A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Sheehan, Neil

  Whistle while you work

  Hitler is a jerk

  Mussolini is a weenie,

  But the Japs are worse.

  The Japs were not worse; the Germans were. The Germans were the dangerous and fiendish enemy. Japan never possessed the military potential to threaten the existence of the United States; Germany did. The urgency behind the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb came from the realization of the American and émigré European scientists that Hitler might be ahead in a race to construct these “superbombs” with which to give the United States and Britain the choice of surrender or annihilation. Japan’s World War II technological capacity was so limited that its navy was forced to fight blind at night and in bad weather because the development of radar, let alone nuclear weapons, was beyond Japanese wartime science and industry. In contrast to the satanic planning and efficiency with which the Nazis used the facilities of an industrialized society to liquidate 12 million persons in the concentration camps (6 million Jews and an equal number of non-Jews from the occupied countries), the Japanese atrocities, however barbarous and cruel, were haphazard.

  Americans feared and hated the two foes in inverse proportion to the threat each posed. The market-research pollsters in the Treasury Department discovered that advertising that relied on racist hate propaganda against the Japanese sold more war bonds than anti-German hatemongering. Their polls showed that the average American viewed Japanese as “ungodly, subhuman, beastly, sneaky, and treacherous.” The war-bond drives therefore concentrated on toothy “Nips.” The FBI arrested some of the more prominent American Nazis in the Bund. Otherwise, German-Americans were not disturbed, except for the heckling of neighborhood children.

  After Pearl Harbor there was a wave of hysterical rumors in California and the other West Coast states, encouraged by the press and the Army, that Japanese-Americans were signaling submarines, sending secret radio transmissions to invasion fleets, caching arms, and drawing maps with which to guide the Nipponese hordes after they landed. An attempt to organize a program of voluntary resettlement inland failed because no one would have the Japanese. The reply of the governor of Idaho was typical: “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats. We don’t want them.” The Army rounded up more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the spring of 1942, 60,000 of whom were U.S. citizens by birth, and herded them into concentration camps in barren and arid federal reservations in the West. The governor of California tried to have them employed on their way to the camps as menial agricultural labor. The Supreme Court approved what has since been recognized as the greatest violation of civil liberties in the history of the Republic.

  Not a single case of espionage or other disloyal conduct was ever discovered among Japanese-Americans. The Army had the gall to ask the Nisei of military age (Nisei is the Japanese-American term for those born in the United States) to fight. Their families still had to remain in the camps for the duration of the war. Surprisingly, 1,200 Nisei did volunteer to prove their patriotism. Others permitted themselves to be drafted without complaint. Their 442nd Regimental Combat Team, formed around a Nisei battalion recruited in Hawaii, became one of the most highly decorated regiments in the Army and won four Presidential Unit Citations for valor in Italy and France. The regimental motto, chosen by the men, was “Remember Pearl Harbor.” The Army permitted them to kill Caucasian Germans, but otherwise segregated these Japanese-Americans from white men, just as it then segregated blacks.

  Had the Vietnamese been white Europeans, Roosevelt and Truman would not have consigned them so readily to the tortures of colonial conquest. Human considerations would have mitigated strategic ones. Truman’s high-minded warning in his October 1945 Navy Day speech that the United States would refuse to “recognize any government imposed on any nation by the force of any foreign power”—the twelve-point Wilsonian declaration that had encouraged Ho to appeal to him for protection against the French—showed that the racist double standard of the American statesman had not changed since Wilson’s time. Truman’s words were directed at the Soviet Union for imposing its rule on the white nations of Eastern Europe. He was upset by Soviet atrocities in Eastern Europe. There is no indication he was disturbed by the atrocities the French had been committing for a month in their campaign to reconquer the Saigon region and the Mekong Delta. Nor is there any evidence that he or anyone else in a senior position in the U.S. government became seriously upset about the greater atrocities, such as the November 1946 slaughter of 6,000 Vietnamese civilians in Haiphong, which the French were to commit during their subsequent campaign in the North.

  Ho and his Communist-led Viet Minh were a happenstance that was not without some benefit to American statesmen. The emergence of Communists at the head of the Vietnamese Revolution gave the leaders of the United States a conscience-salving reason to do in Vietnam what Washington had intended to do there in any case. The men in Washington swiftly forgot the original circumstances and told themselves, to justify inflicting on the Vietnamese the sufferings of a war that was to endure for seven and a half more years, that they were preventing the spread of Soviet (soon to be Sino-Soviet) imperialism in Southeast Asia. Succeeding generations of American statesmen, who never examined the past because they too were so certain of what they wanted to do, were to tell themselves the same thing.

  Ho Chi Minh and his disciples became Communists through an accident of French politics. They were mandarins, Vietnamese aristocrats, the natural leaders of a people whom foreigners have repeatedly sought and failed to conquer and pacify. There are a small number of such peoples on the earth. The Irish are one. The Vietnamese are another. The violence of their resistance forms history and legend to remind the living that they must never shame the dead.

  The Vietnamese derived their precolonial system of government from China. The country was ruled by an emperor who governed through a hierarchy of mandarins. The Vietnamese emperor was a replica in miniature of the Chinese “Son of Heaven,” and his mandarins were scholar-administrators who acquired their positions by demonstrating proficiency in the Confucian classics through a national examination system modeled on the Chinese one. As in China, the mandarins also developed into a class, the scholar-bureaucracy becoming a scholar-aristocracy, because landless peasants and poor farmers were unable to afford the cost of educating their sons for the examinations.

  French colonialism corrupted the Vietnamese mandarin class. In order to keep their places, the majority of the mandarin families served the French, became agents of the foreigner, and lost the legitimacy of their claim to national leadership. They became socially depraved too. With its state monopolies to encourage the sale of alcohol and opium, forced-labor conditions on the rubber plantations, and other abuses, French colonialism was highly exploitive. The mandarins who collaborated had to participate daily in crimes against their own people. After a time they and their families no longer felt the sense of guilt that such atrocities would normally have aroused in them. A minority among the mandarins refused to bow their heads to the European barbarians. Their refusal brought about their humiliation and impoverishment, but it was later to be the salvation of family and country. They preserved their pride and a conviction that they were the spiritual heirs of the heroes of the Vietnamese past. They kept their place as the natural leaders of the society in the eyes of a peasantry which also retained a memory of national resistance to foreign rule. They aroused in themselves and passed on to their descendants an anger that would not be satisfied until the nation was rid of outside domination. The leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party came chiefly from these families and from mandarin families that splintered under the ordeal of colonialism, with some members collaborating while others held true.

  The family background and political journey of Ho Chi Minh were representative of the Vietnamese who became his followers. He was the youngest son of a Confucian scholar-aristocrat, born in 1890 in Nghe An, a coastal province in the northern part of Central Vietnam noted for ant
i-French agitation. The family was impoverished after his father, who had been a district magistrate in Binh Dinh, later a province of the South, was dismissed for nationalist activity. The political context of the colonial power inevitably influenced the politics of colonized Asians. Lansdale’s Filipinos had American democracy, where elements of both major parties believed in anticolonialism, as their political model. Jawaharlal Nehru and a number of the leaders of Indian independence were British Socialists in their politics. After Ho had made his way to France and settled in Paris during World War I, he joined the French Socialist Party, because its more radical members were the only French political grouping that seriously advocated independence for the colonies.

  In 1920, the French Socialist Party became entangled in one of the most important political debates of modern French history—whether to remain with the socialist parties allied under the Second International convened at Paris in 1889, or to join the far more revolutionary Third International (subsequently known as the Communist International or Comintern) that Vladimir Lenin had organized in Moscow in 1919 to rally support for the Bolshevik cause. Ho recalled in an article forty years later that he attended the initial debates, listened carefully, did not understand many of the issues, but did notice that the question of colonialism was not being argued. He therefore asked: “What I wanted most to know. … Which International sides with the peoples of the colonial countries?” He was told that the Third International did. That spring one of his French friends gave him a copy of Lenin’s “Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions,” which had been published in L’Humanité, later the official newspaper of the French Communist Party. He described his reaction on reading it in his scruffy hotel room:

  There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness, and confidence it instilled in me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: “Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!”

  During future debates he was not silent. He ridiculed the opponents of Lenin with a single question: “If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you making?” At the Socialist Party congress at Tours in December 1920, he voted with the radicals and became a founder of the French Communist Party.

  Within five years he was in Canton in southern China founding another organization that was the forerunner of the Vietnamese Communist Party—the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth League. The French Party had sent him to Moscow in the summer of 1923 as its delegate to the Congress of the Peasant International. He was elected to its executive committee and stayed on, studying Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary tactics for a year at the University of Toilers of the East. At the end of 1924 the Comintern dispatched him to Canton as an interpreter with its political and military training mission to the party of China’s national revolution—Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang, in which the Chinese Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s faction were then still allied. Shortly after his arrival he wrote an enthusiastic report saying that he had formed the first secret Communist organization in the history of Vietnam. It was the first chapter of the Youth League and consisted of himself and eight other Vietnamese in Canton, most of whom were from his home province. He traveled to Hangchow and Shanghai and other cities, talking up among Vietnamese exiles who had led abortive revolts and then fled to China the need to give the national cause better organization.

  As word of his activities passed down the exile’s resistance grapevine into Vietnam, young Vietnamese made their way to the house on Wenming Street in Canton where Ho established a school of revolution for his Youth League. Some found his ideas too radical. Those who accepted him and Communist economic and social concepts did so for the same reason that he had followed Lenin. Through his lessons on Leninist revolutionary strategy and tactics they heard the message he had heard—that while a Communist society was the ultimate salvation, the way to it lay through the achievement of national independence. Most of those who did find what they were seeking in Ho, either in Canton or later as his ideas spread through Vietnam, were also sons, and some daughters too, of disenfranchised scholar-gentry. One of the first to come to him in Canton was a seventeen-year-old student named Pham Van Dong, the son of a mandarin who had been chief secretary to the youthful Emperor Duy Tan. Dong’s father had lost his position when the French had deposed Duy Tan at the age of eighteen and exiled him to the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean for plotting a revolt among Vietnamese troops recruited by the French Army for World War I battlefields. Dong was to become one of Ho’s closest associates, to lead the Viet Minh delegation to the Geneva Conference of 1954, and to serve as prime minister of the North. He was also to spend six of his young years on the penal island of Con Son, also known as Poulo Condore. The French had constructed a prison there of sunken cells, barred across the top, that were to become notorious during the American war as “tiger cages” when they were used to confine Viet Cong insurgents.

  A proletarian political institution led by an indigenous aristocracy made the Vietnamese organization an oddity among Communist parties. Alexander Woodside, the Canadian historian whose pioneering scholarship discerned the nature of the Vietnamese leadership, invented a term for these men. He called them “Marxist mandarins.” Truong Chinh, the senior theoretician of the party; Le Duc Tho, the deft negotiator whom Henry Kissinger was to meet at the table in Paris; and Vo Nguyen Giap, the great military leader of modern Vietnam and the best-known of Ho’s disciples to Americans were all from scholar-gentry families. The absence of men of worker or peasant origin among the senior leadership was notable by the conspicuousness of those few who could genuinely claim it. One was Giap’s friend and protégé Van Tien Dung, who was to lead a division in the war against the French and then to serve as the chief of staff of the armed forces in the North. Dung started life as a weaver at a textile mill in Hanoi. In 1963 the Party officially admitted that the majority of its members traced their parentage to “petit bourgeois elements.”

  The turn of this uncorrupted core of the Vietnamese aristocracy to respond to the need of their nation came on February 8, 1941, when Ho Chi Minh crossed the South China border into Vietnam after thirty years of exile. With World War II underway and the Vichy French colonial administration alienated from the Allies by its cooperation with the Japanese forces occupying Indochina, Ho had decided that the time was propitious for a successful revolt. The Central Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party that he convened at the remote hamlet of Pac Bo in May 1941 was by now composed of canny men mature in the school of struggle. They agreed to adopt the sophisticated strategy he advocated. They toned down the Party’s proposals for social revolution in order to form the broadest possible alliance with non-Communist groups and individuals in a national front organization. They named the new organization the Vietnamese Independence Brotherhood League (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi), henceforth to be known by its Vietnamese abbreviation—the Viet Minh. The task of the Viet Minh, Ho’s proclamation announcing its formation said, would be to wage a war “of national salvation” and “overthrow the Japanese and French and their [Vietnamese] jackals.”

  Over the next four years these Communist mandarins accomplished a prodigy of revolutionary preparation. Their common heritage was one of the major reasons they were able to do so much in so short a time. It gave them a special cohesiveness and led them to reach back into their history for guidance on how to adapt Marxist-Leninist concepts to the peculiar conditions of Vietnamese society and make their revolution a Vietnamese one. Unlike many small peoples who have been victimized by large neighbors, the Vietnamese have more than martyrs to inspire them. They have historical examples of victorious resistance to foreign domination which they can imitate. They can say to themselves that if their ancestors prevailed, they will pr
evail too.

  It took the Vietnamese a millennium of revolt and sacrifice to win their independence from China in A.D. 938. During the next near millennium, from 938 until the arrival of the French in the 1850s, every new dynasty that came to power in China invaded Vietnam. The recurrent necessity to drive out big invaders from the north, and incessant warfare with less menacing neighbors in the course of their expansion southward down the Indochinese Peninsula, lent a martial cast to Vietnamese culture. Chinese civilization, as it developed in later centuries, did not admire the soldier. China produced the intellectual who was also a man of action—the Confucian mandarin-governor. He was a figure worthy of emulation because of his learning and the ethical standards of his conduct. The warrior was regarded as an inferior human being, to be tolerated when he was necessary, but never to be admired. There was nothing intrinsically good in his art of war. This Chinese ideal underwent a mutation in Vietnamese society. The Vietnamese ideal became the intellectual and man of action who was also a great soldier, a mandarin-warrior. The Vietnamese had few gentle heroes like Lincoln. Their heroes, as a foreigner might notice after studying the porcelain figurines on shelves and tables in Vietnamese homes, were men on horseback or elephants, clad in armor, swords in hand. The same held true for their legendary women heroes, the Trung Sisters, who drowned themselves in A.D. 43 rather than submit after their rebel army was defeated by the Chinese. Physical courage was highly prized for its own sake in Vietnamese culture. Le Loi, the mandarin who overthrew two decades of Chinese domination in a nine-year war in the fifteenth century and consequently founded a new dynasty, made an observation that was often repeated: “We have been weak and we have been strong, but at no time have we lacked heroes.”