Rural Government Advisers in South Vietnam and the U.S. War Effort, 1962–1973

In the mid-1960s, as the U.S. effort to bring widespread change to the social, economic, and political fabric of rural South Vietnam was getting under way, a representative of the United States Official Mission (USOM) in that country stumbled across evidence of large-scale corruption among officials of the South Vietnamese government (known in U.S. terminology as Government of Vietnam, or GVN). The USOM official was stationed in the Mekong Delta, which crammed some 70 percent of the South Vietnamese population into 25 percent of its land area and was a key base of support for the Communist insurgents that made up the National Liberation Front (NLF). The official worried that the corruption he had uncovered “had implications all over the Delta,” but he did not feel he had the authority to intervene directly in the GVN's affairs. Instead he made discreet inquiries to try to learn the facts and report...