The Lessons of Vinh Hoa

The fortified village of Vinh Hoa was captured four times by U.S. troops last week without the loss of a single life. The Army, in fact, expects Vinh Hoa to save G.I. lives in combat, for the village, an exact replica of a typical Viet Cong settlement deep in the piney woods of eastern Georgia, is part of a new, expanded training program for Viet Nam-bound infantry troops.

The program got under way last week at Georgia's Fort Gordon and at Fort Polk, La., where another Vietnamese village has been set up. The course consists of an extra 98-hour week of field training and marks the first time that the Army has given such specialized and authentic preparation to troops for a specific battle zone. "Our aim," says Colonel Warren Davis, 51, commander of Fort Gordon's 3rd Training Brigade, "is to turn out the kind of troops you would like to have when you are over there."

Pajamaed Defenders. To help the Army achieve that aim, the 3rd Brigade's 419-man teaching cadre, 31 of whom are Viet Nam veterans, spent six weeks building Vinh Hoa, which they named for the Rev. Nguyen Lac Hoa, a Catholic soldier-priest who began fighting the Viet Cong in 1959. The instructors' wives wove grass rugs and made clay cooking pots, while children helped to fashion the village's huts and whittled vicious punji stakes of bamboo. For added authenticity, chickens were let loose to roam the village.

Surrounded by a high, spiked fence and a 20-ft.-wide defense perimeter bristling with punji stakes, the one-acre compound consists of five grass-and-straw huts, a camouflaged lookout tower, a well, a shaded hammock for the village chief. A dozen "Viet Cong" defenders--infantry troops who have completed their training and are awaiting assignment to Viet Nam--wear black pajamas and conical peasant hats. Underneath the village snakes a maze of tunnels that connect each hut to a passageway leading under the village wall. When the trainees attack, some villagers usually slip into the tunnels to get away; those who are captured and interrogated try to convince their captors that they are loyal peasants.*

Extra Rations. Besides attacking Vinh Hoa, the trainees learn to set up and patrol a defense perimeter, detect enemy booby traps and set out their own, establish listening posts; they spend 29 hours practicing night defense and are taught to catch wild animals to supplement their C rations. They also see a full-size Viet Cong prisoner stockade, including a solitary-confinement pit, and learn how to evade their captors' questions. Even at night, G.I.s in the main camp are liable to be attacked by "terrorists" from Vinh Hoa. Above all, they are taught to be on the alert against enemy ambush. Says Sergeant Louis A. Peterson, a Viet Nam veteran whose unit lost several men in surprise attacks by the Viet Cong: "We try to stage the same types of ambush here that happened to us. I don't see where too much more could be done."

* According to a current joke, a G.I. in a Saigon hospital is explaining how he had been wounded. "Well," he says, "I was told that the way to tell a Viet Cong from a friendly Vietnamese is to yell 'To hell with Ho Chi Minh!' If he shoots, he's a Viet Cong. So I saw this fellow on the road and yelled, To hell with Ho Chi Minh!' and he yelled back, 'To hell with Lyndon Johnson!' We were shaking hands when a truck hit us."

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