The war, they say, is not going to be won in Saigon, nor on the battlefield, but in the villages and hamlets. This idea, by now trite (it was first discovered in Diem’s time and has been rebaptized under a number of names – New Life Hamlets, Rural Construction, Counter Insurgency, Nation-Building, Revolutionary Development, the Hearts and Minds Program), is the main source of inspiration for the various teams of missionaries, military and civilian, who think they are engaged in a crusade. Not just a crusade against Communism, but something positive. Back in the fifties and early sixties, the war was presented as an investment: the taxpayer was persuaded that if he stopped Communism now in Vietnam, he would not have to keep stopping it in Thailand, Burma, etc. That was the domino theory, which our leading statesmen today, quite comically, are busy repudiating before Congressional committees – suddenly nobody will admit to ever having been an advocate of it. The notion of a costly investment that will save money in the end has a natural appeal to a nation of homeowners, but now the assertion of an American “interest” in Vietnam has begun to look too speculative as the stake increases (“When is it going to pay off?”) and also too squalid as the war daily becomes more savage and destructive. Hence the “other” war, proclaimed by President Johnson in Honolulu, which is simultaneously pictured as a strategy for winning War Number One and as a top priority in itself. Indeed, in Vietnam, there are moments when the “other” war seems to be viewed as the sole reason for the American presence, and it is certainly more congenial to American officials, brimming with public spirit, than the war they are launching from the skies. Americans do not like to be negative, and the “other” war is constructive.