Editing Strategic Hamlet Program (section)

==Failure==

Despite the Diem government's attempt to put a positive spin on the Strategic Hamlet Program, by mid-1963 it was clear to many that the program was failing. American military advisors such as [[John Paul Vann]] criticized the program in their official reports. They also expressed concerns to reporters who began to investigate more closely. [[David Halberstam]]'s coverage of the Strategic Hamlet Program's shortcomings caught the eye of President Kennedy.<ref>[[John M. Newman|Newman, John M.]], ''JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power'', New York: Time Warner Books, 1992, pp. 316–330; Halberstam, David, "Rift With Vietnam on Strategy Underlined by 2 Red Attacks", ''New York Times'' (16 Sept. 1963), p. 2; Halberstam, David, "Vietnamese Reds Gain in Key Area", ''New York Times'' (15 Aug. 1963), 1; ''Foreign Relations'', 4:237.</ref>

The Strategic Hamlet Program was exposed as an almost complete failure in the aftermath of the [[1963 South Vietnamese coup|November 1, 1963 coup]] that left Diem and his brother Nhu murdered. US officials discovered, for example, that only 20% of the 8600 hamlets that the Diem regime had reported "Complete" met the minimum American standards of security and readiness. The situation had passed the point of possible recovery. The program officially ended in 1964.<ref name="Tucker, p. 1070"/>

On the ground in Vietnam, the demise of the program was visible. By the end of 1963, empty hamlets lined country roads, stripped of valuable metal by the Vietcong and the fleeing peasants. According to [[Neil Sheehan]], "The rows of roofless houses looked like villages of play huts that children had erected and then whimsically abandoned."<ref>Hilsman, Roger, ''To Move a Nation'', pp. 522–523; ''Foreign Relations'', 4:687, 4:715; Sheehan, Neil, ''Bright Shining Lie'', p. 365.</ref>

In his book ''Vietnam: a History'' (Viking,1983) [[Stanley Karnow]] describes his observations: 
:In the last week of November . . I drove south from Saigon into Long An, a province in the [[Mekong Delta]], the rice basket of South Vietnam where 40 per cent of the population lived. 
:There I found the strategic hamlet program begun during the Diem regime in shambles. 
:At a place called Hoa Phu, the strategic hamlet built during the previous summer now looked like it had been hit by a hurricane.  The barbed wire fence around the enclosure had been ripped apart, the watchtowers were demolished and only a few of its original thousand residents remained, sheltered in lean-tos... A local guard explained to me that a handful of Vietcong agents had entered the hamlet one night and told the peasants to tear it down and return to their native villages. The peasants complied... 
:From the start, in Hoa Phu and elsewhere, they had hated the strategic hamlets, many of which they had been forced to construct by corrupt officials who had pocketed a percentage of the money allocated for the projects. Besides, there were virtually no government troops in the sector to keep them from leaving. If the war was a battle for "hearts and minds,"...the United States and its South Vietnamese clients had certainly lost Long An. 
:My cursory impression, I later discovered, was confirmed in a more extensive survey conducted by Earl Young, the senior U. S. representative in the province. He reported in early December that three quarters of the two hundred strategic hamlets in Long An had been destroyed since the summer, either by the Vietcong or by their own occupants, or by a combination of both.<ref>[http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/faculty/hauser/ps493origins/ps493vietnam/karnowvietnamhistory.pdf ''Vietnam: A History''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140115113622/http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/faculty/hauser/ps493origins/ps493vietnam/karnowvietnamhistory.pdf |date=2014-01-15 }} [[Stanley Karnow]] Penguin Books, 1997 – Chapter 9:  The Commitments Deepen, pp. 335, 336 (first published: Viking, 1983) |</ref>

Years later Roger Hilsman stated his belief that the strategic hamlet concept was executed so poorly by the Diem regime and the GVN "that it was useless."<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/hilsman1.html Episode 11: Vietnam], "An interview with Roger Hilsman", from the [[National Security Archive]].</ref>