Marines) building new schools about as rapidly as ad­ditional villages were being protected from the VC. The secondary school system, however, remained ill-organized and ineffective. The province government annually announced ambitious public works plans, but delays in release of funds by the national ministries and shortages of construction equipment and skilled workers prevented completion of many projects. The amount of land under cultivation in the province had increased during 1969, with about 70 percent of the acreage devoted to rice, but land reform had made lit­tle progress due to a lack of trained administrators in the villages and hamlets. Quang Nam's social welfare program, according to the PSA, was:

. . . very poor. Little has been accomplished in care of the needy or in caring for war victims, widows, orphans, and disabled soldiers. The program in this province con­sists mainly of feeding the orphans, war victims, blind, and widows

.... In the past this has been a token program at best. . . .29

Quang Nam's most distressing social problem was its large refugee population, probably the largest sin­gle refugee concentration anywhere in South Vietnam. The exact number of refugees was obscured by the peculiarities of GVN reporting. Colonel Hixson ex­plained:

The refugee figures that are shown as refugees . . . are official refugees who have not been paid their [GVN] refu­gee allowances. Once they have been paid their refugee al­lowances, they go in a refugee camp. They are still not back in their home. They're still a "social welfare problem. . . ."30

To keep the number of officially recognized refu­gees awaiting payment constant or declining and thus show progress to their superiors, GVN officials habitu­ally paid some their allowances, taking them off the rolls, and then added controlled numbers of actual but hitherto unacknowledged displaced persons. As a result, while estimates of the "official refugee" popu­lation in Quang Nam ranged from 75, 000 to 100, 000, Colonel Peabody, the III MAF G-5, estimated the ac­tual number of refugees as nearer 200, 00031 GVN policy called for returning refugees to their home vil­lages, or for upgrading long-inhabited refugee camps into permanent hamlets and villages. The allies in Quang Nam would launch ambitious resettlement projects during 1970. Even so, the size of the problem would continue to dwarf the efforts toward a solution.

In the struggle for the allegiance of the people, ac­curate information about how many people there were and where they lived was vital for success. In Quang Nam, the GVN lacked such information, not only about refugees, but about permanent residents. Late in 1970, in connection with the 1st Marine Division's effort to reduce harassing and interdiction fire in populated areas, Colonel Paul X. "PX" Kelley reported that in the 1st Marines TAOR:

. . . Maps currently available are outdated and do not represent a reliable picture of local habitation. . . . The migratory habits of many Vietnamese civilians are such that they move constantly from place to place, more often than not without the knowledge of any GVN officials.... Many district officials can provide only vague, inconclusive esti­mates relative to [lie location of civilians, theoretically un­der their political cognizance.32

The most severe deficiencies in the pacification ef­fort were rooted in the character of the GVN and the nature of South Vietnamese society and hence beyond III MAF's authority or capacity to remedy. Neverthe­less, insofar as they could, Marines throughout Quang Nam worked to strengthen and extend pacification. Throughout 1970, with men and material diminish­ing as redeployment proceeded, the Marines continued and further refined pacification programs and tech­niques they had developed earlier in the war.