Page:Allied Participation in Vietnam.pdf/91

 Rh

a field artillery battery. Attached to this force were six surgical teams and one rural health team which had been working in Vietnam under an earlier Philippine assistance program.

The plan called for the deployment of the Philippine Civic Action Group to Tay Ninh Province where it would clear the Thanh Dien forest, which for years had been a Viet Cong base area near the provincial capital. In addition, the group was to prepare the site for a refugee resettlement village of 1,000 families and at the same time conduct extensive civic action projects in the surrounding area.

The Philippine advance party arrived in Vietnam on 16 August 1966 to co-ordinate the arrival of the main body. With this group were three civic action teams that immediately began to conduct medical and dental programs in the area surrounding the base camp.

After the arrival of the main body in October 1966, work commenced in full. The first major project was the construction of the base camp on the eastern side of Tay Ninh West airfield. The construction was planned so that the base camp could be converted into another refugee resettlement village after the withdrawal of the Philippine Civic Action Group, Vietnam; 150 permanent prefabricated buildings of Philippine design were constructed, along with ten kilometers of road, a drainage system, and an electric lighting system.

The completed complex was more elaborate than was needed for a Vietnamese village, and most observers believed that in the long term the site could have been used more productively as a major training facility. Some American observers criticized the amount of work and materials which went into the construction of the base camp. Some said that by any standards, it was one of the "plushest" military camps in South Vietnam. It appeared to some that the Philippine Civic Action Group was intent on building a showplace that would impress visitors, especially those from the Philippines, and by so doing offset criticism leveled against the Philippine presence in South Vietnam. Much of the time and material used in the base camp construction, the critics felt, could have been better used on projects outside the camp.

Several alternate proposals for the use of the site were made early in the camp's history. One was that it be turned over to the South Vietnamese as a base camp for government troops; but this was not practical since there were few regular troops in the Tay Ninh area. A second proposal, more serious at the time because it had been expressed publicly by the province chief, was that the camp be used as the nucleus of a new university. When