Reading John Peterkin’s first hand account of being a senior adviser was very insightful. He explained his duties and what was going on in Vietnam at this time. The United States had set up Province Senior Advisors or PSA’s to basically monitor villages in Vietnam and judge whither they were fully functioning safe villages or if the village was a target of the VC. John began to tell of some of the corruption that we had talked about in class, things such as over counting body’s and not using United States money for what it was intended for.
These villages he was assigned to watch over were for the most part good villages with good people, but of course, no one ever truly knew where the VC were, so an attack at anytime to any village could happen. It would happen more so if a PSA was staying at that village, or if the village was given officials. That PSA or official would become a target of the VC and make that village more dangerous. This lead to some Vietnamese officials actually leaving their village at night in fear of an attack, and then retuning during the daytime.
The big thing here is that for a village to receive money from the United States government, it had to be a fully functioning village with some sort of officials etc. This was important because the village also had to be graded, and this grade would determine how much they got, so when officials were leaving the village during the night in fear it really weakened the village. Peterkin dealt with one of these villages’ first hand and explained,
“I beat them there. When I got to the office, it was bone-dry. Nobody there. I waited for them. So I said, looking, you gotta make up your minds. If this is going to be a functioning village, someone has to stay here. Otherwise I’m gonna have to downgrade it.”
Peterkin’s whole summary of his stint in Vietnam shows us how corrupt some things could be. He was a former police officer and felt the need to mostly go by the book, so I believe his accounts are fairly true, he doesn’t show any one sidedness. In Vietnam during war time, a lot of army officials wanted to move up in rank quickly and thus over counted body counts. The Vietnamese villages on the other hand wanted the money from the United States so they, or at least their appointed officials would try and beat the system to continue getting the money. Peterkin saw this and would have no problem downgrading a village that either was not performing well, or simply wasn’t there anymore.
