Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  In 1966 Senator George Aiken of Vermont suggested that the United States government simply announce that it had won the war and then withdraw its troops from Vietnam. In refusing to take this plausible alternative of ignoring reality altogether, Johnson condemned his officials who worked on Vietnam to the excruciating mental task of holding reality and the official version of reality together as they moved farther and farther apart. For many officials the attempt entailed a total self-contradiction. In 1966, for example, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey went to Vietnam on Johnson's bidding to congratulate the Saigon government on the progress it had made in the area of Revolutionary Development. In the course of a ritual visit to the RD training camp in Vung Tao, he heard the chief instructor of the program, Major Nguyen Be, assert that the program was not working because the entire Saigon government was corrupt. The Vice-President, who had made his political fortunes in Minneapolis as a muck-raking reformer, found himself in the position of defending a government he must have known was corrupt against a Vietnamese reformer.

  The incident only illustrated in a public way what happened in private to many American officials who had to deal with the Saigon government. The aim of the American advisory program was, after all, to help the Vietnamese officials; in practice this meant to help them with whatever they wanted. Few American advisers dared to criticize their “counterparts” for fear of limiting their “effectiveness” in the future; few dared to send in pessimistic reports for fear of damaging their own careers.9 Even if their “counterparts” were corrupt or otherwise incapable, they would send in glowing reports, recommending that the mission send them more aid, more arms, more men, in order to make up for a deficiency that remained invisible to their superior officers. The result was that the necessity for false reporting would increase — along with the fortunes of their “counterparts.” As men with access to the source of supply, the advisers became active participants in the Vietnamese network of corruption. The penalty for doing otherwise was too severe. In 1967 William Lederer discovered that a district chief in Quang Nam province (the same official who so enraged Colonel Corson) was stealing the rations of his own PF soldiers, thus causing the PF to desert and to leave the U.S. Marine pacification teams unprotected. When he took that story to the American adviser to the First Corps commander, Lieutenant General Hoang Xuan Lam, the U.S. army colonel refused even to hear him out. As a Marine officer later explained to Lederer, the adviser was caught in an impossible situation : if he cut the district chief out of the supply line, General Lam (from whom the district chief had undoubtedly bought his job) would complain to the Saigon junta; a member of the junta would then tell the American command that the adviser was unable to get along with the Vietnamese; the adviser would then be removed (losing his chance for promotion) and the district chief would continue to steal the supplies.

  To the end of “helping” the Vietnamese government, American officials not only concealed Vietnamese corruption but suppressed information about the extortion rackets, rape, pillage, and outright military atrocities. For at least two years, the generals of Westmoreland's staff refused to let even the analysts on contract to the Defense Department investigate the wholesale slaughter of civilians by the Korean troops in the course of their “pacification” program. And it was not until 1970 that members of a congressional committee stumbled across a concealed group of “tiger cages” on Con Son Island, where for years the Vietnamese military, with the knowledge of American advisers, had kept political prisoners — that is, Buddhist students — under conditions that hardly bore description.10 The information first revealed by Don Luce came to general public attention only because one member of the committee staff decided to give the story to the newspapers; the camp situation had not been discussed in the later congressional report. A few days later a doctor working for the American Friends Service in Quang Ngai province reported that she had treated “political prisoners” after they were tortured in a Vietnamese interrogation center, with the knowledge of American officers, by Vietnamese officers, who were carrying on a thriving extortion racket through the center.11

  To suppress information of this kind required the cooperation not only of a few colonels bucking for general but by the heads of the American mission in Saigon.

  That the mission heads were capable of tolerating such abuses should not, perhaps, have been surprising. In 1966 Henry Cabot Lodge had, after all, condoned Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan's slaughter of more than a hundred Buddhist civilians in Da Nang. In 1967 Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, the distinguished career diplomat who succeeded Lodge, applauded a rigged election and condoned the imprisonment of a large number of opposition political and labor leaders on false charges.12 In the name of freedom and democracy, the ambassadors did nothing while the Saigon officials arrested or murdered whomever they liked without fear of reprisal from the rest of the population.

  Rather than reform the Vietnamese, these distinguished men, who operated with a perfectly clear conscience as to their own integrity and patriotism, presided over a system that corrupted both Vietnamese and Americans. Further, in deceiving themselves into a belief in “progress,” they worked against the interests of the government and the country they served.

  The effort of trying to hold reality and the official version of reality together finally took its toll on the Americans in Vietnam. When added to all the other strains of war, it produced an almost intolerable tension that expressed itself not in a criticism of American policy so much as in a fierce resentment against the Vietnamese. The logic of that anger was a simple one, combined of guilt and illusions destroyed. The nature of those illusions was even less apparent to Americans than it had been to the French, but the illusions were nonetheless powerful. At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in 1965, General Maxwell Taylor, just returned from the ambassadorship in Saigon, said in describing the pacification program: “We have always been able to move in the areas where the security was good enough. But I have often said it is very hard to plant the corn outside the stockade when the Indians are still around. We have to get the Indians farther away in many of the provinces to make good progress.”13 In Vietnam American officers liked to call the area outside GVN control “Indian country.” It was a joke, of course, no more than a figure of speech, but it put the Vietnam War into a definite historical and mythological perspective: the Americans were once again embarked upon a heroic and (for themselves) almost painless conquest of an inferior race. To the American settlers the defeat of the Indians had seemed not just a nationalist victory, but an achievement made in the name of humanity — the triumph of light over darkness, of good over evil, and of civilization over brutish nature. Quite unconsciously, the American officers and officials used a similar language to describe their war against the NLF. According to the official rhetoric, the Viet Cong did not live in places, they “infested areas”; to “clean them out” the American forces went on “sweep and clear” operations or moved all the villagers into refugee camps in order to “sanitize the area.” Westmoreland spoke of the NLF as “termites.” The implications of this language rarely came to consciousness (some of the American field commanders actually admired the Front as a fighting force), but they were nonetheless there. The Americans were white men in Asia, and they could not conceive that they might fail in their enterprise, could not conceive that they could be morally wrong.

  Beyond all the bureaucratic and strategic interests in the war, it was this “can do” attitude, this sense of righteous mission that had led the U.S. government deeper and deeper into Vietnam. Moral infallibility, military invincibility — the two went together and were not to be differentiated, not in Vietnam, in any case, where the enemy was not only Communist but small, yellow, and poor.14 The difficulty was that the “allies” of the United States belonged within almost the same category — the same category with the one term of Communism removed. The distinction — Communist, non-Communist — so obvious in theory, became an elusive one in practice when jux
taposed with the much greater contrast between Americans and Vietnamese.

  In coming to Vietnam, most American advisers, for instance, expected their “counterparts” to render them their due as members of a more “advanced” society. The expectation was not, after all, unreasonable, since the U.S. government sent them out to advise the Vietnamese. But the advisers tended to see themselves in the roles of teacher and older brother, and when the Vietnamese did not respond to them in the expected manner — when they did not even take their advice — few succeeded in reconstructing the truth of the matter. Few saw that the Vietnamese were not the pupils of the Americans, but people with a very different view of the world and with interests that only occasionally coincided with their own. For those few who succeeded there were an equal number of others (men such as the Marine colonel with his carpentry set) who took an extreme parochial view, looking upon the Vietnamese as savages or children with empty heads into which they would pour instruction. Covered with righteous platitudes, theirs was an essentially colonialist vision, born out of the same insecurity and desire for domination that had motivated many of the French. When their “counterparts” did not take their instruction, these advisers treated the Vietnamese like bad pupils, accusing them of corruption or laziness, and attempted to impose authority over them. And when the attempt at coercion failed, they retreated from the Vietnamese entirely, barricading themselves in behind American weapons and American PX goods, behind the assumption of American superiority and the assumption that the Vietnamese were not quite human like themselves.

  “Don't you realize,” exploded one young embassy officer, “don't you realize that everything the Americans do in Vietnam is founded on a hatred of the Vietnamese?” His outburst was shocking, for he, of all Americans in Vietnam, had managed to preserve a sense of balance. He understood the point of view of the Vietnamese officials as well as the Americans, and because of his own success at reconciling the two, he had believed that the best in both would prevail. Two years earlier he had confidence that the two could find some common ground for cooperation against the NLF. But he, the diplomat par excellence, had seen his compatriots turn into spineless bureaucrats and frustrated proconsuls. And into murderers.

  In 1969 an incident came to the attention of the U.S. Congress that had occurred a year and a half before in the wake of the Tet offensive. On a routine search and destroy operation a company from the America Division had walked into the village of My Lai and without provocation had gunned down three hundred and forty seven civilians, most of them women and children. A photographer had taken pictures of screaming women, dead babies, and a mass of bodies piled up in a ditch. Even once substantiated, the story seemed incredible to many people. How could American soldiers have committed such an atrocity? The congressional subcommittee investigating the incident wrote much later, “What obviously happened at My Lai was wrong. In fact it was so wrong and so foreign to the normal character and actions of our military forces as to immediately raise a question as to the legal sanity at the time of those men involved.”15 But as teams of psychiatrists were later to show, Lieutenant William Calley and the other men involved were at the time quite as “sane” as the members of the congressional committee who investigated them. The incident was not exceptional to the American war.

  Young men from the small towns of America, the GIs who came to Vietnam found themselves in a place halfway round the earth among people with whom they could make no human contact. Like an Orwellian army, they knew everything about military tactics, but nothing about where they were or who the enemy was. And they found themselves not attacking fixed positions but walking through the jungle or through villages among small yellow people, as strange and exposed among them as if they were Martians. Their buddies were killed by land mines, sniper fire, and mortar attacks, but the enemy remained invisible, not only in the jungle but among the people of the villages — an almost metaphysical enemy who inflicted upon them heat, boredom, terror, and death, and gave them nothing to show for it — no territory taken, no visible sign of progress except the bodies of small yellow men.16 And they passed around stories: you couldn't trust anyone in this country, not the laundresses or the prostitutes or the boys of six years old. The enemy would not stand up and fight, but he had agents everywhere, among the villagers, even among the ARVN officers. The Vietnamese soldiers were lazy and the officials corrupt — they were all out to get you one way or another. They were all “gooks,” after all. Just look how they lived in the shacks and the filth; they'd steal the watch off your arm.

  And the stories of combat were embellished: about how the enemy attacked Alpha Company one night and hundreds of them were killed, but they kept on coming in “human waves,” screaming like banshees. It didn't matter how many you killed because they were fanatics who didn't know the value of human life. In boot camp or in the barracks late at night, an experienced sergeant would tell about how the VC killed women and children and tortured their prisoners, cutting off the ears of their victims, or their genitals. And how the ARVN soldiers did the same when their American advisers weren't around.

  There was terror in these stories, but also a kind of release, since if the Vietnamese did not act like human beings, then they did not have to be treated as such. All the laws of civilization were suspended. “And when you shot someone you didn't think you were shooting at a human. They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay, 'cause, like, they [the American officers] would tell you they'd do it to you if they had the chance.”17 The expressiveness of the soldiers' language made even more explicit the fact that these stories were largely fantasies — and fantasies of exactly the same sort that the Americans had created about the Indians and Prospero about Caliban. Like the French soldiers before them, GIs mentally stripped the Vietnamese of their humanity in order to deliver themselves of their own guilty desires. The war brought out their latent sadism, as perhaps all wars between races (and particularly guerrilla wars) have brought it out of all armies. The Americans were no different — that was the shock. “You'll look at your enemy and these people that you're sort of a visitor to. You'll look at them as animals and at the same time you're just turning yourself into an animal, too.”18

  The American soldiers were, perhaps, no different from other soldiers; certainly they were no different from other Americans at home. It was just that the Vietnam War had given them an opportunity to carry their fantasies out. And some of them had taken that opportunity. Some, but not all, of the soldiers at My Lai took it; so too did a number of others, including a number of officers. As the experienced war correspondents knew, many soldiers used to carry around in their wallets pictures they had taken of Vietnamese men and women in obscene positions, obscenely wounded. Another all too familiar spectacle was the beating and crude torture of “Viet Cong suspects” by men from combat units on their way in from an operation. But the officers tended to restrain their men when the press was around. In early 1971 a hundred honorably discharged veterans testified in Detroit and then again before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the atrocities they had witnessed or participated in since 1965. Some had seen prisoners thrown out of helicopters; one had seen two platoons set fire to a hamlet where they found no enemy troops and then shoot down the escaping women and children with high-caliber machine guns. Several others had seen Americans rape, torture, and mutilate Vietnamese women. At least one of them confirmed previous reports that American Special Forces and intelligence officers practiced sophisticated methods of torture on their prisoners in the interrogation centers.19 (In this case the officers presumably justified their methods by the importance of the intelligence thus received. The irony was that while most Americans in Vietnam believed that only the ARVN interrogators tortured their prisoners, those ARVN officers who were interested in information rather than in the torture itself used psychological means — isolation, ridicule, and humiliation — as a much more effective way of dealing with Vietnamese prisoners. Had the American officers really been in
terested in exacting information, they would have figured that out.)

  Once investigated, the My Lai report and others that followed led to the courts-martial of five soldiers — among them Lieutenant William Calley. In making a case for the accused, some of the defense attorneys considered the advantage of raising the question of the legitimacy of the war and the responsibility of the higher political and military authorities. The military courts naturally refused to touch such an explosive political issue, but the very fact that the issue had been raised allowed Calley and others to take a moral position that proved sympathetic to thousands of Americans all over the country: Calley had committed no crime, he was just doing his job as a soldier in killing Vietnamese — civilians though they were. The argument did not, of course, take account of the principle of individual responsibility established at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, nor did it take account of those thousands of American soldiers who did not see killing civilians as in the line of their duty. Still, there was a certain sense in which it could be said that the responsibility belonged to American policy in Vietnam.

  According to the State Department's justification of the war in international law, the American soldiers had been sent to Vietnam to defend the South Vietnamese against an “invasion from the North.” In this the State Department had, of course, deceived the soldiers, for when they arrived in Vietnam, the GIs found that they had also to fight the South Vietnamese. This deception did not, however, surprise them, for the administration officials and their superior officers had as much as told them that the legal grounds in international law were no more than a fiction, that they were going to Vietnam not so much to defend territory as to defend the “Free World allies” of the United States against totalitarian Communism. But it was in this purpose that they would feel themselves most bitterly deceived, for upon arriving in Vietnam, they found not a nation of Communists and democrats, but a nation of “gooks.” To say that one “gook” was a Communist whereas another was not was to make what seemed to be a purely metaphysical distinction which, if wrongly made, might cost you your life. As Calley said after his trial, “When my troops were getting massacred and mauled by an enemy I couldn't see, I couldn't feel and I couldn't touch — that nobody in the military system ever described them as anything other than Communism. They didn't give it a race, they didn't give it a sex, they didn't give it an age. They never let me believe it was just a philosophy in a man's mind. That was my enemy out there.”20 Thus in the My Lai massacre the soldiers abandoned the unrealistic war aims of Dean Rusk and drew their mistaken but nonetheless understandable conclusion: since all Communists in Vietnam are Vietnamese, and since the only good Communist is a dead one, then all Vietnamese had to be killed.