Fire in the Lake (66 page)

Under these favorable conditions the program of “Vietnamization” proceeded in an apparently satisfactory manner. In the wake of the renewed Front attacks in May 1968, General Thieu, by various persuasions, managed to have the legislature authorize the general mobilization that the Americans had for so long urged. The mobilization law allowed the GVN to induct all men from eighteen to thirty-eight into military service and to order seventeen-year-olds and men from thirty-nine to forty-three into the newly formed self-defense forces for the protection of the villages.
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By the end of 1970 the GVN had added some 400,000 men to its armed forces, bringing the total up to 1,100,000. The number itself was staggering, for, if it were anywhere near correct, it meant that the GVN had mobilized about a half of the able-bodied male population of the country into the armed forces. Counting the militia, the civil service, and the 110,000-man police force, the United States was arming and, in one way or another, supporting most of the male population of Vietnam — and for the duration of the war.
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At the same time the United States began to arm the Vietnamese with a generosity unknown in the days of General Westmoreland. For the first time it issued the infantry with the powerful M-16 automatic rifles, the grenade launchers, and machine guns that the Americans used. It imported helicopters, patrol boats, tanks, APCs, artillery pieces, air transports, and squadrons of F-5s, the reliable tactical jet bomber.
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New advanced military training courses were set up in South Vietnam, and one hundred Vietnamese soldiers a week went to the United States for six to eighteen months of technical training. The greatest benefit to the Vietnamese was not, however, in the area of sophisticated armament, but in that of conventional infantry weapons. For the first time the ARVN battalions had more firepower than the North Vietnamese ground troops; the territorial forces, once ragged groups of men with old carbines, now far outgunned the Front forces and possessed access to the massive air and artillery screens that covered the country. In the fall of 1969 an American officer working on the “Vietnamization” program said, “I think we are at the point now where we are giving them enough training and equipment so that if they lose this war, they can only blame themselves.”
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His statement characterized the moral ambiguity of a policy designed to save American lives while continuing the war.

In effect the result of the “Vietnamization” program was that a half of the Vietnamese population, armed and trained by the United States, sat in military occupation over the other half. By 1970 regional, popular, and police forces swarmed through almost every village, every hamlet in the country. The upkeep of these security forces was extremely expensive, but it did not begin to compare with the cost of keeping American troops in Vietnam. Though the system could not have been erected before the commitment of American troops, it was in certain respects a much more efficient system of control. Where before the American troops had occupied the Vietnamese, now all, or most, of the Vietnamese were swept up into the American war machine. “Vietnamization” preempted the manpower base of the country and brought it into a state of dependency on the American economy. And the results were spectacular. The major roads were open to traffic; the cities flourished on American money and goods; those peasant families that remained in the fertile areas of the Delta grew rich on bumper crops of “miracle” rice. The country was more “pacified” than it had ever been before.

To many Americans in Vietnam it seemed that the progress in pacification might continue indefinitely, with the territorial forces slowly “cleaning out” the local guerrillas and the countryside opening up to the city economy. The difficulty was that the process depended on something more than the continuation of American aid. With all their new weapons and with all the American air power that continued to support and supply them, the ARVN divisions were still no match for their North Vietnamese counterparts. Certain optimists in the American mission claimed that the North Vietnamese were “hurting” and near the end of their capacity to make war. But from the amount of supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail it was clear that they were “hurting” no more than they had been under the bombing. Quite possibly they were experimenting to see whether the slowdown of their offensive might not bring the United States to a negotiated withdrawal and a political settlement. Failing that, they were simply waiting for more American troops to leave. As the Tet offensive had shown, they had more dedication to their war aims than the American people had to those of the Nixon administration, and they remained militarily capable of disputing the American presence in the south. And then the root of the problem lay elsewhere. As one former GVN premier put it, “The problem is not the North Vietnamese, it is the Saigon government.” Whenever Thieu repeated that a coalition with the NLF would be a “disguise for surrender,” he was admitting that the GVN could not compete politically with the Front. After all these years of war, the Saigon government remained a network of cliques held together by American subsidies, a group of people without a coherent political orientation, bent on their own separate survival. By building up the ARVN the Americans were merely enlarging this artificial tissue without injecting any life into it. The NLF had lost strength, but it was difficult to believe that it could not recover as the Americans moved out for the simple reason that the GVN did not constitute a “side” within the domestic political struggle. Thieu's own maneuvers in 1968–1969 demonstrated this point well enough.

Just after the Tet offensive Thieu, with some American prodding, attempted to put together a “national congress” of all the non-Communist political splinter groups, including the moderate Buddhists. The Americans applauded the attempt as an effort to “broaden the base” of the GVN, but Thieu contradicted them by giving the congress no share in governmental power. Just why Thieu acceded to American pressure and convened the congress at all remains a matter of doubt, but, quite plausibly, he wished to distribute the blame for the Tet disaster on as many different people as possible. In any case, the congress collapsed a few months later in much the same manner as had all the American-sponsored congresses and councils of 1964–1965, leaving little more to Thieu's own “political coalition” than a number of men susceptible to bribery by Thieu's businessman friend, Nguyen Cao Thang. In the fall of 1969, the president dismissed his conciliatory post-Tet cabinet (composed of such men as the former premier, Tran Van Huong) and replaced it with a cabinet composed almost exclusively of his old military cronies and former members of Ngo Dinh Nhu's Can Lao Party. The American officials went into high reverse gear on the subject of “broadening the base of the GVN,” discovering extraordinary virtues in these old political toughs, but they could not explain Thieu's reasons for so obviously rejecting their advice. They could not have explained them, had they understood them, for to have done so would have been to admit that Thieu was trying to gain what he was already supposed to have: some control over his own administration. In the attempt a sharp sword was more useful to him than the unmatched parts of a blunderbuss. Thieu would need that sword shortly in order to deal with the political effects of the American troop withdrawals.

Nixon's announcement of the “Vietnamization” policy signaled much the same thing to the Saigonese as it did to the American middle-of-the-road doves. When Nixon ordered a withdrawal of ten thousand American troops per month, the Saigonese politicians, reasonably enough, came to the conclusion that he intended to end the war in the near future. Alarmed by the intransigence of their own government at the Paris negotiating table, a certain number began to seek alternate routes to a political settlement before the American troops departed. Deputy Tran Ngoc Chau proposed that a group of Saigonese legislators visit the north in order to talk with their opposite numbers in Hanoi. Students and intellectuals formed committees and put out manifestos attacking the U.S.-GVN conditions for peace negotiations. The Saigonese had, unfortunately, misjudged Nixon, and Thieu for his own protection had to silence them. In March Thieu, overriding the constitutional provision for legislative immunity, had a military court sentence Chau to ten years' hard labor. A month or so later he arrested the heads of the newly formed student opposition group.

From these events many Americans concluded that Thieu, personally, held the extreme right-wing position in the Vietnamese political spectrum. As usual, however, the situation was not so ideologically linear as it seemed.

In the fall of 1969 American intelligence in Saigon discovered an NLF ring consisting of some one hundred members, many of them placed in high positions throughout the GVN. When arrested by the Americans, one member revealed that he had had dealings with President Thieu's own political adviser, a man called Huynh Van Trung. While the Americans were congratulating themselves on having removed a viper from the breast of the GVN, many Saigonese were laughing at the joke on both General Thieu and the Americans. General Thieu's adviser, after all, had a well-known history as a Viet Minh informer during the first Indochina war. Recently, and perhaps as a result of his wife's infidelity, he had been going around Saigon complaining about the corruption of Vietnamese society. When Thieu's military court gave the man a sentence of only two years in jail, the suspicions of the Saigonese seemed confirmed: Thieu had known about the man all along and had been using him as a liaison with the NLF. (The fact that this man was of such a dubious background suggested that both parties had left him in an exposed place as a cover for their better-protected liaisons.)

Had the affair never reached the press, many Saigonese would have nonetheless assumed that Thieu possessed such a contact. It was only reasonable — and besides, the war had gone on for so long that its history could only be repetitious. In 1963, at the moment when the United States threatened to withdraw its support from the Diem regime, Ngo Dinh Nhu attempted to enter into relations with the North Vietnamese while still hotly professing his anti-Communism. The present situation differed only in that now the Americans appeared to be threatening to withdraw their support from the entire Saigon regime. To the Saigonese the only illegitimate aspect of these contacts was their secrecy. Had there been any unity or responsibility within the GVN, General Thieu would have attempted to make the accommodation in public — as Chau intended — and to show the way of least resistance to the people who depended upon him. But, as even the highest officials of the GVN did not trust each other, Thieu, like many others, was doing his best to see that he did not hang separately. It was this attempt at self-preservation that led, as it always had in the past, to a political repression in the cities. Thieu would use the leverage of American support to suppress those who challenged his personal position and his own contacts with the NLF.

Finally, after a year of accommodating the Nixon administration, Senator Fulbright and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings to argue the fact that the new American effort was having very little effect on the GVN: the ARVN remained ineffective, the Saigon government unable to meet the political challenge, and so forth. The discussion could have been put together from old newspaper clippings. But in some sense the situation was a new one and the issue was not joined.

In his foreign policy message to Congress in January 1970, President Nixon revealed what was to be his prime moral justification for the continuation of the war through the “Vietnamization” policy. “When,” he said, “we assumed the burden of helping South Vietnam, millions of South Vietnamese men and women placed their trust in us. To abandon them would risk a massacre that would shock and dismay everyone in the world who values human life.”
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Many American doves disputed this argument on the basis that the American military had already done more damage in Vietnam than any Vietnamese group (presumably Nixon meant the Communists) could possibly do. The United States had a moral responsibility for its own actions and not for the (hypothetical) actions of every foreign political party towards its own people. So much the “doves” could say without any knowledge of Vietnam, but from the perspective of Vietnamese politics there was something more to be said. The experience of the war had shown that the buildup of the ARVN was not only ineffective as a means of “stopping the Communists” but actually destructive to the South Vietnamese people. To continue this buildup in the context of an American withdrawal was both to compound the errors of the past and to increase the chances of those “massacres” that Nixon said he hoped to avoid. As one illustration will suffice to show, “Vietnamization” was the tactic most likely to produce present and future violence against the civilian population.

Just six months before the Tet offensive, the United States finally succeeded in pressuring the GVN to adopt its latest-model counter-insurgency scheme for “rooting out the Viet Cong infrastructure.” The Phoenix program, as the plan was known, consisted of the centralization of all intelligence data and counterespionage operations in the person of an army or police officer at each level of the bureaucracy. The aim of the program was to eliminate the rivalries between the various army units and the police which had so long prevented the Americans and the GVN from identifying, much less capturing, the political agents of the Front. In addition the GVN revived the old detention law whereby without the delay and uncertainty of trial by jury a provincial security committee could condemn a suspect to up to two years in prison. As with the Revolutionary Development program, however, the Americans managed to clear away mountains of red tape only to build another mountain. They created an efficient system of counterinsurgency in a void of any efficient agencies to carry it out. The results were predictable. In 1969 the United States set a goal for the Phoenix program to “neutralize” twenty thousand NLF agents during the year, and at the end of the year GVN authorities reported 19,534 agents “neutralized.” The figure was unsettling in that there had been no corresponding decline in American estimates of NLF agents at large.
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Who, then, were the 19,534 people, and what had become of them? As only 20 percent of those arrested were actually sentenced — and then only for periods of a few months — the American officials concluded that a large percentage of the “neutralized agents” were simply people whom the Phoenix agents herded in and out of the police stations in order to fill their quotas. American advisers on the spot complained of GVN inefficiency and collusion with the NLF.
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Their complaints were undoubtedly justified, but the matter was more serious than that. Despite the fact that the law provided only for the arrest and detention of the suspects, one-third of the “neutralized agents” were reported dead.
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Then, too, the survivors had stories to tell. In one village in An Giang province a woman had come to the Phoenix officials with a story that her brother-in-law had tried to persuade her husband to pay taxes to the NLF. As was later discovered, the brother-in-law was an old man with heart disease against whom the woman held a long-standing grudge. But the discovery came too late. Within the week the Phoenix agent had the old man arrested and tortured as a “Viet Cong tax collector.” In another village a conscientious village chief discovered the local Phoenix agent was extorting gold and jewelry from the people of the village on the threat of arresting them as “Viet Cong agents.” When the village chief attempted to tell the district chief about the racket, the Phoenix agent had him fingered as a “Viet Cong suspect.”
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