54. Memorandum From the Special Assistant to the Director of the United States Information Agency (Keogh) to the Director-Designate (Marks)1
SUBJECT
- Field Representatives in Vietnam
A field representative gets involved with practically every aspect of formal communications, and a large number of decidedly informal types. A collective summary from four Field Representative reports (attached)2 provides some typical activities:
1. He prepares posters, leaflets, pamphlets, movies, and tapes in connection with the Chieu Hoi program in the districts, designed to persuade the Viet Cong to abandon their warfare and return to peaceable ways under government control.
[Page 159]2. He assists the government teams in coping with returnees at the Chieu Hoi centers, in re-educating and rehabilitating them, providing ideas and materials.
3. He provides leaflets for local PsyWar air-drops, and often is the man who pushes the bundles out of the plane. He prepares messages for air-borne loudspeaker missions.
4. He provides rice sacks printed with appropriate messages for repackaging food stores captured from the Viet Cong which will be distributed to the local citizenry.
5. He develops local newspapers and wall newspapers in Vietnamese and tribal languages, frequently preparing editorial copy and working with the printer to get them out.
6. He provides photos for local and Saigon newspapers.
7. He represents the Embassy at memorial services for U.S. and Vietnamese dead, both civilians and military. He gets involved in local problems for the care and schooling of orphaned children of killed Vietnamese soldiers, organizing fund collections for schools, food programs and the like.
8. He develops drama troupes who entertain in remote districts with politically themed plays and dances.
9. He helps train the Vietnamese military in civil action work around their bases.
10. He administers funds for local JUSPAO work.
11. He services and maintains bulletin boards in remote as well as central sites, and supplies the Vietnam Information Service in providing authentic news and comment which will contradict Viet Cong propaganda and rumors, providing tapes for sound truck use, organizing local distribution of low-cost radio sets for families in outlying districts, assisting in local radio programming.
12. He advises the VIS in publicity programs for summer work projects by students in the hamlets.
13. He assists local authorities in election procedures and publicity.
14. Assists the Vietnamese military in troop morale projects, providing camp libraries, publishing wall newspapers, providing projector boxes, films, etc., even using JUSPAO funds to purchase bed mats and mosquito nets for recruits who are ordinarily badly neglected.
15. Stimulates the military in such useful practices as collecting information documents on the battlefield and reproducing those letters, orders and what-not in newspapers and other media for the edification of the local populace.
16. He lectures to students and youth.
17. He stimulates the formation of village libraries and helps to stock them, to replenish and rebuild when the VC destroy them.
[Page 160]18. He ranges widely within his zone, travelling by air, river and road, often hitching rides on such unorthodox vehicles as ammunition plans and military helicopters. He must keep in touch not only with Vietnamese government officials, military and opinion leaders, but with hamlet leaders and heads of family groups, travelling roads which are laced with Viet Cong roadblocks, mines and tax collectors. In addition, he keeps in touch with U.S. military advisers and USOM representatives, coordinating his activities with theirs when useful and possible.