As McNamara had predicted, these new measures did not deter the NLF. The success of American policy thus continued to rest on the capacities of the Saigon government. In 1961 American officials presented the Diem regime with a new list of demands for political, economic, and military reform. Possibly they thought that the Diem regime would now meet these demands, for with the increase of military aid the Americans took steps to transform their “advisory” relationship to one of “limited partnership” with the Saigon government.89 In 1962 the Military Assistance Advisory Group became the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) — “something nearer — but not quite — an operational headquarters in a theater of war.”90 Foreign advisers — British and American — were inserted into every part of the GVN bureaucracy with the authority not only to advise but to insist on the adoption of new programs. Within this new arrangement the Diem regime undertook a new pacification plan, designed by Diem’s British advisory team and called the Strategic Hamlet program.
The centerpiece of American strategy in Vietnam for the next two years, the Strategic Hamlet program was by far the most ambitious of the Diemist land programs and by far the most destructive. In its very conception the program was a study in misplaced analogy. Sir Robert Thompson, the head of the British team of advisers to Ngo Dinh Diem, proposed to build up a system of fortified villages such as the British had used against the Communist insurgency in Malaya. The difficulty was that while in Malaya the British had fortified Malay villages against Chinese insurgents, in Vietnam the Vietnamese would have to fortify Vietnamese hamlets against other Vietnamese who had grown up in those hamlets. The plan purported not to involve the displacement of the villagers from their homes and fields, as the other failed resettlement programs had done. But it involved precisely that in most regions of the Mekong Delta. Anyone who took an airplane trip across the Delta could have seen that the villagers did not live in concentrated settlements, but in farmhouses scattered through the paddies and along the edges of the dikes. Because the new program made no provision for the allotment of new land to the villagers, many of the peasants who moved into the strategic hamlets ended up with no land at all — five miles being the same as five hundred to those who had to walk to their fields each day and back. The American and British advisers overlooked this basic economic difficulty. The strategic hamlets offered them the military advantage of concentrating people into small, fortified settlements that the armed forces could actually surround. And by 1962 the military situation appeared to be desperate.
The Ngo brothers had from the beginning favored the new program in the expectation that it would give them more direct control over the villages. Once they learned how much money the Americans were willing to commit to the new plan, and the possibility of direct American intervention if they did not concur, they rushed ahead to implement it.91 Ngo Dinh Nhu took charge of the program himself and insisted that two-thirds of the sixteen thousand hamlets in South Vietnam be fortified within the next fourteen months. His theory — or rather the theory he explained to the Americans — was that with the help of Personalist indoctrination the peasants would be all too glad to defend their own villages against the Communists without any military or financial support. Sir Robert Thompson argued that the program had to proceed more slowly, so that at every stage the government could protect the hamlets from large-scale Viet Cong attacks. But Nhu went ahead with his own plan, whereby the Americans shipped in vast quantities of commodities to enable all the villagers both to construct their own defenses and, as the press releases had it, to build new and better communities for themselves.
By the end of 1962 Diemist officials reported that though they had not quite reached their objective, half of the country’s hamlets had been fortified and provided with some means of self-defense. The figure reflected no real achievement but rather the amount of American aid that had gone to the various province chiefs for such a purpose. As one American study later showed, only fifteen hundred, or less than 10 percent, of the hamlets possessed any military security.92 Actually, even that figure might not have been achieved without the new American commitment of firepower. With artillery, helicopters, and tactical bombers at its disposal, the Allied command declared whole areas outside the strategic hamlet belt “free fire zones,” where anything moving might be shot. Inside the belt it permitted the artillery to fire out almost at random every night on suspected Viet Cong concentrations, trails, and staging areas — a tactic known as “harassment and interdiction.” All this unguided firing naturally dissuaded many peasants from following what would have been their normal course of slipping away from the crowded, squalid enclosures. At least one American admitted that the NLF were not far wrong in calling these settlements concentration camps.
In those areas where it was actually applied, the strategic hamlet program did give the Saigon government a short-term military advantage. Politically, it proved a disaster. If the American and British officials really envisioned happy and prosperous peasants standing up to defend their villages against the insurgents, their wishful thinking was mighty indeed. Except for the Catholics, the peasants had no possible reason for doing anything of the sort. The amount of American aid that actually trickled down to the villages hardly gave them a motive to support the government — in the Delta it barely permitted them to survive. Armed with Personalist slogans on the virtues of self-sufficiency and self-sacrifice, the officials took the peasants away from their fields and forced them to construct mud and barbed-wire fences that made them liable to NLF attacks and thus put them in some jeopardy. Even those officials who conducted themselves in an exemplary manner induced anxiety among the villagers by their very physical presence. Under constant surveillance and in constant fear of attack, many of the hamlets lost even such unity as they possessed. As one village lawyer said of his hamlet not far from Saigon, “We have no solidarity here, no cooperation. And so if the Viet Cong come, no matter where we are, they can take advantage of us.” In his hamlet as in so many others, the circle of artillery and barbed wire enclosed a political void that waited for the NLF.
And from the Plain of Reeds, from the Ca Mau peninsula and the central Vietnamese highlands, the NLF moved slowly in to fill the vacuum. They drove the government forces completely out of many areas. In other places, near heavy troop concentrations, they simply drained away government authority and acted as the government of the nighttime. In the view of the American command, the Viet Cong seemed to have arisen by spontaneous generation. The Americans had not perceived the anarchy of the villages, for to them the first sign of anarchy was unorganized violence, and there was no violence inside the villages until the NLF began to mobilize them in the most compulsively methodical manner, Not until their military offensive of 1962–1963 did the Front persuade at least some Americans that it had extended its influence to over 80 percent of the rural population.93
The new American aid commitment bought time for the Saigon regime, but it increased the dangers confronting the Ngo family itself. The larger the military bureaucracy grew, the more it grew to resemble the country itself, its officers no more “pacified” and no more loyal to the Diem regime than the peasants inside the strategic hamlets. Ngo Dinh Diem knew this perfectly well. He as much as told his American advisers that he feared his ministers and generals. But the Americans did not understand his situation. From the very beginning Diem’s aim had been not to run the administration but to render it helpless, to bypass it with the help of his brothers. As time went on, his attempt to divide and rule required more and more extreme measures: the sabotaging of military operations, the replacement of the most competent officers by the most venal. The Ngos were not so much running a government as running an opposition within it. Between them they managed to create an underworld of warlords, secret societies, and bandit groups such as had existed in the periods of greatest anarchy between Confucian governments. In order to finance the Can Lao Party and his other subversive intelligence agencies, Nhu engaged in activi
ties similar to those of his old enemy Bay Vien: waterfront piracy, extortion rackets, illicit trading in opium, and exchange manipulation.94 Ngo Dinh Can ran central Vietnam as his own private business venture: he controlled the local shipping and the cinnamon trade, and with Diem’s tacit consent ruled the local officials through adroit manipulation, graft, and extortion.95 The two brothers jealously guarded their sources of revenue from each other — their agents occasionally killing each other off in an excess of zeal. Madame Nhu had the foresight to amass a fortune in goods that might be quickly translated into European assets. It was later said that, among other things, she owned a large theatre on the Champs Élysées — an odd investment for this most self-advertised of Catholics.
Amazingly, despite all of this illicit traffic, the Ngos maintained an impenetrable façade of self-righteous hauteur. The world, they seemed to be saying, was not good or pure enough for them. After the abortive military coup of 1960 — a daredevil operation mounted by a few paratrooper units under the command of Colonel Nguyen Chanh Thi and crushed after a day or so — Diem declared that the “hand of God” had sustained him against the rebel assault. And yet the attempted coup had a demonstrable effect on the Ngo family. Ngo Dinh Diem had at one time trusted his relatives, but after 1960 even his family members began to drop away: some were fired, others resigned, still others remained at their posts but no longer had any influence on Diem or Nhu. The extended family narrowed down to the nuclear family of Diem, Can, Thuc, and the Nhus. And even within this inner ring there were fights for power and prestige with Nhu claiming the protocol arrangements for a head of state and Madame Nhu claiming responsibility for her husband’s ideas. Only the farouche Can remained constant.
After the coup of 1960 Diem began to withdraw more and more into himself. It was true that he had long been something of a recluse. He was always as Graham Greene so brilliantly pictured him in 1955: “Separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers droning of global strategy… sitting with his blank brown gaze, incorruptible, obstinate, ill-advised, going to his weekly confession, bolstered up by his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle.”96 But in the past he had traveled a great deal around the country, visiting those villages where his officials had taken pains to produce elaborate pageants of a thriving, moral, and deeply respectful peasantry.97 Now he traveled less and appeared at fewer public ceremonies. Each year he celebrated his election as chief of state with a day of parades and speeches. At the anniversary parade of 1962 the New York Times reporter, David Halberstam, observed that there were no Vietnamese crowds to be seen anywhere near the route of the parade. The police, on Diem’s orders, had erected great barricades to keep the people away, and the parades were held in a vacuum for Diem and his foreign advisers.98 Now, too, Diem began to talk more and more. In the last year of his life he would lecture for six and sometimes ten hours at a stretch, refusing to be interrupted by questions. Some of the American reporters saw his incessant talking as a sign of defensiveness. The Vietnamese understood it to have a very precise meaning: his talking was the sign that he could no longer exercise the self-control of a true “father,” a Confucian gentleman. Diem was frightened of his subordinates, but he had no recourse except to insist on his authority — the image of the open mouth. By his talking he threatened to starve them.
As Diem withdrew into himself, the influence of Ngo Dinh Nhu began to displace the president’s as the dark the light of the waning moon. Diem himself possessed many of the puritanical virtues of the true Confucian monarch. Nhu had, and to some degree personified, the complementary vices of arrogance, indiscipline, and brutality. As Diem represented the first sovereign of a dynasty, Nhu represented the last one. Certainly, Nhu came to the end of the “downward spiral” long before 1963. Perhaps anticipating Diem’s failure at moral instruction, Nhu had quite early on begun to bully. It was Nhu who defended the special military courts on the grounds that those found guilty must be “wicked people.” It was Nhu who organized the internal spy system and who encouraged corruption and factionalism in order to control the bureaucracy. It was Nhu who so divided and demoralized the officer corps that it provided small resistance to the NLF. In the end Diem displayed some of the classical anxieties of a failed Confucian ruler, but Nhu gave signs of insanity. It was Nhu who precipitated the coup of 1963 against his own family.
After a period of quiescence following the failure of the 1960 coup, the army officers once again began to plot against the regime. This time their victory appeared assured. The military collapse persuaded most of the top generals and much of the Saigon bourgeoisie that the existence of the republic required the removal of the Ngo family. And then there were few officers to whom the Ngos had not given excellent reasons for a private vendetta. As one general described the situation in another context — his image recalling the oldest of Confucian metaphors, “While the government deludes itself and its powerful allies by giving the outward impression of authority, those responsive to its authority became fewer and fewer… [until it is] balanced like an inverted pyramid and requires only a push from some other self-centered group to topple it from power.”99 In other words, the same process was taking place inside the government as outside it.
But the officers vacillated. Most of them were afraid of Nhu. For eight years Nhu had almost single-handedly prevented them from taking that share of power they always felt was rightly theirs. He had bribed many of them, blackmailed others, and manipulated all of them so successfully that not one of them trusted another. The officers feared that any one among them might inform or lead a counter-coup to place himself in the Ngos’ favor. They feared that in the event of a successful coup against the Ngos, one of their number might seize power and oust the rest of them. Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, Nhu’s own security chief, now turned against the Ngos and organized a plot that brought several officers to the point of counting battalions. But still the officers could not bring themselves to act. The Americans controlled the purse strings of the government, and the officers knew they could not count on the rest of the army until they obtained a firm commitment from the embassy. In the spring of 1963 this commitment seemed impossible to come by. Despite the disintegration of the ARVN, Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins, the MACV commander, remained optimistic about the war and about the capacities of the Ngo family to reform the government under their tutelage. The heads of the mission appeared unable to comprehend the seriousness of the situation inside or outside of the government. Given their faith in the Ngos’ own military estimates and their obliviousness to the silent defections within the government, they might, it seemed, have remained ignorant of the situation up until the moment when the NLF took over the government — and then perhaps a little beyond it. Contemplating that end, the officers waited, as if paralyzed.
But then something surprising happened. On May 8, 1963, large crowds of Buddhist priests and laymen surrounded the radio station in Hue to protest Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc’s order forbidding them to carry the Buddhist flags on the birthday of the Buddha. When the crowds would not disperse before fire hoses, blank shells, and tear gas, the Catholic deputy province chief ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowd, with the result that nine people were killed. The next day the government claimed that the Viet Cong had set off plastic charges in the midst of the crowd — a lie that further antagonized the Buddhists. After weeks of argument, the Americans finally persuaded Diem to meet with the Buddhist leaders and to give in to some of their demands. But the regime never admitted responsibility for the killings, and Nhu ordered the Republican Youth to protest Diem’s signing of the agreement.100 The bonzes demonstrated before the National Assembly building and embarked upon a hunger strike in Hue.
In the second week of June the bonze Thich Quang Duc died by fire, seated in the lotus position in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon. From that moment on the bonzes went into determined, organized opposit
ion to the Diem regime. Traveling from city to city, the leaders in Hue and Saigon held mass meetings of prayer and political protest; their spokesmen held almost daily conferences for the American press. From that moment on it became increasingly clear that the days of the Diem regime were numbered. Only the details and the timing of their demise remained to be settled.
four
To American journalists in Saigon the whole affair of the Buddhists was puzzling in the extreme. Who were “the Buddhists,” after all? Until the May incident the few hundred bonzes who inhabited the city pagodas had never appeared upon American horizons. Few of them spoke Western languages, and with one or two exceptions they seemed naïve about the outside world.101 It was known, of course, that all nonsectarian Vietnamese were “Buddhists” in some vague sense: they worshiped the image of the Buddha along with the scrolls of their ancestors and the Taoist spirits. But these city bonzes could not be said to represent them, for at least among the peasantry Buddhism had no established tradition, no network of pagodas such as existed in Thailand, Burma, or Japan. The bonzes who initiated the demonstration were men, or the heirs of men, who had gone abroad during the 1930’s to draw from the pure, intellectual stream of Mahayana Buddhism and later set up study centers in Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon. At the time of the great nationalist eruption of the 1930’s and 1940’s they remained politically inconspicuous. Like most of the urban groups, they made their accommodation with the French, never venturing out to seek a following in the countryside, never rivaling the Catholics in organizational strength. By 1962 they had a number of pagodas in Saigon and the central Vietnamese cities and a small following loosely organized into what the Americans always assumed was a “purely religious” group, the Association for the Propagation of the Buddhist Faith.102 The nominal Buddhists of the countryside had suffered from Catholic persecution since 1954, but the bonzes of the city pagodas never felt the same pressures. In Hue it was said that Ngo Dinh Can had often gone to visit the most important of the Buddhist leaders, Thich Tri Quang, in order to discuss the affairs of the community. It was only when Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, randy for a cardinal’s hat, tried to prove his zeal as a defender of the faith that the government issued edicts that impinged upon the Buddhists’ religious freedom.103 But now, suddenly, the bonzes became the leaders of a powerful movement of opposition to Diem. They were energetic, persistent, resourceful — and irreversibly committed to the overthrow of the regime. Most extraordinarily, they seemed to call forth an intense, emotional reaction from the Vietnamese of the cities, and even from those who had never visited their pagodas before. The televised pictures of another monk’s death by fire showed people running to the body to fall on their knees and weep. The reaction remained unexplained by the Vietnamese; it was as if the bonzes had touched a chord so profound that it lay beyond explanation.
Fire in the Lake Page 17
