Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  While the young American advisers went on trusting in the future, the “communication” and “cooperation” they expected with the Vietnamese would never materialize. Both peoples — individually and collectively — were making conflicting demands which neither could satisfy. Furthermore, both had a wholly different idea of the relationship. One incident — an incident among many — that happened to a Marine doctor in Quang Nam province described these contrasting images.

  As part of the Marine “civic action” program the doctor, so he explained, spent the whole of one very hot day in a hamlet going from door to door, examining patients and dispensing medicines without charge. At the last house — a shop, as it happened, where the women sold cold drinks — he treated four members of the family for various minor illnesses. When he had finished his work, he asked the woman politely if he could have a cold beer. The woman refused. She demanded that he pay for it — and at American rates. Later, as he recounted the story, the Marine officer was once again puzzled and angry. “Those Vietnamese,” he said finally, “they just aren't… they have no gratitude.”

  The Marine would seem to have been justified in his anger. But, as Otare Mannoni has pointed out, gratitude is a strange emotion in that it is made up of two seemingly contradictory expressions: first, that the individual is deeply indebted to his benefactor, and second, that he is not indebted at all. Gratitude is, in effect, a compromise, and one made almost uniquely by Westerners, to reconcile the demand for obligation with the need to maintain personal independence. In asking for gratitude the Marine had not been quite as altruistic as he imagined, for, while he asked for no monetary payment, he asked for a deeper acknowledgment of his services — an emotional quid pro quo.

  In a sense, the American mission was making the same kind of complicated demand upon the Vietnamese. The officials asked the Saigon government both to maintain its independence and at the same time to oblige them by following their advice. They regarded their commitment to the GVN as being in the nature of a business deal — a loan of funds and management consultants such as a large company may make to a smaller one that is threatened by bankruptcy. As they were to have no return on their investment except that of foiling the schemes of their rival consortium, they assumed they had the right to some thanks, if not to obedience.

  Like the seller of cold drinks, the Vietnamese officials did not take the same view at all. They saw the relationship not as a business transaction but as a long-term personal engagement between superior and inferior — between master and slave when there is only one master and one slave in the market. Even those Vietnamese intellectuals who opposed the regime objected to American demands for a quid pro quo. Writing in 1969, at least five years after the Americans had last threatened to cut off any aid to the GVN, one intellectual complained:

  In going to help us, you always placed your own interests above personal relationships and against the moral spirit of East Asia; why should so many people not feel irritated? Every time you felt your own interests being chipped away, you did not hesitate to use every method to apply pressure against us, and the nut and the bolt of the whole matter has always been the question of money. Your special cardsharping trick [lit., your professional fingers] was always “aid and the cutting of aid.”18

  As the Vietnamese reasoned, the Americans had no right to exact anything from them; on the contrary, the Americans owed them something for the use of their soil to fight a war that was really directed against China and the Soviet Union. The fact that so many American soldiers thought of themselves as giving their lives to save the lives of a lot of “ungrateful” Vietnamese officials did not change their point of view. Like Caliban in The Tempest, they believed the Americans had already broken their trust and relieved them of the necessity to show their obligation. They were free to work against the Americans up to the point at which the Americans would abandon them.

  The more Americans spent their best efforts and their lives in Vietnam, the less influence the United States had for reform upon the GVN. With both men and material resources, the Americans were enforcing corruption and destroying the tissue of Vietnamese society. Further, they were tearing the GVN officials further and further away from their own people. The thousands of dead ARVN soldiers, the bombed-out villages, and the refugees, all attested to the alienation. The officials continued to speak of “the Vietnamese nation” and the “Vietnamese people,” but they had lost whatever residual solidarity they once had with the villagers. The Saigon government had turned over on its back to feed upon the Americans.

  13

  Prospero

  PROSPERO:

  (aside) I had forgot that foul conspiracy Of the beast Caliban and his confederates Against my life: the minute of their plot Is almost come.…

  FEHDINAND:

  This is strange. Your father's in some passion That works him strongly.

  MIRANDA:

  Never till this day Saw I him touched with anger, so distempered.

  PROSPERO:

  A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick: on whom my pains, Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost! And as with age his body uglier grows, So his mind cankers. I will plague them all, Even to roaring.

  William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 4, scene 1

  In September 1967, four staff members from the International Voluntary Service in Vietnam resigned from their posts and with forty-nine of their colleagues wrote a letter to President Johnson condemning the American war. These young volunteers had come to Vietnam with the intention of helping to carry out the “war against hunger, ignorance and disease” described in the Honolulu program, and the mission had judged their contribution valuable.1 Two of the staff members, Don Luce and John Sommer, had spent a total of thirteen years in Vietnam; they had been working with the montagnards, students, and poor farmers long before the arrival of the American troops, and they had a commitment to the whole notion of aid to underdeveloped countries and, in particular, to the success of the American aid program in Vietnam. Thus they resigned reluctantly, and they did so not because they had just decided that the aid program was a failure (this Luce and Sommer had known for some years) but because they had come to realize that the main efforts of the United States in Vietnam were destructive rather than constructive. “We do not accuse anyone of deliberate cruelty,” the IVSers wrote. “Perhaps if you accept the war, all can be justified — the free strike zones, the refugees, the spraying of herbicide on crops, the napalm. But the Vietnam war is in itself an overwhelming atrocity. Its every victim — the dead, the bereaved, the deprived — is a victim of this atrocity.”2 It was from the beginning an error for the young men to project their own idealism onto the United States policy in Vietnam, but at least they realized their mistake and acted upon their convictions. And in this the young men were unique, for no other American official in Vietnam resigned publicly for reasons of conscience.

  For the rest of the American officials, nothing seemed to have changed. In the air-conditioned offices of Saigon, the mission “regulars” pored over plans for the dredging of a long canal through NLF territory — a project that would employ the labors of some eight or nine thousand people for months in order to bring the Delta rice two days closer to Saigon. In his villa not far away, General Lansdale entertained a select company with talk about the motivation of the cadre teams and the spirit of democracy in Asia. The confidence of the Americans was something quite extraordinary — indeed it was probably incredible to those who had not spent time in Vietnam. After thirteen years of failed programs and fallen governments, the officials were still planning new approaches not only to winning the war, but to building a prosperous, independent nation out of the shreds of non-Communist Vietnam. “Democratic elections… rooting out corruption… rooting in the government… land reform… rural electrification… revolutionary development” — the phrases had become so familiar that it was difficult now to grasp the magnitude of the changes they implied, or to sort out the i
ntellectual confusion. In Da Nang one might find (as one writer did) a Marine colonel distributing carpentry sets paid for by Marine Reserve officers in the United States and saying, “Of course we try to make what we do seem as though it comes from the government, not us. We want the villagers to think their own people are looking after them and not Uncle Sam. We're trying to get some other kind of training for people. Maybe in ten or fifteen years there'll be some ground to build democracy on here.”3

  Confusion of goals and motives extended not only to the soldiers and the junior AID officials. By 1967 Vietnam was inundated with social scientists working under contract to the Defense Department.4 Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the Hudson Institute briefed colonels on increasing “security” by means of substituting German shepherd dogs for Vietnamese soldiers on night patrols and building a moat all the way around Saigon. At a conference in 1968, Professor Ithiel de Sola Pool of MIT and the Simulmatics Corporation5 spoke about the great success of the Vietnamese elections and the drive against corruption, proposing that the United States “build a bridge” between the new legislature and the elected village councils so as to reduce and finally eliminate the autonomy of the Vietnamese military bureaucracy. Dr. Pool, in other words, proposed that the U.S. mission destroy the whole infrastructure of the war and deliver power to a group of unarmed legislators, whom the Vietnamese generals tolerated as creatures of an American whim.6

  In this third year of a major war that had made the Vietnamese civilians into survivors and refugees, the mission had an air of freshness and newness about it. Young men from RAND and Simulmatics bounded about the countryside in Land Rovers studying “upward mobility among village elites” or “the interrelationship of land reform with peasant political motivation.” “Of course,” they would say with a slight swagger as they emptied the clips from their Swedish K submachine guns, “if the GVN realized the RF-PF potential, the lower-level Viet Cong village hierarchies would disappear in a matter of weeks.” The old-timers would scoff at their naïveté. In the embassy weary State Department officials would look up from their desks to describe the disasters that had occurred to the RF-PF in Quang Ngai, Quang Tin, and Quang Nam provinces. “So the program isn't working,” a journalist might conclude. “Not working?” They would look up, startled. “Why, just look at An Giang province. The GVN is really pulling itself together this year.”

  Many American newspaper readers had come to regard such statements as propaganda, but they were nothing of the sort. The time for such propaganda had long since passed, and the officials were sincere, sometimes painfully so. In 1956, even in 1962, this sincerity could be thought of as no more than a product of native American optimism and a misunderstanding of the Vietnamese. Many officials in Vietnam believed, with most Americans, that they faced an enemy who ruled by force and terror alone. They believed they could give the Vietnamese material prosperity and political reform. At the time it took a great deal of sophistication to see why U.S. ambitions might be unrealistic. But now in this third year of the war, after the U.S. mission had set up a weak military dictatorship and dismantled the economy, after the American troops had killed countless thousands of Vietnamese, had burned their villages and destroyed their crops, all the talk of “social revolution” and nation-building evidenced an extreme removal from reality.

  In many respects this distance was institutional. The high officials of the mission had created a system by which they could receive no bad news. Under the reign of Lodge and Porter, for instance, all civilian province officials filled out a single report every month describing not what the situation was but what the “Free World Forces” had done in their province for the past month. The aim of this report was patent, as its title was “Progress Report.” And it did indeed show progress up to the point of a perfect tautology. What went in one end of the pipeline came out the other: a hundred bags of bulgur distributed, two villages cleared, and so forth. As a perfectly closed system, it did not even contain a space where the province representative might write that the NLF had gone back into the two villages or that the refugees who did not receive the bulgur had starved. The equivalent accounting system in the military was the description of all U.S. actions undertaken, followed by an enumeration of enemy deaths and enemy “structures” destroyed. Most Americans in Vietnam automatically discounted the ARVN “body counts” as fabrications, but they were not so willing to admit that the American tallies often reflected no more than Vietnamese dead and Vietnamese houses ruined —if that. The system put pressure on all military men to exaggerate or falsify statistics.7 Furthermore, as the only “indicator of progress,” it suggested that death and destruction had some absolute value in terms of winning the war. That the enemy might continue to recruit, rearm, and rebuild (often with the help of people enraged by the American destruction) did not seem to enter into the calculations.

  Another even more obvious form of error arose from the way in which the high officials arranged the already questionable figures they received. Robert Komer, for instance, included the number of refugees within the total of the “increase of people living in secure areas,” thereby leaving the impression that the entire increase, as opposed to a small percentage of it, owed to his own pacification teams and the expansion of the GVN into the countryside. (Komer's Hamlet Evaluation Survey, a most sophisticated system that classified hamlets into five categories of GVN control according to eighteen political, economic, and military criteria, had similar built-in deceptions, and in any case proved much too complicated for any American with a one-year tour to use.) The U.S. military intelligence, for its part, estimated the enemy effectives by counting only those fighting in the main force units and ignoring the number employed as cadres or village guerrillas, thereby overlooking the NLF's entire base of recruitment and supply. (After what was undoubtedly a long interservice battle, the CIA managed to make the larger view prevail. The result was that after all the military claims of enemy killed during the Tet offensive, the estimates of enemy strength shot up from 245,000 to 600,000. )8

  The neophyte journalists naturally assumed that these estimates were solely for their own benefit, but this was not the case. The officials made those figures for themselves. Each layer of officials added a new distortion with the result that the higher the official, the less he usually knew about the situation on the ground. President Johnson, perhaps, knew the least of all. Upon replacing Robert McNamara as secretary of defense in 1968, Clark Clifford quite quickly came to the conclusion that the President was being misinformed by the ambassador and others in Saigon. He realized soon afterwards that this misinformation was only a part of the problem. In his meetings with the President he would occasionally read the passages he considered significant from the reports of the CIA chief of station and the U.S. commander in Vietnam. Instead of objecting to those passages, the President would say, in effect, “Where did that come from? Why didn't anyone show me that before?” But the President had read those same reports already; he had merely overlooked those passages.

  The reason for this failure of vision was not hard to locate. Before the United States committed troops to Vietnam, the American intelligence estimates were with some exceptions extremely accurate. They continued to be accurate throughout the war in those sections of the bureaucracy (notably the intelligence, as distinct from the operations, divisions of the CIA) that had no responsibility for carrying American policy to success. But by 1968 there were very few such groups in Vietnam or among those concerned with Vietnam in Washington. In 1968 the job of the American ambassador, the military command, the heads of the aid programs, the CIA operations groups, and their counterparts in Washington, was not to discover if the American effort was morally wrong or doomed to failure, but to make that war effort a success. Each individual bureaucrat wished to prove himself a member of a successful enterprise. Each official believed (wished to believe) in his own wisdom and “effectiveness.” He believed (wished to believe) in U.S. policy and the war in Vietnam. This credo
could be read from front to back or back to front and one tenet would still follow the other as night the day. To admit that the war was excessively destructive or that it was not being won was to admit to personal as well as institutional failure — an admission difficult for anyone to make. The higher the official, the more he was publicly identified with the war policy, and the greater was his temptation to look only for an optimistic interpretation of events. (Facing an electorate that received the war largely with indifference or hostility, the President himself had very little latitude to alter his public stance and little interest in discovering the gloomy truths.) The circle of self-interest created a complete circle of self-deception that began and ended in the office of the President of the United States.