Chapter 7, Part 3
The White Rice Experiment
Our Navy doctor, Grant, was from Thibodaux, Louisiana, and was familiar with American rice farming, though he was not a farmer. He observed the meager yield of the local brown rice and decided to try to help. He wrote and asked his wife to send a 100-pound bag of white Louisiana rice. She was to take it to a local Navy unit and the Navy would transport it to him in Da Nang. It took several months but it eventually arrived. (This had the potential to become the Navy’s major feat in Vietnam!)
We hauled Grant’s “imported rice” to Son Duc on a stretcher and asked for a conference with the village leaders. Grant explained to them, through the ARVN interpreter, that the rice was high-yield and would produce perhaps twice the harvest of their brown rice. Informed by my experiences as a cotton and peanut farmer, I silently listened to Grant’s pitch and had a sinking suspicion he was selling snake oil.
The villagers were also skeptical; they questioned how it tasted and if it would survive in their fields. Grant suggested they take part of the rice and cook it for the whole village to taste. They agreed and took the bag to a large pot and poured almost half of it in. Grant panicked to see so much of his bag being used as a taste test. After a half-hour, the rice was ready and the villagers brought bowls and sampled the free meal. Upon tasting, they made scowling faces and complained that the rice was tasteless. Some did not finish their bowls.
The village council then gathered and considered what to do with the bland, white rice. They did not really want to plant any, but were polite and did not want to offend us. After the leaders had discussed it -- and Bao had consulted with Kim, they agreed to plant some in a small “test area” that was not very good soil anyway. If it failed, they would not have risked much. They said that if it produced, they would sell it on the market in the Danang. They did not want to eat it.
As it turned out, the Son Duc leaders were very wise. When planted, the rice was attacked by a local “rust,” a red fungi that formed at the water level on the rice stems and caused the plants to die and not produce any grain. Only about ten percent of the test site survived. My battery was relocated westward and I rotated back to the States before they planted their next crop. I do not know if they planted any of Grant’s surviving Louisiana rice.
Epilogue:
Peasant farmers, whether in Son Duc, Vietnam; or Johnston County, Oklahoma, are always up to their noses in risk – the slightest mistake, bad luck, or shift in the weather can put us up over our noses and we drown in debt or famine.
That the Son Duc rice farmers would even try a new strand of rice is remarkable and perhaps an error in the trust they had come to give we leaders of Mike Battery’s patrols. But at their local level, and with their keen instincts, they demonstrated their agricultural science in a matter markedly like the best agricultural colleges in American States: they tested the product and did not overly invest meager resources in a new, unproven seed.
A major, systematic fault in our efforts to assist the peasants was the lack of prolonged engagement: We were relocated, reassigned, busted, or rotated back to The World, with little or no attention paid to whatever technical advances or political relations had evolved with the peaceful Vietnamese who surrounded us.
This mentality has not shifted through the decades: the U.S. continues to engage in bush-fire wars that only deplete national resources and leave civilians in hundreds of struggling countries in terrible dilemmas, almost always worst-off than before we came.
Bo McCarver
From Greater Wapanucka, Oklahoma
For Radio-Free Oklahoma
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