Fire in the Lake (33 page)

The egalitarianism of the Party operated not only as a psychological corrective, but as a force for social change. What distinguished the PRP from the elite of the GVN was its effort to remain as close to the people as possible. As one Party directive put it, “The Party is like a plant. The people are like the soil that nourishes the plant.… If the roots of the plant go deeply and firmly into the ground, only then will the plant grow well and steadily.”
¹⁶
Whether or not the Party served the interest of the people in other respects, its members lived in the villages and recruited directly out of them. An NLF soldier, technician, or member of the village administrative committee, could join the Party at any time provided he had the proper qualifications. The Party tended to favor those with lower-class backgrounds, even though it needed men with education. By 1965 the NLF was what it never would have become without its Marxist-Leninist core, an organization of peasants.

Over the years American counterinsurgency scholars have given a great deal of effort to arguing that the NLF with its program of moderate reform was no more than a deception, a façade that camouflaged the Communist Party with its doctrinaire Marxist program. But the issue is not quite so clear-cut. Even at its inception the NLF was not a true coalition of “front” in the sense of uniting a number of strong political parties. Its national and provincial committees included a number of people from the sects and the small urban political parties, but these people did not bring their organizations with them. Presumably the PRP would have used these people and the moderate NLF program as the basis for a coalition had the United States withdrawn from the war during the period when the sects remained a potent political force. In that case, however, the Party would have had to enter a coalition and test its strength against all the other political groups that believed just as strongly as it did that their particular political line would eventually triumph. When the United States did not withdraw and the coalition did not take form, the NLF became during the years of war an almost single-minded organization. Growing up among people who had no previous political affiliation, it evolved into a movement whose members differed politically only in the degree of indoctrination in Marxism-Leninism. The Party did, of course, infiltrate certain non-Communist organizations in the cities, and it did create certain cover organizations to enlist the support of urban intellectuals or rural religious dignitaries. But in most cases the difference between Party infiltration and NLF infiltration was nonexistent. In perhaps 90 percent of the villages there was no political distinction between the Party cadres and the Front committees, and the peasants did not differentiate between the PRP and the leadership of the Front as a whole. The Party cadres were simply “the Front cadres” who created and directed the government of the villages.
¹⁷
The Party maintained the Front and its program as a means of obtaining a coalition and a national reconciliation after an American with-drawal.

Americans, and particularly American liberals, find it difficult to understand how an elite, disciplined party could be an acceptable form of government for any people in the world. But the Vietnamese have always believed that some people know how to govern better than others. This belief may change — it may already be changing — but for the moment the question for the Vietnamese is simply to know who those people are. Traditionally, those people the Vietnamese assumed to be best qualified were those who had studied government as a science and a system of morality. Whatever the virtues or vices of its policies, the PRP has laid strong claim to this tradition — its important modification being that it opened the opportunity for such study to the poorest members of the society. Oddly enough, from the American point of view, the very anonymity of the PRP constituted an element in its favor for many Vietnamese. For the traditional Vietnamese peasant, power, like wisdom and virtue, lies (and ought to lie) at the core of things. A man of real power is not one who makes a brazen display of his might, but one who speaks softly and maintains his reserve. The NLF worked to destroy this ideal by bringing certain kinds of conflicts out into the open and by exposing themselves directly to the people. But the ideal has powerful roots. In Western terms Vietnamese peasants have always identified with the fox rather than with the lion. Believing that ruse and cunning will (and should) prevail over brute force, they disdain the displays of prowess so much admired by the hunter. The Oriental science of judo — literally, “the easy way” — opposes knowledge and the inner force of concentration to brawn and weaponry. For many Vietnamese the PRP was attractive just because of its qualities of innerness.

The Making of a Revolutionary

Force binds for a time, education enchains forever.

— A Vietnamese proverb

Even in 1966 the American Military Assistance Command — General Westmoreland’s apparatus for dealing with the Vietnamese — was still very much in the business of producing studies on “morale” and “motivation” within the ARVN. These studies had their own scientific curiosity since, like perpetual motion machines, they had a perfectly circular logic as well as a perfect record for circulating around and across a hundred desks and back into the same filing cabinet without the slightest coefficient of friction. The problem of morale (the officers argued) was a problem of training, which was a problem of leadership, and the problem of leadership was a problem of promotions, which was a problem of corruption, which was a problem of motivation.

The American civilians, who for their part were not wedded to the structure of the regular army, took a much less spiritual view of the same group of “problems.” According to the studies produced by their analysts, a reform of the Vietnamese government depended upon its reorganization, to wit: the success of the pacification program depended upon the reorganization of the cadre teams, whose success depended upon the reorganization of the ARVN, and so forth. Those Americans who recognized the NLF as a part of the scheme of things tended to agree, as in their view the success of the Viet Cong depended on the superiority of their organization.

All of which was absolutely true and absolutely not true at the same time. The reason that few GVN bureaucrats proved effective administrators, that few ARVN soldiers patrolled regularly at night, was that their entire education in society had not prepared them for such tasks. Brought up in the traditional Way, most Vietnamese had, as children, taken their place within a society that confined most forms of communication to the vertical transmission of authority and obedience. Restricted to this single, exclusive system of relationships, they had found it difficult to establish any community with those outside their own blood families. To recognize a stranger was automatically to bring him into the most intimate circle of obligation and to give him a place as “father,” “younger brother,” or “uncle.” It was either to recognize his authority or to insist upon his recognition of one’s own. Such a relationship was dangerous, for it demanded the unconditional surrender of one party to the other. The inferior had to depend upon his superior as a child depends upon his father — only without those guarantees implicit in the family relationship. The peasant could not risk a relationship with an official; similarly, the under-minister could not risk submitting to the authority of his minister except as a matter of form. Underneath the mask of form, of “face,” mutual suspicions would grow until the most trivial of problems became insoluble. Given a title, an office, and the job of running some seemingly straightforward logistical operation, the under-minister would spend his time knotting and unknotting the web of intrigue around him: Was the minister losing his influence with General X, and if so, who would be blamed for the disappearance of that million piastres? Why had the section chief told his American adviser that the warehouse to be built with that money would not be built for six months? In the same way, the simple GVN squad leader, given ten men, a radio, and a mission to patrol the outskirts of a hamlet, would spend his night in the outpost because headquarters had not delivered two rifles and he feared that his second-in-command might want his job badly enough to report the squad movements to the local guerrillas.

To many Americans these small intrigues appeared to be a series of day-to-day frustrations, insignificant problems that could be overcome with time and training. They were in fact symptoms of a profound condition within the society. The GVN struggled to survive, but it lived on like the dinosaur whose nervous system can no longer adequately transmit information from its mind to the ends of its great body. To operate such Western organizations as a city government, a factory, or a battalion without American help, the GVN required a much more flexible and specialized order of communications. It required a system of relationships that included not only “father” and “younger brother,” but “colleague,” “expert,” “buddy,” and “citizen”: a system that allowed communication to flow evenly throughout the society. The under-minister had to be able to question his minister without fear of a final break in their relations. The squad leader had to be able to persuade his deputy of their common interests and to take the initiative to procure what arms were necessary for the security of the hamlet. A sociologist might well conceive of the inadequacy of the GVN as a structural problem. It was also, as the NLF insisted, a political or ideological problem, for in its very essence, a modern army or bureaucracy implies a certain freedom of communication, a certain equality between men. From this perspective the success of the NLF depended largely on its ability to give the Vietnamese a new identity, a new sense of their own society and its purposes. In some sense its organizations were but shells for men, and its program of political instruction the essence of the revolution.

The NLF organizations were not purely functional military or administrative units; they were also training camps where the new men and the new society would be formed. Entering into a guerrilla unit or a village association, the young peasant boy would step into a new medium of talk and activity which grew denser with time and increasingly shut out the world beyond it. Under Front aegis he would learn that the world had a very different set of dimensions than the one he had imagined. He would also learn that to achieve his ends he must behave in a different manner from that he had thought desirable. For him, to join the NLF was to embark on a process something like that of growing up from childhood again: it was to begin a “re-education.”

When I got to my unit, we shook hands all around saying, “Now that we have come from various directions to this place, we should treat each other as members of a big family.” They seemed to be happy to have me with them.… [They] addressed me as “comrade.”… Their enthusiasm remained the same throughout.
¹

In a sense, the major task of the Front consisted in breaking down the traditional barriers of fear and giving the peasants or soldiers some sense of their community with each other. When they joined their units, few of the young men had any sense of the coordination — both physical and mental — with which a modern society must operate. Unfamiliar with clocks, with school or factory routines, with large machines or precision instruments, they lived in rhythms of time and space too extended for the needs of a modern army. According to several of the squad leaders, their major disciplinary problem was the soldiers’ habit of walking away from their unit and forgetting to return on schedule. Having never, or rarely, played team sports, the soldiers had little experience of a common endeavor requiring immediate group response. They could not depend on each other. Like the ARVN soldiers, the young recruits tended to neglect their weapons, to sleep during guard duty, and to scatter or freeze when attacked. But then, when the ARVN training stopped, the NLF training began.

Joining their units after a bare two or three weeks of preliminary training, the Front recruits would learn the real stuff of war from the experienced fighters seeded among them. Unless the situation demanded desperate measures, their commanders would initially send them into battle only as a controlled exercise, retiring them later for basic training. Usually an NLF main force unit would go into action only once a month; the rest of the time was spent in education for the illiterate, in political instruction, in military training and retraining. On his visit to the Liberated zone in 1964 the Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, watched a People’s Liberation Army battalion rehearse an assault on a government installation, using first a sandpit model and then a full-scale wooden mock-up of the blockhouse. Like the cast of some Hollywood spectacular on set, the recruits went through the operation over and over again until their commanders were completely satisfied with their performance.
²
Those American advisers who found this painstaking attention to detail almost comical did not perhaps consider that to change a Vietnamese peasant into a soldier, a radio operator, or a gunnery or demolition expert, was to change the entire pattern of his life.

As a radio operator, my job was to listen to the GVN radio communication. I had a little 3-band Philip short-wave transistor radio and a GRC-9 — confiscated from the GVN — with which I could listen to all GVN communications in the area.… I must say the GVN people were lousy as far as radio communication was concerned. They were lazy, irresponsible and careless. Their conventions were never changed and were the same everywhere. For example, “banana bud” was “shell” and “eagle” was “aircraft.” Once in a while a telegram was sent from one post to another in coded morse, but a few minutes later the receiving operator would cry out, “Come on, buddy, use the ordinary language, I’m tired of decoding.” Thus the other would continue the telegram in plain morse.… When there was no official communication, the men would talk shop or would exchange gossip. So that it was easy for us to know their exact location, their units and even their names.
³