Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  If it was true, as Robert Komer said, that the NLF in 1967 controlled 24 percent of the population, it did not therefore follow that the GVN controlled the rest. As designed by the “regulars” and the GVN officials, the pacification program meant little more than military control and a few welfare programs. As in the days of Diem, the only people who had a political commitment to something other than the Front were the members of the sects and political factions. And they, perhaps less than the others, were “under the control” of the government. Under American pressure General Khanh had ended the repressive Diemist policy towards the sects and granted them a measure of autonomy and government support, but he had succeeded only in reinstating something like the status quo ante of the French regime. The Hoa Hao and Cao Dai did not make common cause with the NLF, but they supported the military junta on condition that it did not interfere in their local affairs. When in moments of crisis the generals would try to pull the sects into the arena of Saigon politics to act as a conservative force, they would cooperate to the extent of protecting only their own investment in a weak and accommodating government. They favored a civilian government because they felt it might give them a greater share of power and preserve the barter politics of the Delta against the self-righteous étatisme of the centrists and northerners. But they were not willing to fight for it: Saigon politics, they felt, was not really their concern. Indeed, they looked upon the succession of coups and counter-coups with a certain Schadenfreude. The governmental chaos only confirmed their view that Vietnam was passing through an interregnum preceding the coming of their respective saviors. With respect to this final goal, a strong Saigon government was as much of a danger to them as the NLF.9

  The GVN could perhaps claim the status of referee between the various rural political factions, but it could claim only the role of oppressor with regard to the various non-Vietnamese minorities. Under an organization called FULRO (Front Unifié pour la Lutte des Races Opprimées) many of the montagnard tribes had for years lived in a state of open revolt from the GVN. When the American Special Forces armed and fed the tribesmen with a view to keeping them out of the NLF, the GVN officials repaid their efforts by accusing them of favoritism and subversion of GVN authority. In 1966 the anthropologist, Gerald Hickey, managed after months of labor to arrange a treaty whereby the Vietnamese government would recognize the montagnard tribal rights and property. Just a few weeks after the ceremonial accord, a few Vietnamese officers, finding it convenient to sacrifice a montagnard village for the sake of their own safety, wrecked the agreement and drove the montagnards back into their old resistance.10

  The GVN officials had not quite the same racist disdain for the other minorities — the Chams, the Khmers, and the Chinese — but they (in sharp contrast to the NLF) systematically excluded them from all but the lower ranks of the army and administration. This discrimination naturally insured that none of these important groups would give their loyalties to the government. As the Tet offensive showed, the GVN failed to pacify even the Chinese enclave of Cholon. But then, if by “pacified” the Americans meant anything more than “non-Communist,” it was questionable whether the ruling junta itself was “pacified.”

  After the trying four months of the Buddhist crisis, the Vietnamese Armed Forces Council settled down to business as usual. Having promised the Americans and the various political groups a constitutional assembly, the generals went about preparing for elections and restaffing the First Corps with their own political cronies. Now in debt to the three southern corps commanders, Generals Ky and Thieu left them to consolidate their positions and make the arrangements — personal, financial, and logistical — necessary to support a new and more stable system of corruption. As befitted the nature of the government, the system was perfectly decentralized: General Dan Van Quang, the Fourth Corps commander, ran a brisk trade in rice and opium; General Vinh Loc of the Second Corps and General Hoang Xuan Lam of the First Corps dealt in military preferments and American commodities. While still minister of defense, General Nguyen Huu Co held extensive real estate concerns. His purchases may have seemed arbitrary at the time of negotiation, but the various seaside villas and barren tracts of land turned out with monotonous regularity to be the choice of the U.S. military procurement office for the sites of new American installations. Though General Thieu did not engage in such transactions, his wife managed the family finances and, judging from the grape-size diamond she wore to everyday functions, she managed them most efficiently.

  Of all the top generals, only Nguyen Cao Ky did not noticeably derive any financial gain from his job. Living in a spare bungalow within the protective confines of Tan Son Nhut airport, he diverted the incidental tax receipts he might have spent on the beautiful Madame Ky to the purchase of province officials and to the organization of his own gang of street toughs. (His Anti-Fraud and Corruption League was later disbanded by General Thieu on well-founded charges of fraud and corruption.) General Ky’s goal for the moment was not money but power. The Saigonese laughed cynically at his speeches against corruption, but Ky was no doubt sincere in his opposition to it. He would have preferred to run an honest government than a corrupt one. The only difficulty was that his power depended upon corruption, both directly — his mainstay and mastermind, the Colonel, now General, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, had all but cornered the extortion racket in Saigon — as well as institutionally. During his great anti-corruption drive in the fall and winter of 1965–1966 Ky arrested only one man, a Chinese businessman whom the Chinese community reportedly delivered up to Ky as a scapegoat (no doubt for his refusal to pay their own local protection racket). And a scapegoat in the ritual sense of the word, for Ky had the unfortunate Mr. Ta Vinh shot by a firing squad in the central market of Saigon.

  Unequal to the task of “rooting out corruption,” Ky had virtually no power to implement any of the other reforms the Americans pressed upon him. He could not fire the bad officials because they had bought their jobs; he could not promote the good officials because they had not. With a power base in the nonterritorial commands — the Marines, the air force, and the paratroopers — Ky could not change a district chief or divert a truckload of supplies unless he convinced the corps commander that it might be in his interests to convince the province chief that it was in his interests to execute the order. “In a way,” mused one Vietnamese minister, “it is the most democratic government we’ve ever had.”

  Boxed in on all sides, Ky managed to take his aggression out on the people who could not protect themselves — the French who remained in Vietnam, the newspaper publishers who criticized him (he banned their newspapers from time to time, or simply took the newsprint out of circulation), the Buddhists, and the student leaders. It was not much, perhaps, but it was a good indication of what would have happened had he possessed more power.

  The returning reporters could see little change in the Saigon government since the days of Diem; the American embassy officials also seemed to perceive none. In the face of corruption, apathy, and military defeat for the ARVN, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Deputy Ambassador Porter, Robert Komer, and the AID officials maintained, at least in public, the traditional sangfroid. The Revolutionary Development program was going forward with an “integrated management system in sight”; nine hundred and sixty-six more hamlet classrooms were built, 10,134 sewing kits were distributed, temporary shelter was provided for almost two hundred and eighty thousand refugees, and twelve thousand Viet Cong voluntarily left the jungles and swamps to return to the government. Premier Ky was doing a good job under difficult conditions and the Vietnamese people were building a nation in the midst of war. At the top of a tower of statistics and progress reports, the embassy officials hardly seemed aware of the disorder around them. General Westmoreland avoided the subject altogether by focusing his attentions on the American operations and insisting that the embassy deal with all “political” matters. His august position gave him the dizzying breadth of perspective to speak of progress in the war and
the improvement of the ARVN while asking the President for more American troops.

  And yet with all the official optimism, the American mission lacked its old unity of tone. During the summer of 1963 only a few officials had broken the serenity of the mission; now there were at least as many malcontents as there were optimists in the middle and lower ranks — the phenomenon less a result of change in the Saigon government than of the new numbers of Americans in Vietnam. In 1966–1967 thousands of Americans, in addition to the regular combat troops, took up posts throughout the country as agricultural experts, military advisers, nurses, refugee coordinators, and logistics experts. Largely unprepared for what they would face, many of them could not help remarking on the general disorder of the Vietnamese government. Among them were men like Dr. Goodhope. A physician from a rich suburb in California, Dr. Goodhope sacrificed two months’ vacation in order to treat napalm burns and gangrenous bullet wounds as well as cases of plague, typhoid, and cholera at a Vietnamese civilian hospital. Arriving in Qui Nhon, he found the hospital, recently rebuilt by AID, a bare, excrement-covered shell of a building: the lighting and toilet fixtures had been torn out of the walls, the kitchen had been dismantled, and a pair of dogs came daily to dig for the amputated limbs buried in the hospital yard. With seven hundred beds and two to three patients in each bed, the hospital barely accommodated the numbers of war-wounded civilians coming in from the countryside, but Dr. Goodhope and two doctors from New Zealand constituted the entire hospital staff. As Goodhope was to discover, the Vietnamese doctors preferred their private practices to working at the hospital; the nurses allowed the patients to die of thirst and filth; the procurement officer stole the hospital funds and (perhaps with Viet Cong help) the shipments of essential drugs from Saigon. After a month and a half in Qui Nhon, Dr. Goodhope hated the Vietnamese — all Vietnamese — and demanded that the United States take over the country. He did not ask himself who had created the casualties and put the Vietnamese in such a situation.

  Hardly more sanguine than Dr. Goodhope was Colonel William R. Corson, the somewhat eccentric Ph.D., Oriental linguist, ex-CIA agent and Marine officer who, among other things, commanded a battalion in the First Corps. Though a believer in the universal value of American capitalism, Colonel Corson did not approve of the initiative the local Vietnamese division commander took in setting up all of the eleven laundries used by the U.S. Marines in that area. More understandably, he did not condone the local district chief’s habit of presenting him with the bodies of dead Vietnamese tied up in a sack to claim the reward for dead Viet Cong (particularly when the same dead bodies were presented to him more than once). Both as the commander of a battalion and the head of the Marine Combined Action Program, he did his best to carry out the unspoken Marine policy of avoiding the GVN administration as far as possible and working directly with the peasants. In the book that he wrote upon quitting Vietnam and the Marine Corps, Corson concluded that the United States could not win the war if it maintained a purely “advisory” relationship to the GVN.11

  Americans everywhere had stories to tell: this Vietnamese was corrupt, this one incompetent, and the other, treacherous or cowardly. The soldiers complained openly that the Vietnamese units in their laziness or inefficiency had cost the lives of many of their buddies. The American generals did not complain in public, but they too seethed for all the enemy cadres that escaped through faulty intelligence, all the operations ruined through military snafus. Their anger transmitted itself quickly enough to the journalists. After a few weeks’ tour of Vietnam, William Lederer, the author of The Ugly American, wrote a book “exposing” the “scandal” of the war effort — the corruption, the military lethargy, and so forth. He indignantly accused the Americans of permitting themselves to be exploited by the Vietnamese, while at the same time he defended the basic goals of the war.12 For many Americans such as Lederer (and perhaps particularly for those who had a similarly superficial knowledge of the country), the “answer to the whole problem” was a disengagement of the American war effort from the GVN. This formula, of course, implied disengagement only in the sense that apartheid implies separation; it meant an abrogation of Vietnamese sovereignty, if not an American take-over of the whole Vietnamese government. In justification of what was essentially a colonialist position, the sophisticated Colonel Corson argued that the United States had a responsibility to save the Vietnamese people from the Vietnamese government. This, of course, in addition to saving them from Communism.

  As might have been expected, these attacks on the Vietnamese angered the embassy officials in charge of maintaining the status quo more than they angered anyone else. And yet there was a certain irony to the situation. When the opponents of the war combined with its most avid proponents in attacking the GVN, only the embassy officials remained to defend the Vietnamese from what took on the coloring of a racist attack against them. By virtue of their interest in the current U.S. policy, it was the young mission officers such as Paul Hare, Frank Wisner, and Frank Scotton, and not the more “dovish” journalists who best understood the difficulties that the American war presented to the Vietnamese of the GVN. In answer to men like Lederer and Corson the young officials would point out that the Vietnamese soldier faced not a year but a lifetime of war — and war on their own soil. Living on fixed salaries, the soldiers and civil servants suffered badly from the American-induced inflation. While the artificial war economy lasted, there was bound to be corruption because they could not otherwise support their families. As for the advisory system, if that did not work well, it was at least partly because the advisers themselves were incompetent to deal with Vietnamese problems. They simply did not know enough, and with only a year or a year and a half in Vietnam, could not know enough, even to interpret what was happening. An experienced Vietnamese officer on his fifth or sixth American adviser probably had excellent reason for disregarding all advice. Neither incompetent nor cowardly, he might be simply trying to deal with things as they were. To increase American “control” over Vietnamese government activities would make the jobs of the officials even more difficult. As the young embassy officers put it most bluntly, the idea that the Americans ought to take over the GVN was a position taken by men who had no sympathy with the Vietnamese and furthermore no grasp of what the war was about.

  These young officials were right — at least as far as they went. The difficulty was, of course, that their own advocacy of the war drove them back to the official embassy position that the United States was helping the Vietnamese people — despite all evidence to the contrary. Their critique thus lacked any systematic basis. In order to account for the failings of the GVN both before and after the American intervention, they had to criticize individual Vietnamese, individual Americans, and the defects of almost every individual program ever perpetrated by the Americans in Vietnam. Brought to an extreme, their position was not unlike that of Robert Shaplen, the New Yorker correspondent, who in his cautious, reasoned analysis for nine years attributed the demise of every pacification program and of every attempt to create a stable, constitutional government to the failure of American officials to give more constructive advice at the right time. The young embassy officials would have rejected the comparison — their position was far more complicated, and would become more complicated still the longer they stayed in Vietnam — but there was an inescapable logic to it. Those who supported the war — that is, all of the officials and most of the journalists — had to line up behind one of two general positions: the first, the conventional diplomatic position that the Saigon government was not so bad and would improve with American help; and the second, the position held by many within the regular military forces (which were, after all, suffering the consequences), that the GVN would never reform itself until the Americans took stricter control over it. In fact the two positions were more like each other than not, for neither acknowledged that the United States was in fact the cause of the problems within the GVN.

  Created, financed, and defe
nded by Americans, the Saigon regime was less a government than an act of the American will — an artificial military bureaucracy that since the beginning of the Diem regime had governed no one and represented no one except upon occasion the northern Catholics. The U.S. attempt to polarize the Vietnamese between Communists and non-Communists made as much sense as an attempt to polarize the American people between Southerners and Catholics: the two groups were not in any way equivalent. Indeed, there were not two sides at all. The period from 1963 to the spring of 1965 demonstrated clearly enough that American-supported governments corresponded to no internal political forces. After a dozen coups and counter-coups, the Ky junta was not even the leadership of the army, but a group of officers who happened to be occupying the Armed Forces Headquarters at the time of the American military intervention: a directory of hostile generals, ministries full of tangled and struggling civil servants and a rabble of soldiers in American-made uniforms, caught and held by the glacial flow of American troops. The American mission had the option to depose Ky, but as Jean Lacouture once pointed out, if the names of all the generals were put into a hat and Vy or Thi pulled out, the results would have been much the same. What the Americans did not see was that this constituted a stable situation — and one that resulted directly from the stability of American policy in Vietnam.