Lansdale tried to teach “psywar” techniques to Vietnamese troops, his curriculum focusing, as in the Philippines, on trying to improve “the relationship between the troops and the people.” He did not have much success. “Hungry and ill-paid troops still stole chickens, pigs, and rice during military operations,” Lansdale lamented. The French “found my ideas alien,” he wrote, “and suggested laughingly that I take up smoking opium instead.” Lansdale realized that to change the situation would require “some new direction from the top.”44 That new direction arrived, unexpectedly, on June 25, 1954,
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