The Northern "refugees" supported Diem, a fellow Catholic, and oppressed non-Catholics (especially Buddhists) upon their arrival in the south. They then began to take over the area in which they settled creating "refugees in their own land" by the hundreds of thousands of Southern Vietnamese who were put out--broke and homeless. That's how the Viet Cong were created. The Cong were NOT North Vietnamese--they were South Vietnamese; they were NOT communists nor were they communist sympathizers. They were disenfranchised natives that were willing to take assistance from whomever offered it in order to attempt to regain their lost property, homes, and lives.