[Seascamp]

James,
re: ?Farmers?
Yes to all the fields of endeavor you listed and a lot more. My experience was in the coastal population centers of I Corps and as far as I was concerned everyone was VC to one degree or another. I found no monolithic ?I?m it? VC types, just a whole population covering their bets and burning the candle from both ends and I don?t blame them one damn bit. There was no such thing as a misty-eyed revolutionary that I saw, just people trying to survive and going with the flow and that?s about the sum of it.
And then there was a whole bunch of people taking advantage of the political/security instability and making a bunch of them Ps and MPCs and for sale to the highest bidder, including identified VC Cadre members.

As a group the coastal VC were very self-reliant and didn?t depend on the HCM trail for much of anything, if at all. And I will categorically state they were not at all fond of their supposed northern fraternal brothers. At least initially, the core VC control groups were the Cadres that were educated and trained in either the PRC or the Soviet Union. These people may or may not have been local, but fared much better in the population centers than out in the bush. As the war pressed on, the enmity between the VC and the PAVN/Hanoi/Moscow grew it became clear that someone had to go and subsequently the VC were virtually wiped out and ceased to exist as a main force unit beyond TET 68. They were used as front rank cannon fodder and that is a fact and a source of continuing squabble and acrimony within the current ranks of surviving Vietnamese combatants. But this confrontation is outside contemporary Vietnam, not within, for obvious reasons.
Rightfully so, the surviving VC feel that their revolution was hijacked by the Soviet Union for the Bear's purposes, not theirs, and are very outspoken about it all.

Scamp