by Norman Stone
The Vietnam problem had emerged in the first place from the collapse both of France and of Japan. There had been other, similar cases — similar, at least, in the sense that they all looked the same if you judged things with the wrong criteria, as, increasingly, number-obsessed American managers, with no particular knowledge, were inclined to do. The European empires in Asia had collapsed, but the American record in the area had not been bad — not at all: Japan, Taiwan and South Korea were starting to flourish, and, in the Philippines, American military intervention had quite successfully put down a Communist rebellion. The British had done the same in Malaya, had in fact had a legendary success in doing so. Why Vietnam was different is still an interesting question. For a start, it was not a unity, but until 1954 a French colony, acquired in the later nineteenth century, as a sort of failed stepping stone to China. The complications even began with the name. The French had called it Annam, a Chinese word meaning ‘conquered place’; Cochinchine, as the south was known, came from a Portuguese word that was itself a misreading of the Chinese characters for ‘Vietnam’. The French also used Tonkin for the northern part, and stressed the divisions, so as to rule more easily; and there were two associated countries, Laos and Cambodia, the whole being known as French Indo-China. Indian and Chinese influences had shaped the country, and Buddhism of various types reigned, but Catholicism had also been brought to bear. There was even a Moslem minority, the Chams, who spoke a language that was the link between the version of Thai spoken in southern China and Indonesian. There was rice, there was rubber, and the geography, from the great Mekong Delta in the south to the mist-swathed mountains of the centre, was very varied. Much of the trade was in the hands of the Chinese minority, who had a symbiotic relationship with river pirates who managed to develop a religious sect all their own. The French managed things easily enough in the days when they had the machine-guns and the Vietnamese did not. There was even an emperor, supplying picturesque legitimacy to the French presence. Then the Vietnamese acquired machine-guns.
They also acquired, and again courtesy of French lessons, a leader of genius who had much the same understanding as Mao had had, as to how technique from the West could be used to subvert the West. The Comintern had its adventurers, men and women who went from language to language and country to country stirring up trouble. Ho Chi Minh was the strangest. He started out with the usual twixt-and-between origins of so many Comintern stalwarts: his father, son of a concubine, nevertheless a mandarin; his schooling, from a French Foreign Legionary with a foul temper; an escape, as stoker, to France, where there was a spell of market-gardening, and then London, where he assisted the great Escoffier in making pastry for the Savoy. In the First World War the French shifted 100,000 Annamites to dig trenches, and Ho picked up Marxism from two Hungarian-Jewish brothers who ran a hostel. The French socialists split in 1920 as to whether they should link up with the victorious Communists in Russia. Ho attended the conference that decided in favour, and signed the document. Then it was the Oriental Workers University in Moscow, where the Comintern taught its people how to take over countries, what were the levers of real power. Ho then moved east — Bangkok as a Buddhist monk, Hong Kong as a cigarette-seller. There, the police picked him up, and he had to be released when appeal was made on his behalf by a prominent British left-wing figure, Sir Stafford Cripps. In 1941, when the Japanese invaded Vietnam, he walked back in. This extremely thin, ascetic, chain-smoking figure with his TB and malaria, his multiple pseudonyms (of which Ho Chi Minh was one, and meant ‘bringer of light’) soon met another clever product of French Marxism, Vo Nguyen Giap, who turned out to have a superb talent for underground warfare. In May 1941, in a small hut, with bamboo tables, they staged the ‘eighth plenum’ of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Ho, chairman, sat on a wooden box and drafted the introductory statements, which are not inflammatory reading. The new organization, essentially popular-front Communist, had the name Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or Vietnamese Independence League. It was shortened to ‘Vietminh’ and was then known as ‘Vietcong’.
In 1945, when the Japanese collapsed, Ho Chi Minh could claim quite simply to be the leader of a nationalist resistance. Giap had organized resistance cells among the peasantry, five to a cell, and, in accordance with the usual practice, did not reveal cells’ existence to other cells. They just took their orders from an unknown source — that committee meeting in a bamboo hut. Having used non-Communists in the resistance, Ho and Giap set about eliminating them when the Japanese surrendered (including all Trotskyists, who had illusions that there might be a ‘native’ revolution independent of Moscow). Ho knew very well that help from Moscow would be decisive, but here, as a pawn in Moscow’s game, he needed to be careful. After all, the French were far more important, as potential allies, than any Vietnamese Communists and until 1947, when the Communists were expelled from the Paris government, Ho was required to co-operate with the French. They were very clumsy, not appreciating that their end of empire was upon them, and Ho gained allies. In 1949 China became Communist, and help was forthcoming from that quarter. It gave the Vietminh a commanding lead. By 1952 the French were facing an extremely difficult war, with brittle allies and uncertain American support; in May 1954 they lost a final battle at Dien Bien Phu, in the north. No doubt if Ho had been left to his own devices, he would have gone on to conquer the south. However, in 1954 the Soviets, anxious to spare France in case she signed up to the European Defence Union, pushed for negotiations at Geneva, and a South Vietnamese state came into existence. Ho’s North Vietnam established itself in the usual way, with a million refugees, mainly Catholic, fleeing from collectivized agriculture and the one-party militarized state. There were 100,000 executions.
Saigon, the Southern capital, was then a backwater of French colonial architecture, with its Hôtel Caravelle on the rue Catinat, where Graham Greene talked Pascal to despairing French officers in the stink of rotting vegetation in the marsh heat. It was not at all well organized, and there were battles of some depth between Buddhists and Catholics, while protection rackets pretended to be religions, and the drugs trade flourished. The picture was further confused because there were still French influences, and the refugees from the North made everything difficult. Some wished to take land, and that opened up a dimension of the Vietnam imbroglio which made it, for some academics, romantic: like Cuba, Vietnam was supposed to be having a ‘peasant war’. This was a situation well understood by Ho, perhaps via Mao, but certainly through his Comintern background. It was not so much a matter of class confict between poor peasant and rich peasant, but between poor peasants and their creditors; besides, within and between villages there were generally deeply felt and sometimes hereditary grievances that could be exploited by Communist guerrillas who knew the ground. By the later fifties, guerrillas from the North were infiltrating the South, carrying out attacks on landowners and government servants. As ever, the Communists presented at least an organization, whereas the Saigon regime, preoccupied with internal fighting, was helpless; it appealed to the Americans.
Kennedy’s advisers, in 1960, were unanimously in favour of giving help and in 1961 7,000 Americans appeared, giving instruction in ‘statebuilding’, i.e. teaching the Vietnamese to be democratic in the American manner. Beefy, gold-braided Americans now had to deal with the South Vietnamese ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem, and found him very difficult: an austere, chaste figure, given to lecturing them about a fashionable French Catholic substitute ideology, ‘personalism’. He had taken over the insufferable loftiness of the French higher administrative style, and he had worked out that the way to avoid awkward questions was to talk and talk. He talked and talked, and the power at court was his sister-in-law, who banned divorce. Still, the Americans had had to deal with tiresome Asiatics in the past; these were not to get in the way. Strangely enough, it was only Johnson who had his doubts: ‘I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out.’ De Gaulle (‘a rotten country’) also advised him aga
inst going in, but the academic advisers were all adamant.
This had been successfully — very successfully — done elsewhere in Asia, most obviously in the case of a Japan that was now lifted off on an extraordinary trajectory that would make her a world economic power, but also with South Korea and Taiwan. Colonization was not part of the programme: on the contrary, the American ambassador was expected to be avuncular and helpful, not domineering, and as a sign of this the embassy itself was not much protected — easy access and no bombproof windows. ‘Hearts and minds’ programmes taught English and showed Hollywood movies; a famous photograph showed a very slender Vietnamese boy wielding a baseball bat almost his own size at the behest of a protein-stuffed and well-intentioned soldier. Dollars flowed into Vietnam; so did advisers with the latest wisdoms of political science (in 1966 they staged a constitutional convention, as the country fell to pieces around them: some of the people present had even designed three constitutions and Samuel Huntington immortally remarked upon the ‘consensus-making bodies… viable institutions for power-sharing which would gradually lead to the legitimation of the entire governmental framework’). In all of this, security of body and soul naturally came first, and the Vietcong would have to be contained and defeated, the Americans helping where necessary. But some means to gain the peasants’ loyalty was also of elementary importance.
At the time, influential writers were saying that the central problem of ‘Third World’ countries was the great imbalance in land ownership — huge estates, downtrodden peasants. The peasants, dirt-poor, could not buy anything, so native industry did not develop; the rich just imported goods via some comprador class. Such was Sicily in the nineteenth century, such was Latin America in the twentieth (Barrington Moore is an outstanding writer on these subjects). The answer was for governments to intervene and give land to the peasant. Japan and Taiwan had had land reforms, for political reasons, and these were thought to have been successful, in that societies with an element of equality had emerged. There was much more to this story than met the eye. The most successful agriculture was practised (outside the great empty plains of America) in England, which even in 1930 had more land under the cultivation of great estates than Tsarist Russia in 1916. But in the decolonizing era, landowners were an obvious target for expropriation, and the contented, picturesque peasant made for good propaganda. In South Vietnam the growers of rice for export had thrived in the French period, and they were influential in Saigon. That they were Catholics, and the peasants generally not, mattered; the prevalence of the Chinese minority in the whole trade also mattered; and sometimes there was not even a language in common between lord and peasant.
Diem knew the complications, but his Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was ragtag and his writ hardly went beyond Saigon. Efforts at land reform went slowly and badly, and the Vietcong, launching guerrilla attacks, made matters far more difficult. Peasants were herded into agrovilles and had to walk for hours to reach their plots; there was much bribery in the sale of, for instance, rat poison, and it was sometimes difficult for peasants to stop squatters from occupying their land. Surrounded by barbed wire, but badly defended, the peasants became demoralized, and the Vietcong knew how to exploit the situation. One of their first acts was to murder people who had the peasants’ confidence, such that, leaderless, they would be an open target. The reform programme, never enthusiastically pursued, was largely abandoned, and in Long An province only 1,000 tenants out of 35,000 received any land at all; many were expected to buy it whereas the Vietcong ‘gave’ it. Diem, surrounded by relatives — half of his cabinet — hardly knew what to do, beyond keeping the old system going, however bad, on the grounds that anything else would have been worse. The rural scene would no doubt have got better, as peasants moved to towns, reduced overpopulation and sent money home, as happened in happier climes. That was not to be. As the journalist Neil Sheehan says, ‘the Americans… were not gaining the communities of controlled peasants they sought. They were instead fostering temporary encampments of peasants motivated as never before to support the Vietcong.’
How were Americans to deal with assassins, clutching an old rifle, waiting for hours in ambush, their feet rotting in the rice paddy slush? Guerrillas who moved with great cunning to terrorize peasants in their huts? There were very good American officers, and one such was Lieutenant-Colonel John Vann, who had made his mark in Korea, and went to Vietnam as adviser — a man of enormous energy, a good organizer and brave without being foolhardy. He knew only too well what was going wrong in Vietnam. He had to deal with a Colonel Huynh Van Cao in the Plain of Reeds, the north-western corner of the Mekong Delta. It was close to the Cambodian border, where the Vietcong had sanctuary, and was a vile place to fight — swamp, waist-high reeds, clumps of bush and woods, stretching over two provinces. There were concrete blockhouses at the bridges, with rusting barbed wire, among fields of sprouting sugarcane, with canals, ditches and, in the season, a steady downpour. It was easy enough for the Vietcong to hide, where necessary in the water, breathing through a hollow reed; and they could come and go, noiselessly, on flat-bottomed boats. They would wait patiently, suddenly emerging to fire. The Saigon government had in effect lost the southern delta, and the northern delta, with its 2 million people, supplied much of the country’s food.
Colonel Cao had written a novel and talked windy French ideology; the French had not trained Vietnamese officers until late in the day and the soldiers, paid ten dollars per month in Saigon piastres, were not enthusiastic for the cause. On night patrol, for instance, they would cough, to warn Vietcong to keep away. If trouble came, American air power would be used, and the peasantry suffered from such indiscriminate firing. Vann became especially angry when a battle went hopelessly wrong at a village, Ap Bac, in the eastern part of the Plain of Reeds, early in 1963. The Vietcong had suffered from American helicopters in particular, but wished to show the peasantry that they had not been beaten. They had studied the situation, and worked out that, if they aimed in front of a passing helicopter, they would hit it; and they used captured American machine-guns. Now, holding a well-camouflaged zigzag line along irrigation ditches, which had small embankments and a dike on the outer edge, they threatened the South Vietnamese positions. On that side, what could go wrong, did — artillery firing inaccurately, American helicopter pilots resenting direction by South Vietnamese, landing in the wrong place, there to be shot to pieces; armoured vehicles pushed across impossible swamp; napalm dropped on peasant straw huts; Colonel Cao going into a huff and refusing to fight at all. A total of 350 Vietcong defeated four times their number, at that with fighter bombers, and five helicopters were lost. Reuters and Associated Press had been present to see the mess, and John Vann, in private, briefed them. He had been especially dismayed at the remoteness and serenity of the senior Americans — General Paul D. Harkins, swagger stick, gold braid, impeccable uniform, playing the part in a Hollywood movie about the Pacific war; the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, extraordinary two — dimensional energy, suit, writing down every figure he could in a little notebook for transfer into some machine that would mathematize everything (and produce the inevitable conclusion that the United States would win).
By 1963 much of the countryside was ungovernable, unsafe to travel in, and the Americans’ support encouraged the Catholics in charge of affairs to act high-handedly. In the summer, surrealism supervened. To the Catholics, the Buddhists were backward and absurd — a dozen and more squabbling sects, 750,000 monks who were, strictly speaking, parasitical. Their involvement in the sectarian protection rackets was dangerous, and they had links with the Vietcong. The Diem regime tried to control the Buddhists; a 73-year-old monk adopted the lotus position, arranged his saffron robes, covered himself in petrol, and struck a match. His example was followed, and Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu — wife of the president’s brother and adviser — clapped her delicate little hands in glee at the ‘barbecue’. Ugly episodes followed — the police manhandling protestin
g nuns, students, even young girls from school, some of them children of well-placed officials. That summer, there were further self-sacrifices by monks, and into this stepped forceful Americans, their patience barely under control. The ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, talked to the generals, and Diem was killed after a coup led by Duong Van Minh and despite an American safe-conduct. When, three weeks later, Kennedy was killed, his wife received a barbed letter of condolences from Madame Nhu.
The South Vietnamese now fell back, often enough, on passivity, expecting the Americans to do everything. One immediate consequence was an overloading of the American machinery: for instance, security had been left to the South Vietnamese, and a suicide car-bombing at the embassy in Saigon killed twenty and wounded 126, mostly Vietnamese, in summer 1965. Not even the glass had been reinforced, or covered with plastic. As Vietcong authority grew, so too did the number of Americans. By the spring of 1965 the South Vietnamese were taking $500m per annum, but this somehow did not give them a workable government. As William Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser, said, the government was ‘the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel’. There was even briefly a nonagenarian in charge. The problem as regards Buddhists continued — they sacked the American library in the city of Hue, for instance. It was not until the summer of 1966 that the Buddhist movement was (bloodily) crushed, but in towns and cities such as Hue it was the Vietcong that profited from the resulting hatreds. Meanwhile, South Vietnam became memorably corrupt. Import licences for cement were such that the entire country could have been paved over; theft from the PX was gigantic, even involving a computer worth two million dollars. Inflation had wrecked government salaries, so that corruption became the only means of survival — a provincial chief, with a family, could not survive on $200 per month, and there were networks of black-marketeering, involving wives, often enough, such that the Vietcong could obtain anything they wanted. Some Americans understood the situation well — Vann’s associate, Douglas Ramsay, who spoke the language, acquired the locals’ confidence, became a target for the Vietcong, and survived seven hellish years in their prison cages. The guerrilleros’ grip on the countryside was such that the roads to Saigon were mined, again and again, and Vann himself rode around in an unmarked pick-up, without ostensible defences.
