Fire in the Lake (82 page)

———. “Some Southern Vietnamese Writers Look at the War.”
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
2 (October 1969): 53–58.

———.
Vietnam and the Chinese Model.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Wurfel, David. “The Saigon Political Elite: Focus on Four Cabinets.”
Asian Survey
7 (August 1967): 527–539.

The Year of the Pig.
Documentary film. Directed by Emile de Antonio. 1969.

Zasloff, J. J. “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960: The Role of the Southern Vietminh Cadres.” RAND Corporation Collection RM-5163/2-ISA/ARPA. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, May 1968.

———. “Political Motivation of the Viet Cong and the Vietminh Regroupees.” RAND Corporation Collection RM-4703/2-ISA/ARPA. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, May 1968.

“
Fire in the Lake
is a magnificent achievement, huge, wide ranging, fascinating, stimulating. It is the first book I would recommend to anyone to read on Vietnam.”

—Martin Bernal,
New York Review of Books

This landmark work, based on Frances FitzGerald’s own research and travels in Southeast Asia in the era of the Vietnam War, takes us inside Vietnam—into the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages and the corrupt, crowded cities, into the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks—and reveals the country as if through Vietnamese eyes. With a clarity and authority unrivaled by any book before it or since,
Fire in the Lake
shows how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.

“Fresh and enthralling.… FitzGerald fills an enormous gap by explaining the Vietnamese from their own point of view and by describing the war from the perspective of Vietnamese culture.”

—Kevin P. Buckley,
Newsweek

“FitzGerald is a good writer and a cool one: there are no moral tantrums or cast-iron ironies here. What she undertakes is a social history of a remote and truly enigmatic world beginning with a fascinating, leisurely description of traditional Vietnamese society.”

—Martha Duffy,
Time

“I find
Fire in the Lake
the bravest and most intelligent effort by an American writer to comprehend the Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass relationship between the Vietnamese and the Americans.”

—Laurence Stern,
Washington Post Book World

Frances FitzGerald is the author of several bestselling books, including
Fire in the Lake, America Revised, Cities on a Hill,
and, most recently,
Way Out There in the Blue
and
Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth
(with photographs by Mary Cross). She is a frequent contributor to
The New Yorker.

Cover design by Chika Azuma

Author photograph by Philip Jones Griffiths

Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

^*
“The English word ‘struggle,’ a pale translation of the Vietnamese term
dautranh
, fails to convey the drama, the awesomeness, the totality of the original.” (Douglas Pike,
Viet Cong
, p. 85.)

^*
Ngo Dinh Can was later taken to Saigon, tried in court, and executed by a firing squad in a public square. Madame Nhu was in the United States at the time on a lecture tour, and Archbishop Thuc was in Rome. Neither, needless to say, returned to Vietnam.

^*
The Communist insurgencies in Cambodia and Laos have always been inextricably bound up with that in Vietnam.

^*
In the wake of the Tet offensive in Hue the GVN estimated that a total of 5,800 people were dead or missing. The vast majority of those deaths certainly occurred as the result of the Allied bombing of the city and the bloody battles between the U.S. Marines and the entrenched North Vietnamese divisions. The GVN authorities, however, later discovered 1,200 bodies buried in shallow mass graves within the city — a half of which, according to official reports, showed signs of deliberate execution: hands bound behind the back, and so forth. Later on the GVN discovered two more mass graves a long way from the city — one almost at the other end of the province — containing something over 1,200 bodies. Three NFL defectors reported witnessing the execution of about four hundred of these people. By piecing various bits of evidence together Douglas Pike concluded that the NLF cadres had taken these four hundred people — most of them Catholics — from their sanctuary in a church and had marched them out of the city. One NLF unit then executed twenty of them as a public example and slated the rest of them for a program of political re-education. Another unit then took charge of the prisoners, and, after wandering about the countryside with them for several days, killed them all. Pike believes this unit wished to dispose of the witnesses to the previous crimes, but it seems more than likely that in fleeing the American forces the unit saw the prisoners as an impediment to its progress and a threat to the local organization.
    According to other evidence, the assassination of certain GVN officials, VNQDD leaders, and former Can Lao Party members was performed under orders from the NLF Security Section. The other killings do not appear to have been planned at all. A report from the Front Security Section in Quang Tri province indicated that many of the security cadres questioned the mass execution of those who had already “surrendered” to the troops on the grounds that this was inconsistent with NLF policy. Other reports indicated that the responsible units did not execute the right people in the city. The Tet offensive clearly created intense confusion and terror on all sides. Members of the NLF local forces and hangers-on, as well as members of other political groups, may have used the period of confusion as a chance to revenge themselves on old enemies. Since the days of Diem, Hue had, after all, been hot with political passions — so much so that it seemed to be the prism for all of the political conflicts throughout the country.

^*
Americans, informed that “Viet Cong” means “Vietnamese Communist,” have always wondered why the term was not acceptable to the NLF. The explanation lies not only in the fact that the NLF was not an exclusively Communist front, but in the translation of “Communism.” “Viet Cong” was a term invented by the Diem regime to connect the NLF with the secular, proletarian-based revolution that Ho Chi Minh had specificially rejected.

^*
American officials might also assert that this and other such peace groups were in fact directed by the NLF. In many cases they would be correct. But that fact would not alter the contention. It is only reasonable that a group, once it reached an NLF position, should have contact with the NLF and even welcome NLF direction. The point was that these city people had arrived at an NLF position.
    Such groups as the Popular Front tended to have no permanent organization for the excellent reason that the Thieu regime would not permit them to survive as public association.