Fire in the Lake (49 page)

In Mannoni’s judgment the best portrayal of the relations between colonial and native lies in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest.
On the one hand there is Prospero, the European, who, unable to get along in his own society (his brother, he says, has betrayed him), has invented a world that he with his “magical powers” can dominate. In Caliban, the “bestial” native of the island, he sees everything he detests in himself — including a desire for incestual relations with his daughter Miranda. On the other hand there is Caliban himself, the native who hates his master not because Prospero dominates him but because he treats him so badly. As Mannoni points out, Caliban remembers a time when his master loved him and treated him kindly. He looks forward not to independence, but to finding a new and better master. This temporal sequence is in fact a representation of his own ambivalence towards authority: on the one hand he desires it, on the other hand he feels it will harm him. (The temporal succession is also curiously representative of the Vietnamese view of life, where it is hoped that the “golden age” of childhood will return once again in old age.) Ariel, the third character in the drama, combines features of both of the others. An important figure in colonial society, he is the houseboy, the intermediary between the colonial and the native Calibans. He desires independence, but he cannot take it for himself, for in exchange for his master’s “magical powers,” he has relinquished his independence of spirit and bound himself in servitude. (Prospero keeps insisting on the debt Ariel owes him for having “saved” him from the curse of Caliban’s mother. Prospero is here the missionary who “saves” his houseboys from the “darkness,” “misery,” and “paganism” of native life — but who will not let his houseboys go.)

As
The Tempest
indicates, the relationship between colonial and native must eventually end, for while there is some superficial correspondence, the attitudes of both colonial and native are based on false, and finally contradictory, assumptions.

During the 1920’s and 1930’s the character of colonial society in Vietnam changed appreciably with the influx of men from the metropolis — professional civil servants, journalists, and party organizers — who in demanding liberal reforms, shook the very foundations of the paternalistic colonial authority. The colonial type did not disappear (indeed it often cropped up among those who came out to destroy it), but the reforms indicated to the Vietnamese that the French were no longer sure of themselves. Because they were no longer sure of their right to power, the Vietnamese intelligentsia began to conclude that they had no right to rule.
²
On their own many Vietnamese had, like Caliban, concluded that the French were not their patrons but tyrants who treated them as inferiors. During the 1930’s Hanoi and Saigon were riddled with subversive groups, all of which wanted to drive the French out of Saigon. (Their cause was later aided by the Japanese invasion and coup d’etat that demonstrated to the people of the villages that the Westerners no longer had heaven’s will behind them.) Among the subversive parties the Viet Minh alone succeeded in their object, not because they hated the French any more than the others, but because they managed to create a real alternative to French rule, a state with sufficient authority to mobilize the peasantry and direct their long-suppressed anger against the French to the achievement of national independence. But the resistance war was a political revolution and not a transformation of the Vietnamese personality. Through the Viet Minh the Vietnamese merely found a new “master,” and it was themselves.

In the north the drama was ended, but in the south in merely passed into a new phase. The peasants, even those who once belonged to the Viet Minh, looked upon the Americans much as they had looked at the French. Afraid of the Americans, afraid of their own anger, they tended to avoid the confrontation by blaming the sufferings caused by the American bombs and soldiers on Fate. One major effort of the NLF went into convincing the southern peasants, so long dominated by foreigners and landlords, that they had a real and vulnerable enemy in the regime created and supported by the Americans. While they taught their cadres to hate the Americans, they taught them also not to overestimate them — that is, not to attribute to them all the hostile forces of Fate or Nature. In the 1947 rebellion in Madagascar the peasants charged the French guns uttering incantations that would, so the witch doctor assured them, turn the French bullets to water.
³
The NLF propaganda was not so contrary to science, but it served somewhat the same function, at once demystifying the Americans and creating a bond between the fighters that attached indirectly (through the structure of Vietnamese society) to the Americans. To the well-indoctrinated cadre, the contest appeared to be more or less equal: the Americans had powerful bombers and artillery, but the NLF had the strength of the Vietnamese people behind them.

The attitude of those who lived under the aegis of the GVN was, however, very different. Those who supported the Bao Dai government and later the Diem regime were the “Ariels” of Vietnam — the people that grew rich and powerful under the French and who could not maintain their status without them. When the French gave them their independence, they found a willing new master in the Americans. And they and their successors made the same transference. They assumed the Americans were endowed with an invincible power, an omnipotent intelligence and a ruthless desire to control them. But their assumption was more wish fulfillment than fact: they wanted the Americans to feed them and take responsibility for them. An incident this writer witnessed illustrates this attitude perfectly. In Washington a young Vietnamese girl of a “good family” who had come to teach Vietnamese to American foreign service officers was invited to a party at the house of a high official in the U.S. government. When introduced to the official, she, without a word of prologue, asked him whether he would help her find a small diamond ring that she had lost in a washbasin at the Foreign Service Institute. The official, greatly taken aback, mumbled some excuse about having nothing to do with the Foreign Service Institute and moved away. What the girl could not explain was that she had only a marginal interest in finding the ring: she wanted a protector — and the more powerful the better — among the Americans.

But the Vietnamese view of the Americans as ruthless and invincible also carried within it a terror that quite contradicted this desire for protection. Their image of the United States was in fact the expression of an ambivalence similar to that the young man, Huong, had faced in relation to his stepfather. They wanted the Americans to save them from their own people; but as the Americans were
not
their own people, they sought to preserve their autonomy from a power that was by definition untrustworthy. During the Buddhist crisis one student committee issued a manifesto calling for the United States to increase its military and economic aid to the GVN and at the same time to stop interfering in Vietnamese politics. The generals, the Saigon politicians, and the Buddhists echoed both of these sentiments alternately. That the Americans were already interfering in Vietnamese politics was a connection that neither they nor the Americans were willing to make. This contradiction between desire for, and hostility to, the American presence was to govern the whole history of the relationship between the Americans and the Vietnamese under the GVN aegis. In their struggle movement the Buddhists gave this contradiction its most violent and dramatic expression.

In beginning their protest against the Ky government, the Buddhists had much the same division of purpose that plagued all the other non-Communist parties. On the one hand, they were merely attempting to redistribute the power and wealth of the GVN. On the other hand, Tri Quang saw this attempt as a step towards the final goal of creating a community strong enough to unite the nation and banish both the Americans and Communism from Vietnam. The difficulty was that to separate tactics from strategy Tri Quang required a much more disciplined organization than he had in hand. In initiating the anti-government protests he ended by breaking down the Confucian restraints and unleashing the deep-running rivers of resentment against the new authority, the Americans. He had not meant to, for while he believed with an absolute religious conviction that Buddhism would one day unite the Vietnamese, he knew perfectly well that for the moment his organization was divided, weak, and finally as much dependent upon the Americans as the generals.
⁴
But he failed in his attempt to control the outburst. The Americans turned against him, and the movement could not survive their opposition, for even in their anger the Buddhists remained divided between resentment of the American presence in Vietnam and fury that the Americans did not support them against the junta.

Nearly half a century earlier the French ethnologists, Huard and Durand, wrote of the Vietnamese:

The rupture of dependency has… provoked violent feelings of inferiority [
sic
] with their habitual successions of manic and depressed activity… [leading among a minority] to a fierce will to destruction, a desire for the holocaust and an aesthetic of oblivion, which in turn leads, collectively, to a scorched earth policy and, individually, to suicide.
⁵

Just three days after the junta, with American consent, began the siege of Hue, one hundred and twenty-five bonzes and bonzesses went on a hunger strike in the compound of the U.S. consulate. It was not a tactic the NLF would have used. By refusing food the bonzes were in effect pleading for the Americans to feed them.
⁶
When it became clear that the Americans would not do so, Tri Quang despaired. On June 8 he began a hunger strike that, prolonged for over a month, weakened him to the point where he could no longer give leadership. Rather than live with defeat and begin again, he chose a form of suicide and abandoned his followers to the full revenge of the junta. His hunger strike was a sign that the Buddhist movement was finished. In the same period eight bonzes and bonzesses from different parts of the country committed suicide by fire in an attempt to repeat the experience of 1963. Because the Americans did not respond, their self-immolation was not an effective act of protest but merely suicide. Simultaneously, the Buddhist students of Hue began what amounted to a scorched earth policy, burning the empty USIS library and the empty U.S. consulate, which buildings remained their only symbolic link to the Americans. A vain and desperate gesture, it stripped them of their last possible defense against the junta — an appeal to the American press — and left them with only the choice of imprisonment or flight to the NLF.

The Buddhist movement was never to recover. Buddhism failed because it was not a Middle Way between the Communists and the Americans, but a last-ditch stand of the Vietnamese traditionalists against the West. Writing to a young American friend, one Buddhist student described the desperation he and his companions felt as they saw the two walls of the war close in upon them. The letter is a fitting epitaph to the whole Buddhist struggle movement:

Maybe this is the last letter I send you — because I must make the choice, the choice of my life. I am pushing to the wall. To choose this side or the other side — and not the middle way!

I can no more use my mouth, my voice, my heart, my hands for useful things. All the people here have to choose to manipulate guns — and they have to point straightly in face of each other. One side the Vietnamese city people and Americans, another side Vietnamese rural people and Communists and Leftist minded people.

What have I to choose?

But all things are relative now — I can’t side even with Americans or Communists. But you have no choice. Or this side or the other side — With Americans, you are accused of valets of Imperialism, of pure Colonialism — You are in the side of foreigners, of the people who kill your people, who bomb your country, with the eternal foreigners who always wanted to subjugate you for thousands of years…

No, it’s a desperate situation. I want so desperately to be still in jail —
⁷

For the Buddhists and for those who felt themselves rejected or ill-treated by the Americans, the ambivalence took open expression in the attempt at flight, in the search for oblivion, and in the death reflex that appears the one possible means of escape from an intolerable situation.
⁸
For those who did not feel rejected it took quite another form. It would involve constant duplicity, and constant effort at deception and self-deception, but it would eventually lead to much the same destruction.

10

Bad Puppets

Seen from the viewpoint of General Westmoreland, the events of the Buddhist crisis and the civil war within the GVN were but ripples in the steadily building tide of the American war. By Westmoreland’s account, the year 1966 was the year of the Allied offensive against the Communists. Before the year was out, the United States had nearly four hundred thousand troops in Vietnam, its soldiers outnumbering the ARVN and the enemy forces in the south. In one year American spending on the war leaped from one hundred and five million dollars to two billion dollars a month — a sum whose equivalent would have paid every South Vietnamese more than a hundred dollars a year. The American military engineers and a group of U.S. construction firms went to work building roads, bridges, barracks, and ports, and completed construction of fifty-nine new airfields. By the end of the year the quantity of American supplies arriving in Vietnam reached six hundred thousand tons a month.
¹
In 1966 the U.S. forces launched over six major search-and-destroy operations against large enemy units and base camps. Their main efforts were concentrated just below the DMZ and in the middle tier of central Vietnamese provinces.

Now developed into action, Westmoreland’s strategy consisted of a defense against what he considered a renewed attempt by the North Vietnamese to “cut the country in half” and an offense of attrition — that is, the attempt to cut down the enemy’s main forces to the point where they could no longer carry on the war. In terms of these goals Westmoreland counted the year a success. Reporting to the President in the spring of 1967, he said that the American troops had “spoiled” four enemy offensives, prevented the North Vietnamese from taking over the northern provinces of the First Corps (that is, the northern capitals of the First Corps) and raised the enemy death toll from four to eight thousand a month.
²