Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  During the two months following the November coup, the NLF moved into the Delta provinces just south of Saigon, confining the GVN troops to the province capitals and inflicting upon them their highest casualties of the war. The new Front victories were not precisely the fault of the generals: the Front merely seized the opportunities laid open to them in the interval of change and uncertainty. But as two and then three months passed, the generals seemed to be making slight progress at imposing order within the army and the administration.

  Washington was anxious. Shortly before the coup, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had urged that the National Security Council consider disengaging the United States from Vietnam if the war appeared unwinnable by any successor to the Diem regime. President Kennedy at the time dismissed the option of withdrawal and decided to encourage a coup in the hopes that the new government would be more capable of pursuing the war than the last. In giving its support to the military junta, the Kennedy administration passed an important checkpoint in its involvement in the war and its commitment to the Saigon regime. American officials simply assumed that the responsibility they were taking on would lead to a new degree of American influence, or control, over the Saigon government. But in attempting to direct the Minh junta, the Americans might as well have been trying to sculpt in Silly Putty. There were so many generals, so many ambitious young officers, that the embassy could hardly keep track of them, much less exert any pressure. General Minh claimed to be making the decisions for the junta, but he clearly held small authority: the commander of the vital Saigon region did not even make a pretense of doing his job. In December 1963, on the first of what was to be a series of trips to Vietnam over the coming months, Secretary McNamara reported to Johnson that the situation was “very disturbing” and that the generals seemed almost to have given up fighting the war in favor of their internal political squabbling. He lectured the generals on the need for leadership, programs, action.11 The generals respectfully agreed and went back to their squabbling.

  Were the generals anti-Communist? Even that was difficult to determine. Certainly they were not as religiously anti-Communist as Ngo Dinh Diem had been. They were soldiers, anti-Communist by social background and economic interest. But above all they were Cochin Chinese who believed in the politics of arrangement. And, American support notwithstanding, the time for an arrangement seemed to be approaching. In December President Charles de Gaulle proposed a plan for the neutralization of all the former states of Indochina in pursuance of the Geneva accords. The Americans worried that the generals might look favorably on his proposals. In his New Year’s message to the Republic of Vietnam, President Johnson wrote to the Minh junta:

  Neutralization of South Vietnam would only be another name for a Communist take-over.… The United States will continue to furnish you and your people with the fullest measure of support in this bitter fight.… We shall maintain in Vietnam American personnel and material as needed to assist you in achieving victory.12

  Many Americans in Saigon blamed the junta for its inability to reconstitute a military offensive — assuming, perhaps, that the generals had some authority over their subordinates, or perhaps that they could create a government and an army out of the void. But the American assurance of support and expressions of dissatisfaction only had the effect of exciting the ambitions of those generals who did not belong to the junta and pushing the junta members to look for new alternatives. In December a rumor spread quickly around Saigon that three of the junta members, Generals Don, Kim, and Xuan, were involved in a French plot to neutralize the country. The rumor may or may not have been true — Saigon at the time was thick with agents dealing in every sort of currency — but it was enough that some of the Saigonese believed it. Throughout late December and early January there were student demonstrations in the city and wage strikes involving some violence. On January 29, 1964, General Nguyen Khanh, the commander of the First Corps, executed the plot he had prepared since November with the Catholic General Khiem and the general who headed the other major officers’ conspiracy against Diem. Moving their combined troops into the city, Khanh seized the general staff headquarters, arrested several of the junta members on charges of treason, and proclaimed himself chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council.13

  The second coup did not come as any real surprise to the Americans or the Saigonese. Any battalion commander might well have predicted something of the sort, for as far as the Vietnamese army was concerned, the first junta had no more right to power than any other group of generals. The generals all proclaimed their commitment to the “unity of the army,” but they trusted each other no better than they ever had in the days of Ngo Dinh Diem. As there were forty-eight generals, so there were forty-eight reasons for upsetting the status quo and at least twelve plans in motion for doing so. General Khanh merely carried out his plan. It made little difference that the first junta had expressed fairly well the division and uncertainty of the non-Communist population, that it had been the first government of southerners in the south: it had failed to mobilize the political support necessary to dampen the ambitions of the other generals. Such support was extremely difficult to come by.

  Khanh’s move was nothing but a coup, plain and simple. Still, it signaled the one significant change that had occurred within Saigonese politics since 1954: the development of the Vietnamese army as the preponderant political force. This development owed entirely to the American aid program. In the first five years of the Diem regime the United States contributed three-quarters of its aid budget to the armed forces of South Vietnam. Over the course of ten years it provided thousands of Vietnamese officers with trips to Fort Bragg and other American training camps. With the steadily growing stream of American advisers, it educated an entire generation within the Vietnamese army. By mid-1964 the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (soon to be “upgraded” to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, or MACV) consisted of some sixteen thousand men with a budget of over half a billion dollars — the equivalent of twice the budget of the city of Washington, D.C. As the MAAG grew to overwhelm the civilian branch of the U.S. mission in Saigon — and to exert pressure for further American military intervention — the Vietnamese armed forces similarly outgrew all the civilian institutions of non-Communist Vietnam. Except for his control over American aid, Diem possessed little leverage against the army. Forced to give his officers control over the entire rural administration, he took the expedient of shifting them around so frequently that they did not have time to build up a stable power base. It was a tactic that could not work forever, and when the Buddhist demonstrations momentarily healed the divisions within the army, the generals simply seized power. The generals were now no more united than the civilians, but they at least had guns, and they commanded the entire flow of American aid.

  It was the same thing that had happened in so many underdeveloped countries. In Egypt, the Congo, Ghana, in most of Latin America and the Arab world, the army seized power by virtue of its weight alone, by virtue of the fact that (with the occasional exception of the Communist Party) it was the only large, modern organization in a traditional world. In most of the decolonized countries the colonial power was responsible for this imbalance. At a certain point it had built up an indigenous army in order to defend the colony’s borders or to keep one part of its population under control. Once the country was decolonized, the former colonial army reigned supreme in a void of those organizations — industrial concerns, trade unions, and political parties — that maintained civilian power in the metropolis. As opposition it had only the traditional leaders and the ineffectual colonial bourgeoisie. This consequence did not concern the colonial regimes, which, after all, intended to rule the countries themselves, but it ought, perhaps, to have been of some interest to the Americans allotting aid to Vietnam. Given the American preoccupation with the Communist “invasion from the north,” however, the aid apportionment never came under serious debate under the Eisenhower, the Kennedy, or the Johnson
administrations. By 1964 most Americans concerned in the war planning either refused to admit the consequences or accepted them as a fact of life about which they could do nothing. And then, of course, many American officials, including Henry Cabot Lodge and Robert McNamara, positively welcomed the prospect of military rule. In their view, the Republic required a strong military leader to stop the alarming succession of defeats and to halt the general demoralization of the army. In their view the Vietnamese ought to wait until the Communist threat had passed before they indulged, as Lodge said, in the “luxury” of politics.

  To the eternally optimistic General Paul D. Harkins, commander of the MAAG since 1962, General Nguyen Khanh appeared to be the strong man that the country required. A northerner by birth and reportedly one of the ablest field commanders in the ARVN, Khanh became deputy chief of staff in the early years of the Diem regime. He had — or so he claimed — begun to oppose Diem in 1960, and though somewhat younger than the other top generals of the first junta, he then began to think of himself as the potential leader of his country. Outmaneuvered in the first coup and shunted off to the command most distant from Saigon, he made efforts to ingratiate himself with Harkins as well as with the other dissident generals.14 The military precision with which he performed the coup seemed above all intended to impress General Harkins. It certainly had that effect. When, shortly after the coup, Khanh agreed to the American suggestions for a reform of the administration and the Strategic Hamlet program, the enthusiasm of the American mission for the general rose to new heights.

  American hopes for the new regime were founded not merely in General Khanh, but in the new group of officers who followed him to power. The Khanh coup, as it happened, marked a generational change in the army leadership. Though only a few years younger than the generals of the first junta, Generals Nguyen Khanh, Nguyen Chanh Thi, Nguyen Huu Co, Nguyen Cao Ky, and Nguyen Van Thieu came from a very different conjunction of Vietnam and the West — the difference manifesting itself in their personal style as well as in their views on the war and the role of the army. The generals of the first junta typically came from the small French-educated elite. General Don, for instance, was training to be an economist, General Chieu to be a doctor, and General Xuan was serving in the high echelons of the French police when the French Indochina War broke out.15 The new group of generals came from much more modest backgrounds. General Khanh’s mother had owned a bar for French soldiers in Dalat, while his stepmother had been a renowned Vietnamese torch singer. General Ky came from a family of low-level civil servants in a province just south of Hanoi. Men from central Vietnam, Generals Thieu, Co, and Thi came from similar petit bourgeois families. Most of them went straight into the army after leaving high school, and they did not take on important rank until after Vietnamese independence in 1954.16 After that, they rose rocket-like to power. At the age of thirty, Khanh was a general, Ky the head of the Tan Son Nhut air base outside of Saigon, and Thieu a division commander. Unlike the generals of the first junta, these men had no real loyalty to France. Many of them indeed claimed to hate the French, preferring to speak English, even if it were the pidgin dialect they had picked up at Fort Bragg, to the “language of colonialism.” The adaptation pleased their American advisers who, convinced that the French had ruined Vietnam, were equally convinced that they would succeed where the French had failed. Under the Diem regime these advisers had found it uncomfortable to be snubbed by Vietnamese for not speaking French grammatically.

  A second point in their favor, in the eyes of the American advisers, was that these officers were professional soldiers. Most of them had combat experience, and some of them, such as Khanh, Thi, and Ky, who commanded the elite units, had great physical courage and a mastery of all the techniques Fort Bragg had to offer. Ky was an ace pilot and Thi commanded the paratroopers in their daredevil attempt to bring down the Diem regime in 1960. No intellectuals, the younger generals picked up some of the soldierly camaraderie of the French and American officers. They liked a good joke, and when they did not feel the weight of rank upon them they went to the extent of slapping their knees and indulging in belly laughs. At the same time, as their advisers noted with some paternal pride, the young officers had dignity and were generally respected by the men under their command. The officers appeared to like the Americans and to be firmly dedicated to the war against Communism. Instead of turning a cold shoulder to the suggestions of their advisers, they would often agree with them, earnestly admitting that there was a great deal to be done and that they must work harder for their country. With their aggressiveness and their democratic manners, the officers appeared to many Americans to be the young modern leadership that was necessary to usurp the corrupt traditionalists who had ruled the south. “If General Minh is the Naguib of Vietnam,” the Americans said, “then General Khanh is the Nasser.” Similarly, when they came to power under Khanh, Generals Ky, Thi, Co, and Khang were known as the “Young Turks.”

  The analogy was farfetched — too farfetched, perhaps, to describe the realities of Vietnam. True, the younger officers did not possess the most obvious of Diem’s failings, but the question was what they had to offer their country. Certainly the officers had no education to speak of. For the administration of the state they would have to depend upon the civilians whom the French and the Americans had trained in those disciplines normally useful to rulers — economics, diplomacy, management, public health, political theory, and so forth. And these civilians, whose families had for generations dominated the bureaucracy of Saigon, despised the young officers as ignorant upstarts. A militant Catholic and anti-Communist professor once remarked, “The generals are so stupid you wonder how they manage to make those coups all by themselves.”17 There was a certain amount of social snobbery, if not class antagonism, in such an attitude, but the civilians had a point: while the professional military officers remained at the head of state there would be an almost total divorce between knowledge and power.

  To many Americans, however, the generals’ lack of education seemed in many respects a virtue. Education had, after all, meant isolation for the Saigonese elite. Without any local nationalist tradition the intellectuals learned their patriotism in French classrooms that excluded the mass of the Vietnamese people. Even despite themselves, they belonged to France rather than to Vietnam; they were not at home in their own countryside. To many American officials who were offended by the Vietnamese upper-class attitudes, the army officers seemed to offer some hope for a more socially responsible leadership. Because the younger generals had no French education, they would be closer to the people, more “Vietnamese.” In an article in Foreign Affairs of April 1965, George Carver, the leading CIA expert on South Vietnam, claimed that for these reasons the rise of the Buddhists and the younger army officers constituted “a fundamental shift in the locus of urban political power and a basic realignment of political forces — in short, a revolution.”18

  Carver’s conclusion stands today as a sublime example of American official scholarship. The accession of the younger officers was no more of a revolution than the succession of George Carver to the role of Wesley Fishel. It was a change of men. And not, perhaps, a change for the better.

  Considered in another way, the young officers had the worst of both worlds. Unlike the older officers, they had no formal education; unlike Ngo Dinh Diem and the Buddhists, they had no nationalist credentials whatever. They served the French for the duration of a colonial war — and in the most menial of capacities. True, they had no loyalty to the French, but then they had very little loyalty to anything. They regarded the French war not as a national political struggle, but as an unlooked-for boost to their otherwise unpromising careers. Nguyen Khanh, for instance, joined the Viet Minh after leaving high school. After fifteen months of rather desultory activity he and his comrades were fired by the Viet Minh for “tiredness” and lack of discipline. Khanh then returned to Saigon to pursue his military career under less arduous circumstances at the military school that
the French had just opened for the training of Vietnamese officers. He rose through the ranks to become an officer in the elite French-commanded gardes mobiles. 19 As for General Nguyen Cao Ky, he joined the French forces as soon as he came of age, and spent the last years of the war training as a bomber pilot in France and North Africa. He married a Frenchwoman, had four children, and divorced his wife not long after independence, divesting himself of what had probably been a striving — conscious or unconscious — to become a Frenchman. Like Ky, most of these younger officers turned against the French, but only after the French stopped paying their salaries. Their change of heart neither cleared their reputations with other Vietnamese nor gave them another kind of education. The French had not taught them Descartes or Pascal, but instead had occupied their formative years with instruction on how to serve a European army fighting a European war. The French trained them — trained them badly. And the Americans took up where the French left off.

  Had Carver and the American advisers read, or understood, Ho Chi Minh, they might have realized that Ngo Dinh Diem’s “mandarinism” had very little to do with an accident of birth. General Khanh and the “Young Turks” had none of Diem’s aristocratic pretensions, but they felt most of the same terrors that had incapacitated him politically. They distrusted their fellow officers, disdained the civilians, and had no more idea of how to “go to the people” than Diem himself. The generals began their lives much closer to the peasantry than Diem or the older Cochin Chinese generals, but, by concerted effort, they successfully overcame their initial advantage. Petit bourgeois who aspired to the status of the haute bourgeoisie, they were, if possible, more jealous of their positions and more anxious to close the doors of opportunity behind them than their predecessors. The older officers had at least the security of wealth and a civilian education; the younger officers had only the army as a vehicle to enter the privileged upper class. Probity, a desire for social justice and equal opportunity for all — such virtues might more reasonably be expected in the heads of a Mafia ring than in those generals who had spent their formative years struggling to the top of the corrupt, inefficient, and demoralized army of the Diem regime.