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war, and executed appointed officials and sympathizers of the government, such as the district chief of Cu Chi. However, the peasants did not in the main have to be terrorized into acquiescence by such tactics. The Viet Cong were themselves villagers, or their sons and daughters, and operated most of the time with the consent and assistance of the people among whom they lived.
    President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, and found that his administration’s resolve in confronting Communism was on the line in Southeast Asia. Anxious to avoid the slur of being “soft” on Communism, he was embarrassed by earlyupsets like the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. After his unhappy summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy said, “Now we have a problem making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.” The internal threat to Diem’s regime was perceived as the tide of Communism engulfing Asia; South Vietnam, said Kennedy, was “a proving ground for democracy.” Both he and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, were confident that American military might would reverse Communist successes. Gradually, its presence in Vietnam was stepped up: U.S. advisers to the ARVN were increased to 12,000 by mid-1962. Earlier that year American Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV, pronounced “Macvee”) was set up in Saigon. Kennedy was consciously edging his country into what French president Charles de Gaulle had warned him would be “a bottomless military and political swamp.”
    The strategic hamlet program progressively decayed and collapsed. The peasants returned to their native villages and the ARVN was unable to restrain them. In August 1963 the Viet Cong even overran the showpiece hamlet of Ben Thuong near Ben Cat. ARVN military disasters multiplied, despite superior equipment, aircraft, and American advisers. Of particular psychological impact in South Vietnam was the destruction by the Viet Cong Phu Loi battalion of the elite ARVN unit, the Black Tiger (or Panther) battalion. It was at Duong Long, about a mile north of the village of Ben Suc, on 31 December 1963. The Black Tigers were notorious for their cruelty, rape, and looting, and were alleged to have eaten the livers of dead Viet Cong.
    A few weeks before Kennedy was assassinated, in November 1963, President Diem was murdered during a coup staged with Washington’s consent. This followed city-based agitation by Buddhists, long offended by Catholic domination, and led to a bewildering series of military juntas in Saigon. Viet Cong activity was, by 1964, augmented by practical help from North Vietnam. The militants who had gone north after 1954 had filtered home, trained and motivated for political action and guerrilla war. With them came the first North Vietnamese soldiers to fight alongside the Viet Cong under the command of the Communists’ southern headquarters, the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN).
    Shortly before American soldiers arrived in force in 1965,the Viet Cong were bold enough to hold a victory parade in the middle of Cu Chi town, while the local ARVN detachment, the 49th Regiment, stayed in its fort in the Fil Hol plantation. At the same time, General Giap was moving division-strength troops from the North to cut South Vietnam in half. With the growing ineffectiveness of the ARVN, Communist takeover in South Vietnam in 1965 was a serious possibility. The ARVN’s area of control, commented Brigadier General Harley Mooney of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division, was “about three or four feet on either side of wherever they were.”

    The full-scale military intervention in the war in Vietnam by the United States in August 1965 was a direct result of the ARVN’s failure to hold back the tide of Viet Cong military successes. By that year the ARVN desertions were surpassing recruitment by 2,000 a month, and the U.S. advisers noted that only one senior ARVN officer had been wounded since 1954. At