Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  And further:

  Yes, people complained very much about the soldiers’ behavior. At night the soldiers used to come to the people’s houses to drink wine and eat. After eating, they got drunk and quarreled with each other, and they used their rifles to shoot at each other. If a family had girls, the soldiers came to flirt with them and tease them. Some of the soldiers even wore masks to blackmail the rich people in the village.77

  Huong’s particular story cannot be verified, but there is evidence that the GVN soldiers and officials behaved in a similar manner in many, if not the majority, of the villages of the south. And it was not so surprising. Marriage trapped Huong’s stepfather into a relationship he could not manage; similarly, their uniforms imprisoned the soldiers and officials into a position of authority for which neither their upbringing nor their training had prepared them. The soldiers were young peasants like Huong himself, yet they had no more sense of community with the strange villagers than if they had been Martians. Suspect in the eyes of the villagers, they in their turn feared exploitation both by the villagers and by the authorities above them:

  I talked to many of them. They told me they didn’t want to join the army, but that they were afraid of being drafted. If they were drafted, they would not be able to be with their families. Therefore, they joined the Civil Guards and the Self-Defense Corps in order to be with their families, and they were also able to receive some money to feed their families. This was what they said, but I think many of them were bad. They were very arrogant. They took the villagers as their servants.78

  The soldiers tried at least once to deny their rank, but they did not persuade Huong of their equality in misfortune. They did not, perhaps, persuade themselves. Taking on the traditional attitudes of authority, they entered the vicious circle of fear and bad faith — or “not a vicious circle, but a downward spiral,” as Ho Chi Minh’s foreign minister was to remark in a similar context.79

  It was the course already charted between Huong and his stepfather, and it was to be the course followed by so many of the Diemist officials in the villages of the south.80 The officials drew back behind their masks of “haughtiness” and “arrogance,” and the villagers retreated from them. Hiding their rice from the tax collector and their sons from the army recruiter, they protected themselves as best they could. Rarely — except as a result of NLF instigation — would they make an attempt to bargain with the officials or to complain of their behavior to the higher authorities at district and province level.

  “I didn’t like my stepfather, but I just hated him in my mind. I never showed my hatred.”81 Huong did not express his anger either to his stepfather or to the soldiers he considered “bad.” In the same way the villagers of the south concealed their hatred of the Diemist officials. In Huong’s village of Phuoc Khanh there was, after a while, nothing left between the villagers and their officials but the trappings of authority and submission: the villagers’ masks of respect, the soldiers’ masks of haughtiness. Finally, the soldiers donned real masks and began to make good their threats by bullying the villagers and stealing their food and money. Still the villagers made no outward sign of resistance. Trusting in no authority, they ceased to trust each other to the point where they could not organize to defend themselves. The brittle hierarchy of the village had split apart, and if it were to be put back together again, the initiative would have to come from the outside.

  Asked if he had ever quarreled with his stepfather, Huong recalled the time when his stepfather nearly hit him for fighting with another child; following that incident he left home.

  But the villagers of the south were unable to leave their land and their houses in order to escape the Diemist officials. Instead, they went into internal emigration. In public they claimed to “know nothing of the government”; even in private they rarely spoke of politics. (“Silence is golden, silence is golden,” said one village “notable.”) Their resistance took the form of passivity and denial. For two years NLF agents visited the village of Phuoc Khanh to distribute leaflets and recruit young men. They recruited the young man, Huong, and within daily view of the soldiers, he carried on the work of an insurgent, the silence of the villagers a shield of invisibility about him. Gradually they persuaded most of the village officials to stop working for the Diem regime. Those officials who continued to work for Diem had to work and sleep in the military outpost, for some 85 percent of the villagers favored the enemy. Openly by night, invisibly by day, the village belonged to the National Liberation Front. In the old language of Vietnam, the will of Heaven had changed.

  Huong did not simply run away from home, he fled to his aunt and then to his paternal uncle. Similarly the villagers went over from the Diem regime to the NLF, substituting one authority for another in the hope that the second would prove better than the first. In villages such as Phuoc Khanh there was very little alternative, for in the sense that the Vietnamese understood government — as a complete order, a complete set of relationships — the Diem regime had been no government at all. Under the guns of the soldiers the village had been reduced to a state of pure anarchy where men did not trust their masters and where no laws held. For those villagers the years of the Diem regime, no less than the war, represented a “time of troubles,” an “interregnum” in which the regime could not give the minimum protection and nourishment to its people.

  Such periods had come before in Vietnamese history — but never quite in the same way. Traditionally the villagers of the north and center found refuge behind the hedges of the village — the Confucian mask translated into the landscape. In times of trouble they retreated into the maze of interior pathways, as into the circumlocutions of the old-fashioned courtesy, to wait until one or another of the warlords gained full control over the village. Traditionally the emperors, too, had their own defenses. Spaced out across the landscape, their citadels symbolically established their claim to rule over the “mountains and rivers” of the country. But these stern towers of brick and stone also signified the distance between the emperor and his people — a distance that grew with the expansion to the south and the thinning of Confucian culture. When in the nineteenth century the Nguyen emperor Gia Long built a new imperial citadel in Hue, he chose the site for its seclusion according to the laws of geomancy, behind the Perfume River and the mountains called the “Screen of the Kings.”82 With walls over six feet thick, the new citadel was a fortress into which none but the mandarins, the ritually pure, might enter. When the French came to Vietnam in threatening numbers, the Nguyen retreated further and further into their world of rituals until in the end they behaved as though the citadel contained the nation. The walls of Hue never crumbled — at least not until the Tet offensive of 1968 — but, as the French armies moved across the Mekong Delta, the villages broke away from the capital, leaving the last of the Nguyen sacred prisoners without exit from their citadel.

  The history of the Diem regime bore a striking resemblance to that of the Nguyen dynasty. Taking his mandate from the Emperor Bao Dai in 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem, like Gia Long, borrowed foreign arms to use against his own countrymen. Had he managed to design a new political community, many South Vietnamese, including the members of the sects, might have approved his military actions as necessary to the restoration of social harmony. But, like Gia Long, Diem was a traditionalist who looked only backwards into the old stream of Confucian civilization, and he regarded the political movements that grew up out of the south as mere “sources of demoralization” within the country. Initially he tried to pacify the south with moral instruction — it was that, he supposed, that had insured the harmonious working of society in the past. When instruction did not work — and perhaps he had always feared that it would not — he found himself at a loss. The idea that he might consult the people or attempt to win popular support did not occur to him as a possibility. “I know what is best for the people,” he would repeat endlessly to his American advisers.83 Seeing himself as the patriarch, the father of his people, he
could not cope with the social disintegration. He scarcely knew what had happened or why. When it became clear that the people would not respond to what many Americans were pleased to call the “traditional government” of the Vietnamese villages, Diem’s reaction was to extend his own paternal rule down into the villages with the appointment of officials from the outside. But his administration would not function, and not surprisingly, for a Western-style bureaucracy could not function according to the traditional Way. The old order had rested upon two graduated pyramids, each insulated from the other by custom as well as by the time and space of the old empire. By imposing his own administration upon the villages, Diem broke down the last barriers and exposed the villagers to intolerable pressure. In the end the villagers would break away from him, as they broke away from the Nguyen emperors, leaving him helpless before the foreigners.

  In a sense those villagers who, ignorant of bureaucracy, saw their new, government-appointed village chief as Diem’s own personal representative to them perceived the true “substance” of the Diem regime more clearly than anyone else. This was not because the Ngo family controlled every official, but because Diem and Nhu resembled those officials. Like the Emperor Ly Thai To, Diem believed that the sovereign exerted a deep influence over the lives of his people — an influence beyond that of cause-and-effect or of simple example. Stripped of its magical overtones, the Confucian notion of “sympathy” between the ruler and the ruled consisted in the bonds of heredity and shared experience between the father and the junior members of the great family of the empire. And more than Ho Chi Minh, more than the bourgeoisie of Saigon, Diem had that sympathy. Like the majority of his people, he grew up in a very small world — Hue in the 1930’s was hardly more cosmopolitan than a back-country village. Like them, he watched, uncomprehending, while his world gave way before the strange forces of the West. Suddenly made responsible for a country fashioned by others and altered beyond recognition, he could only react as he had been trained to in his childhood. He was, in a sense, the lowliest of his officials, and the history of his reign was the history of Phuoc Khanh village, repeated on a larger scale. Like his officials, he was a man out of tune with his times, a sovereign of discord.

  In 1960 a group of eighteen senior Saigonese politicians met with the American press at the Caravelle Hotel to present a list of their grievances against the government. The Groupe Caravelliste, as it was called, denounced the regime for driving the peasantry into the hands of the Communists and called for an end to press censorship, to detention without trial, and to the measures that were demoralizing the army — the last an implied criticism of Nhu’s secret police. A few months later Colonel Nguyen Chanh Thi undertook an ill-planned and finally abortive military coup against the regime. The Ngo family used the coup as a pretext for intensifying all those measures the Caravellists objected to and slapped several of the politicians in jail.

  It was, of course, quite ridiculous for the Americans to expect Ngo Dinh Diem to establish an electoral democracy or to become “another Magsaysay.” Diem believed that the Hand of God, or the will of Heaven, supported him.84 He simply assumed that the people supported, or ought to support, him. The real difficulty was that he could not take the oldest of Confucian advice:

  The mountain rests on the earth:

  The image of SPLITTING APART.

  Thus those above can insure their position

  Only by giving generously to those below.

  — I Ching 85

  His refusal to “give generously,” to “yield” and “conciliate” as a correct sovereign should, resulted perhaps not so much from a quirk in his nature as from a realistic assessment that it would not work. Because he could create no political system, no political constituency apart from his family, his subordinates would have no compunction against behaving like unfilial children: they would try to exploit and finally to replace him.

  But Diem could not admit his failure. Given his position — his very identity as president of the republic — he had to believe that the people supported him, and that they had no other choice as long as he held the Mandate of Heaven. Within this circle of logic, closed off by the fact of American support, he could only assimilate the dissension by blaming it upon outside enemy agents — the “colonialists,” the “Communists,” or the “demoralized elements.” These elements could not, so Nhu assured him, be “re-educated” or brought back into the community. Unable to conceive of an alternative, Diem gave way to the ferocity of Nhu and to the attempt to exterminate these “enemies” wherever they were, in the villages and in his own administration. It was here that Diem’s alliance with the United States became a disaster for the Vietnamese people. Not only did the Americans give him the power to carry out his repression, but they gave him little alternative to a policy founded on the use of force.

  three

  Even as late as 1968 many American liberals, including many of the journalists in Saigon, believed the official claims that the United States was at least making an effort to develop South Vietnam and to improve the welfare of the South Vietnamese people. But as a look at the aid budget would show, the claims were, and always had been, false. Even in the period 1954–1960, before the guerrilla war began, the United States spent only a minute fraction of its aid on industrial or agricultural development — two sectors that required heavy investment if South Vietnam were to become an economically independent country. The land reform program of 1956 failed in part because the United States did not allocate capital for the Diem regime or the peasants to buy the land the large proprietors had by law to relinquish. Throughout the Diem era the United States spent approximately 90 percent of its aid on the creation of an army and a military bureaucracy.86

  This distribution of aid was not arbitrary; nor was it the result of mere shortsightedness on the part of the local American officials. In Washington U.S. officers conceived of their policy not as an attempt to help the Vietnamese, but as an attempt to hold the line at the 17th parallel against the Communists. These officials justified the entire aid and assistance program on the basis of this essentially negative, military goal. When it appeared that the main source of trouble for the Diem regime would come from below the 17th parallel, they made no attempt to change their priorities. All the social scientists notwithstanding, the Americans had no real theory of development, no firm belief that development would reduce the insurgency. And they would make no large-scale appropriations for humanitarian purposes. For the United States government, “security” — or the attempt at a military occupation of the countryside — always came first. The final shape of the Diem regime reflected that concern.

  Beginning in 1955, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group under the command of General Samuel T. “Hanging Sam” Williams dismantled the small, mobile units of the French-trained armed forces (the groupes mobiles) and replaced them with seven regular divisions armed with American infantry weapons. The reorganization exemplified the usual military obsession with precedent — in this case for the Korean War. The regular divisions were to prove perfectly unsuitable for a domestic guerrilla conflict. But the MAAG, instead of correcting its initial error, merely added to it by forming a new group of units — Marine, Ranger, and paratrooper battalions — from its own repertoire, so that with the addition of a navy and an air force, the armed forces of the Saigon government became a complete scale model of the American army, its soldiers all dressed in American uniforms labeled combat, Asian, men’s, large or small. At the same time the civilian side of the American mission, with the help of the Michigan State University teams, built up territorial forces that more or less paralleled the Viet Minh-NLF formations: a self-defense guard (later called the Popular Forces) to patrol the villages, and a fifty-thousand-man civil guard (later, Regional Forces) to provide provincial defense.87

  The very size of the American military commitment insured that the Vietnamese armed forces would eventually dominate the civil administration. By 1962 village chiefs were installe
d in most of the villages and military officers assigned to almost all of the crucial territorial posts of province and district chief. The “security” and “control” system was then complete. The village chiefs reported to the military district and province chiefs, the province chiefs to the three (later, four) corps commanders, and the corps commanders to the presidential palace. The whole system brooked no interference from any representative institutions, or indeed from any civilian body whatsoever. The United States had, in other words, made the Saigon government into a military machine whose sole raison d’être was to fight the Communists. The only difficulty was that the machine did not work. That the regular army divisions could not effectively cope with the domestic guerrilla warfare was only the superficial aspect of the problem. The real problem was that these divisions bore no relation to Vietnamese politics. From the American point of view, the ARVN appeared to be solid, a group of men in the same uniform trained and ready to do battle against the Communists. But within the Vietnamese context the ARVN was more like a collection of individuals, all of whom happened to be carrying weapons.

  In 1961 it became quite clear to the inner circle of the Kennedy administration that the NLF was threatening the very life of the Diem regime. New measures were required if the regime were to survive for long. After a trip to South Vietnam to survey the military situation General Maxwell Taylor recommended to President Kennedy that the United States send eight thousand regular troops to Vietnam for the purpose of raising the morale of the GVN and showing the Communists the seriousness of the American intent to defend South Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara queried the value of a token force, warning, “We would be almost certain to get increasingly mired down in an inconclusive struggle.” He recommended that the United States make a clear commitment to the defense of South Vietnam and support that commitment with the introduction of U.S. forces on the “substantial scale” that would be necessary to achieve military victory.88 President Kennedy did not accept McNamara’s recommendation or Taylor’s proposal as they stood. But over the next two years he doubled the number of troops Taylor requested, posting sixteen thousand American soldiers as advisers to the ARVN. At the same time he increased military aid to the Saigon government, reinforced the Vietnamese units with squadrons of American helicopters and airplanes, and undertook a CIA-sponsored program of clandestine sabotage operations in Laos and North and South Vietnam, all directed against the DRVN.