Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  This particular form of political education — that of a dialogue between the ranks — had an underlying force to it. The young recruits had little intellectual reason for observing the soldierly disciplines. They had at the same time a strong emotional bias against doing so, for, as they saw it, to cooperate with their superiors was to expose themselves to exploitation. By talking with the soldiers the cadres were not only educating them in their duties, but on some deeper level assuring them that they would not abandon them and (literally as well as figuratively) keep all the food for themselves. “Talking was the best we could do,” explained one of the squad leaders. “We would have a private talk with a man whose spirits were particularly low. I don’t know if the talks were any good, but we believed that the men might feel better if they could talk about their troubles.” The cadres did not expect to keep all of their men from defecting, but they felt — and correctly — that the constant pressure of their attention acted as some counterweight to the hunger and cold, to the jungle leeches and the bombing. As one defector testified, “The Front’s political cadres are very dangerous. Nothing can escape them. When they see a combatant looking sad, they don’t hesitate to comfort him.”6

  Rather than simply asserting command over their soldiers, the cadres first established the legitimacy of their authority by gaining the fighters’ confidence and participation. To some degree their efforts amounted to an attempt to transfer the soldiers’ attachments from their real families to the great “family” of the Liberation.

  Unlike the ARVN soldiers, who usually settled their families near their fixed bases or in an accessible town, the Front fighters rarely saw their families more than once or twice a year. Removed from their villages, they entered into a society entirely composed of their peers — a society isolated and thrown back upon itself by the external walls of danger. The cadres did not attack the soldiers’ filial ties directly; rather they played them down in a number of important ways. By performing the ceremonies of marriage and burial, by promising to support the crippled soldiers, to help the families of the dead and the wounded, and to pay special attention to those of the fighters’ families who lived in the Liberated areas, they relieved the soldiers of their most pressing economic worries. For many of the fighters a sense of obligation was the strongest attachment they had to their families. The transfer of responsibility thus helped them to rationalize the breach of filial piety that they had made in the very act of joining the NLF. “How can you help your families,” the cadres asked, “if the nation is in such trouble? The best thing you can do for your families is to fight for the Liberation.” In all of their talks with the fighters the cadres praised the “masculine” virtues of aggressiveness, courage, and comradeship as against the “feminine” qualities of sentimentality, cleverness, and guile. Given their solidarity and strength of purpose, the soldiers had, so the cadres said, the power to overcome all hardships, including that of long separation from their families.

  As soon as the soldiers began to talk to each other more freely and to rely on each other in combat, they naturally began to look upon their fellows as a source of security and affection. And they began to regard themselves as an elite: in contrast to the GVN soldiers who were “lazy,” “ill-trained,” and “corrupt,” they were virile, disciplined, and capable of sacrifice. At the beginning they interpreted all their privations as a sign of the Front’s weakness and inability to succor them, but later on they began to look upon the same hardships as a continual proof of their strength and virtue. As American statistics showed, the more time they spent with the NLF, the higher their morale rose and the lower went their rate of defections.

  Though in the light of hindsight much of the NLF training program must seem to be little more than a thoroughgoing civics course, there was one aspect of it that went beyond all the boundaries which Westerners customarily draw around the concept “education.” This was the institution of khiem thao, “criticism” or “self-criticism” (the words mean “to verify” and “to discuss”). Used previously by the Chinese Communists and the Viet Minh, khiem thao was a “truth game” in which every member of the organization from the lowliest soldier to the highest cadre had to participate. In the “criticism sessions,” held on a regular basis as a part of the daily activities, each NLF member had to admit his own failings and given his honest opinion about the conduct of all the other members of the group. Within the sessions he did not have to fear punishment for his own errors other than the most devastating one of concerted group criticism. Only if he refused to participate would he incur the final penalty of expulsion by the group.

  Khiem thao was a game in which the rules of life were suspended, but it was a game designed to reach back into life and change its players. When the NLF recruits came into the army or the administration, they arrived almost totally insulated from their fellow men by their masks of “politeness.” Suspicious of both their commanders and their peers, they remained attentistes, always watching for a sign of trouble, always on the point of defection. The khiem thao sessions forced them to participate, forced them to break down all the defenses which they had built up around them in childhood. For the newcomer “criticism” was a terrifying experience. “When they were being criticized,” reported one squad leader, “their manner was correct and humble, but when the khiem thao was over, some would leave the unit to go home or to rally to the GVN, while others would swear and then forget all about it. We lost a lost of men because of those criticism sessions. After all, every man has his self-respect, and when his short-comings were brought up publically, he was hurt.”7

  But to the extent that khiem thao was painful, so it was perhaps necessary to the functioning of the entire organization. If the recruits could not strip themselves of their anxieties about each other and the power of the group, they could not begin to work together or to commit themselves to a common cause. Without a real psychological readjustment, their loyalties to any organization, other than that of their own families, would remain only surface deep. Given the newcomer’s ambivalence between fear of the group and desire to belong to it, the cadres had to strike a delicate balance in their disciplinary measures. As one Party manual warned:

  The criticism must be made in a spirit of mutual, comradely affection, helping each other to reform. But criticism in a hostile spirit does harm, causes loss of face, goes too far, etc. Criticism of this kind really causes divisions and prejudices in the Party. It is not useful for helping each other to correct defects, in a spirit of compassion, to advance together.8

  In practice the Party cadres attempted to restrain the low-level guerrilla fighters from discussing more than the details of the day-to-day work. (Burchett, for instance, observed several of these tactical khiem thao sessions going on in the intervals between the practice attacks on the GVN blockhouse.) Discussion of more profound and difficult matters was reserved for those who had already developed strong attachments to the Front — and was used primarily as a corrective. If a supply system broke down or a battalion performed badly in a fight, not only the top-ranking officers, but the entire group of cadres who bore some responsibility for the operation would meet for a period of perhaps two or three weeks to discuss their technical errors and the obstacles in their communication with each other. No one but the NLF cadres themselves know what went on at these sessions, and thus it is possible only to imagine the process in a rather distant and abstract manner.

  Given a safe forum in which to express his own grievances, the cadre came to see that he did not depend directly on any one member of the group. He could put his case on the table with some assurance that it would be judged on its own merits rather than on a personal basis. When, as must frequently have happened, two members quarreled, the group would not dissolve itself until the matter was settled by mutual agreement. With some experience at khiem thao the cadre would grow less and less afraid to disagree with another member, for he would realize that by initiating a verbal conflict he did not risk his entire
career in the Front, or indeed his life. By the same token, he would come to understand that when others criticized him for mishandling a situation, they were not doing it from motives other than that of desire to get the job done better the next time. The knowledge came as a revelation — though one perhaps gradually arrived at; and if he allowed it to, that revelation could change his life. What mattered now was not the maintenance of “face,” but the competence to deal with the “objective” problems that confronted the entire group.

  By forcing the cadres into conflict and limiting the damage done by it, the khiem thao sessions opened up entirely new channels of communication within the NLF. From the outside it is impossible to match cause exactly with result. But it takes only a small stretch of the imagination to see that in melting down the whole hierarchical structure of relationships the khiem thao gave the NLF a strength that could be measured in battalions. If, for instance, a number of soldiers from one company died or deserted, the local Front commander would have an excellent chance of hearing about his losses and taking measures to deal with them. His counterpart in the ARVN, by contrast, rarely knew how many men he commanded. The ARVN company, battalion, and regimental commanders made it a general practice to conceal their losses in the hopes of disguising their own failures or of collecting the pay due to the missing men. (According to American analysts, most ARVN units remained at 70 to 80 percent of their reported strength for the duration of the war.) The ARVN generals thus courted military disaster when they committed anything but an overwhelming force into action.

  The Front propaganda reports did not always reflect reality, but the reports they circulated among themselves were almost unique in their realism. Unlike either the Saigon officials or many members of the American mission, Front cadres were actually able to report bad news. So good was their intelligence and security system, indeed, that they were able to prevent much of the intrigue, corruption, graft, and blackmail which had effectively paralyzed the ARVN.

  Q. How many party members were there in your company?

  A. There were eight or nine of them.

  Q. How did these men become party members?

  A. They had excellent performance records, and were ready to sacrifice anything that was asked of them. They were virtuous and enthusiastic. They were the outstanding members of the unit.9

  The above remarks came from a young man the NLF had refused to promote. Instead of assuming that his rivals had gained their position by influence and intrigue, he felt, as did most of his fellow soldiers, that he had an equal opportunity to compete. Unlike the ARVN soldiers, the Liberation Army’s rank-and-file members usually trusted their commanders. In the khiem thao sessions they had a chance to criticize their superiors and to find out for themselves that the promotion system was in no way arbitrary.

  Khiem thao helped to prevent the Front organization from splitting apart into a network of self-protective cliques. Also — and by extension — it opened the gates to the villages and allowed the cadres to have some communication with the peasants, who since the beginning of time had resisted officialdom with all their vast inert strength. “In administering the rural area,” wrote the cadre from XB village, the Party seeks to settle contradictions between people, teach the people Party policy, urge the people to have spite for the Americans and Diem and seek to unite all groups and social classes in the village. If a Party member or cadre makes a mistake he will be freely subjected to the criticism of the people. When the people can boldly criticize Party members they will then be ready to forgive them.10

  With some experience in khiem thao, the cadres were better prepared to go to the people without fear of “loss of face,” without the inner need to keep their distance from the people and turn the mask of authority towards them.

  By accepting criticism from the people, they could show them that a commitment to the NLF did not imply an unconditional surrender to authority. The Front cadres, they suggested, were not trying to be the “fathers of the people”; on the contrary, they were confirming the people in their own rights and powers.

  The leaders of the NLF, and of the Viet Minh before them, had the ability, unique among Vietnamese politicians, to make alliances with other political groups and to make compromises in negotiation. This capacity, too, may have owed to khiem thao. Certainly it came from an assessment of their place in society similar to that khiem thao awoke in the individual. The NLF leaders hoped to become the sole government of the people, but they, unlike the Ngos or the sect leaders, knew that they were not — at least not for the moment. They believed the victory of the revolution to be inevitable. But they also knew that making compromises and temporarily sharing their claim to power with other real powers might be sometimes necessary, sometimes advantageous. In the period 1954–1960 they did not destroy themselves, as did the sects — and later the Diem regime itself — through inflexibility and futile military resistance. They did not have to take Ngo Dinh Diem’s passive, all-or-nothing attitude, and so they had the freedom to be truly Machiavellian, taking their advantages where they saw them and giving in on issues that they could not win immediately by direct confrontation. Here, within an attitude, a psychological set, lay clues to those mysteries known as the NLF’s “superior organization” and “superior leadership.”

  For a Westerner it is tempting to equate khiem thao with the new American practice of encounter group therapy and sensitivity training. A parallel between the two exists, but it is not a direct one: the similarity lies buried beneath an acute difference in psychological perspective. In theory at least, the goal of the American encounter group is to free the individual, to permit him to understand himself and express his personality as fully as possible. The goal of khiem thao — and of the NLF’s political training in general — was, on the other hand, to free the individual from old social constraints only to impose new ones. By its own admission the PRP was interested in far-reaching control over the individual. In a study entitled “How Should Party Members Promote Revolutionary Virtue?” the Party outlined the requirements for its members:

  The comrades we want are revolutionaries who are determined, hardened, who are well-forged, who have discarded individualism.… They have a steady, firm, impartial spirit, absolutely loyal to the Party. They will work either morning or evening, are tested in battle, in daily work. They always think in terms of controlling their thoughts, their attitudes, their expressions in a sincere way. They always ask the question: are we doing this right, are we thinking correctly? Is this useful or harmful for the revolution? When we act and think that way, are we serving the interests of the revolution or individual interests?… If we see clearly, see there are still shortcomings, such as individualistic thoughts, we must try to overcome them. We must bravely carry on self-criticism, point out where we are wrong, where we are right in our work and in our thought.11

  Rather than opening the cadres to themselves, the Party was, on the contrary, demanding that they repress their inmost thoughts and feelings and conform to the narrow, exacting standards of the group — or rather, of the Party cadres who controlled the group. If a cadre showed no enthusiasm, if he deviated from the Party line or put his own interests ahead of those of the Party, he would be criticized and finally expelled if he did not correct himself. Beyond the freedom of their cadres to criticize each other, the Party seemed to want authoritarian order and unanimity. Khiem thao and the Front’s political education in general was what Westerners called “thought control” or “brainwashing.”

  Of all the aspects of the Vietnamese revolution, it was this domination of the individual by the state which Americans — even those most opposed to their government’s policy in Vietnam — found most difficult to come to terms with. On their trips to Hanoi in 1968 the writers Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag discovered to their dismay that the North Vietnamese they met seemed to speak entirely in Communist jargon. “Everything is on one level here,” complained Miss Sontag to her journal. “All the words belong to the same voc
abulary: struggle, bombings, friend, aggressor, imperialist, patriot.… I can’t help experiencing them as elements of an official language.”12 Had Miss Sontag been any less sympathetic to the North Vietnamese, she might have simply concluded that they were “brainwashed victims of Communist tyranny” — though they did not seem to be, for there was not a heavy atmosphere of Stalinism about them. On the contrary, they seemed to take a lucid, almost childlike pride in their government. In Eastern Europe many intellectuals had made it plain to Miss McCarthy that the official language was an oppressive weight upon their normal speech, but the North Vietnamese seemed to possess no other kind of rhetoric. Neither of the writers could dispute the truth of their hosts’ words (the Americans were indeed, they felt, “imperialists” in Vietnam), but they could not help feeling that the North Vietnamese were in some way children, or, as they were not children, people who lacked a dimension of sensibility. Without any rebelliousness, indeed with a kind of joy in their achievement, the North Vietnamese seemed to have suppressed their private lives, their very personalities, in order to act out the cardboard role of “patriotic citizens.”

  Miss McCarthy and Miss Sontag saw in North Vietnam what no American official had ever prepared them for: the very foreignness of the Vietnamese. The familiarity of the Communist language was in many ways a deception, for the Vietnamese were not like the Russians or the East Europeans. As Miss Sontag rightly concluded, the Communist ideology was not responsible for the social discipline of the Vietnamese. Rather, the impetus to such discipline rose out of traditional Vietnamese society.

  Traditionally, the Vietnamese notion of society was not that of an aggregate, a collection of people, but that of a complete organism. The whole of society was much greater than the sum of its parts because it reflected and duplicated the overall design of the universe. Within his society the individual had no separate existence. His sense of personal identity came from his sense of participation in the society and in the universe. The moral problem for the individual was to discover not what he himself thought or wanted, but what the society required of him. The goal of speech was less to express the individuality of the ego than to arrive at a harmonious relationship with others and with the laws of the universe. “Truth” was not a conquest of reality, but an attempt to harmonize with it — an ethical as well as a scientific goal.