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structure. Then it was ready to step up the size of its attacks. In 1964, its main forces grew from 10,000 troops to 30,000, and its paramilitary forces increased from 30,000 to 80,000. These men needed weapons. Caches left behind before the 1954 partition contained 10,000 weapons. The National Liberation Front had captured 39,000 weapons and lost 25,000, producing a net gain of 14,000. But this would have left 86,000 troops unarmed. AK-47s did not grow on trees and could not be carved from bamboo shoots. The weapons had to come from North Vietnam.
    If there was any doubt during the war that the National Liberation Front was merely a front, it was quickly dispelled after the war ended. North Vietnamese General Van Tien Dung, in his account of the final victory of his armies in 1975, barely mentions the role of South Vietnam’s Communists. In southern Vietnam, all key government positions were given to northerners, and the forces of the People’s Liberation Army were immediately absorbed into the North Vietnamese Army. In May 1975, Le Duan said, “Our Party is the unique and single leader that organized, controlled, and governed the entire struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first day of the revolution.”
    Those who had been members of the front organization came forward after the war to testify that Hanoi had from the startplanned and orchestrated a war of conquest against the South. In December 1975, Nguyen Huu Tho, a former president of the National Liberation Front, remarked in a speech that his organization had been “wholly obedient to the party line.” After he escaped from Vietnam, Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the front, wrote that “we discovered that the North Vietnamese Communists had engaged in a deliberate deception to achieve what had been their true goal from the start, the destruction of South Vietnam as a political or social entity in any way separate from the North.”
    North Vietnam’s war might have been justified if it advanced the wishes of the people of South Vietnam. Many critics of American policy argued that the National Liberation Front could operate as freely as it did in the countryside because Communist ideology was in tune with Vietnamese culture and because the humanitarian policies of the guerrillas had won the support—the “hearts and minds,” in the fashionable phrase—of the villagers. The Communist revolution in South Vietnam, they said, was as legitimate as the American Revolution.
    To compare the two in any respect is a ludicrous libel of America’s Founding Fathers.
    Love of communism did not dwell in the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. Hatred of it ran in their veins. In Vietnamese tradition, a leader should win power by his virtue, but the Communists sought to control by virtue of their power. In Vietnamese culture, the individual does not exist merely to serve the community; instead, society should maximize the freedom of each individual. A tenacious belief in private property, a deep desire for individual freedom, and a resentment of power not based in moral authority are all part of the Vietnamese character. Communism, on the other hand, completely subordinates the individual to the state. It destroys freedom of expression, abolishes private property, and demands blind obedience. The Communists were well aware that their ideology was antithetical to Vietnamese culture. One of the mainreasons they set up the National Liberation Front was to keep the people from learning that the Communists were behind the revolution.
    The Communists won converts by cultivating not hope but hatred. Even a prominent antiwar writer observed that one key to the success of the National Liberation Front was its “systematic encouragement of hatred.” Like almost all developing nations, South Vietnam had problems in providing social justice and avoiding governmental abuses. The Communists made it their mission to