U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge
On Unconventional Warfare in Vietnam
Press conference, June 6, 1965

Well what you have in Vietnam is a totally distinct kind of fighting man. He's as distinct as the infantryman or the aviator, and he is the terrorist. And he dresses like every other man, he looks just like the average farmer. But he is very professionally trained, he's expertly guided, he's carefully protected, and he is told for example to terrorize a certain village, and so Monday morning there'll be a dozen bodies out in the road--old men, women, children, nobody who's done anything special, just indiscriminate terror. And then he'll kidnap the village chief, cut off his head and walk it around on a pole, and by the middle of the afternoon there isn't too much trouble getting 16, 17-year-old boys to join the Viet Cong. It seems like the line of least resistance.

Now that doesn't mean that there aren't some enthusiastic, convinced ideological communists, because there are. And it doesn't mean that these boys that they get by terrorism can't be trained into being good fighters because they can. But the fact remains that if you could get at this terrorism you'd have a manageable situation and it would only be a matter of time before you solved it.

Now, to send in an infantry battalion isn't the way to get at this terrorist, 'cause he just disappears into the grass and palm leaf shacks of the people, and he waits until the infantry battalion passes on and he comes out again. To bomb them from the air isn't a good way to do it 'cause every twenty people you kill, nineteen are women and children and one is a terrorist. So what you have to do is get a chairman for each hamlet. The hamlet out there is equivalent to what American politicians know as the precinct; it's the smallest organization there is. And you have a census and identification cards, a curfew, and with the help of the police you comb through everything and require everybody to have passes. And they all know who the terrorists are. The question is giving them enough courage to tell you who they are; then shifting the fear from being fear of the terrorist to being respect for the government. And then as fast as you get law and order bring in your agricultural, and your teachers and your clinics and your doctors and all that. And that's what you have to do.

And this has to be done by the Vietnamese themselves. We can supply technical assistance, we can supply agricultural aid and all that, but still they have to do it themselves. And that involves nothing less than a revolution for a new and better life, that's what it really is. We oughten't to be scared of the word "revolution" we're revolutionists ourselves, we came from the American revolution. It would be even more revolutionary if we did what we preached, what we preach is revolutionary.

And they have to--the people who are working for the government--have to be the ones to put into affect the kind of program that will give them a better life. Now there isn't any way out of that. And that has been done now in about 400 hamlets. I didn't mention it in my speech 'cause I don't want to make too much out of it; 400 hamlets out of 12,000 isn't very much. But I think maybe it's a little tiny bit of a green sprout coming up above the surface of the ground. If it isn't, why then, we have to do it. There isn't any around this world revolution. The people insist on it and it's a question of who's going to give it to them and whether it's going to be given to them in a way that consistent with freedom and equality and whether it's going to be given to them in an authoritarian and cruel manner.