Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  In the year following ‘liberation’, some three hundred thousand South Vietnamese were detained. All those with the slightest association with the fallen government were branded, tainted for life: while the cashier at Saigon’s Majestic Hotel escaped imprisonment, he was denied further employment and repeatedly interrogated, because he had accepted payment for so many bills from Americans. Approximately two-thirds of detainees, including all ex-officers, were dispatched to re-education camps where they remained for between three and seventeen years. A record of opposition to the Thieu regime provided no immunity: among those confined was Buddhist monk Tri Quang, who had created such embarrassments for Saigon’s generals.

  A film scripted by the famous poet Nha Ca had been banned by the former rulers as an alleged incitement to pacifism. Back in 1968, however, she was present in Hue during the communist massacres, and published an emotional elegy, ‘Mourning Headband for Hue’. For this she was now dispatched to a camp, and a copy of her Hue poem was exhibited in Hanoi’s Museum of War Crimes as a specimen of ‘puppet lies’. No fixed term was set for prisoners’ incarceration, determined by Party whim. Le Minh Dao, who commanded the South’s 18th Division at Xuan Loc, remained behind barbed wire until 1991 – much longer than Stalin held captured Nazi generals in the wake of World War II.

  Thousands of ex-ARVN officers were shipped to camps in the North, where one group labouring under guard found themselves fiercely reproached by an elderly villager: ‘Since 1954, we have been waiting for you to liberate us. Instead you come here at last as prisoners. You are shameful! It’s because you didn’t fight hard enough, you tolerated corruption, you enjoyed too much. You have betrayed us.’ One of his hearers, Major Luan, wrote: ‘[We] quietly swallowed the stinging words as a punishment we deserved.’ He himself was held for seven years, then eked an existence in Saigon for another nine before escaping to the US. His guard sergeant told him when he was freed: ‘You are leaving the smaller prison and will begin to live in the larger one with me and our seventy million compatriots.’

  Former lieutenant Nguyen Quoc Si found himself working on the Cambodian border, in conditions little better than those prevailing in World War II Japanese prison camps. He and his comrades spent countless hours composing confessions of supposed crimes. They were told that they would be released only when judged fit to play their parts in the New Society. Uncertainty about when this might be drove some men to madness: ‘An army doctor one day slashed his wrists – then next morning we found his name on a list for release.’ Since the only medicine available was aspirin, almost any disease sufficed to kill. Si’s father, a former Saigon police officer aged fifty-nine, perished in the first months of his own incarceration, probably from chronic liver trouble, though the family was never informed. One of Si’s fellow-prisoners died of asthma. Another, unaccustomed to agricultural tasks, was fatally injured by a jagged bamboo that sprang back and slashed him as he strove ineffectually to fell it. Dysentery was endemic.

  Starvation was employed as a psychological weapon. Former ARVN medical officer Ly Van Quy became enraged by the behaviour of one of his eight-man team of prisoners: when distributing the group’s daily rice ration out of an old ammunition can, this man always took a fraction extra for himself. Quy finally snapped, leaping to his feet, bent on killing the thief. Anti-climax followed: debility caused him to topple over and collapse before he could strike a blow. ‘That night I felt so ashamed. I thought: this is exactly what the communists want us to do to each other. I am playing their game. I never behaved in such a way again.’ Quy worked on a burial detail at the first camp in which he was confined. Three years later he chanced to be returned to the same compound, and found its cemetery much expanded.

  Camp routine began at 5 a.m., when prisoners were issued a ball of rice to sustain them through the day, and marched into the fields to work. One among each eight-man squad was permitted to forage for wild edibles while the others fulfilled his output quota – a concession that narrowly staved off death from inanition. They returned to the huts at 6 p.m.; and the evenings were devoted to ideological indoctrination. Most were soon eager to say anything, agree anything, in exchange for freedom. Si said: ‘Had I been told that if I cried enough, I would be released, I would have become the best crier in that camp. I watched the hair of one man turn white, who was just twenty-two.’

  Some of those dispatched to the camps were relatively elderly city-dwellers, ill-adapted to a primitive life with minimal sanitation and chronic malaria. Nobody knows how many prisoners perished, but a death rate of 5 per cent – a conservative estimate – would indicate at least ten thousand. Following release, they remained ineligible for civil rights: most were sent to ‘New Economic Zones’, raw jungle areas where they were expected to create communities amid privations little less stringent than those of the camps. Some eventually received exit visas, in return for surrendering everything they owned. When Nguyen Thi Minh-Ha left in 1980, the destitute widow carried with her only the ashes of her husband, who had perished in a camp, which she eventually scattered in the sea off Britain’s shores.

  Her brother Si, released in 1978, was permitted to make one brief visit to his old Saigon home before being exiled to a New Economic Zone. In the following year, with the help of friends abroad and the surrender of the family house, he was allowed to leave Vietnam with $US20. He had secretly married Kim Thanh, whom he had known since schooldays and who now worked as a teacher; only in 1984 was she permitted to join him in Britain. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who found themselves unable to secure exit visas became instead ‘boat people’, braving appalling perils and hardships to escape by sea from what had become a national prison.

  Some better-off Southerners had initially embraced the end of the war, even though its outcome was not that which they would have chosen. Among these was retired Southern colonel Ly Van Quang’s wife, who had three sons serving in the military, another already dead in Lam Son 719. Her brother was Thien Le, a general in the North Vietnamese Army: she was rashly confident that this connection would preserve the family from persecution. Instead her three sons – Thien Le’s nephews – endured years in the camps.

  The family was bemused that their father was meanwhile left in peace. Only much later was this anomaly explained: through twenty years as an Airborne officer, Col. Quang was served by a devoted personal aide named Thong. This man became so much a part of the officer’s family life that his children called him ‘Uncle Thong’. On the colonel’s recommendation Thong was commissioned, attaining a captaincy. A year after the fall of Saigon he reappeared at the family house in the uniform of a communist officer, and revealed that for more than a decade he had been an enemy informant. He assured the family that they would come to no harm, because he recognised Col. Quang as a good and honest man. Far from expressing gratitude, the elderly veteran turned grey with rage and hurled a chair, shouting, ‘Get out of my house, you treacherous bastard!’ His son said, ‘To my father, everything was black and white.’

  Nguyen Cong Hoan, an anti-war South Vietnamese who served two terms in the post-1975 National Assembly before fleeing in a refugee boat, said six years later: ‘I am very regretful that I did not understand the communists before. The communists always speak in lofty terms that appeal to the better part of people. Then they are used for a tragic end. I believed them; I was wrong.’ Hai Thuan, a veteran who fought with the Vietminh and then lived in the North through the war, returned to Saigon to work in its new Justice Ministry. He was horrified to find that his own son, a former Southern officer, had been sent to a camp, and that his impassioned protest to the politburo was dismissed. One fine morning, Thuan threw himself off the roof of a high building on Le Loi Street, leaving behind two letters. One was addressed to the Party leadership, denouncing its brutality and mendacity. The second begged forgiveness from his wife and son.

  Truong Nhu Tang, the PRG’s justice minister, found that no more than any other Southerner could he get news about his two brothers
, detained at Long Thanh. He eventually secured permission to visit the camp, but was forbidden to communicate directly with them. Having caught a brief glimpse of them, he wrote: ‘Even now their faces haunt me: pale, thin, frightened, their eyes fixed in a glazed stare. I can’t even imagine what they must have thought, seeing me in the back seat of a government car driving around that place.’ He eventually secured the release of one brother, but the other was dispatched to spend more than a decade at another camp in the North, because he had been associated with Saigon’s former National Assembly.

  Tang had joined the resistance movement ‘believing that Ho Chi Minh, Pham Van Dong and the Vietnamese Communist Party were patriots who would place the national interest above personal and ideological objectives. Because of love for my country I gave up my family, everything, for this dream. I would not listen when my father warned me, “In return for your service, the communists will not even give you a part of what you have now. Worse, they will betray and persecute you all your life.”’ Which they did. ‘The politburo’s real policy,’ Tang wrote bitterly, ‘was vicious and ultimately destructive to the nation.’

  Police Special Branch officer Phan Tan Nguu escaped execution – the fate of several of his colleagues – but served seventeen years’ imprisonment. His wife completed five years, then on a fourth escape attempt among boat people reached America with her children. The family was finally reunited when Nguu was allowed to join them in 1996, having been separated for more than twenty years. He found that his sons, of whom he had been permitted to know nothing, were students at Johns Hopkins Medical School – both became successful surgeons.

  Phan Phuong, daughter of another Special Branch officer, was fifteen when Saigon fell, and her adored father was removed to serve eight years’ imprisonment. At first, she and her eight brothers and sisters were able to continue to attend school. Her mother traded a little in the market – the family was barred from fixed employment – and they gradually sold their few possessions. Then her mother too was sent to prison for a year, and Phuong became sole breadwinner, making and selling banana ice cream. She begged food for her siblings, in a new universe in which desperation made self-preservation the only objective: one day, seeing a neighbour with a bunch of sweet potatoes, she pleaded for just one for the family – and was refused. ‘Each night I prayed for a miracle, until at last my mum came back. I was so happy.’ The family finally escaped from Vietnam in 1991. Doug Ramsey professed lack of surprise at communist ruthlessness: ‘If anything, I was amazed that it was not harsher – think of the Chinese principle of seeking vengeance upon at least three generations, sometimes seven.’ NVA veteran Bao Ninh says that following Hanoi’s triumph, ‘It was asking too much of the victors not to seize the opportunity to oblige the losers to accept their way of thinking. But the camps went on far too long.’

  In Nguyen Viet Than’s best-selling 2016 novel The Sympathiser, there is mention of an attempt by exiles to mount a guerrilla campaign against the Hanoi regime. Such a scheme was indeed launched in 1977: fiercely aggressive fund-raising among the US Vietnamese exile community paid for the creation of a training camp in northern Thailand. A few years later Frank Scotton, then serving at the US Bangkok embassy, found himself deputed to disperse the deluded counter-revolutionaries. He told them they should be ashamed of themselves for risking getting people killed for nothing. Yet they persisted until the late 1980s, seeking to infiltrate guerrillas via Laos: several hundred ‘Resistance fighters’ died, including their leader, a former South Vietnamese naval officer, in the course of operations that were tragic, because futile.

  The war’s ending inflicted an unwelcome shock upon Vietnam’s leaders: the superpowers of both East and West relegated their country – which for two decades had sustained a prominence far beyond that conferred by its size or strength – to the margin of affairs. China became increasingly adversarial. By the late 1970s, Beijing officials referred contemptuously to one Hanoi politburo member as ‘the beggar’ because of the frequency with which he appealed for aid. In 1979 China and Vietnam staged a brief but bloody frontier war. Russian aid dwindled dramatically, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union disappeared altogether. By 1980 resource-rich Vietnam had become one of the poorest nations on earth.

  Through the decade that followed, its people suffered terribly, yet their elderly leaders remained unwilling to abandon collectivism, or to engage with the non-communist world, for fear of polluting Vietnam’s ideological purity. Only after the 1986 Sixth Party Congress did the Hanoi politburo grudgingly begin to modify some policies, allowing southerners to dally anew with commerce, which they understood much better than their northern compatriots. In 1988 famine swept large parts of the north, imposing terrible suffering on more than nine million people: an unknown number died. Yet still ideologues in Hanoi, together with some military men and especially members of the powerful intelligence apparatus, found it hard to reconcile themselves to compromises with economic rationality. Nguyen Van Linh said in a speech delivered as late as September 1989 to the Party’s Ideological Training Institute: ‘Capitalism will certainly be replaced by socialism, because that is the law of human history, which nobody can deny.’ Le Duc Tho wrote a poem shortly before his death in 1990, glorifying the lost joys of shared poverty and suffering:

  In the past we had strong emotion

  Sharing life and death, sharing a bowl of rice and a shirt

  But now people take money

  And individuality as a measure for emotion and feelings

  The sense of camaraderie has faded.

  Le Duan died in 1986, but the successors to Tho and himself have shown no inclination either to indulge personal freedom or to sacrifice a jot of the power of the Party: Marxist-Leninist theory continues to be taught in every secondary school. Hanoi’s gerontocratic leadership has merely acknowledged the necessity to allow individuals to make money, to generate wealth, which some have done with notable success. As for neighbours and allies, most of Hanoi’s soldiers left Laos in 1988, and quit Cambodia in the following year. Diplomatic relations with the US were restored in 1995. That year Vietnam also joined the ASEAN political and trade organisation, and the WTO a decade later. The processes of the Hanoi leadership remain cloaked in secrecy, but it is apparent that an alliance of old men who cherish Vietnamese ideological exceptionalism, and new men and women whose families have achieved power within the Party, continues to block liberalisation. Many have become spectacularly rich personal beneficiaries of their country’s economic gains.

  As for its enormous and still-growing exile community, the US Congress’s 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act represented an enlightened initial response to a humanitarian crisis. Nonetheless, Chau Phat says: ‘Nobody had reason to be happy about the outcome of the war, but being labelled losers was harder to live with than being called winners.’ Many of those who started new lives abroad struggled in their early years: ‘They had been misinformed for too long. They supposed the Americans had gone to Vietnam to help them. Instead they went only to use the country as a platform to challenge international communism.’ Phat himself has become a successful businessman and philanthropist, now known as Frank Jao.

  Former air force officer Nghien Khiem also began a new life in southern California, where he worked as a labourer for $2.50 an hour until he could train as a computer technician. One day soon after his arrival, a man leaned out of a truck cab and shouted at him, ‘Go home!’ ‘That hurt,’ said Khiem, but he added, ‘I have since met a lot of good people.’ Like an astonishing number of Vietnamese-Americans, he has made a success of his new life. Don Graham hired thirty refugees to work at his family’s newspaper, the Washington Post: ‘They proved the most loyal and hard-working people we had.’ Nguyen Tri, once the youngest commander in the Vietnamese navy, has become a contented citizen of Orange County. He says: ‘Today I am simply proud to be an American. I want to live for the future, not in the past. I regret only that after the communists conquere
d South Vietnam, they did not behave as generously as did the North after the US Civil War.’

  2 THE AUDIT OF WAR

  The concluding pages of Vietnam’s eight-volume war history, entitled Total Victory, suggests casualty figures: almost two million civilians killed; two million more crippled or disabled; a further two million exposed to poisonous chemicals. On the battlefield Hanoi estimates 1.4 million men killed and missing, together with six hundred thousand wounded. The civilian numbers seem exaggerated, but the military statistics are of the right order of magnitude – nobody will ever know for sure. It is noteworthy that ARVN veterans, and especially the disabled, remain to this day non-people in the eyes of Vietnam’s rulers. The authors conclude their peroration: ‘Our entire Party, army and population in both halves of Vietnam had successfully carried out the strategic concept laid down by our beloved Uncle Ho in his 1969 “Tet Greeting”: “Fight to force the Americans to go home, fight to topple the puppets.” Our country was united … the Vietnamese people had defeated a neo-colonialist campaign of aggression that became the biggest, longest and fiercest struggle since the Second World War.’ Robert McNamara once asked Giap who was the best general of the struggle, to which the Vietnamese answered with unassailable ideological correctness: ‘The people.’

  By contrast, Ronald Reagan said a decade after Saigon’s fall: ‘It’s time that we recognised that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.’ While American conservative writer Michael Lind acknowledges the struggle as ‘a horrible debacle … waged by methods that were often counter-productive and sometimes arguably immoral’, he and some of his political kin today view it as merely ‘a failed campaign in a successful world war … [that] had to be fought to preserve the military and diplomatic credibility of the United States’.