Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  17

  Our Guys, Their Guys: the Vietnamese War

  1 SONG QUA NGAY – ‘LET’S JUST GET THROUGH THE DAY’

  Doug Ramsey, before his capture, often risked joyriding with John Vann in a bright yellow pick-up pockmarked with bulletholes, for the simple pleasure of gazing on the Vietnamese countryside. He wrote: ‘As we passed field after lush field of ripening rice, we would watch the fat kernels of grain turn slowly, then rapidly, from straw color to sunset saffron to burnished copper in the afterglow. We had enjoyed the cool, moving air, the visual and aural panorama and the pungent rural odors as if we had been small city children on the way to camp for the first time. Occasionally, we would stop for a minute or two in some red-tiled or thatched-roofed hamlet, where the people were settling in for the evening as they and their ancestors had done for hundreds of years – while we ourselves tried for a little while to forget lifeless memos and lifeless bodies and rediscover what ordinary sane life and ordinary sane beauty and truth in ordinary sane people were all about.’ Ramsey added sadly: ‘I knew, of course, that all of this had to vanish from the landscape someday – probably rather soon, and be replaced by the appurtenances of the eighteenth century, if not the twentieth. I also knew that my wistful, romantic images masked harsh realities of backbreaking, lifelong heavy manual labor, perpetual semi-poverty, progress-thwarting superstition, and short life expectancy suffered by probably 90 per cent of the population.’ Over a decade, the war doubled the country’s city-dwellers, to 40 per cent by 1970.

  Life is what you are used to. Young Vietnamese accepted the conflict as their natural environment, along with paddies and palm trees. Nghien Khiem said of his schooldays, ‘We learned to run when we heard a rocket, and otherwise not to worry much.’ Yet the struggle determined the life courses of all but the most privileged. Phan Tan Nguu cherished ambitions to exploit his college chemistry major to work in pharmaceuticals. In 1966 South Vietnam, however, he saw no choice save to join some element of the security forces, and became a police Special Branch officer. He ever afterwards sustained a tinge of regret for that lost career: ‘I was successful in the service, but policemen carry that stigma …’ Everywhere that US military might held sway, local people earned dollars, but also paid a toll: on successive nights, truck-drivers of a field-artillery unit on road runs to Qui Nhon first killed a six-year-old montagnard girl, then hit an elderly woman outside Kontum. One of the drivers thought it comic to sound his deafening horn behind a bike-rider who swerved into the bush, catching a foot in his wheel spokes, with agonising consequences. A fellow-driver said later, with the mortification of maturity, ‘That’s how some Americans behaved.’

  The rival capitals had assumed mantles of decay, Hanoi’s the grimmer. In the later 1960s the austerity of North Vietnamese life was intensified by an infusion of the spirit of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Children attended state nurseries; agricultural collectivisation was rigorously enforced; private property increasingly frowned upon. Such measures were readily justified to Ho Chi Minh’s people by the imperatives of the unification struggle, and the crimes of the American imperialists. The Soviet Union was now explicitly branded as ‘revisionist’.

  Saigon’s condition reflected a preoccupation with the war to the exclusion of almost all else, including street-cleaning. In the 1930s the city’s Phu Tho racecourse had been almost as elegant as Paris’s Longchamps. By the later sixties, however, the red-and-yellow grandstands were crumbling; dragonflies swarmed in the paddock. There were still occasional Sunday meetings at which featherweight eighty-pound jockeys rode horses that disliked the heat as much as any grunt, though they facilitated manic gambling. Yet it would have been rash to bet on which side in the war even the flashiest spectator supported. Consider Truong Nhu Tang, boss of the Société Sucrière, which employed five thousand people. He lived the smart social life, owned a beach house on Cap St Jacques, holidayed in Dalat, played tennis and the ‘four colour’ card game at the best houses, yet was secretly a top NLF cadre.

  He survived a 1965 denunciation, being fortunate enough to be released to return to his big office at the Société after six months in jail. Two years later, however, he was betrayed by Ba Tra, a cadre who defected to the government and was later assassinated by the Vietcong. Tang painted a vivid picture of the Saigon prison to which he was consigned: ‘The scene that presented itself … struck me with a horror and fear so terrible that I felt I had lost my soul. Sprawled out on the floor the whole length of the corridor were people chained together by the ankles. Many of their faces were bloody and swollen; here and there, limbs jutted at unnatural angles. Some writhed in agony. Others just lay, staring blankly. From the tangle of bodies came groans and the sound of weeping. The air was filled with a low, continuous wail. My heart began to race. One side of the passage was lined with doors that apparently led to interrogation rooms. From behind these came curses and spasmodic screams of pain.’ Tang, a privileged person in the eyes of both sides, with access to big money, escaped lightly. His wife bribed his principal interrogator $6,000 to spare him from torture. Later she paid another $5,000 to the president of the tribunal that tried his case – a man who afterwards became Thieu’s chief security adviser – to secure a sentence of just two years’ imprisonment, following which Tang joined his NLF comrades in the jungle.

  In Southern life, family ties counted for at least as much as ideology. The CIA’s long-serving Saigon officer Frank Snepp loved and admired the Vietnamese, but rejected Frances Fitzgerald’s idealised view: ‘She wasn’t writing about the Vietnam I had to deal with. I didn’t see them vibrating with anti-colonialist intensity. They seemed intensely pragmatic: South Vietnam was an endless series of accommodations.’ President Thieu’s psywar chief sheltered in his house a sister-in-law who had run a communist cell in Hue. The army chief of staff protected two of his wife’s nephews whose father was a top communist. Tang’s daughter Loan was a close friend of Thieu’s daughter Tuan-Anh: the president continued to welcome the girl into his home even after Tang was revealed as a traitor, and – much to Thieu’s credit – eventually sponsored Loan’s computer-science course in Pennsylvania.

  While the country retained peerless natural beauties, much of it was polluted by the war, in a fashion evidenced by its seventy-seven orphanages and two hundred thousand child delinquents. Some farmers, weary of seeing their paddy fields wrecked by the passage of military vehicles, abandoned rice-growing, sustaining the drift to the cities. A permanent chemical pall hung over Saigon and its adjoining military suburbs of Long Binh and Tan Son Nhut. Almost every street was rutted and potholed by neglect, excesses of climate and traffic, the last increased from 1967 onwards by a tsunami of Honda mopeds. Piles of cement and rubbish were as ubiquitous as security chicanes, barbed wire and belching black truck diesel smoke.

  Shanty towns had sprung up alongside the Saigon River and its adjoining canals. Everywhere artisans hammered, sawed and screwed at outdoor workshops, while each of many of the capital’s streets offered its own specialised goods and goodies for sale: kitchen equipment in one, electric fans in another, elsewhere air-conditioners, bicycles, clothes, books, cameras, replica military fatigues for children, fish sauce, soups, vegetables, nuts, oranges, frog and eel in garlic, rice spirit thinly disguised as Scotch or bourbon. There were also girls: in prodigious quantity, of considerable beauty, wearing excessive make-up and expressions that ranged from absolute ruthlessness to profound melancholy. There were still islands of romance in Saigon, but squalor dominated. It was a matter of ideological taste, whether Hanoi’s uniform socialist drabness was preferred.

  The war was happening in the countryside. Villagers often said to Vietcong fighters: ‘It’s easy for you. All you have are your guns and your packs. You can go and live anywhere. But we have our wives, children, rice, gardens, and we cannot take them with us. It is difficult enough to get the buffalo to follow us. So we must stay here.’ Many adopted the fatalistic motto Song qua ngay – ‘Let’s just g
et through the day.’ An important element in the communists’ successes was that they worked with the grain of rural society more effectively than did the Saigon regime. They spread rumours that ‘round-eye’ inoculation programmes were really punishments for supporting the VC, and would make children infertile. An American pest-control expert insisted on ignoring warnings that farmers made a good thing out of selling rats for the table.

  A US initiative to improve soldiers’ rations substituted for nuoc mam – the fermented fish sauce that all Vietnamese love – soy imported from Korea, which they hated. ‘Miracle rice’ boosted harvests, to farmers’ initial delight: soon more than half South Vietnam’s production derived from these revolutionary strains, which became jocularly known as ‘Honda rice’ because the profits enabled growers to buy mopeds. Unfortunately, ‘miracle’ varieties also required heavy inputs of fertiliser and pesticides: when American aid later shrank while oil and fertiliser prices soared, South Vietnamese rice producers were crippled.

  Few rural people looked on the government as a force for good, instead viewing it as a remote entity that taxed them and took away their young men. The communists did the same, but were more skilful in presenting their imposts as benign. While ARVN troops plucked at will peasants’ fruit and poultry, an American prisoner marvelled at the VC’s respect for the edible property of others: ‘Our line of march carried us through a vegetable garden. But because it apparently belonged to a sister unit, none of the guards gave in to the temptation to grab even a handful of cabbage leaves – this, despite the fact that most of them hadn’t seen fresh vegetables for more than a year.’ Australian Dr Norman Wyndham wrote in Vung Tau: ‘The peasants want nothing more than peace. They have nothing to lose, so they do not fear that any new government can take anything away from them.’

  Creighton Abrams characterised Saigon’s district chiefs as ‘so incompetent that assassination would be counter-productive’. Almost the only rural inhabitants of South Vietnam who thought well of its government were a small minority who had experienced life in the North, including an old village chief named Ngo Dinh Ho. In 1967 he described to a British journalist his youth under the communists as ten years of ‘earthly hell’. Many of his neighbours on Phu Quoc island, off the delta, were likewise fishermen originally from the communist state. ‘This red earth is very good,’ said Ho. ‘If only we could get rid of the Vietcong it would be just like heaven – just like a dream of women … I’m very grateful for the help given by the United States.’ If there had been more Vietnamese who had shared Ho’s life experience, the war might have had a different outcome.

  2 FIGHTERS

  1967 was a tough year for communist forces in South Vietnam. A soldier of the NVA’s 3rd ‘Yellow Star’ Division described how its units were harrowed by crippling losses: ‘Having gone into battle strong and keen, when they returned a whole company might consist of just four to seven men sitting eating around a single tray of rice.’ After receiving a mauling at the hands of the 1st Air Cavalry, ‘our soldiers could not help being frightened and confused’. The same soldier asserted that after one battle in the winter of 1967, his own battalion – ‘ripped to shreds’ – was reduced from a strength of 240 men to thirty-eight. Yet still it was obliged to fight on.

  The dramatically increased US troop presence put greater pressure on the Vietcong in the Mekong delta, where most of the terrain was less suited to guerrilla activity than the hills and jungle further north: no tunnels could be dug. NLF efforts to maintain their dominance, partly through a resumption of murders of alleged government sympathisers, sometimes smacked of desperation. Naval offshore and riverine patrolling almost shut down the communists’ sea supply line from the North, which since 1963 had played a critical role in the campaign.

  Henceforward the north and Central Highlands, more readily accessible from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, would provide the communists’ favoured big battlefields. The country’s wildernesses were so vast that, despite the sophistication of American surveillance technology, they could sustain permanent base camps. Andy Finlayson described one that his long-range patrol encountered near the Laotian border, concealed by the hundred-foot-high jungle canopy, protected by a bamboo fence, thickets of sharpened punji stakes and bunkers: ‘At each end of the fortified village was a guard tower on ten-foot-high stilts. I counted eight well-constructed huts, each large enough to hold a squad of enemy soldiers. There was a large animal pen with pigs in it, a hut used as kitchen, a raised stage with a roof over it, and a very large two-story building made of finished lumber, bamboo and thatch with a balcony. The size and sophistication of this camp shocked us.’

  In one or other such place, shifted periodically between 1966 and 1973, Doug Ramsey and a handful of other American prisoners enjoyed unusual opportunities to study communist fighters. Ramsey wrote: ‘The best of the VC and NVA … suffered chiefly from the defects of youthful exuberance, the arrogance of the True Believer, and sheer ignorance concerning the West.’ The American discerned the same mix as in all clusters of humanity. ‘There were truly beautiful people and spaced-out sado-masochists. There were spindly bookworms and big-man-on-campus types; loudmouths and shrinking violets; city sophisticates and raw hayseeds; intellectual snobs and intelligent people genuinely interested in the pursuit of truth … I felt safer in the hands of the VC than I believed I would have been in the custody of certain American hate groups of the far left. A good case could be made, that we were a more violent people than the Vietnamese.’

  His captors were wonderfully kind to children, unspeakably barbaric to animals: Western visitors to Saigon zoo remarked on the enthusiastic audiences for the feeding of live ducklings to the snakes. Ramsey, like many Americans, noted a distinction between the appetite of North Vietnamese people for indoctrination, to which they had grown accustomed, and the indifference of most Southerners, committed merely to the eviction of foreigners and a better life for the peasantry. PoW interrogator Bob Destatte agreed that ideology was much subordinate to hatred of foreign influence: ‘Even many Party members had joined just because it was the practical thing to do.’ Most of the guerrillas whom Doug Ramsey encountered were aged between twenty-five and forty, far more experienced fighters than their American counterparts. They shrugged fatalistically, ‘Thoi ke me no? Bao nhieu thi bao; cu danh giac hoai vay thoi!’: ‘Hell, what can we do about it? We can talk until we’re blue in the face, but we’ll just have to keep on fighting.’ Many yearned for some decisive step – a showdown, however perilous – which goes far to explain their eagerness to participate in the 1968 Tet offensive.

  A vivid insight into the mind of an ardent revolutionary is provided by the diary of a young woman doctor in the mountains of Quang Ngai province. Unlike many other communist narratives, this document was neither censored at the time, nor later embellished. Dang Thuy Tram was twenty-four, daughter of a distinguished Hanoi surgeon, when in 1967 she made a ten-week march down the Trail to work at a Vietcong field hospital. The guiding passions in her life were unrequited love for an NVA officer whom she had known since her teens, and hatred for the American ‘bandits’. She wrote of her yearning for Party membership, dismay that her supposed ‘intellectual’ background threatened to thwart this ambition: ‘Why do they fill the path of a bourgeois with spikes and thorns?’ she wailed. ‘No matter how much effort you have shown through your achievements … you are still below a person of the labouring class who has only just begun to comprehend Party ideals.’ She was ecstatic when at last she secured the coveted badge.

  Tram often wept over the deaths of VC fighters whom she tended: ‘One comrade falls today, another tomorrow. Will such agonies ever cease? Heaps of flesh and bones keep piling up into a mountain of hatred rising ever higher in our hearts … When can we drive the whole bloodthirsty mob from our motherland? … If some day we find ourselves living amid the fragrant flowers of socialism, we should remember this scene forever, recall the sacrifice of all those who shed blood for the common cause.’ If such
phrases seem parroted from a lexicon of propaganda clichés, their sentiments suffused this young woman’s soul. When a comrade poured out to her a declaration of love, she responded sternly: ‘My heart has banished all private dreams to focus on my duties … Could anything make one more proud than to be part of this family of revolutionaries?’ One of her young comrades named Luc was sufficiently sensitive to natural beauty that he liked to sing in their camp:

  O mountain and river, how beautiful,

  When the moon lights the hills, clouds fly beneath the feet.

  But Luc also affected a red scarf with the words ‘Pledge Resolutely to Sacrifice for the Nation’s Survival’ stitched into its fabric, and was wearing it when he was killed attacking Duc Pho district centre.

  The fervour of committed revolutionaries such as Luc and Tram impressed some Americans. Jack Langguth, a reporter who covered the war for the New York Times, wrote in a subsequent book: ‘North Vietnam’s leaders … deserved to win. South Vietnam’s leaders … deserved to lose.’ This view, quite widely held among correspondents, was influenced by daily encounters with the cruelties and bungles of the Saigon regime and its American mentors, while those of the communists took place out of sight. Citizens of modern liberal democracies, many of whom exercise the privilege of their freedom to care more for the fate of a sports team than about politics, are often impressed by True Believers in other cultures. Yet history’s least humane movements have inspired and also perverted young men and women to sacrifice all in their name. It is unsurprising that foreigners in Vietnam favourably contrasted the commitment of the communists with the corruption and lethargy of the Saigon regime. Yet this was only half a story.

  Hanoi’s success in the global propaganda contest was partially rooted in a policy of omertà, silence. The oppression of its own people and the failure of its economic policies were curtained by censorship. No images of its war crimes existed. Only card-carrying foreign sympathisers were granted glimpses even of its scenery. French writer Jean Lacouture, a prominent contemporary apologist for Ho Chi Minh, told a Milan newspaper in a hand-wringing interview long afterwards: ‘With regard to Vietnam, my behaviour was sometimes more that of a militant than that of a journalist. I dissimulated certain aspects of North Vietnam at war … because I believed that the cause … was good and just enough so that I should not expose their errors. I believed it was not opportune to expose the Stalinist nature of the North Vietnamese regime.’