Fire in the Lake (52 page)

These young officials were right — at least as far as they went. The difficulty was, of course, that their own advocacy of the war drove them back to the official embassy position that the United States was helping the Vietnamese people — despite all evidence to the contrary. Their critique thus lacked any systematic basis. In order to account for the failings of the GVN both before and after the American intervention, they had to criticize individual Vietnamese, individual Americans, and the defects of almost every individual program ever perpetrated by the Americans in Vietnam. Brought to an extreme, their position was not unlike that of Robert Shaplen, the
New Yorker
correspondent, who in his cautious, reasoned analysis for nine years attributed the demise of every pacification program and of every attempt to create a stable, constitutional government to the failure of American officials to give more constructive advice at the right time. The young embassy officials would have rejected the comparison — their position was far more complicated, and would become more complicated still the longer they stayed in Vietnam — but there was an inescapable logic to it. Those who supported the war — that is, all of the officials and most of the journalists — had to line up behind one of two general positions: the first, the conventional diplomatic position that the Saigon government was not so bad and would improve with American help; and the second, the position held by many within the regular military forces (which were, after all, suffering the consequences), that the GVN would never reform itself until the Americans took stricter control over it. In fact the two positions were more like each other than not, for neither acknowledged that the United States was in fact the cause of the problems within the GVN.

Created, financed, and defended by Americans, the Saigon regime was less a government than an act of the American will — an artificial military bureaucracy that since the beginning of the Diem regime had governed no one and represented no one except upon occasion the northern Catholics. The U.S. attempt to polarize the Vietnamese between Communists and non-Communists made as much sense as an attempt to polarize the American people between Southerners and Catholics: the two groups were not in any way equivalent. Indeed, there were not two sides at all. The period from 1963 to the spring of 1965 demonstrated clearly enough that American-supported governments corresponded to no internal political forces. After a dozen coups and counter-coups, the Ky junta was not even the leadership of the army, but a group of officers who happened to be occupying the Armed Forces Headquarters at the time of the American military intervention: a directory of hostile generals, ministries full of tangled and struggling civil servants and a rabble of soldiers in American-made uniforms, caught and held by the glacial flow of American troops. The American mission had the option to depose Ky, but as Jean Lacouture once pointed out, if the names of all the generals were put into a hat and Vy or Thi pulled out, the results would have been much the same. What the Americans did not see was that this constituted a stable situation — and one that resulted directly from the stability of American policy in Vietnam.

Since the days of the Diem regime, the Americans had assumed that technical changes such as a retraining program, an increase in aid, a change of priorities or province chiefs, would change the nature of the GVN and start it on the road to improvement. But year after year those administrative reforms were attempted, if not achieved, and they made no difference at all. The ARVN soldiers fought badly not so much because they were badly trained as because they had nothing to fight for (the proof of this being that they often fought bravely and well when cornered or when defending their own villages). Those soldiers who allowed the Front forces to burn the hamlet on Route 4 and those that in 1967 permitted the destruction of seventy-five million dollars’ worth of American airplanes in Da Nang
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obviously saw no connection between that hamlet, those airplanes, and the welfare of their own families. Had they risked their lives for that hamlet, those airplanes, they would have gained neither the immediate reward of a promotion nor the long-term reward of knowing they had brought the goal of a just society nearer. The same was true of the bureaucrats, the police, and all the various groups of cadre. The CIA trained them to use many of the NLF techniques, but the cadres saw no reason to use them. Unlike the NLF they did not depend on the support of the villagers for their lives and they did not feel that their efforts would be rewarded by those in authority. And they were correct in that assumption.

The injustice and the anarchy were not, however, the responsibility of the Saigon generals. As the Front leaders perceived most clearly, the generals were themselves as much victims as their subordinates. When they stole from the government or mistreated their own men, they did so out of much the same motives as their subordinates. Without any larger system of social security, they obeyed only the morality of the kitchen — the commitment to feed themselves and their families. Exiled by General Ky after the Buddhist crisis, the defense minister, General Nguyen Huu Co, wrote to a former colleague from Hong Kong:

My family of 12 children is now fine. My oldest child, nineteen years old, passed the first exam and is still studying at the Lycée Yersin, Dalat. The other children are also in school and I don’t have to worry much about my family. Luckily, while General Khanh hated me, I took my cue and constructed a house in Nha Trang on government land which the Americans rent for three million [piastres] per year. After annual taxes and maintenance, I still have half that for myself, enough to raise my 12 children. If it weren’t for that, I don’t know what I would do for a living. In our career as generals, and once we are turned to pasture, it is very difficult to change profession.
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General Co was perhaps too modest. One of the biggest profiteers of the period, he continued after his exile — or so the story went — to make a comfortable living by acting as financial liaison for the generals remaining in power. Still, his letter shows the reason and the necessity for much of the profiteering. What is more striking, it shows that General Co had a real sense of virtue about his undertakings: he had fulfilled his social obligations; he had in fact fulfilled them a great deal better than had those many honest and improvident officers who were fired for similarly arbitrary reasons. Evidently Co, like so many of the generals, felt himself isolated and (in the most precise sense of the word) alienated from his fellow officers, from the Americans, and from the state to which he belonged. Even while in office he did not think of himself as the defense minister, but rather as an obscure officer who for a moment held that title in a disorderly, Malthusian world.

In 1963 the Buddhists had protested against a small-time tyrant, but in 1966 they had protested this anarchy, this Shanghai-ism emanating from Saigon. The most sophisticated of them saw the irony of it: the Americans who despised the corruption had collectively visited it upon the Vietnamese. From the bar girls with their PX transistors to General Ky with his helicopter and his silver jet, the Saigonese were engaged in little more than a scramble for their own selfish interests. And the Americans could do nothing to stop it, for by their very presence they made the city people into prostitutes, parasites. Saigon was the first to go, for, so recently a dependency of the French, it was not strong enough to stand up to the Americans. Nor had it really wished to. As the perpetual middlemen, the servants and translators for the foreigners, the Saigonese wished for a new master to replace the French and to defend them against their own countryside. Now once again feeding in safety on the foreigners, they gave up their own independence of spirit, their own will to reform themselves.
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In his first major speech of the 1968 campaign, Senator Robert F. Kennedy cited the corruption and the general frailty of the Saigon government as reasons for a withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. It was a conclusion that did not seem at all just to many urban Vietnamese, even those who had long and staunchly opposed the military regime. At a meeting at the American Council of Foreign Relations Senator Tran Ngoc Chau, a former Viet Minh officer soon to become the foremost Vietnamese proponent of a negotiated settlement, replied with restrained anger: “As a politician, I understand him very well. But as a Vietnamese I must be angry with him. We are to blame for the Government’s failure, but so are you Americans. When you took over the war, you took on a responsibility towards us, and you must recognize that responsibility.”

Chau’s remark had a double edge to it. He was speaking of the morality of the “objective” situation, but he could also have been speaking of the psychological effects of the American occupation on the Vietnamese leaders. As the generals saw it, the United States had taken on total responsibility for their country. After his fall from power Ky called the Americans “colonialists,” though he himself had requested American money and air and troop support. Despite their fierce struggles for position and power, he and the other generals felt themselves to be no more the government of their country than when they were subalterns under the French regime. How should they resist the overwhelming power of the United States? Where were the terms of equality? Now that the United States had come to Vietnam in force, it would, so the generals assumed, do what it had set out to do with or without their participation. The ARVN officers took an aggressive nationalist stance in public, but they expressed other feelings in their actions. In 1966 the American command discovered that only one Vietnamese field grade officer had been wounded in action since 1954 (this by contrast to the NLF, the North Vietnamese, and the American forces, whose officer corps took many casualties), and out of the hundreds of officers graduating from the military academy in the past few years, only two or three cadets had requested assignments outside of Saigon. The American military briefers spoke of the ARVN officers’ “tiredness,” but the condition was more like that of apathy and a sense of impotence. Why should they expose themselves to danger in a war that was not theirs? What possible function would it serve? Ironically, their passivity only convinced the Americans that the Vietnamese were not capable of running their own country.

In an interview with Pham Van Dong, one American asked the North Vietnamese foreign minister how he could call the Saigon government an “American puppet” when it acted with such consistency against American interests. “Ah,” replied the minister, “it’s a puppet, all right. It’s just a bad puppet.”

The paradox explained the situation perfectly, for with regard to the United States, the generals, like the Buddhists, stood at the crossroads of two contrary emotions, one of which was a real desire for American protection. Like the Emperor Dong Khanh, who first submitted to the French, they made a bargain with the foreigners, abdicating their legitimacy in return for the attributes of foreign power. Since the beginning of the Indochina War the generals had been the Ariels
par excellence
of Vietnam — and appropriately enough, for it was in the army that the believers in a superhuman power, whether magic or technology, found each other. They were therefore “puppets” in the sense that until the Americans broke with them, they would not overstep the limits and risk the withdrawal of American support. Presented with reports of American massacres or the damage done by nine years of American defoliation in South Vietnam, they would not defend their own people; they would ban the subject from the newspapers. On the other hand they, like the Buddhists, feared domination by what they saw as a vast and implacable power. Angered by journalists’ questions, Premier Ky once said, “There is no reason you or other people should impose on us to surrender or accept domination from the Communists. Now we want to be free men. We are willing to fight.”
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His statement said two things at once: “we do not want you to abandon us” and “we are afraid of losing our independence to you.” Ky expressed his hostility to American domination — a sentiment that he, like most Vietnamese, sincerely felt — but it was clear that he could do little to create a counterforce, and that his only power lay in his ability to manipulate the Americans.

In this enterprise the generals, unlike the Buddhists, were largely successful. Appearing at conferences with the American brass to pledge “the work of the social revolution” and “the attack on hunger, ignorance, and disease,” they would return home to their speculations in American goods and their anti-American intrigues. In late 1966 General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then the Saigon chief of police, arrested a man whom he described to the newspapers as a “Viet Cong spy on his way to the American embassy with peace proposals.” Whether or not such a man existed, and whether or not the embassy knew anything about him, Loan’s little public relations job was carefully calculated to fan the suspicions of the Saigonese that the Americans would sell them out in secret — were it not for the vigilance of the Ky government.
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The American embassy could do nothing to counteract his move. As the Buddhist crisis showed, they had only one lever of influence over the Ky regime, and that they would not use, for to withdraw support from the Ky regime would, they calculated, be far too great a risk to take in the middle of the war. The situation was therefore a most curious one: the Americans dominated the GVN but could not make it work for them.

Beyond this central conundrum, the difficulty for the Americans was that not only the Communists, but all Vietnamese in the opposition — a category that by 1966–1967 included most politically conscious Vietnamese — considered the Ky regime to be an “American puppet.” In a realm that lay beyond the reach of argument, even such men as Dr. Dan Van Sung, the most pro-American of Vietnamese, believed that the Ky regime was corrupt, inefficient, and unjust because the Americans wanted it that way. If they had not wanted it that way (so the logic went), they would have done something about it. As a solution to the dilemma, the editor of a Saigon English-language newspaper, the Jesuitical Ton That Thien, quite seriously suggested that the Americans depose Ky and find themselves a good puppet who would stamp out corruption and carry out their reform program. Thien himself knew that the Ky government did not obey American wishes (his implication was that everyone else believed it did), but he believed that the Americans had the power to change it for the better. His argument revealed a strange parallel between Vietnamese and American thinking: even in the most sophisticated circles, both peoples believed that the United States could control the Vietnamese government — a belief that, while wholly misplaced, was comforting to both parties. As Lieutenant General Stanley “Swede” Larson once said, “What’s wrong with those Americans down in Saigon? Why can’t they produce a decent civil government to match the military effort?”
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Clearly the Ariels had found their Prosperos.