Fire in the Lake (68 page)

The history of the war was repeating itself, only now the tide was running in the opposite direction. The Vietnamese of the cities understood and registered that shift. With the announcement of the bombing halt and the negotiations in Paris, the mood of Saigon changed. The vocal political groups now expressed open resentment against the Americans. The head of one Saigon student committee described to an American reporter how the change came over him. As a high-school student in central Vietnam the young man had, he said, admired the American soldiers. “They seemed so carefree, so strong, I was moved to think they would have come from so far away to die for something other than their own country.” But later he began to look at them more critically. “I saw how they interfered at all levels in Vietnamese society. I read about the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in Mylai. I saw myself how the lives of city people were disrupted by the American presence. I began to feel that the American presence itself is the reason why the Communists continue the war.” And, his friend continued, “We students take note of the fact that on this side we have half a million foreign troops, while on the other side there are none.”
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It was not only the students who criticized the Americans. For the first time in years, the Saigon newspapers, even those that supported the Thieu regime, began to attack the United States and expose stories of new military atrocities.
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The politicians who had been the strongest supporters of the United States now spoke of the Americans as they used to speak of the French in Vietnam. Just before his arrest, Deputy Tran Ngoc Chau issued a statement regretting his own cooperation with the United States and warning General Thieu and his associates of the “schemes of the U.S. officials” to keep the GVN weak and unrepresentative — in effect, a puppet to their will. At a meeting of “retired” generals, including the former chiefs of state, Generals Duong Van Minh and Tran Van Don — the nucleus of a new opposition group — General Ky ironically called the American ambassador “Governor General Bunker,” after the French authority in Indochina. Elsewhere, even more plainly, he spoke of the Americans as “colonialists.”
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Rather than allay the resentment of the politicians, the slow process of “Vietnamization” only increased it. As time went on and the Americans hesitantly pulled at the fabric they had created, every slight tear seemed to remind the Vietnamese of the inevitable. The central and most sensitive issue was the economy. Resistant to all attempts at public relations camouflage, the value of the piastre registered with an almost mathematical precision the amount of U.S. aid to South Vietnam and Vietnamese confidence in the continuation of the war. As the U.S. troops withdrew and the flow of dollars diminished, the black-market rate shot up to new heights and the inflation, once “stabilized” at 30 percent a year, rose dangerously.
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The political temperature rose with it. When the Americans urged Thieu to impose higher taxes and devalue the piastre, the Vietnamese politicians warned him against complying with American “schemes” to impoverish all Vietnamese. There were fistfights in the legislature when Thieu presented a bill requesting dictatorial powers over the economy for the next several months. In 1970 there were demonstrations of veterans and war widows calling for reparations. Thieu met these complaints with stopgap measures, but he could not raise the salaries of the armed forces enough to compensate for the rise in prices. And it was the soldiers upon whom the regime depended.
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During 1970 and 1971 the attacks against the regime and the American presence remained largely rhetorical. The soldiers, the city people, and the non-Communist groups disliked the regime and resented the Americans as much as they ever had, but they depended — and more heavily than before — upon the flow of American aid. Just after the Cambodian invasion, on June 11, 1970, the anniversary of Quang Due's death, a seventy-four-year-old bonze burned himself to death in a Saigon pagoda. A spokesman for the Buddhists said that while the Buddhists would never encourage self-immolations, they regarded the act as a sign of growing aspirations for peace.
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The statement was a good deal more ambiguous than the act itself, for while the Buddhists, like all Vietnamese, wished for peace, they knew that for the moment it would be quite futile to oppose American policy and the American-supported government. For the moment they, like most of the non-Communist “opposition” groups, aspired only to replace the Thieu government and take control of the American aid. As a result, the “opposition” remained as divided as ever and as incapable as ever of formulating any long-term strategies for creating a non-Communist movement or negotiating with the Front. After the Cambodian invasion it was thus only the students who demonstrated — some of them calling for the overthrow of the Thieu government and others, more significantly, for the withdrawal of American troops. Thieu's response was to throw the demonstrating students in jail and to raid the central pagoda of Saigon. Still the students continued to protest, and in 1971 they were joined by a number of young Catholic priests, who openly advocated a political settlement with the Front. The defection of these young priests was significant in that it pointed towards a political shift within the Catholic Church as a whole and a weakening of the last solid moral support for the regime.

The elections of 1971 offered some hope both to those who hoped for peace and to those who hoped for the maintenance of American policy and a substitution of men. But the moment of hope was short-lived. Well before the presidential election it became clear that Thieu would do what was necessary to keep himself in power and that the Americans would support him. The Americans did not want a change of policy, and though they wanted a contested election — a façade of electoral democracy — they judged a change of men too dangerous at that moment in history. They assumed, and quite correctly, that after four years of the Thieu government a change of president would have meant a shake-up of government personnel throughout the country and a situation like that succeeding the fall of Diem. The difficulty was that their stance was quite apparent to the two potential opposition candidates, General Nguyen Cao Ky and General Duong Van Minh. When Thieu unsuccessfully attempted to get Ky out of the race, Minh withdrew his candidacy and Ky refused to act as a substitute for him. To the great dismay of the Americans Thieu finally ran the election as a referendum for himself and collected an impossible 94 percent of the vote. It was, as Tri Quang said apropos of Thieu's police actions against the Buddhists, much like the last days of the Diem regime. Only now Catholics and non-Catholics alike began to compare Thieu unfavorably with Diem.

It was like 1963, only now the power in question was that of the Americans rather than that of any particular government in Saigon. General Thieu did not matter. He himself announced that he would quit the government if and when the Americans decided to withdraw their aid from the GVN. For the moment he controlled the police, but the more he had to use them against opposition groups, the more his power declined. For the moment he controlled the top army officers and province officials. But he trusted no one — not even his own premier — and he appointed only those particularly indebted to him as commanders of the provinces controlling the roads into Saigon. The regime was closing in on itself, just as Diem's had done. The opposition in Saigon waited for a change of American policy, but as the American troops withdrew and the economic situation worsened, the signs of disintegration began to gather. The armed forces increased their financial exactions upon the civilians, and incidents of theft, hooliganism, and even fighting between whole units were reported throughout the countryside. In the strategic Central Highlands the montagnard troops, once the protégés of the American Special Forces and now incorporated into the regular Vietnamese army, began to defect en masse from their Vietnamese officers. In these and other border areas the junior Vietnamese officers complained that they were being sacrificed to the interests of their senior officers and the Americans. The people of the central Vietnamese cities, still the last on the supply lines and the closest to the fighting, gave signs of turning against Saigon once again in reaction to the American withdrawals. Except for certain isolated incidents, such as the students' burning of American vehicles before the presidential election, Saigon was quiet, betraying as little of itself as it had in the early spring of 1963. Once again the Saigonese were withdrawing from political life and waiting for that crisis — economic, military, or diplomatic — that they felt sure would fall upon the regime. When it came, they would respond, breaking through the surface of order and orderly repression and putting an end to American power in Saigon.

Though Nixon took no initiative to end the war, the U.S. government had used up its credit with the American as well as the Vietnamese people for the pursuit of its war aims. Vice-President Agnew liked to make a distinction between the “hippies” and “subversives” who opposed the war at home and the young patriots who nobly served their country in Vietnam. But by 1971 there was no political distinction between young Americans in and out of the armed forces. The army, once dominated by career men and volunteers, was now filled with draftees who did not want to die in Vietnam for a cause they felt had already been abandoned. Many opposed the American war aims; others merely resented their own condition. It was a white man's war being fought by blacks, a rich man's war being fought by the poor, an old man's war being fought by the young. While Agnew talked of patriotism, the soldiers grew more and more sensitive to these antagonisms. The American command made it practically impossible for the soldiers to demonstrate, write, or petition against the war, and thus the overt opposition to it was confined to the wearing of peace symbols, an occasional letter or petition, and the antiwar movement of the Vietnam veterans. These were the healthy signs. In general the soldiers expressed their sense of alienation in a manner reminiscent of the ARVN, turning their suppressed, and often unfocused, anger against themselves or their superiors. There were more reports of atrocities against Vietnamese civilians, and then, quite suddenly, there was a rash of “fragging” incidents in which enlisted men killed or wounded their officers. These incidents remained scattered, but many officers took the threat seriously and grew less and less willing to compel their men to carry out orders. The well-known Vietnamese practice of passive resistance and avoidance became almost standard. Combat units would shirk patrols and routine security duties, leaving their positions open to enemy attack.
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Many — perhaps the majority — of the soldiers in Vietnam smoked the cheap, locally grown marihuana on and off duty. In the spring of 1971 the U.S. command itself estimated that 10 percent of the troops in Vietnam were taking heroin, and that 5 percent were addicts.

The traffic in heroin was the final, and perhaps the blackest, irony of the war. The heroin came largely from Burma and Laos. Much of it was processed in or near Vientiane by those people for whose sake (it was to be supposed) the U.S. government was demolishing the rest of Laos. It came to Vietnam either by air drop from Vietnamese or Lao military planes, paid for by the U.S. government, or through the customs at Tan Son Nhut airfield. The Vietnamese customs inspectors earned several dozen times as much for not inspecting the bags and bundles as for inspecting them. When the American customs advisers attempted to crack down on their “counterparts,” they discovered that the two key customs posts were held by the brothers of Thieu's premier, General Tran Thien Khiem.
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General Khiem was one of the three men the NLF said they could not include in a coalition government. American officials refused to consider dropping their support for Khiem because, they said, he belonged to the “freely elected government of the South Vietnamese people.” As this “freely elected government” would not prosecute the customs officials (heroin, the Vietnamese said, was “an American problem”), the heroin continued to enter the country unimpeded. Once in Vietnam it was sold openly in the streets and around the American bases by young war widows and children orphaned by the American war. Finally, the heroin, unlike anything else the Vietnamese sold the American soldiers, was of excellent quality — white as ivory and of such purity that it would cost a small fortune to support a habit of it on the illicit market of the United States. Such was the revenge of the Indochinese who, Nixon had claimed, “trusted in” the Americans. And such was the reward of the U.S. government to the soldiers who served its cause in Vietnam.

The United States might leave Vietnam, but the Vietnam War would now never leave the United States. The soldiers would bring it back with them like an addiction. The civilians may neglect or try to ignore it, but those who have seen combat must find a reason for that killing; they must put it in some relation to their normal experience and to their role as citizens. The usual agent for this reintegration is not the psychiatrist, but the politician. In this case, however, the politicians could give no satisfactory answer to many of those who had killed or watched their comrades being killed. In 1971 the soldiers had before them the knowledge that President Johnson had deceived them about the war during his election campaign. All his cryptic signals to the contrary, he had indicated that there would be no American war in Vietnam, while he was in fact making plans for entering that war. They had before them the spectacle of a new President, Richard M. Nixon, who with one hand engaged in peaceful negotiations with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and with the other condemned thousands of Americans and Indochinese to die for the principle of anti-Communism. To those who had for so long believed that the United States was different, that it possessed a fundamental innocence, generosity, and disinterestedness, these facts were shocking. No longer was it possible to say, as so many Americans and French had, that Vietnam was the “quagmire,” the
“pays pourri”
that had enmired and corrupted the United States. It was the other way around. The U.S. officials had enmired Vietnam. They had corrupted the Vietnamese and, by extension, the American soldiers who had to fight amongst the Vietnamese in their service. By involving the United States in a fruitless and immoral war, they had also corrupted themselves.