Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  There were, of course, people who profited: the hotel owners, for instance, the licensed importers, the brothel keepers, pharmacists, real estate dealers, diamond merchants, and distributors of American luxury goods. The big businessmen knew the value of a dollar; many of them had made similar profits during the last war when the French drained their gold reserves to support the piastre. As the only people in Vietnam who profited enough by the war to hope it would go on forever and to take what steps needed to be taken vis-à-vis the GVN officials to see that it did, these people held an absolute veto over the existence of the Republic of Vietnam. (Not that they would ever use it as long as the supply of dollars continued.) Behind them — indeed invisible both in the streets and in the pages of any economic analysis — were a number of non-Vietnamese: the Chinese merchants, who dealt in rice and war materials between Saigon and Hong Kong, Paris, Singapore, and perhaps finally Peking; the Indian merchants, money traders, and black marketeers. These men leeched from the Americans as they had once leeched from the French. Servicing them or stealing from them — it made little difference, as few of them had any commitment to the aims of the American war.

  These men had some experience at their trade, but they could not initially have imagined the magnitude of the current transaction. In the single year of 1968 an estimated two hundred and fifty million dollars went into the black market traffic in currency. Whereas only a small elite had profited by the first war, now a considerable sector of the urban population was involved: the restaurant owners who put up their prices to New York rates, the hotel managers who demanded a sizable bribe to rent a room, the PX clerks who stole from the commissaries (with or without the help of U.S. supply sergeants), government clerks who demanded ransoms for exit visas and other necessary papers. Finally there were the bar girls and prostitutes of Tu Do Street, those lovely girls in their floating au dais, who told the soldiers sad stories about their widowed mothers, took their money, and invested it in another bar in Nha Trang or Da Nang. There were professional beggars, pimps, drug dealers, and thieves — a Brechtian cast of characters in the midst of a new Thirty Years' War.

  Saigon had a long and well-integrated tradition of corruption that only a revolutionary upsurge could have rejected. Now that corruption took on a new dimension. In the fall of 1967 a young American embassy officer told David Halberstam that he had recently listened to the wife of the chief of staff, General Cao Van Vien, giving orders to a group of provincial officials on the distribution of San Miguel beer. “What was so amazing,” he said, “was not the extent of her financial interest, which was very considerable, but the flagrancy of it — the absolute indifference to what we thought. She knew I spoke Vietnamese and she simply did not give a damn.”11 A few months before, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan's police arrested a leading member of the French community and the head of all the beer and soft-drink concerns in the country, alleging that he was giving payoffs to the Viet Cong. The gentleman in question had granted distributorships to the wives of four generals and his company had been paying NLF road taxes almost openly for years; it was therefore not hard to imagine just why he had gone to jail and just how he had managed to walk out of jail a week later with no more questions asked.

  Under the Diem regime the corruption was covert and restrained by the barriers of practicality and good form; it was now unlimited, all-pervasive and naked of hypocrisy. The mayor of Quinhon, for instance, turned his official residence into a “massage parlor” for American soldiers, and the American officials could not persuade his superiors to order him to get the girls out. When AID imported forty garbage trucks to clean the fetid streets of Saigon, the GVN ministry concerned left them at the docks for a few days. Upon going down to check on them, an American official found some of them missing and the rest empty shells from which all the movable parts had been taken. On a rather grander scale, the head of the Saigon city council, La Thanh Nghe, took thousands of dollars every year in kickbacks from American drug companies for his pharmaceutical business. According to Halberstam, the corps commanders sold the job of district chief for a going rate of a million piastres (somewhere around ten thousand dollars, depending on the rate of exchange), and that of province chief for three million.12 Given the total size of the American war budget, the price of a Vietnamese official was not, perhaps, excessive — if thereby the job was done. But there are two types of corruption in this world — the first, which permits an ill-made system to function; the second, which becomes the raison d'être of the system — and the corruption of the GVN was of the second type.

  “Saigon has become an American brothel,” said Senator William Fulbright in 1967. And he was right. A Tokyo or a Berlin could perhaps accommodate an American occupation and survive with some of its privacy intact, some of its leaders uncorrupted. But Saigon was a small and terrified city, and though money could not kill, the vast influx of American dollars had almost as much influence on it as the bombing had on the countryside. It turned the society of Saigon inside out. Almost every night a young man stood on his Honda at the end of Tu Do Street, waiting to take the American soldiers from the bars and brothels back to their bases: the young man was an under-secretary in the ministry of revolutionary development. The French war had sustained the old professions of land ownership and government service, but this war profited only those who served the Americans. In the new economy a prostitute earned more than a GVN minister, a secretary working for USAID more than a full colonel, a taxi owner who spoke a few words of English more than a university professor. Small wonder, then, that many GVN officials were corrupt and that the students, so criticized by the Americans for their refusal to “participate” and “take responsibility,” put off taking their final exams year after year. The old rich of Saigon had opposed the Communists as a threat to their position in society; they found that the Americans took away that position in a much quicker and more decisive fashion — and with it, what was left of the underpinning of Vietnamese values. As one soldier complained ironically, “We people in this society curse the Communists because we live in a free society. Thus, crooks, cheats, thieves, and prostitutes are free to climb the ladder of values.”13 For many Vietnamese the life of the cities had become a carnival-like existence, a permanent Fasching; Generals Ky and Thieu reigned as the Lords of Misrule over a country where all laws were suspended, all license permitted.

  Just before his departure for a two-week tour of Vietnam in 1967, the defense analyst, Herman Kahn, listened to an American businessman give a detailed account of the economic situation in South Vietnam. At the end of the talk — an argument for reducing the war — Kahn said, “I see what you mean. We have corrupted the cities. Now, perhaps we can corrupt the countryside as well.” It was not a joke. Kahn was thinking in terms of a counterinsurgency program: the United States would win the war by making all Vietnamese economically dependent upon it. In 1967 his program was already becoming a reality, for the corruption reached even to the lowest levels of Vietnamese society. Around the American bases from An Khe to Nha Trang, Cu Chi, and Chu Lai, there had grown up entire towns made of packing cases and waste tin from the canning factories — entire towns advertising Schlitz, Coca-Cola, or Pepsi Cola a thousand times over. The “food,” “shelter,” and “job opportunities” that Westmoreland had promised came to this: a series of packing-case towns with exactly three kinds of industry — the taking in of American laundry, the selling of American cold drinks to American soldiers, and prostitution for the benefit of the Americans. But to Robert Komer and General Westmoreland these towns meant only more Vietnamese under “government control.” They had become obsessed, these important people from Johnson to McNamara to the patrician Cabot Lodge, with the eradication of a few thousand Front troops and cadres. In their pursuit of “pacification” it did not seem to matter how much the United States spent, how many soldiers it took, or what happened to the millions of other Vietnamese. Nor could they build the Vietnamese government to stand on its own; at least, if that were t
heir intention, they were coming no closer to their goal. In fact, quite the contrary.

  In the spring of 1967 Westmoreland authorized the 199th U.S. Light Infantry Brigade to integrate its operations with those of the Vietnamese Fifth Ranger Group, placing all of the troops, from squad to battalion, under the joint command of an American and a Vietnamese officer. In November the brigade's commander, Brigadier General Robert C. Forbes, decided to terminate what he then called an “experiment.” “Quite frankly,” he said, “integrated operations are relatively good if they don't go on too long.… Six to eight months is enough. Other than that, you're going to get involved in a situation where the underdeveloped forces are going to become totally dependent on the developed forces. That's not the name of the game here.”14 The general, it appeared, was somewhat understating the case. According to his subordinates, the Vietnamese officers were already dependent on the Americans to the point where they sometimes forsook their commands in the field, leaving the Americans with two companies instead of one to command. “They became dependent on us for rations, for medical supplies, for calling in air strikes, even for leadership,” said one American officer. “Well, they're not supposed to be mercenaries, they're supposed to be an independent fighting group.” The truth was that all the other Vietnamese units, to the degree that they received U.S. aid and support, were becoming similarly dependent on the Americans.

  By 1967 the Vietnamese officers had begun to look at the war from an entirely new perspective. General Phan Truong Chinh, for instance, the commander of the Twenty-fifth Division and the stalwart of generals Khang and Ky, apparently ceased to think of himself as conducting a military operation. In that year more of his men were killed in traffic accidents than in combat. The fact that he was a poet, and a good one by Saigon standards, may have had something to do with it, but he seemed preoccupied by the presence of three American divisions within a fifty-mile radius of his division headquarters. In November of 1966 he had put the Long An province chief under house arrest for going beyond his authority and requesting helicopters from the U.S. First Division for hot pursuit of the Viet Cong. This and other uncooperative acts (the general had managed to stop three American operations in the ten days before that incident; he had also caused the current American hope, Colonel Sam Wilson, to leave his pacification project for operations in the trackless Plain of Reeds) led the general's adviser to send out a secret report on him to General Westmoreland. Within a few days Chinh acquired a copy of the report and issued an order forbidding all his officers from speaking to their American advisers. For Chinh, as for many other GVN officials, the main concern now seemed to be not the Communists but the Americans.

  The attitude of the Vietnamese officials towards the Americans was a complicated one. The sense and tone of it are perhaps best explained in the famous parable by the Greek poet, Cavafy. In that poem the people of a fictional city are waiting for the approach of a barbarian horde. Having decided not to resist, they wait in the public square to welcome the barbarians. The emperor sits passive on his throne, the senators stop passing laws, and the orators are quiet so as to make the best impression on the barbarians. After they have waited all day, the people hear that the barbarians have turned away from the city. And they are strangely disappointed, for as they say, “Those people were a kind of a solution.” The Vietnamese officials waited in the same manner for the Americans — only the Americans did not turn away, did not leave them with the problem of how to cope with their own freedom. They entered the city and did what they wanted with it. The officials never grew to like them — in a sense there was no question of “liking,” for communication was impossible — but they nonetheless grew to depend upon them. Whatever happened in the city, the barbarians were responsible. The barbarian horde committed outrages upon the citizens from time to time, but the situation was generally satisfactory. The Vietnamese officials no longer had to worry about their own survival, and they felt no obligation towards their masters. The barbarians were all-powerful; they did what they liked, and therefore the Vietnamese were free to do anything they liked. In a sense, life was more difficult for the barbarians than for the people of the city.

  In 1967 an experienced American adviser told the New York Times correspondent, R. W. Apple, that recently his “counterpart,” a battalion commander in the Vietnamese Twenty-fifth Division, had disappeared during one ferocious all-night battle. Assuming that the officer was dead, the adviser took command of the battalion and led it through the fight. The next morning, however, the commander emerged from the foxhole where he had spent the night, shook himself, and ordered his men to move out. When the adviser suggested that he deploy his men in a less bunched-up formation, the officer coldly ignored him and marched his men back to base as they were.15

  The officer was an exception — an exception, that is, among thousands of exceptions — but the story is an excellent illustration of what, in a wider sense, U.S. military “support” did for the Vietnamese government. Instead of helping the officials to govern, it alienated them from their own position as leaders. Such officers did not act like “puppets,” but they saw themselves as puppets or mercenaries with respect to their public duties. Mistrustful of the Americans, the Vietnamese attempted to box them into accepting the total responsibility for a situation that was, as the Vietnamese saw it, of American making. General Chinh, Mme. Cao Van Vien, Lederer's famous Major Hao, General Thieu himself — all of them watched the Americans as a prisoner watches his jailer until finally they could make a defiant gesture showing the imprisonment of the guard and the freedom of the prisoner. They felt what they did was in no way immoral, but merely a matter of self-protection.

  In many ways the most tragic figures of the war were those Vietnamese who trusted the Americans and believed in their own responsibility for all those fine words written at the Honolulu Conference. In Dinh Tuong province a young half-Chinese official, the protégé of a fatherly American AID adviser, had dedicated himself to the thankless task of trying to persuade the villagers to organize and build schools for their children with government aid. When his American protector departed the province, the local police chief threw the young man in jail on trumped-up charges and demanded all of his wife's jewelry as a ransom. Because the official was honest and had friends among the Americans, he was seen as a threat to the whole provincial system of corruption. Similarly, Major Nguyen Be, a former Viet Minh officer and one of the few men in the GVN with any political concern for the peasantry, became, as the deputy province chief of Binh Dinh, the focus of all American hopes for the pacification program in early 1966. While in Binh Dinh he told (or was thought to have told) his American friends too much about the workings of the local bureaucracy. Unable to remove him by any other means, the province chief, a cousin of the corps commander, General Vinh Loc, one day sent his agents out to assassinate him. Alerted just in time, Be escaped the city in a jeep and, thanks to his Viet Minh training, managed to hide out in the nearby villages for a week without being caught by either the GVN officials or the Front cadre.

  Be escaped and managed to get a job training the RD cadre for the CIA in Vung Tau. But his colleague, another former Viet Minh officer, Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau, elected to the Assembly in 1967, was later jailed by General Thieu against all the laws of the constitution and the protests of high officials in the mission. Chau's error was to have complained publicly of a certain businessman who, as Thieu's bagman, had a great deal to do with passing Thieu's bills through the Assembly. Many of the deputies at first supported Chau against the official charge that he had negotiated with his brother, an officer in the NLF, but many of them and much of the Saigon press turned against him when, in his defense, Chau admitted that he had told the CIA all about his meetings with his brother. Thieu emerged from the encounter (like Nguyen Ngoc Loan before him) as the protector of Vietnamese sovereignty. The Catholic scholar, Nguyen Van Trung, expressed the feelings of many Saigonese when he wrote:

  The countries belonging to
what is called the free world revere democracy and equality, yet in fact they are only democratic and egalitarian within their own countries.… With regard to small countries… their policy is still the policy of domination.… Only this domination is not overt and crude as under the forms of the old-model colonialism, but is rather very discreet, subtle, and scientific.… Because it does not directly control and govern, the masses of people do not resent it. Furthermore, it not only does not produce feelings of nationalism but makes those feelings disappear. Even those revolutionaries who fought against the old colonialism, because they now hold power, receive the aid of “advisers” and enjoy it. For precisely this reason, the new-model policy of intervention is more dangerous than the old colonialism, because the new style does not create conditions which give rise to opposition.16

  The argument had a great measure of truth to it. The Americans were in control of South Vietnam, and any claims they made for the independence of the Saigon government were hypocritical given that fact. But the argument was also in some sense a rationalization. The “masses of people” resented the French no more and no less than they resented the Americans: it was the Viet Minh who focused that resentment, and there was no such group within the Saigon government. The fact was that many Vietnamese of the cities had wanted the Americans to intervene — wanted them not only for practical reasons but for the psychological ones suggested by Cavafy. They wanted the Americans to be the all-powerful barbarians, to take responsibility for the war — at the same time that they feared American domination. By one of those strange reverses that the mind makes for the sake of self-consistency, both the desire and the fear merged in an expression of fear that the Americans would leave them. The constant demands — the demands of the Fifth Ranger Group for more supplies, the demands of the Thieu government for more American aid17 — were demands for reassurance that the Americans were “sincere” and would continue to feed them whatever the cost. The demands were insatiable — far in excess of the need — for the reassurance could never be obtained: the Americans were not their leaders and thus could never be trusted. Paradoxically, of course, the American attempts to assure the Vietnamese that they were not colonialists, and that they would one day leave Vietnam, only heightened the Vietnamese anxiety about their good faith. How could they enter into a relationship they knew would not last? The Americans who demanded that the United States take over the Saigon government were responding to this anxiety in a classical colonial fashion. Here again, however, the Americans could not win because the expressed fear was only an aspect of the real one: the Vietnamese were afraid of their own dependence.