Fire in the Lake (58 page)

By 1967 the Vietnamese officers had begun to look at the war from an entirely new perspective. General Phan Truong Chinh, for instance, the commander of the Twenty-fifth Division and the stalwart of generals Khang and Ky, apparently ceased to think of himself as conducting a military operation. In that year more of his men were killed in traffic accidents than in combat. The fact that he was a poet, and a good one by Saigon standards, may have had something to do with it, but he seemed preoccupied by the presence of three American divisions within a fifty-mile radius of his division headquarters. In November of 1966 he had put the Long An province chief under house arrest for going beyond his authority and requesting helicopters from the U.S. First Division for hot pursuit of the Viet Cong. This and other uncooperative acts (the general had managed to stop three American operations in the ten days before that incident; he had also caused the current American hope, Colonel Sam Wilson, to leave his pacification project for operations in the trackless Plain of Reeds) led the general's adviser to send out a secret report on him to General Westmoreland. Within a few days Chinh acquired a copy of the report and issued an order forbidding all his officers from speaking to their American advisers. For Chinh, as for many other GVN officials, the main concern now seemed to be not the Communists but the Americans.

The attitude of the Vietnamese officials towards the Americans was a complicated one. The sense and tone of it are perhaps best explained in the famous parable by the Greek poet, Cavafy. In that poem the people of a fictional city are waiting for the approach of a barbarian horde. Having decided not to resist, they wait in the public square to welcome the barbarians. The emperor sits passive on his throne, the senators stop passing laws, and the orators are quiet so as to make the best impression on the barbarians. After they have waited all day, the people hear that the barbarians have turned away from the city. And they are strangely disappointed, for as they say, “Those people were a kind of a solution.” The Vietnamese officials waited in the same manner for the Americans — only the Americans did not turn away, did not leave them with the problem of how to cope with their own freedom. They entered the city and did what they wanted with it. The officials never grew to like them — in a sense there was no question of “liking,” for communication was impossible — but they nonetheless grew to depend upon them. Whatever happened in the city, the barbarians were responsible. The barbarian horde committed outrages upon the citizens from time to time, but the situation was generally satisfactory. The Vietnamese officials no longer had to worry about their own survival, and they felt no obligation towards their masters. The barbarians were all-powerful; they did what they liked, and therefore the Vietnamese were free to do anything they liked. In a sense, life was more difficult for the barbarians than for the people of the city.

In 1967 an experienced American adviser told the
New York Times
correspondent, R. W. Apple, that recently his “counterpart,” a battalion commander in the Vietnamese Twenty-fifth Division, had disappeared during one ferocious all-night battle. Assuming that the officer was dead, the adviser took command of the battalion and led it through the fight. The next morning, however, the commander emerged from the foxhole where he had spent the night, shook himself, and ordered his men to move out. When the adviser suggested that he deploy his men in a less bunched-up formation, the officer coldly ignored him and marched his men back to base as they were.
¹⁵

The officer was an exception — an exception, that is, among thousands of exceptions — but the story is an excellent illustration of what, in a wider sense, U.S. military “support” did for the Vietnamese government. Instead of helping the officials to govern, it alienated them from their own position as leaders. Such officers did not act like “puppets,” but they saw themselves as puppets or mercenaries with respect to their public duties. Mistrustful of the Americans, the Vietnamese attempted to box them into accepting the total responsibility for a situation that was, as the Vietnamese saw it, of American making. General Chinh, Mme. Cao Van Vien, Lederer's famous Major Hao, General Thieu himself — all of them watched the Americans as a prisoner watches his jailer until finally they could make a defiant gesture showing the imprisonment of the guard and the freedom of the prisoner. They felt what they did was in no way immoral, but merely a matter of self-protection.

In many ways the most tragic figures of the war were those Vietnamese who trusted the Americans and believed in their own responsibility for all those fine words written at the Honolulu Conference. In Dinh Tuong province a young half-Chinese official, the protégé of a fatherly American AID adviser, had dedicated himself to the thankless task of trying to persuade the villagers to organize and build schools for their children with government aid. When his American protector departed the province, the local police chief threw the young man in jail on trumped-up charges and demanded all of his wife's jewelry as a ransom. Because the official was honest and had friends among the Americans, he was seen as a threat to the whole provincial system of corruption. Similarly, Major Nguyen Be, a former Viet Minh officer and one of the few men in the GVN with any political concern for the peasantry, became, as the deputy province chief of Binh Dinh, the focus of all American hopes for the pacification program in early 1966. While in Binh Dinh he told (or was thought to have told) his American friends too much about the workings of the local bureaucracy. Unable to remove him by any other means, the province chief, a cousin of the corps commander, General Vinh Loc, one day sent his agents out to assassinate him. Alerted just in time, Be escaped the city in a jeep and, thanks to his Viet Minh training, managed to hide out in the nearby villages for a week without being caught by either the GVN officials or the Front cadre.

Be escaped and managed to get a job training the RD cadre for the CIA in Vung Tau. But his colleague, another former Viet Minh officer, Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau, elected to the Assembly in 1967, was later jailed by General Thieu against all the laws of the constitution and the protests of high officials in the mission. Chau's error was to have complained publicly of a certain businessman who, as Thieu's bagman, had a great deal to do with passing Thieu's bills through the Assembly. Many of the deputies at first supported Chau against the official charge that he had negotiated with his brother, an officer in the NLF, but many of them and much of the Saigon press turned against him when, in his defense, Chau admitted that he had told the CIA all about his meetings with his brother. Thieu emerged from the encounter (like Nguyen Ngoc Loan before him) as the protector of Vietnamese sovereignty. The Catholic scholar, Nguyen Van Trung, expressed the feelings of many Saigonese when he wrote:

The countries belonging to what is called the free world revere democracy and equality, yet in fact they are only democratic and egalitarian within their own countries.… With regard to small countries… their policy is still the policy of domination.… Only this domination is not overt and crude as under the forms of the old-model colonialism, but is rather very discreet, subtle, and scientific.… Because it does not directly control and govern, the masses of people do not resent it. Furthermore, it not only does not produce feelings of nationalism but makes those feelings disappear. Even those revolutionaries who fought against the old colonialism, because they now hold power, receive the aid of “advisers” and enjoy it. For precisely this reason, the new-model policy of intervention is more dangerous than the old colonialism, because the new style does not create conditions which give rise to opposition.
¹⁶

The argument had a great measure of truth to it. The Americans were in control of South Vietnam, and any claims they made for the independence of the Saigon government were hypocritical given that fact. But the argument was also in some sense a rationalization. The “masses of people” resented the French no more and no less than they resented the Americans: it was the Viet Minh who focused that resentment, and there was no such group within the Saigon government. The fact was that many Vietnamese of the cities had wanted the Americans to intervene — wanted them not only for practical reasons but for the psychological ones suggested by Cavafy. They wanted the Americans to be the all-powerful barbarians, to take responsibility for the war — at the same time that they feared American domination. By one of those strange reverses that the mind makes for the sake of self-consistency, both the desire and the fear merged in an expression of fear that the Americans would leave them. The constant demands — the demands of the Fifth Ranger Group for more supplies, the demands of the Thieu government for more American aid
¹⁷
— were demands for reassurance that the Americans were “sincere” and would continue to feed them whatever the cost. The demands were insatiable — far in excess of the need — for the reassurance could never be obtained: the Americans
were not
their leaders and thus could never be trusted. Paradoxically, of course, the American attempts to assure the Vietnamese that they were not colonialists, and that they would one day leave Vietnam, only heightened the Vietnamese anxiety about their good faith. How could they enter into a relationship they knew would not last? The Americans who demanded that the United States take over the Saigon government were responding to this anxiety in a classical colonial fashion. Here again, however, the Americans could not win because the expressed fear was only an aspect of the real one: the Vietnamese were afraid of their own dependence.

While the young American advisers went on trusting in the future, the “communication” and “cooperation” they expected with the Vietnamese would never materialize. Both peoples — individually and collectively — were making conflicting demands which neither could satisfy. Furthermore, both had a wholly different idea of the relationship. One incident — an incident among many — that happened to a Marine doctor in Quang Nam province described these contrasting images.

As part of the Marine “civic action” program the doctor, so he explained, spent the whole of one very hot day in a hamlet going from door to door, examining patients and dispensing medicines without charge. At the last house — a shop, as it happened, where the women sold cold drinks — he treated four members of the family for various minor illnesses. When he had finished his work, he asked the woman politely if he could have a cold beer. The woman refused. She demanded that he pay for it — and at American rates. Later, as he recounted the story, the Marine officer was once again puzzled and angry. “Those Vietnamese,” he said finally, “they just aren't… they have no
gratitude.”

The Marine would seem to have been justified in his anger. But, as Otare Mannoni has pointed out, gratitude is a strange emotion in that it is made up of two seemingly contradictory expressions: first, that the individual is deeply indebted to his benefactor, and second, that he is not indebted at all. Gratitude is, in effect, a compromise, and one made almost uniquely by Westerners, to reconcile the demand for obligation with the need to maintain personal independence. In asking for gratitude the Marine had not been quite as altruistic as he imagined, for, while he asked for no monetary payment, he asked for a deeper acknowledgment of his services — an emotional quid pro quo.

In a sense, the American mission was making the same kind of complicated demand upon the Vietnamese. The officials asked the Saigon government both to maintain its independence and at the same time to oblige them by following their advice. They regarded their commitment to the GVN as being in the nature of a business deal — a loan of funds and management consultants such as a large company may make to a smaller one that is threatened by bankruptcy. As they were to have no return on their investment except that of foiling the schemes of their rival consortium, they assumed they had the right to some thanks, if not to obedience.

Like the seller of cold drinks, the Vietnamese officials did not take the same view at all. They saw the relationship not as a business transaction but as a long-term personal engagement between superior and inferior — between master and slave when there is only one master and one slave in the market. Even those Vietnamese intellectuals who opposed the regime objected to American demands for a quid pro quo. Writing in 1969, at least five years after the Americans had last threatened to cut off any aid to the GVN, one intellectual complained:

In going to help us, you always placed your own interests above personal relationships and against the moral spirit of East Asia; why should so many people not feel irritated? Every time you felt your own interests being chipped away, you did not hesitate to use every method to apply pressure against us, and the nut and the bolt of the whole matter has always been the question of money. Your special cardsharping trick [lit., your professional fingers] was always “aid and the cutting of aid.”
¹⁸

As the Vietnamese reasoned, the Americans had no right to exact anything from them; on the contrary, the Americans owed them something for the use of their soil to fight a war that was really directed against China and the Soviet Union. The fact that so many American soldiers thought of themselves as giving their lives to save the lives of a lot of “ungrateful” Vietnamese officials did not change their point of view. Like Caliban in
The Tempest,
they believed the Americans had already broken their trust and relieved them of the necessity to show their obligation. They were free to work against the Americans up to the point at which the Americans would abandon them.

The more Americans spent their best efforts and their lives in Vietnam, the less influence the United States had for reform upon the GVN. With both men and material resources, the Americans were enforcing corruption and destroying the tissue of Vietnamese society. Further, they were tearing the GVN officials further and further away from their own people. The thousands of dead ARVN soldiers, the bombed-out villages, and the refugees, all attested to the alienation. The officials continued to speak of “the Vietnamese nation” and the “Vietnamese people,” but they had lost whatever residual solidarity they once had with the villagers. The Saigon government had turned over on its back to feed upon the Americans.