Fire in the Lake (69 page)

17

Fire in the Lake

I hammer the pain of separateness into a statue to stand in the park. Below it I carve a horizontal inscription that reads: Soul of the Twentieth Century.

—Tru Vu
¹

Before entering Saigon, the military traffic from Tan Son Nhut airfield slows in a choking blanket of its own exhaust. Where it crawls along to the narrow bridge in a frenzy of bicycles, pedicabs, and tri-Lambrettas, two piles of garbage mark the entrance to a new quarter of the city. Every evening a girl on spindle heels picks her way over the barrier of rotting fruit and onto the sidewalk. Triumphant, she smiles at the boys who lounge at the soft-drink stand, and with a toss of her long earrings, climbs into a waiting Buick.

Behind her, the alleyway carpeted with mud winds back past the facade of the new houses into a maze of thatched huts and tin-roofed shacks called Bui Phat. One of the oldest of the refugee quarters,
²
Bui Phat lies just across the river from the generous villas and tree-lined streets of French Saigon. On its tangle of footpaths, white-shirted boys push their Vespas past laborers in black pajamas and women carrying water on coolie poles. After twelve years and recurrent tides of new refugees, Bui Phat is less an urban quarter than a compost of villages where peasants live with their city children. The children run thick underfoot. The police, it is said, rarely enter this quarter for fear of a gang of teen-age boys, whose leader, a young army deserter, reigns over Bui Phat.

Most of Bui Phat lives beyond the law, the electricity lines, and the water system, but it has its secret fortunes. Here and there amid the chaos of shacks and alleyways, new concrete buildings rear up in a splendor of pastel-faced walls, neon lights, and plastic garden furniture. In one of them there is a half-naked American who suns himself on a porch under a clothesline draped with military uniforms. He does not know, and probably never will know, that the house just down the alleyway is owned and inhabited by an agent of the NLF.

Bui Phat and its likenesses are what the American war has brought to Vietnam. In the countryside there is only an absence: the bare brown fields, the weeds growing in the charred earth of the village, the jungle that has swept back over the cleared land. The grandest ruins are those of the American tanks, for the Vietnamese no longer build fine stone tombs as did their ancestors. The U.S. First Infantry Division has carved its divisional insignia with defoliants in a stretch of jungle — a giant, poisonous graffito — but the Vietnamese have left nothing to mark the passage of their armies and an entire generation of young men. In many places death is not even a physical absence. The villages that once again take root in the rich soil of the Delta fill up with children as quickly as the holes made by the five-hundred-pound and thousand-pound bombs fill up with paddy silt, The desire for survival has been greater than the war itself, for there are approximately two million more people in the south today than there were before the war. But the balance of the nation has changed, and Saigon is no longer the village, it is Bui Phat.

From Dong Ha in the north to Rach Gia, the slow port at the base of the Delta, these new slums, these crushed villages, spread through all of the cities and garrisoned towns. They are everywhere, plastered against sandbag forts, piled up under the guns of the provincial capitals, overwhelming what is left of the Delta's yellow stucco towns. Seaward of Da Nang the tin huts of the refugee settlements lie between the ammunition and the garbage dumps, indistinguishable from either. These huts have been rebuilt many times during the war, for every year there is some kind of disaster — an airplane crash or an explosion in the ammunition depot — that wipes out whole hamlets. Around Qui Nhon, Bien Hoa, and Cam Ranh bay, where the Americans have built jetports and military installations to last through the twentieth century, the thatched huts crowd so closely that a single neglected cigarette or a spark from a charcoal brazier suffices to burn the settlements down. On the streets of tin shacks that run straight as a surrealist's line past the runways and into the sand, babies play naked in the dust and rows of green combat fatigues hang over the barbed wire like dead soldiers.

Out of a population of seventeen million there are now five million refugees. Perhaps 40 or 50 percent of the population, as opposed to the 15 percent before the war, live in and around the cities and towns. The distribution is that of a highly industrialized country, but there is almost no industry in South Vietnam. And the word “city” and even “town” is misleading. What was even in 1965 a nation of villages and landed estates is now a nation of
bidonvilles,
refugee camps, and army bases. South Vietnam is a country shattered so that no two pieces fit together.

In Saigon alone more than three million people live on swampy ground between river and canal in a space made to accommodate a quarter of a million. Saigon now has one of the most dense populations in the world, although few houses rise above two stories, for in the monsoon season whole quarters of the city sink into the marsh. Some districts are little more than gigantic sewers, lakes of filth, above which thatched huts rise on stilts, connected only by rotting boards. In other quarters where the refugees have not had time to build stilts, the sewage inundated even the houses. But there is nowhere else for these people to go. The squatters have already filled up all the free space; their shacks elbow across the main thoroughfares.

In the spring of 1970 crowds of disabled veterans came to the presidential palace to demonstrate against the plan of the Saigon municipality to tear down the squatters' shacks. The scene of these veterans — the blind, the tubercular, the double and triple amputees — advancing on the palace on crutches and wheely boards might have come straight from a Goya illustration of
The Disasters of War.
The first expression of the ignored and hugely silent masses of the city, the veterans marched upon the newly built palace and the American embassy like a nemesis.

At least there is for the moment employment and food in the cities. Westmoreland predicted that correctly. In the cities the women can become prostitutes or cleaning women; they can hawk gelatine or sit on the street corners with their trays of stolen PX goods. The men can push cyclos or break stones in the American construction projects; they can also steal or work at the docks stealing for others. Of course, their jobs will disappear slowly as the American troops move out, but in the meantime they are better off in the cities than in the free fire zones or a refugee camp. The Americans were correct there.

In one camp just south of Da Nang, the refugees from a nearby hamlet have lived for three months in shelters that would adequately house pigs or chickens. Their hamlet has been burned to the ground by the U.S. Marines, and they do not know when, if ever, they can go back to rebuild it. The district chief lives only one hundred yards away, but he has not come to visit them at all this month, no doubt because it was he who appropriated the supplies of cooking oil and bulgur designated for the camp, and the people are near starvation. A funeral procession makes its way through the camp — two women carrying the covered body of a child on a makeshift stretcher. The other villagers hardly look up to watch it pass. “The children die so quickly here,” says one woman. “But perhaps it is better that way.”

The physical suffering of South Vietnam is difficult to comprehend, even in statistics. The official numbers — 859,641 “enemy,” over 165,268 ARVN soldiers and about 380,000 civilians killed — only begin to tell the toll of death this war has taken. Proportionately, it is as though twenty million Americans died in the war instead of the forty-five thousand to date. But there are more to come. In the refugee camps and isolated villages people die of malnutrition and the children are deformed. In the cities, where there is no sanitation and rarely any running water, the adults die of cholera, typhoid, smallpox, leprosy, bubonic plague, and their children die of the common diseases of dirt, such as scabies and sores. South Vietnam knows nothing like the suffering of India or Bangladesh. Comparatively speaking, it has always been a rich country, and the American aid has provided many people with the means of survival. But its one source of wealth is agriculture, and the American war has wreaked havoc upon its forest and paddy lands. It has given great fortunes to the few while endangering the country's future and forcing the many to live in the kind of “poverty, ignorance, and disease” that South Vietnam never knew before.

Still, the physical destruction is not, perhaps, the worst of it. The destruction of an entire society — “That is, above all, what the Vietnamese blame the Americans for,” said one Vietnamese scholar. “Willfully or not, they have tended to destroy what is most precious to us: family, friendship, our manner of expressing ourselves.”
³
For all these years, the columns in the Saigon newspapers denouncing Americans for destroying “Vietnamese culture” have sounded somehow fatuous and inadequate to those Americans who witnessed the U.S. bombing raids. But the Vietnamese kept their sights on what is permanent and irreparable. Physical death is everywhere, but it is the social death caused by destruction of the family that is of overriding importance.

The French colonial presence and the first Indochina war swept away the Vietnamese state and the order of the village, but it left the family. And the family was the essence, the cell, as it were, that contained the design for the whole society. To the traditional Vietnamese the nation consisted of a landscape, “our mountains and our rivers,” and the past of the family, “our ancestors.” The land and the family were the two sources of national as well as personal identity. The Americans have destroyed these sources for many Vietnamese, not merely by killing people but by forcibly separating them, by removing the people from the land and depositing them in the vast swamp-cities.

In a camp on the Da Nang sand-flats a woman sits nursing her baby and staring apathetically at the gang of small children who run through the crowded rows of shacks, wheeling and screaming like a flock of sea gulls after a ship's refuse. “It is hard to do anything with the children,” she says. Her husband is at first ashamed to talk to the visitors because of his torn and dirty clothes. He has tried, he says, to get a job at the docks, but the Vietnamese interpreter for the Americans demanded a price he could not pay for putting his name on the list. Nowadays he rarely goes out of the barbed-wire enclosure. His hands hang stiffly down, as if paralyzed by their idleness.

An American in Vietnam observes only the most superficial results of this sudden shift of population: the disease, the filth, the stealing, the air of disorientation about the people of the camps and the towns. What he cannot see are the connections within the mind and spirit that have been broken to create this human swamp. The connections between the society and its product, between one man and another, between the nation and its own history — these are lost for these refugees. Land had been the basis of the social contract — the transmission belt of life that carried the generations of the family from the past into the future. Ancestor worshipers, the Vietnamese saw themselves as more than separate egos, as a part of this continuum of life. As they took life from the earth and from the ancestors, so they would find immortality in their children, who in their turn would take their place on the earth. To leave the land and the family forever was therefore to lose their place in the universe and to suffer a permanent, collective death. In one Saigon newspaper story, a young ARVN officer described returning to his home village after many years to find his family gone and the site of his father's house a patch of thorns revealing no trace of human habitation. He felt, he said, “like someone who has lost his soul.”
⁴

The soul is, of course, not a purely metaphysical concept, for it signifies a personal identity in life as well as death. For the Vietnamese to leave the land was to leave a part of the personality. When in 1962 the Diem regime forced the peasants to move behind the barbed wire of the strategic hamlets, the peasants found that they no longer trusted each other. And for an excellent reason. Once landowners or tenants, they became overnight improvidents and drifters who depended for their survival on what they could beg or take from others. Their behavior became unpredictable even to those who knew them.

The American war only completed the process the Diem regime had begun, moving peasants out of the villages and into the refugee camps and the cities, the real strategic hamlets of the war. For these farmers, as for their distant ancestors, to leave the hamlet was to step off the brink of the known world. Brought up as the sons of Mr. X or Mr. Y, the inhabitants of such a place, they suddenly found themselves nameless people in a nameless mass where no laws held. They survived, and as the war went on outside their control, they brought up their children in this anarchic crowd.

It was not, of course, the cities themselves that were at fault. To leave the village for the towns was for many Vietnamese far from a personal tragedy. In the 1940's and 1950's the enterprising young men left their villages voluntarily to join the armies or to find some employment in the towns. The balance of village life had long ago been destroyed, and, in any case, who was to say that the constant toil and small entertainment of a peasant's life was preferable even to the harshest of existences in a city? To join the army was in fact to see the world; to move to a town was to leave a life of inevitability for one of possibility. Though, or perhaps because, the hold of the family and the land was so strong, it contained also its contradiction — the desire for escape, for the death of the father and the end of all the burdensome family obligations. But it was one thing to escape into the new but ordered life of the NLF and quite another to escape to the anarchy of the American-occupied cities.

They are not like village children, these fierce, bored urchins who inhabit the shacks and alleyways of Saigon. When a Westerner visits these slums, the women look out shyly from behind their doorways, but the children run out, shoving and scratching at each other for a better view. They scream with hysterical laughter when one of their number falls off the planking and into the sewage. In a few moments they are a mob, clawing at the strangers as if they were animals to be teased and tortured. The anger comes up quickly behind the curiosity. A pebble sails out and falls gently on the stranger's back, and it is followed by a hail of stones.