The NLF was not content with general acquiescence to its goals or even with high recruitment numbers, however. Total and undivided support for the revolutionary cause was demanded from each guerrilla fighter, and political commissars were even supplied from the North to guarantee his or her ideological commitment to the struggle. One such political commissar states that he did everything possible “to ensure that not a single soldier should have a single doubt as to why and for whom he was fighting.” Moreover, political and ideological teachings were usually blended with military and tactical instruction, to produce not mere incompetent ideologues but confident and effective guerrilla warriors. Trinh Duc, a Village Chief, says “While the political courses were going on, I was also trained in guerrilla warfare. I learned to use a carbine, AK-47, grenades, the different kinds of mines… I also learned field tactics and studied the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy.” Tactics relevant to the South Vietnamese terrain, up-to-date techniques of resistance against an American foe, and detailed training in conventional as well as unconventional weapons usage were essential elements of the NLF training regime. Even the NLF award for bravery during the Vietnam War, the Heroic Killer of Americans medal, was pointedly explicit in terms of what was expected of its warriors. Though they lacked the vast technological and equipment advantages of their American opponents, the NLF's guerrilla fighters were nonetheless better mentally prepared for the type of struggle they would be thrust into, and more ideologically and emotionally committed to the necessity of victory.
Though unalloyed support of the revolutionary cause was a prerequisite for its guerrilla combatants, it was also highly sought after in the general population of NLF-controlled areas in the South. The campaign to inculcate and ensure total civilian commitment to the revolution could reach extreme proportions. "Thought control" programs were devised and initiated in most of the guerrilla-controlled villages. A captured document from the zonal level in 1966 showed that a staggering 2,700 people were put through a district-level thought reform course in a three month period. War correspondent Xuan Vu writes of this NLF effort:
“What they wanted was for you to deny yourself and accept the consciousness of the Party…there was a lot of good psychological insight in what they were doing. After you had written or said something terrible about your parents or grandparents, you really felt as if you had betrayed them… you created a distance… You had broken a bond that tied you to something outside the revolution.”
This intensely psychological program aimed to minimise or eliminate any allegiance or tie that threatened the primacy of the resistance. Those who still dissented were kept in line through social pressures, coercion, force, and terror. In this way, the NLF's system ensured that the revolution was as high a priority as possible for the people under its influence.
The NLF was quickly able to reap the benefits of such an extraordinary and virtually unanimous psychological commitment in the population centres it controlled. Public trials of “reactionary agents and spies” were held without opposition in villages, further spreading the NLF's influence. Villagers were expected to raise food for combatants in their vicinity, to engage in labour such as transporting supplies, to pay "national defence taxes", and to root out spies. When NLF fighters were killed in the conflict, the villages of the south proved a constant source of replacement, such that in spite of “ghastly losses - perhaps 850,000 NVA [North Vietnamese Army] and VC [Vietcong, NLF] dead between 1965-72 - the Communist forces kept increasing.” In this way, support in the villages enabled the NLF to absorb massive punishment and still remain an effective fighting force. None of this would have been possible without explicit use of force - as was usually unnecessary - had the NLF not already had the population in the palm of its hand.
The NLF's emphasis on its soldiers' commitment yielded impressive results as well. Combatants clearly understood a link between the military and political. Nguyen Van Thich, a VC Ranger Platoon Leader in 1967, explains that the “motto we used was "Kill the Wicked and Destroy the Oppressors to Promote Mobilization of the People."” NLF operatives, “indoctrinated with the necessity of killing,” carried out their missions without qualms because they understood the political benefit of their actions to the revolution. Huong Van Ba, a repeat-infiltrator through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, expressed “such hatred for the enemy and such devotion to the noble cause of liberating our suppressed people that we felt we could overcome any difficulty and make any sacrifice [and, furthermore] this faith was reinforced by effective propaganda.” Sau Thuong, also operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, asserts that he “would rather have died in the mountains” than fail his superiors. Born into a social matrix that considered self-sacrifice to be “a normal concomitant of the human condition,” this generation of fighters was an accordingly resilient and powerful force. U.S. General Ridgway noted admiringly that “they are used to all manner of deprivations which would be extreme hardship to our men.” Such total commitment, physical and mental, was necessary for the type of engagements in which these fighters were to be employed.
