[“Though in the light of hindsight much of the NLF training program must seem to be little more than a thoroughgoing civics course, there was one aspect of it that went beyond all the boundaries which Westerners customarily draw around the concept “education.” This was the institution of khiem thao, “criticism” or “self-criticism” (the words mean “to verify” and “to discuss”).
Used previously by the Chinese Communists and the Viet Minh, khiem thao was a “truth game” in which every member of the organization from the lowliest soldier to the highest cadre had to participate. In the “criticism sessions,” held on a regular basis as a part of the daily activities, each NLF member had to admit his own failings and given his honest opinion about the conduct of all the other members of the group. Within the sessions he did not have to fear punishment for his own errors other than the most devastating one of concerted group criticism. Only if he refused to participate would he incur the final penalty of expulsion by the group.
Khiem thao was a game in which the rules of life were suspended, but it was a game designed to reach back into life and change its players. When the NLF recruits came into the army or the administration, they arrived almost totally insulated from their fellow men by their masks of “politeness.” Suspicious of both their commanders and their peers, they remained attentistes, always watching for a sign of trouble, always on the point of defection. The khiem thao sessions forced them to participate, forced them to break down all the defenses which they had built up around them in childhood.
For the newcomer “criticism” was a terrifying experience. “When they were being criticized,” reported one squad leader, “their manner was correct and humble, but when the khiem thao was over, some would leave the unit to go home or to rally to the GVN, while others would swear and then forget all about it. We lost a lost of men because of those criticism sessions. After all, every man has his self-respect, and when his short-comings were brought up publically, he was hurt.”
But to the extent that khiem thao was painful, so it was perhaps necessary to the functioning of the entire organization. If the recruits could not strip themselves of their anxieties about each other and the power of the group, they could not begin to work together or to commit themselves to a common cause. Without a real psychological readjustment, their loyalties to any organization, other than that of their own families, would remain only surface deep. Given the newcomer’s ambivalence between fear of the group and desire to belong to it, the cadres had to strike a delicate balance in their disciplinary measures. As one Party manual warned:
The criticism must be made in a spirit of mutual, comradely affection, helping each other to reform. But criticism in a hostile spirit does harm, causes loss of face, goes too far, etc. Criticism of this kind really causes divisions and prejudices in the Party. It is not useful for helping each other to correct defects, in a spirit of compassion, to advance together.
In practice the Party cadres attempted to restrain the low-level guerrilla fighters from discussing more than the details of the day-to-day work. (Burchett, for instance, observed several of these tactical khiem thao sessions going on in the intervals between the practice attacks on the GVN blockhouse.) Discussion of more profound and difficult matters was reserved for those who had already developed strong attachments to the Front — and was used primarily as a corrective. If a supply system broke down or a battalion performed badly in a fight, not only the top-ranking officers, but the entire group of cadres who bore some responsibility for the operation would meet for a period of perhaps two or three weeks to discuss their technical errors and the obstacles in their communication with each other.
No one but the NLF cadres themselves know what went on at these sessions, and thus it is possible only to imagine the process in a rather distant and abstract manner. Given a safe forum in which to express his own grievances, the cadre came to see that he did not depend directly on any one member of the group. He could put his case on the table with some assurance that it would be judged on its own merits rather than on a personal basis. When, as must frequently have happened, two members quarreled, the group would not dissolve itself until the matter was settled by mutual agreement. With some experience at khiem thao the cadre would grow less and less afraid to disagree with another member, for he would realize that by initiating a verbal conflict he did not risk his entire career in the Front, or indeed his life. By the same token, he would come to understand that when others criticized him for mishandling a situation, they were not doing it from motives other than that of desire to get the job done better the next time. The knowledge came as a revelation — though one perhaps gradually arrived at; and if he allowed it to, that revelation could change his life. What mattered now was not the maintenance of “face,” but the competence to deal with the “objective” problems that confronted the entire group.
By forcing the cadres into conflict and limiting the damage done by it, the khiem thao sessions opened up entirely new channels of communication within the NLF. From the outside it is impossible to match cause exactly with result. But it takes only a small stretch of the imagination to see that in melting down the whole hierarchical structure of relationships the khiem thao gave the NLF a strength that could be measured in battalions. If, for instance, a number of soldiers from one company died or deserted, the local Front commander would have an excellent chance of hearing about his losses and taking measures to deal with them. His counterpart in the ARVN, by contrast, rarely knew how many men he commanded. The ARVN company, battalion, and regimental commanders made it a general practice to conceal their losses in the hopes of disguising their own failures or of collecting the pay due to the missing men.”]
frances fitzgerald, from fire in the lake: the vietnamese and the americans in vietnam, 1972
