Fire in the Lake (8 page)

These eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wars seemed like ancient history to most Americans in Vietnam, but they were very much present in the minds of the Southeast Asian leaders during the American war. In the intervening period of eighty years the five countries had held a merely artificial peace — a peace imposed by the British and the French colonial administrations. With the coming of independence the old territorial disputes broke out again, fired by the same old fears and ambitions. Even the balance of power remained much the same. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia remarked in 1961:

Westerners are always astonished that we Cambodians are not disturbed by our future in which China will play such a powerful role. But one should try to put himself in our place: in this jungle, which is the real world, should we, simple deer, interest ourselves in a dinosaur like China when we are more directly menaced, and have been for centuries, by the wolf and the tiger, who are Vietnam and Thailand?
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In the 1950’s and 1960’s the Cambodians and the Lao had only one hope for maintaining their independence, and that was for one or more of the great powers to insure their territorial integrity against their two more powerful neighbors. In 1954 France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China made an agreement at Geneva to this end. In 1962 the United States appeared to take over the protective role of France and Britain by agreeing, tacitly in the case of Cambodia, overtly in the case of Laos, to support neutralist regimes in both countries acceptable to the Communist powers. Later, however, in the pursuit of the Vietnam War it was to wreck these agreements and destroy the fragile basis on which the independence of Laos and Cambodia rested. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia and Souvanna Phouma of Laos did their best to maintain neutrality and resist participation in the war. But like Belgium or Poland, their countries were finally helpless before the larger powers. Their future depended on an overall political settlement. Thailand, however, being larger and more distant from the conflict, had somewhat more leverage. The military-supported regime in Bangkok granted all the American requests for bases and staging areas in return for princely sums of American aid. Their bargain did not, however, entail an ideological commitment to the Americans or even full support for the American war in Vietnam. The Bangkok politicians had no interest whatsoever in helping the Vietnamese, Communist or non-Communist. Their obligation to the United States for feeding and strengthening them domestically was strictly limited by their desire not to interfere while the Vietnamese destroyed each other and by their calculations as to the final outcome of the conflict. There is an old Thai proverb to the effect that it is worthwhile to try and help an elephant that is trying to stand up, but perfectly useless to help one that happens to be falling down.

It was one of the inconsistencies of American public relations that while the American officials painted over these acute national differences with the rubric of “Asian dominoes” or “Free World Allies,” they simultaneously brought into sharp relief the differences between northern and southern Vietnamese. The American public thus had the impression that while all Southeast Asians were alike — that nationality stood for little among them — the South Vietnamese were a nation distinct from the northerners. Certainly there were differences between the two groups of Vietnamese, but these were small by comparison with the separate culture and the thousand years of history that distinguished the Vietnamese from the Thais and the Cambodians. For until the eighteenth century there was no such thing as southern Vietnam. The demilitarized zone at the 17th parallel, drawn by the members of the Geneva Conference in 1954, corresponded roughly to the line that for a millennium and a half had marked the border of Vietnam and the kingdom of Champa. Only in the fifteenth century did the Vietnamese break through that border and begin their colonization of the south. Gradually, as the nation expanded, it lost its political cohesion, and for a period of time the 18th parallel marked the division between two warring Vietnamese states. It was during this period and afterwards under the colonial regime that the southerners grew slowly away from the northerners. In the twentieth century the southerners had different accents and to some extent different customs from the northerners. But would this difference sustain a new political division of the country? From the American point of view the question was not simply whether the difference was great enough, but whether it implied southern strength and independence. The question is political in the most profound sense. To answer it it is necessary first to have some notion of the foundations of the precolonial Vietnamese state and the changes that occurred within that part of Vietnamese society that colonized the south.

In his defense of Vietnamese sovereignty Le Loi’s court poet himself pointed out the sources of the weakness of the Vietnamese state from its beginnings. On the one hand, he said, the early Vietnamese monarchs governed their country in exactly the same manner as the classical Chinese dynasties. On the other hand, the Vietnamese “habits and customs” differed from those of the Chinese. The contradiction was an important one, for the reason that the Confucian government was essentially a family affair. The Chinese empires achieved their breadth and duration largely by virtue of the extraordinary length of their patrilineal loyalties. Even today Chinese who have lived in Thailand, Indonesia, or Vietnam for generations maintain their attachments to relatives in China and, by extension, to China herself. Up until the twentieth century a Chinese aristocrat might have understood his family loyalties to include everyone in his district or canton — or other noblemen a thousand miles away. But the Vietnamese of the empire drew their boundaries closer to home. Even in the Red River Delta, the region of Chinese occupation, the peasants worshiped their ancestors only to the ninth generation. After ramifying through several nuclear families, their clans would split apart into separate hierarchies unbound by any tie of community.

As a result of this difference in “habits and customs,” the Vietnamese government had never operated in exactly the same manner as the Han, the T’ang, and the Sung, even during its first four hundred years of stability. The emperors followed the rituals of state (each gesture a
déjà vu
) so that time would not flow through the empire, but the “natural order” of the universe did not hold throughout the society. “The laws of the emperor are less than the customs of the village,” runs the best-known of Vietnamese adages. In Vietnam it was the village rather than the clan that stood as the primary community. The village was an informal association of families. An institution peculiar to Vietnam, it had probably developed during the period of Chinese occupation as a response to the decline of the feudalistic principalities. At that point it had served to weld the small and otherwise autarchic families into communities large enough to meet the demands of the traditional rice culture. The village was always the efficient unit of local government, but in the fifteenth century, when the court abandoned the village mandarinate and retired the lowest order of its officials from the villages, it became a quasi-autonomous unit.

In the 1960’s the shells of the central Vietnamese settlements — even voided and half-destroyed by the war — showed what strength the villages must have had in that traditional landscape. The villages of northern and central Vietnam stood like small fortresses in the center of their rice fields, closed off from the world by bamboo hedges. When the mandarin rode out from the stone ramparts of his citadel, he traveled quite alone, a fish out of the water of the population. The mandarin was more an ambassador from the court than a governor in his own domain. He had only the authority to negotiate with the village council for the amount of taxes and the number of army recruits to be submitted to the empire. If the negotiations broke down, he had no resort except the final one of calling in the imperial troops and burning down the hedges of the village.
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Almost self-sufficient, the villages required from the government only the planning of large-scale public works (the dikes) and external defense. Their councils of notables, selected by co-optation from among the senior, the well-educated, and the wealthy men of the village, conducted their external affairs, organized their religious and social life, and managed their administrations. The councils reserved a certain proportion of the land for common use, organized cooperative enterprises, and apportioned the common burden of the tax and the draft. The councils were organized hierarchically on the pattern of the Confucian family, yet they retained enough flexibility to adjust the economic as well as the purely Confucian relationships between various families. Rather than referring misdemeanors and petty disputes to the mandarins, they dealt with them themselves on the basis of informal, customary law. For below the brittle network of family relationships lay the reality of the land and its production of rice. In times of war or revolution the villages shut like oysters, protecting their essential substance from the disorder of the outside world.

In their very self-sufficiency the villages gave Vietnam hidden powers of resistance. In times of war they provided not only a source of recruitment for the regular army but a base for guerrillas. Their high bamboo hedges shut out strangers better than any jungle redoubt. When the guerrilla slipped into the village, he became invisible among other men.
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Because he belonged to the village, he had a ready-made system of logistics and supply, a community that trusted and cooperated with him against all enemies from the outside. In the path of the Chinese armies, as in the path of the French Expeditionary Corps several centuries later, the guerrillas carried out a scorched earth policy with the consent of the villagers. When the empire was divided during the Mongol invasion, the villages themselves opposed the Chinese until national leadership was restored. This deep, underground resistance constituted an important element of the Vietnamese national identity. It was one of the “habits and customs” that distinguished the Vietnamese. As an eighteenth-century Chinese emperor said: “The Vietnamese are indeed not a reliable people. An occupation does not last very long before they raise their arms against us and expel us from their country. The history of past dynasties has proved this fact.”
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The independence of the villages gave strength to the nation, but it proved nonetheless an obstacle to the maintenance of a national government. For Le Loi’s poet to compare the early Vietnamese dynasties to the T’ang and Sung of China was, after all, to elevate his own country into a different dimension: the “empire” of the Ly and the Tran was no larger than a single Chinese province. The Vietnamese state remained stable for as long as it remained within the circle of the Red River Delta, but once it breached the Gates of Annam it began to suffer the consequences of its original political frailty. In the year 1400 the general Le Qui Ly, who had saved his country from the last of the Chinese invasions, turned his army north from the frontier and overthrew the Tran emperor, and laid claim to the Mandate of Heaven. But the great mandarins refused to support him, and the empire shattered along the same faults that had opened during the war for independence. Irreconcilable, the powerful families of Vietnam rose like thunderheads in an electrical storm — their division giving the Chinese a new opportunity to launch an invasion and occupy the country. Only after two decades of guerrilla warfare did the new military hero, Le Loi, succeed in uniting them under his command and driving the Chinese out of Vietnam.

The rebellion of Le Qui Ly did not destroy the Confucian empire, but it did signal the difficulty that future emperors would have in maintaining central control. The Vietnamese empire rested upon smaller units than did the Chinese, and so the danger of its breaking apart was always greater. When the armies of the successful new Le dynasty undertook the conquest of Champa, it was the villages rather than the state that conducted the colonization of the land to the south. From the now crowded plains of the Red River Delta, colonies of the young and the landless set out to pioneer the new territories. These colonies would be supported by the parent-villages until they became self-sufficient; then they would flesh out and close in upon themselves.
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In this process of amoebic reproduction the mandarinate could only certify an accomplished fact by granting the new villages charters of their incorporation into the empire. The difficulty of controlling these colonies naturally increased as they migrated away from the circle of the northern delta and down the thin strip of coastal plain to the Mekong.

Broken laterally by the foothills of the Annamites, the ribbon of cultivable land in what is today central Vietnam is only three hundred miles wide at its greatest extent and forty-five miles wide at its narrowest. As the imperial armies fought their way down through the kingdom of Champa, they left behind them a new line of settlement six hundred miles long. In their seasonal campaigns they could only temporarily secure the stretch of lowland. Isolated within the short valleys, the villages offered easy targets to bandits who made their bases in the jungled slopes of the foothills. Under local military pressure the thin web of loyalty that bound them to the empire would snap off. With time the blood lines that bound the villagers to their ancestors in the north would similarly break and be forgotten. As the frontiers of settlement drew further and further from the capital, the Le emperors began to lose control of their territory in a more and more permanent manner. The bandits secured agricultural bases and turned their guerrilla bands into full-fledged armies. The most successful among them established their own bureaucracies of mandarins and, securing the villages against their smaller rivals, entered into a competition with the Le monarchy. By the beginning of the seventeenth century two warlord families, the Trinh and the Nguyen, had succeeded in eliminating all other contenders and in partitioning the country between them. The Trinh took control of the Red River Delta; the Nguyen withdrew to the Annamese coast to rule that part of the country that continued to expand southward. Though both remained determined to reunify the empire — still under the nominal suzerainty of the Le dynasty — their all-out civil war settled slowly into a boundary dispute. At the end of the seventeenth century they broke off hostilities at a wall built by the Nguyen across the narrow Gates of Annam at the 18th parallel. Once the most powerful and strictly Confucian of all the dynasties, the Le lived out their days as sacred prisoners in the imperial citadel, their empire divided between the northern and the southern warlord-kings.