The Atlantic and Its Enemies (34 page)

This had been successfully - very successfully - done elsewhere in Asia, most obviously in the case of a Japan that was now lifted off on an extraordinary trajectory that would make her a world economic power, but also with South Korea and Taiwan. Colonization was not part of the programme: on the contrary, the American ambassador was expected to be avuncular and helpful, not domineering, and as a sign of this the embassy itself was not much protected - easy access and no bombproof windows. ‘Hearts and minds’ programmes taught English and showed Hollywood movies; a famous photograph showed a very slender Vietnamese boy wielding a baseball bat almost his own size at the behest of a protein-stuffed and well-intentioned soldier. Dollars flowed into Vietnam; so did advisers with the latest wisdoms of political science (in 1966 they staged a constitutional convention, as the country fell to pieces around them: some of the people present had even designed three constitutions and Samuel Huntington immortally remarked upon the ‘consensus-making bodies . . . viable institutions for power-sharing which would gradually lead to the legitimation of the entire governmental framework’). In all of this, security of body and soul naturally came first, and the Vietcong would have to be contained and defeated, the Americans helping where necessary. But some means to gain the peasants’ loyalty was also of elementary importance.

At the time, influential writers were saying that the central problem of ‘Third World’ countries was the great imbalance in land ownership - huge estates, downtrodden peasants. The peasants, dirt-poor, could not buy anything, so native industry did not develop; the rich just imported goods via some comprador class. Such was Sicily in the nineteenth century, such was Latin America in the twentieth (Barrington Moore is an outstanding writer on these subjects). The answer was for governments to intervene and give land to the peasant. Japan and Taiwan had had land reforms, for political reasons, and these were thought to have been successful, in that societies with an element of equality had emerged. There was much more to this story than met the eye. The most successful agriculture was practised (outside the great empty plains of America) in England, which even in 1930 had more land under the cultivation of great estates than Tsarist Russia in 1916. But in the decolonizing era, landowners were an obvious target for expropriation, and the contented, picturesque peasant made for good propaganda. In South Vietnam the growers of rice for export had thrived in the French period, and they were influential in Saigon. That they were Catholics, and the peasants generally not, mattered; the prevalence of the Chinese minority in the whole trade also mattered; and sometimes there was not even a language in common between lord and peasant.

Diem knew the complications, but his Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was ragtag and his writ hardly went beyond Saigon. Efforts at land reform went slowly and badly, and the Vietcong, launching guerrilla attacks, made matters far more difficult. Peasants were herded into
agrovilles
and had to walk for hours to reach their plots; there was much bribery in the sale of, for instance, rat poison, and it was sometimes difficult for peasants to stop squatters from occupying their land. Surrounded by barbed wire, but badly defended, the peasants became demoralized, and the Vietcong knew how to exploit the situation. One of their first acts was to murder people who had the peasants’ confidence, such that, leaderless, they would be an open target. The reform programme, never enthusiastically pursued, was largely abandoned, and in Long An province only 1,000 tenants out of 35,000 received any land at all; many were expected to buy it whereas the Vietcong ‘gave’ it. Diem, surrounded by relatives - half of his cabinet - hardly knew what to do, beyond keeping the old system going, however bad, on the grounds that anything else would have been worse. The rural scene would no doubt have got better, as peasants moved to towns, reduced overpopulation and sent money home, as happened in happier climes. That was not to be. As the journalist Neil Sheehan says, ‘the Americans . . . were not gaining the communities of controlled peasants they sought. They were instead fostering temporary encampments of peasants motivated as never before to support the Vietcong.’

How were Americans to deal with assassins, clutching an old rifle, waiting for hours in ambush, their feet rotting in the rice paddy slush? Guerrillas who moved with great cunning to terrorize peasants in their huts? There were very good American officers, and one such was Lieutenant-Colonel John Vann, who had made his mark in Korea, and went to Vietnam as adviser - a man of enormous energy, a good organizer and brave without being foolhardy. He knew only too well what was going wrong in Vietnam. He had to deal with a Colonel Huynh Van Cao in the Plain of Reeds, the north-western corner of the Mekong Delta. It was close to the Cambodian border, where the Vietcong had sanctuary, and was a vile place to fight - swamp, waist-high reeds, clumps of bush and woods, stretching over two provinces. There were concrete blockhouses at the bridges, with rusting barbed wire, among fields of sprouting sugarcane, with canals, ditches and, in the season, a steady downpour. It was easy enough for the Vietcong to hide, where necessary in the water, breathing through a hollow reed; and they could come and go, noiselessly, on flat-bottomed boats. They would wait patiently, suddenly emerging to fire. The Saigon government had in effect lost the southern delta, and the northern delta, with its 2 million people, supplied much of the country’s food.

Colonel Cao had written a novel and talked windy French ideology; the French had not trained Vietnamese officers until late in the day and the soldiers, paid ten dollars per month in Saigon piastres, were not enthusiastic for the cause. On night patrol, for instance, they would cough, to warn Vietcong to keep away. If trouble came, American air power would be used, and the peasantry suffered from such indiscriminate firing. Vann became especially angry when a battle went hopelessly wrong at a village, Ap Bac, in the eastern part of the Plain of Reeds, early in 1963. The Vietcong had suffered from American helicopters in particular, but wished to show the peasantry that they had not been beaten. They had studied the situation, and worked out that, if they aimed in front of a passing helicopter, they would hit it; and they used captured American machine-guns. Now, holding a well-camouflaged zigzag line along irrigation ditches, which had small embankments and a dike on the outer edge, they threatened the South Vietnamese positions. On that side, what could go wrong, did - artillery firing inaccurately, American helicopter pilots resenting direction by South Vietnamese, landing in the wrong place, there to be shot to pieces; armoured vehicles pushed across impossible swamp; napalm dropped on peasant straw huts; Colonel Cao going into a huff and refusing to fight at all. A total of 350 Vietcong defeated four times their number, at that with fighter bombers, and five helicopters were lost. Reuters and Associated Press had been present to see the mess, and John Vann, in private, briefed them. He had been especially dismayed at the remoteness and serenity of the senior Americans - General Paul D. Harkins, swagger stick, gold braid, impeccable uniform, playing the part in a Hollywood movie about the Pacific war; the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, extraordinary two - dimensional energy, suit, writing down every figure he could in a little notebook for transfer into some machine that would mathematize everything (and produce the inevitable conclusion that the United States would win).

By 1963 much of the countryside was ungovernable, unsafe to travel in, and the Americans’ support encouraged the Catholics in charge of affairs to act high-handedly. In the summer, surrealism supervened. To the Catholics, the Buddhists were backward and absurd - a dozen and more squabbling sects, 750,000 monks who were, strictly speaking, parasitical. Their involvement in the sectarian protection rackets was dangerous, and they had links with the Vietcong. The Diem regime tried to control the Buddhists; a 73-year-old monk adopted the lotus position, arranged his saffron robes, covered himself in petrol, and struck a match. His example was followed, and Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu - wife of the president’s brother and adviser - clapped her delicate little hands in glee at the ‘barbecue’. Ugly episodes followed - the police manhandling protesting nuns, students, even young girls from school, some of them children of well-placed officials. That summer, there were further self-sacrifices by monks, and into this stepped forceful Americans, their patience barely under control. The ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, talked to the generals, and Diem was killed after a coup led by Duong Van Minh and despite an American safe-conduct. When, three weeks later, Kennedy was killed, his wife received a barbed letter of condolences from Madame Nhu.

The South Vietnamese now fell back, often enough, on passivity, expecting the Americans to do everything. One immediate consequence was an overloading of the American machinery: for instance, security had been left to the South Vietnamese, and a suicide car-bombing at the embassy in Saigon killed twenty and wounded 126, mostly Vietnamese, in summer 1965. Not even the glass had been reinforced, or covered with plastic. As Vietcong authority grew, so too did the number of Americans. By the spring of 1965 the South Vietnamese were taking $500m per annum, but this somehow did not give them a workable government. As William Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser, said, the government was ‘the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel’. There was even briefly a nonagenarian in charge. The problem as regards Buddhists continued - they sacked the American library in the city of Hue, for instance. It was not until the summer of 1966 that the Buddhist movement was (bloodily) crushed, but in towns and cities such as Hue it was the Vietcong that profited from the resulting hatreds. Meanwhile, South Vietnam became memorably corrupt. Import licences for cement were such that the entire country could have been paved over; theft from the PX was gigantic, even involving a computer worth two million dollars. Inflation had wrecked government salaries, so that corruption became the only means of survival - a provincial chief, with a family, could not survive on $200 per month, and there were networks of black-marketeering, involving wives, often enough, such that the Vietcong could obtain anything they wanted. Some Americans understood the situation well - Vann’s associate, Douglas Ramsay, who spoke the language, acquired the locals’ confidence, became a target for the Vietcong, and survived seven hellish years in their prison cages. The
guerrilleros
’ grip on the countryside was such that the roads to Saigon were mined, again and again, and Vann himself rode around in an unmarked pick-up, without ostensible defences.

The Saigon government considered just abandoning the five north-central provinces, more or less difficult to hold, given the enemy’s safe supply road through Cambodia. In black pyjama-suits, the Vietcong could even infiltrate American airbases and use mortars against them, knocking out a dozen planes; at the end of 1964, undetected, they encircled Saigon and planted a bomb in an American hotel for officers on Christmas Eve. The bombers had perfect intelligence, had had South Vietnamese uniforms, had even studied how these soldiers smoked. A little later they brought off a similar coup against an airbase at Pleiku. Against such an enemy, the American tactics of bombing and aerial machine-gunning from gunships were ineffectual, or even made the problem worse, because peasants, their homes wrecked, would support the Vietcong.

Johnson could not quite understand the passions that went into the Vietnamese resistance: why could Ho Chi Minh not just be bought off, with some enormous project to develop the Mekong Valley (1965) in return for concessions to end the war? He would have, with great reluctance, to increase the American commitment. In August 1964 he profited from an incident of naval attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to take authority for the war - Congress gave it, with few serious dissidents - and was determined to Americanize the war altogether: ‘power on the land, power in the air, power wherever’. On 8 March 1965 came a decisive moment. The Marines landed at Da Nang, on the central coast, and heavy bombing began against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of tracks through the jungle. Overall, the plan was to bomb North Vietnam in such a way as to show Ho Chi Minh that he must give way, and three times the weight of bombs used in the Second World War was duly dropped - 6 million tons. On the other hand, Johnson was very anxious to spare civilians, and every Tuesday he held a lunch where he himself specified the targets and bomb weights. Quite often - sixteen times - he ordered pauses in the bombing, hoping that the North Vietnamese would come to terms as, in the end, the North Koreans had had to do. There were seventy-two ‘peace initiatives’. None had any effect. The American ambassador in Moscow at one stage sent a letter inviting negotiations, and it was returned unopened.

By the middle of 1965 there were 50,000 American troops on the ground, who had been well-trained for the wrong war, and the military authorities said they needed many more. By November 1965 there were 250,000. Soon there would be half a million. Their arrival transformed the country. A colossal effort was made, with extraordinary ingenuity in engineering, to build a base at Cam Ranh Bay, 200 miles from Saigon, with six panoramic jet bases, carefully protected from infiltration. The Mekong Delta was dredged, to create a 600-acre island used as a secure camp site; six deep-draft harbours were rapidly set up, the pieces, prefabricated, towed across the Pacific. The base had forty ice-cream plants, and enormous deep-freeze facilities, such that on alternate days the electricity in Saigon was shut off. All the Americans’ food was flown in, and the enormous PX arrangements (at Cholon, on the scale of Bloomingdale’s in New York) meant that there was an equally enormous black market in stolen American goods of all sorts. Saigon itself became disgusting - heaps of uncollected rubbish, dogs and cats rooting in them; rats and stray dogs everywhere; drug-dealers, whores, GI bars, refugees pouring in from the stricken countryside. By 1971 the Pentagon said one third of the men were on drugs.