I'm a poor Vietnamese farmer at the beginning of the Vietnam War. When recruiters for the communist north come to my village, how are they going to convince me that I should be involved in the war?

Note: This answer will be expanded with further details tomorrow

It's a good question. It's also a little tricky to answer for a whole bunch of reasons!

I'm a poor Vietnamese farmer at the beginning of the Vietnam War.

What part of Vietnam are you from? Are you in the Central Highlands? The Mekong Delta? By the early 1960s, parts of South Vietnam were Viet Cong "Base Areas" that were largely under Viet Cong military and political control. Other areas were up for grabs. Still others were largely peaceful, with little Communist presence.

And where do we pin the "beginning" of the Vietnam War?

1954, when the Communist insurgency in the South begins? 1960, when the National Liberation Front (better-known to us as the "Viet Cong") are formed? 1961, when JFK's administration expands its advisory program and pushes the Strategic Hamlet Program? 1964, when the Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurs and North Vietnam is bombed? 1965, when U.S. combat troops land in earnest?

How are they going to convince me that I should be involved in the war?

In trying to answer the question, there are two obstacles:

1) The limitations of Vietnamese sources.

There just isn't that much information out there about the early operations of the Viet Cong. By the end of the war, most of the original participants and cadres were dead. The 21 years of fighting from 1954 to 1975 had ground down the Viet Cong and its predecessor organizations. The 1968 fighting of the Tet Offensive had bled the Viet Cong white. Tens of thousands died and tens of thousands more defected thanks to programs like Chieu Hoi and its "winning ticket."

In other words, many old-school Viet Cong weren't alive to tell their story after Saigon fell.

There's also the blatant bias of many wartime primary sources. Just look at some examples:

As you can see, these poster emphasize a few common themes of patriotism, national liberation, anti-imperialism, and anti-Americanism. There's also some Communist iconography. During the war, propagandists tried to create an idealized image of the Viet Cong soldier as a selflessly loyal patriot driven by a love of country and a hatred of the Americans and their "puppets." In short, the official wartime portrayal compresses Viet Cong fighters into one-dimensional caricatures.

Then there's the difficulty of trying to do research in Vietnam today. Vietnam's still a one-party state, and for the the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam, the "American War" is part of its foundation myth. It has a vested interest in how the war and its participants are remembered. Just look at how the Vietnam Military History Museum or the War Remnants Museum (warning: graphic) commemorate the conflict, for example.

While trying to research the Viet Cong, historian Hai Nguyen found that the "current government in Vietnam maintain (sic) a doctrine that discourage (sic) anything but a corrected memory of the conflict" and had to resort to doing "underground interviews" with veterans for fear of potential government interference in his research.

Bottom line: it's hard to research the motivations of individual Viet Cong fighters, especially those who joined early in the war. Those men and women had long odds of living long enough to tell their story.

2) The limitations of Western sources.

During the war, the U.S. was understandably very interested in understanding what made the Viet Cong tick. POWs and defectors were grilled for information, resulting in dozens of reports and studies. John Donnell's 1967 report for RAND, Viet Cong Recruitment: Why and How Men Join is one of the more-detailed ones. To some extent, these studies were successful, gleaning insights that helped make the Chieu Hoi defection program and its cousins successful. Still, this research tended to focus on the Viet Cong from 1965 onwards and didn't always dive into the 1950s and early 1960s. That makes using U.S. sources to address your question about the early Viet Cong a little tricky.

Plus, once the war ended, Western academic interest in the Viet Cong evaporated. Even now, there's been relatively little new scholarship done on Viet Cong recruitment.

So I've just written several hundred words telling you your question is very difficult to answer. It isn't impossible to answer, mind you. I just want everyone to understand the terrain we're dealing with.

Because of the incomplete patchwork of sources we're dealing with, we'll occasionally need to do a little induction, extrapolation, and informed speculation to answer the question about early Viet Cong recruitment.

~~To be continued~~