Fire in the Lake (62 page)

A frank word is required here about “terror” on the other side, by the Government and Allied forces fighting in Viet-Nam. No one with any experience in Vietnam denies that troops, police and others commanding physical power, have committed excesses that are, by our working definition, acts of terror.…

But there is an essential difference in such acts between the two sides, one of outcome or result. To the communist, terror has a utility and is beneficial to his cause, while to the other side the identical act is self-defeating. This is not because one side is made up of heroes and the other of villains. It is because, as noted above, terror is integral in all the communist tactics and programs and communists could not rid themselves of it even if they wanted to. Meanwhile, the other side firmly believes, even though its members do not always behave accordingly, that there is a vested interest in abstaining from such acts.
²⁶

Interestingly, Pike's “working definition” of terror was the “systematic use of death, pain, fear and anxiety among the population (either civilian or military) for the deliberate purpose of coercing, manipulating, intimidating, punishing or simply frightening the helpless into submission.”
²⁷
And by that definition the entire American bombing policy in Vietnam, North and South, was a strategy of terror. Even within the narrower definition of “terror” as an unconventional, clandestine act of violence — an assassination or a satchel-charge bombing — the Allies had been using terror deliberately for a number of years through professionally trained paramilitary units such as the Special Forces and the Provincial Reconnaissance Units. As head of the Psychological Warfare section, Pike knew this as well as anyone in Vietnam. Only he, like many Americans who backed the Vietnam War, ascribed the best of motives to the Americans and their allies, while laying all the evil at the door of the enemy. It was the same kind of bad faith and bad conscience that in 1967 inspired all the American rhetoric about “revolutionary development” and “building democracy” in Vietnam. It was the same kind of rhetoric that inspired the unrestricted use of violence upon the Vietnamese.

14

Guerrillas

William Shakespeare,
The Tempest,
act l, scene 2

And the Vietnamese? Were the GVN officials and politicians, for instance, immune to this rage directed against them and to the destruction of their country by the Americans? Judging by appearances, one would have to say yes, for in 1967 there were no coups, no demonstrations, no protests of any kind against the war or the increasingly difficult economic situation. While the legislators bickered over small matters, General Thieu went about putting together a cabinet with one or two of Ky's protégés, one or two intellectuals, an army officer, and several technicians: a cabinet that, as usual, pleased no one. But it did not seem to matter that year. After the elections, a political calm descended over the cities, such as had not been seen since the days of the Diem regime. The Buddhists, the ironic politicians, and the brash young army officers seemed engrossed in their own petty affairs and unconcerned with the larger issues of war and peace. The American officials seemed finally to have what they had wanted for so long: stability and the acquiescence of the non-Communist groups to working with the Americans. A foreigner, in any case, might have assumed that to be true if he did not know the rhythms of Vietnamese political life, those periods of quiet that, like the damming up of a riverbed and the inevitable rise of the level of the river, led only to catastrophe.

The French in their day preserved this state of quiescence for years. Early in the century Paul Mus, as a boy, was present when a North Vietnamese mandarin came to visit his father, the director of the first French lycée in Hanoi to accept Vietnamese students. Mus and his father knew perfectly well that the mandarin hated the school for giving his son foreign ideas along with the technical instruction, but the mandarin merely bowed, thanked the director for having educated his son so well, and walked stiffly out.

“To show anger is to imitate the conduct of the barbarian,” said Confucius. But manners are the expression — often contradictory — of the civilization itself. The mandarin's exquisite irony betrayed a fear of showing anger, a fear that the anger would become uncontrollable and that the interview would end in irreconcilable conflict. Except for the NLF, no Vietnamese political party had decided upon the course of conflict; and thus in moment of crisis the rest did not show their anger against the Americans. And yet the anger was there. It was merely repressed or transferred to some other object. The peasants blamed Fate for their sufferings and abused their children after the passage of an ARVN unit through their village; similarly the Buddhists of Hue took their anger out upon themselves in hunger strikes and self-immolation.

In his observation of the African and Arab peoples on the eve of decolonization, Frantz Fanon had seen much the same phenomena, including the belief in Fate and the symbolic killing of self, which he called “the behavior patterns of avoidance.” But he had also seen other patterns that seemed equally well to fit the Vietnamese of the GVN: the sudden crime waves that spread through the cities, the tribal warfare, and the fierce, irrational feuding of the native sects. As he explained them,

Tribal feuds only serve to perpetuate old grudges deep buried in the memory. By throwing himself with all his force into the
vendetta,
the native tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist, that everything is going on as before, that history continues.… It is as if plunging into a fraternal blood-bath allowed them to ignore the obstacle, and to put off till later the choice, nevertheless inevitable, which opens up the question of armed resistance to colonialism.
¹

For years American officials had urged the Vietnamese politicians to stop their feuding and to unite against the Viet Cong — but to no avail. The same fierce internal quarrels had been going on since the 1930's, claiming all the energies of every political group except the Viet Minh and the NLF. From this distance in history it is not to strain the limits of belief to accept Fanon's explanation of them: the Vietnamese of the cities were by their feuds expressing their anger against France and the United States, their hatred of their own dependence. The vast American presence merely tore those feuding groups into smaller and smaller pieces, and the calm of 1967 was a result of that diminution of scale. The feuds were now only the innumerable conflicts of splinter groups and individuals.

The political infighting was one form of displaced aggression; the egregious profiteering was perhaps another, more direct one. The primary motives of the GVN officials were, of course, need or greed for money and security in an uncertain world. But the corruption was so often exaggerated, the stealing so far in excess of the needs of the officials and so clearly harmful to the purposes of the United States and the GVN that it was difficult to believe there was not a double motive at work. While the Vietnamese sometimes liked to think of the Americans as being too rich and powerful to be vulnerable to them, they also liked to think of Americans as large dumb creatures continually outwitted by the small, clever Vietnamese. When the tough little slum kids stole from the American soldiers, they knew very well that they were hurting them; in the same way the district chief must have known — though perhaps obscurely — that to steal the food supplies of the PF soldiers and to cause desertions was to endanger the local American troops and to hurt the entire war effort. To believe that he and his colleagues did not understand that is to believe they were something less than human.

And then there were other forms of sabotage that could even less easily be accounted for by self-interest: the shirking of responsibility, for example. And the slowness. For an American in South Vietnam the simplest of chores often turned into endless and painful ordeals. To register a car, to move a truckload of goods from one place to another, often required weeks, if not months, of concentrated attention —of negotiation, of explanation, of filling out of forms, of argument in which the non sequiturs seemed to have very little to do with the language barrier. An American in Saigon could not help thinking bitterly of Kipling's epitaph for the colonial civil servant, “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.” Like Kipling, many Americans, particularly the “old Asia hands,” believed that slowness, lethargy, and corruption were native to the Vietnamese, and that they, as Europeans, were simply beating themselves to death against the torpid masses of Asia. But had they ever witnessed an NLF operation or watched the GVN officials smuggling American goods out of the port, they would have had to change their minds. And perhaps they would have found Kipling's explanation less plausible than that of Frantz Fanon: the slowness of the native is not natural to him, but merely a manifestation of his resistance to his colonial master — a resistance that he often does not dare to admit to himself.

That the GVN officials shared this resistance with the Viet Cong was not at all surprising, for, metaphorically speaking, every Vietnamese is brought up to be a guerrilla. Taught to observe the dictates of filial piety, the Vietnamese child learns to hide his aggressiveness and the demands of his ego behind an impenetrable mask of humility and obedience. As the guerrilla feeds off the land without owning it, so the child, without right to property or person, feeds off his family until his father dies. Unable to leave his family, unable to give open challenge to his superiors, he carries on an endless underground battle for survival that is well described by General Giap's famous dictum: “When the enemy attacks, retreat, when he retreats, harass him…” Not only the Viet Minh and the NLF, but all Vietnamese political parties have been underground parties with subversive intentions. Given this tradition of self-protection and concealed hostility between inferior and superior, it would be difficult to imagine how the GVN officials could avoid resenting the Americans, who, after all, were
not
their leaders. By their slowness, their profiteering, and their intractability, they were carrying on their own guerrilla war against the Americans.

But though there is only one kind of child — the child that grows up to take his father's place — there are two kinds of guerrillas. One kind expects to grow in strength until his movement becomes the majority and the government of the country. (To a Marxist who believes in the historical dialectic, this process is as natural and inevitable as the child's replacement of his father.) The second kind will never give an open challenge to the government, and expects to retain his status of guerrilla forever, feeding off the land without taking responsibility for its government. As the country
par excellence
of the guerrilla, Vietnam had a long tradition of both. But since the French occupation, only two groups have fit into the first category — the Viet Minh and the NLF. Dependent on the foreigners for their very existence, the other nationalist parties remained unable to assert their autonomy, feeding on the French and then the Americans while at the same time trying to sabotage their interests.

An American reporter, experienced in Vietnam, once said to me, “I finally realized we'd never win this war when I noticed that all of the streets in Saigon were named after Vietnamese heroes who fought against foreign invaders.”

The street names were in a sense the perfect metaphor for the resistance of Saigon. Though written in Roman letters and used every day by Americans, they were perfectly incomprehensible to those who did not know a great deal about Vietnamese history. The xenophobia of Saigon was hidden in plain sight. And yet the street names also deceived the Vietnamese — they were both deception and self-deception — for Saigon could never make good on its claim to the tradition of Le Loi, Tran Hung Dao, and Phan Dinh Phung, or of the street called Tu Do (Independence). Like Generals Thieu and Ky, the Saigonese fought the foreigners only from within their own service — a war they never hoped to win.

The Americans did not understand this war of the city people against the foreigners. But for them it was in a sense more destructive than the war fought by the enemy. While the Communists were attempting by relatively straightforward means to get the Americans out of the country, the Saigon government was attempting (and succeeding in the attempt) to draw the Americans further and further into Vietnam. The strategy of the generals was something like that of General Kutuzov when he retreated across the plains of Russia before Napoleon's armies. It was a scorched earth policy with the difference that the Saigon generals never expected to retake the land they had lost. Their harassment would be constant, their retreat never-ending; they would leave behind them a wasteland whose people would be killed or prostituted by the foreigners. The toll that their forces had already taken on the Americans and on the civilian population gave certain plausibility to the rumor among southerners that Premier Ky was the agent of Hanoi. And yet even that notion was too farfetched, for if the North Vietnamese were planning to take over the south, they would not have wished such devastation upon their future inheritance. Dependent upon the Americans, the GVN was, like a parasite attacking its host, engaged in a pure act of self-destruction. The corruption, the endless factional disputes, the civil war of 1966, the bombing and terrorization of the peasantry — all of them were acts of violence against the very population that might have sustained it. They were suicidal acts by a government that had not even the power to kill itself.