A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Sheehan, Neil

  Diem turned next to the land. In the areas they had held south of the 17th Parallel—the 225-mile stretch of Central Vietnam and their enclaves in the Mekong Delta—the Viet Minh had seized French rice plantations and the holdings of “Vietnamese traitors” who sided with the colonial regime. These lands had been distributed to tenant farmers. The peasants had also conducted an ad hoc land reform themselves in much of the rest of the country, including regions that had been under sect domination. Many of the landlords had abandoned their rice fields to seek safety from the fighting in the towns and cities. The peasants had divided up these holdings or had ceased paying rent on those they were working. With 85 percent of the population living in the countryside and drawing a livelihood from agriculture, it was difficult to find a single issue of more profound social, economic, and political sensitivity than land.

  Lansdale and other senior Americans pressed Diem to launch a land-reform program of his own in order to undercut the Communists by fully ending the injustices of landlordism in the South. The American desire would at first glance appear to create a conundrum for Diem, because he was opposed to any alteration of the traditional social structure. He wanted to return to the landlords of the South as much of their land as was practical and have them act as a buttress to his regime. He wanted the peasants to remain peasants. The trip to Tuy Hoa in 1955 taught him that he liked trips to the countryside, although the excitement of having his feet stamped on once was enough. He was a man who needed decorum, and he saw to it that future occasions were orderly. He would chat in friendly fashion with groups of farmers as well as give formal speeches. What he never did was to question the peasants seriously in order to learn their desires. He believed that his duty was to tell them what to do and their duty was to obey. He disposed of the conundrum by announcing that he was conducting a land-reform program while accomplishing something else.

  Diem took away all of the land that the Viet Minh had distributed to tenant farmers by invalidating the land titles these peasants had been given. He then confiscated the former French property for his “agrarian reform” program, and he did distribute much of this land, but he gave a lot of it to the Northern Catholic refugees rather than to Southern farmers. Most of the rest of the land he seized went back to the original Vietnamese landlords who had sided with the French or to other supporters of the regime who could buy it. (Diem’s land-reform act specified a ceiling of 247 acres for an individual holding, quite generous by Vietnamese standards, but the Ngo Dinhs encouraged their officialdom to smile at subterfuges to get around the ceiling. The minister for agrarian reform was a landlord. The entire holding of a landlord family would be disguised by splitting it up among family members.) The regime also confiscated and returned to its former owners the abandoned land the peasants had taken for their own. The small minority of Southern tenant farmers who did receive land discovered that they had to pay for it in yearly installments. When the Viet Minh had given them land they had been told it was theirs by right. They were not nearly as angry as all of the other former tenant farmers who were now tenants again as a result of Diem’s “reform.” By 1958, Diem attained his objective. Through unstinting resort to the armed forces and the police, he reversed the pattern of land ownership in the Mekong Delta back toward one resembling the prewar pattern, when 2 percent of the owners had held about 45 percent of the land and approximately half of the farmers had been landless.

  Disorder came with loss of land. In his ignorance and his concern for the protection of his power to the exclusion of anything else, Diem paid no heed to the Civil Guards and the SDC militia. When he first returned in 1954, Diem thought that he could do without large numbers of infantry and substitute fighter-bombers. (To the end of his days he advocated indiscriminate air and artillery bombardments and was forever urging the Americans to bring in more planes and howitzers.) The civil war with the Binh Xuyen and the sects taught him the value of a regular army as a bastion, or a sledgehammer. The unwieldy, road-bound ARVN that the U.S. Army generals in the Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) then built for him (on the rationale, an unlikely one, that the Viet Minh would next resort to a Korea-type invasion across the 17th Parallel) therefore got all of his attention. It did not occur to him that good territorial formations were equally important to his long-term survival. He allowed the forces that were supposed to provide local security to become instead the principal source of insecurity for the inhabitants of the countryside, a daily manifestation of the “capricious lawlessness” of Diem’s regime, as one atypical American observer of the period put it. The Civil Guards received some care from the province chiefs, who needed them, but were ill equipped and often unpaid. They used their guns to extort a salary. The SDC militia were treated with such relentless shabbiness that the majority became indistinguishable from bandits. The militiamen caused most rural crime. They were constantly robbing and raping and beating up farmers who dared to protest. Many of the peasants remembered that the last time they had known any security and decent government had been under the Viet Minh or their sect theocracies.

  Because of the sufferings of the war against the French, the population of the South might still have put up with the Ngo Dinhs for quite a while had it not been for the Denunciation of Communists Campaign that Diem let loose in the summer of 1955 with U.S. encouragement and help.

  Not all Viet Minh withdrew to the North after the Geneva Conference. Ho and the Communist leadership left in the South in covert status an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 military and civilian cadres. U.S. intelligence referred to these cadres by the same term Lansdale used for the anti-Communist guerrillas he hid in the North—”stay-behinds.” A large number were Party members. The stay-behinds had access to hidden arms, but they were under orders not to use violence or to foment an insurrection against the Ngo Dinhs. Instead, they were to maintain their cover occupations as farmers and village and hamlet officials, and in the towns and cities as everything from lowly cyclo drivers to teachers and other professionals, while they secretly agitated to foster popular demand for the holding of the all-Vietnam election in 1956. They were to wage the “political struggle” Ho was subsequently to refer to in his June 1956 letter to the 130,000 Viet Minh and their dependents who were withdrawn to the North.

  Ev Bumgardner recalled that in 1955 the Viet Minh actually did abandon their bases in the swamps and rain forests and ceased armed resistance. One day late that year while driving back to Saigon from Cambodia in a jeep, he and a friend decided in a moment of self-dare to detour through one of the most famous Viet Minh bases, War Zone C (also called the Duong Minh Chau War Zone) in the rain forest north of the Cao Dai’s Holy See at Tay Ninh town. Using a prewar map as a guide, they turned off down a dirt road into the base region before second thoughts of caution could stop them. The experience was more haunting that it was frightening. This forest that they had feared might still be a haven of guerrillas (they told themselves that the guerrillas would probably let them pass because the war had officially ended) was a desolate place. The signs of a recent Viet Minh presence were there. The Eiffel bridges along the road, which had shrunk to little more than a track from nine years of disuse, were all dismantled, the steel spans dropped into the stream beds to impede French columns. Because it was the dry season, Bumgardner was able to put the jeep into four-wheel drive and navigate around the bridges and up the opposite banks. The paths running off the road into the forest of sixty-foot-high teak and mahogany trees, whose canopy of branches blocked the sunlight from the dense hardwood underbrush below, also announced that this had been a guerrilla base. Bumgardner and his friend saw no one during the entire trip. The 8,000 to 10,000 trusted cadres who had been instructed to stay in the South were by no means the only Viet Minh there. The country was full of men and women who had fought as regional and part-time village and hamlet guerrillas, served as administrators in the local Viet Minh governments, or worked as intelligence agents, messengers, or guides for the revolutionary forces. There wer
e also the Viet Minh sympathizers, most obviously the families and relatives of those who had gone North, or who had died fighting the French. These people were not Communists. They were the non-Communist majority who had followed the Communists out of nationalism. In addition, there had always been a romantic side to the “Resistance War,” as the Vietnamese named their struggle in conscious equation with “La Résistance” against the Nazis in occupied France. (On the last night of Dien Bien Phu the Viet Minh played over the radio frequencies of the garrison the “Song of the Partisans,” the theme song of the French Resistance, to taunt the defenders that this time they were fighting for an unjust cause: “Friend, can you hear the black flight of the crows in the plain?/ Friend, can you hear the muffled cry of the country being loaded with chains?”) All sorts of Vietnamese had been addicted to “Resistance songs.” The Binh Xuyen gangsters who murdered Viet Minh liked to play recordings of “Resistance songs” in their dens. Rebellions usually get better with the telling, and after Dien Bien Phu the appellation “Viet Minh” acquired a greater aura of romantic pride. Vietnamese who had stood aside out of timidity suddenly developed memories of having been “Resistance fighters.” It was difficult not to take pride in the humbling that men of their race had inflicted on the Europeans who had been their masters for so long.

  Diem did not understand that if he persecuted the Viet Minh he would be persecuting a great mass of non-Communist Vietnamese who looked back on what they had done with the emotions of patriotism. Nor did he realize that he would be arousing revulsion in still other Vietnamese who had come to regard the Viet Minh as patriots. He had sat out the war in hiding or in exile, and he and his family did not share these emotions. In his loathing of Communism, Diem regarded all Viet Minh as evil. The majority who were not Party members had been contaminated by Communism. Madame Nhu liked to use the French term—they had been “intoxicated” with Communism. The covert 8,000 to 10,000 stay-behinds were going to stir up a cry for the 1956 election, and they might try to foment guerrilla warfare in the future. The stay-behinds therefore had to be identified, arrested, and shot. Some of the other Viet Minh adherents who seemed to genuinely repent their collusion with the Communists could be allowed to confess their sins as a public example. The rest had to be isolated in “reeducation camps” until their minds could be scrubbed clean of subversive thoughts by indoctrination. Known and likely sympathizers, such as the families of those who had gone North or who had been killed in the war, had to be segregated from the uncontaminated elements of the population and watched so that they did not have an opportunity to cause trouble.

  The U.S. government was as eager as its new surrogate in Saigon to get the Viet Minh stay-behinds “cleaned up,” in Lansdale’s euphemism, and to intimidate the other adherents and sympathizers into permanent submission. American thinking roughly paralleled that of the Ngo Dinhs. The Vietnamese Communist Party had controlled the Viet Minh; ipso facto, all Viet Minh were Communists for practical purposes. Those who were not Party members were “dupes” of the Communists and had to be treated like Communists. The National Intelligence Estimates of the period put together by the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community recognized that the Viet Minh cadres in the South were behaving themselves. One estimate noted that “the Communists in South Vietnam have remained generally quiescent. They have passed by a number of opportunities to embarrass the Diem regime.” The currently peaceful behavior of the stay-behinds was of no consequence in American reasoning. “The Viet Minh, despite their relative quiescence, represent the greatest potential threat to Diem,” another estimate said. It went on to state American intentions in the simple and unemotional language that bureaucracies of all nations seem to favor for the description of violent acts. The United States needed “a strong, stable anti-Communist government” in Saigon. One of the “fundamental problems” to be solved in reaching this objective was “the suppression of Viet Minh military and political capabilities remaining in South Vietnam.”

  A team of CIA specialists knowledgeable in solving such “fundamental problems” arrived in Saigon in June 1955. They were part of the first group of civilian advisors sent to the Diem regime. They came under the cover of a Michigan State University advisory group ostensibly financed for development work by the International Cooperation Administration, the predecessor agency of AID. Their task was to teach the police and intelligence services more efficient American methods to “expose and root out Communists.”

  The CIA team did not have to teach the men of the regular police, the Süreté, and the security agencies Nhu was starting to form how to repress. They had been well schooled by the French. They might repress the wrong people and let genuine Communists escape with their bungling and enthusiastic brutality (the Americans had little success in persuading them to keep precise dossiers, to cross-reference, and to share information between the various services in order to build up an encyclopedic profile of the Communist Party organization and membership in the South), but they did know how to repress. Women arrested were normally raped as well as tortured. The torturers considered rape a perquisite of their job. Torture produced names. Those named were quickly arrested and tortured. They named others whose arrest and torture led to still others in geometric progression. Not everyone arrested was tortured. The torturers lacked the time to attend to every prisoner, but it was frequent enough to be a common fate. Anyone arrested could be certain of receiving a bullet (Diem authorized the province chiefs to execute on suspicion alone, without even a hearing) or a sentence to a concentration camp. Release was rare. Arrest was presumption of guilt.

  No one knows how many real Communist cadres and others suspected of being Party members were killed while the campaign gained momentum during the latter half of 1955 and reached a summit of violence in 1956 and 1957. Those doing the killing were not accustomed to keeping an accurate tally of the lives they extinguished, and after a time the murdering accelerated to the point where, as in the land-reform campaign in the North, no one would have been able to keep score or afterward to reconstruct the number of victims with any precision. The extent of the killing can be documented well enough to say with certainty that thousands died. The arrests often took place at night. Plainclothes police agents, accompanied by Civil Guards or SDC militia, would surround the house and seize the man or woman they wanted. If the victim was to be executed out of hand, as sometimes happened after the campaign was well under way and the security services had enough names to satisfy them for the moment, the condemned would be taken to a road or path near the hamlet and gunned down. The corpse would be left for the family to find the next day. The sight of the body was meant as an admonition to others.

  At least 50,000 more fortunate victims were sent to concentration camps. The regime officially admitted to imprisoning that many people for “reeducation” in camps around the country by the time the campaign ended in 1960. Unofficial estimates put the number of people sentenced to concentration camps at approximately 100,000. Again given the lack of accurate record-keeping, no one will ever know precisely how many tens of thousands were put behind barbed wire and how many of these tens of thousands perished in the camps. The police and other forces of the regime, having served the French, naturally applied the same test of loyalty they had in the past. All those who had opposed the French were automatically suspected of disloyalty to the Ngo Dinhs.

  The recantation ceremonies, which Nhu patterned after what he had read of Communist “people’s tribunals,” were staged everywhere amid the shooting and sentencing to concentration camps as a psychological device designed to demonstrate the regime’s capacity for mercy to those who merited it. In the hamlets, peasant men and women with Viet Minh records were permitted, at the whimsy of province and district officials, to save themselves by humiliation. They were often rehearsed to make the recantations more dramatic. Their neighbors would be assembled to hear them describe atrocities they had committed for Ho Chi Minh and his Communist devils. They would be
required to beg a compassionate President Ngo for forgiveness, and to trample and throw into a fire the red banner with the five-pointed gold star that had become for them during the long war against France the flag of a reborn Vietnamese nation. In the cities and towns the ceremonies tended to be grander affairs with simultaneous group recantations. Portraits of Ho, letters of commendation that had been a frequent form of praise for men in the Viet Minh fighting units, and any other souvenirs of the Resistance were fed to the flames as well. In Saigon in February 1956 a large crowd of civil servants and their families were assembled to watch 2,000 former Viet Minh recant.

  Around this time, Bumgardner remembered, USIS discovered that “Viet Minh” was an appellation of patriotism and that Diem was doing the Communists a favor by identifying all Viet Minh as Reds. The American psychological warriors invented the term “Viet Cong,” an abbreviation of “Vietnamese Communists,” and persuaded the Saigon newspapers to start substituting it for “Viet Minh” later in 1956. Bumgardner recalled how difficult it was to get Diem to say “Viet Cong” consistently instead of “Viet Minh.” (Americans assumed the new term was derogatory because in their dictionary “Communism” was a synonym for “evil.”) Diem was not the only one who had difficulty growing accustomed to the USIS artifice. As late as the spring of 1959, Maj. Gen. Samuel Myers, the returning deputy chief of the MAAG, spoke with satisfaction of the Denunciation of Communists Campaign to a hearing of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He boasted that “the Vietminh guerrillas … were gradually nibbled away until they ceased to be a major menace to the Government.” The term “Viet Cong” eventually did come into common usage within the American community and the Saigon government by the early 1960s, as a result of hard work by Bumgardner and his colleagues. Like so many of the other cosmetic manipulations the Americans tried in their world of good intentions, it could not alter the history of the Vietnamese. The Viet Minh by any other name was still the Viet Minh.