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

by Sheehan, Neil

  The Ngo Dinhs were not content to imprison, torture, and murder the living veterans of the Resistance in the South. Their persecution reached out to the dead. In the most severe insult possible in Vietnamese culture, Diem ordered the desecration of all Viet Minh war memorials and cemeteries. Ancestor worship, filial piety, and the other strong bonds of family have combined in Vietnamese culture to make the rites of burial and the tending of graves particularly sacred. Elderly peasants who can afford to do so buy their coffins to ensure themselves respectable burials. Vann and his fellow American advisors in 1962 assumed that the guerrillas carried off their dead whenever they could in order to hide their casualties. This was not the principal reason. The living brought away the dead, often at risk, because they knew how important it was to their fallen comrades to be buried properly. The vilest scorn one can pour upon a Vietnamese is to deliberately violate the graves of his ancestors. The dynasty of the hero Nguyen Hue was defeated by rivals following his death. They humiliated his son, before torturing him to death, by forcing him to watch while they had Nguyen Hue’s bones disinterred and made common soldiers urinate on them. The French opened the family tombs of Phan Dinh Phung, the most tenacious of the monarchist rebels at the end of the nineteenth century, and exhibited the remains of his ancestors in the nearest town in an unsuccessful attempt to break his spirit.

  The Geneva Agreements specified that graves registration teams from the Viet Minh, the French Army, and the Vietnamese National Army had the right to travel in both zones of the country in order to seek the remains of those missing in action and to assemble the graves of their war dead into permanent cemeteries. The French undertook to turn the valley of Dien Bien Phu into a hallowed ground for the 8,000 Viet Minh and the more than 3,000 French colonial troops, many of them Vietnamese, who had died there. In May 1955, a joint team from the French Army and the Vietnamese National Army, soon to be redesignated the ARVN, were at Dien Bien Phu identifying their dead and doing preliminary work, with laborers provided by Giap, for a massive ossuary to hold in honor together the bones of 5,000 of the dead from both sides. Diem chose instead to symbolically urinate upon the bones of the Viet Minh in the South. He denied the Viet Minh graves registration teams the right to travel in the South and issued his order for the obliteration of the Viet Minh war memorials and cemeteries there. While they did not raze any cemeteries, the Communist leaders retaliated by canceling travel permits for the French and VNA teams in the North. The dead of Dien Bien Phu were left to lie. In his loathing of Communism, Diem denied an honored burial to the fallen of his own army in the North.

  Little was printed in the United States about the Denunciation of Communists Campaign at the time it was being prosecuted in South Vietnam, and little has been published about it since. The American press was not much interested in the country in those years. The CIA officers in the Saigon station, the diplomats, and the generals at the military mission might have expressed some distaste had they looked into the torture. They feigned ignorance. They regarded all of this killing and the concentration camps as a cleansing of Southern society and were not disposed to attract attention to the unpleasant side. They did call attention to the atrocities in the North and made propaganda out of the candor with which Giap and other Vietnamese Communist leaders admitted their crimes. Because candor like Giap’s had disappeared from the American system after World War II, it was interpreted as evidence of weakness and not understood for the strength it actually reflected.

  I first ran across evidence of the Denunciation of Communists Campaign while in the field with ARVN battalions reporting on operations against the guerrillas in 1962 and 1963. The hamlets in the Communist-dominated areas frequently had war memorials erected by the guerrillas. They were usually simple, upright slabs of masonry or wood, like those one saw in the parks of small American towns in the 1950s listing the dead of World War II and Korea, with the dead of Vietnam still to come. Beside the name inscribed on the hamlet monument would be the words “Killed by the Puppet Forces” and the date the man or woman had died. I noticed that the first dates were in 1955 and 1956. Those were supposed to have been years of peace in South Vietnam, before Hanoi had allegedly instigated a second war there, and my curiosity was aroused. I inquired and was told that Diem had conducted an early campaign against clandestine cadres whom Hanoi had left behind after Geneva as part of its conspiracy to foment a rebellion, and that not much was known about the campaign, except that the deaths had reached into the thousands. I did not dwell on the matter. In those years, like almost all Americans, I saw nothing wrong with shooting Communists and their “dupes.” Not until much later did I learn enough about the campaign to understand its significance for the second war and the enormous consequences of the act that the United States committed in collusion with Diem and his family.

  By the beginning of 1957, not many of the original stay-behind cadres were left in the South. The killings, the concentration camps, and desertion had driven their numbers down to an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 from the 8,000 to 10,000 of 1955. Secret Party histories captured by the U.S. Army during the latter half of the 1960s and interviews with old-line Viet Minh who were taken prisoner or who defected during the second war were to tell the tale of what then happened. Ho and the senior Communist leaders in the North, still preoccupied with repairing the devastation wrought by the French and with the aftereffects of the land-reform disaster, did not want another war on their hands in 1957. They instructed the cadres remaining in the South to continue to refrain from armed insurrection and to adopt a strategy of ‘iying low for a long time” while keeping up political agitation. But the Denunciation of Communists Campaign drove the Southern cadres into disobeying their orders and “violating the Party line,” as one secret history captured in 1966 revealed. They were forced for their physical survival to instigate a rebellion against the Ngo Dinhs and the Americans. “In opposing such an enemy, simple political struggle was not possible. It was necessary to use armed struggle. … The enemy would not allow us any peace,” the history explained.

  The dissident Southern cadres who decided to fight back discovered that the Ngo Dinhs and the Americans had made the South ripe for revolution. They went to non-Communists who had been their Viet Minh comrades in the Resistance War and found these comrades willing to join them in a new resistance because they too were being hounded by Diem’s campaign. The guerrilla-band remnants of the armies of the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao were ready to forget the past and make common cause. Most important of all, much of the peasantry was so angry that the farmers were prepared to face the agony of another war to rid the country of this foreigner who had replaced the French. This regime the Americans had imposed on them was more than they could bear. The Southern cadres who had made up their minds to disobey Hanoi’s orders and lead a revolt explained that the Americans, being richer and more powerful than the French, practiced a new and more rapacious form of colonialism. This was why, the cadres explained, the Americans had selected this particularly vicious “traitor,” Diem, and his family and clique of “country-sellers” as their henchmen in Vietnam. The cadres named this regime “My-Diem.” My (pronounced like the pronoun “me”) is the Vietnamese word for “American.” Many of the peasants believed what they were told because the explanation made sense to them. Their memories of the French had dimmed. They did recall that the French had never harried them as this “My-Diem” did.

  (When Vann and other Americans in Vietnam would later read Communist propaganda describing Diem as a “puppet” and the ARVN as “puppet troops,” they would dismiss the terms as nonsense, because Diem so often did what the U.S. government did not want him to do and his army did not take orders from U.S. officers. Americans did not understand the meaning of the word “puppet” in the Vietnamese historical context. To Americans the word meant a puppet on a string responding to direct control. To the Vietnamese the word meant a ruler and his Vietnamese soldiers and administrators who represented alien interests, who acted
on behalf of a foreigner. In this sense, the word “puppet” accurately described Diem and his government and army. One afternoon in 1962 at a U.S. Army Special Forces camp I questioned a young guerrilla who had been wounded and captured in a skirmish nearby. The American sergeant who was the Special Forces team medic had dressed his wound gently and expertly. He was relaxed, having lost, for the moment, his fear that he was going to be tortured and killed. I asked him why he had joined the guerrillas. “To liberate my country,” he said. From whom? I asked. “From the Americans and Diem,” he said. But how could he liberate his country from Diem, since Diem was already independent and did not take orders from the Americans? “No,” he said, “Diem is the same as the Americans.” I argued that Diem could not be the same as the Americans because he often did things that were against the wishes of the U.S. government. “No,” he repeated, “Diem is the same as the Americans.” I dismissed his answer as that of a brainwashed peasant and began to question him on another subject.)

  The Southern cadres, with their old comrades from the Resistance and their newfound allies from the sects, first began striking back at the Ngo Dinhs and the Americans in early 1957, assassinating detested village police agents and village chiefs appointed by Diem’s officials. By the beginning of 1958 they had a campaign of counterterror fully launched and were starting to form guerrilla units on a systematic basis. Bernard Fall, the Franco-American scholar of Vietnam, estimated that about 700 village-level officials were killed during the first year of the rebellion, from the spring of 1957 to the spring of 1958, and that the assassinations nearly doubled during the following year. In September 1958, the chief of a district adjacent to My Tho, a secure Cao Dai area during the French war, was ambushed and killed in the daytime on the main road to Saigon. By late 1958 the dissident cadres had succeeded in presenting the Party leadership in Hanoi with a fait accompli—a major guerrilla revolt in South Vietnam.

  Ho and his disciples in Hanoi were prepared to assume control of it. As Diem’s South had been moving toward renewed war, Ho’s North had been stabilizing. By 1959 the capacity to learn from error had enabled the Communist mandarins to restore much of the confidence in their regime that had been destroyed by the land-reform campaign. Rice and other agricultural products were limited in the chronically deficient North, but enough was being grown by then to feed the population. Reconstruction with Soviet and Chinese economic assistance had brought French-originated industries back to World War II levels of production by the end of 1957, and a Three-Year Plan launched in 1958 was creating a nucleus of heavy industry for the future. A new steel works, the only one in Southeast Asia, was to begin rising in 1960 beside the vast iron-ore deposits at Thai Nguyen, forty miles north of Hanoi. A Vietnamese government that made Vietnamese mistakes and sought to correct them in a Vietnamese way was granted a tolerance for abuse by its public which would have been denied to any foreign-sponsored regime. Vann and other Americans looked at photographs of the North and saw a poor country where life seemed drab and regimented and assumed that the regime was hated. There was hatred of the regime and opposition, but nothing similar to what existed in the South. The majority of the Northern population was loyal to its government. The photographs held a clue to the attitude of ordinary Vietnamese in the North which Americans always missed. The clue was the absence of barbed wire. The entrances to the police stations and other government buildings in Hanoi and in the smaller towns and villages of North Vietnam were not protected by the barbed-wire barricades and bunkers that guarded every government building in Saigon and the rest of the South. The Vietnamese Communists were not afraid of their people.

  Toward the end of 1958, Ho sent Le Duan, the man he was soon to name secretary-general of the Party, on a secret trip to South Vietnam to determine whether the rebellion was as widespread and self-sustaining as the reports claimed it was. Duan, a Central Vietnamese by birth, had fought almost the entire French war in the South, rising to become a senior leader of the Viet Minh in the Saigon area and the Mekong Delta. (As the one national party in Vietnam, the Communists were able to overcome regionalist divisions.) Duan returned to Hanoi in early 1959 and urged the Party leadership to reverse policy and resume the unfinished revolution. Ho and the rest of the Politburo agreed. The full Central Committee was convened in May and ratified the leadership’s decision. The second war formally began.

  That fall, when the monsoon rains ended and the trails through Laos started to dry, the first few hundred infiltrators marched south. They were the first of the thousands to follow in the coming years from among the Southern Viet Minh who had been withdrawn to the North after Geneva. The cadres who had stayed in the South and disobeyed and led the revolt distinguished themselves from the newcomers. They named the infiltrators “autumn cadres” and called themselves “winter cadres.” The nickname did not derive from the season in which the newcomers arrived. Rather it was drawn from the pride of the cadres who had stayed in surviving alone the winter of Diem’s terror. Many years later an old-line Viet Minh who had been a winter cadre explained to his American interrogators why he and his comrades had been able to fire this second rebellion so quickly: “The explanation is not that these cadres were exceptionally gifted. … The people were like a mound of straw, ready to be ignited.”

  Replicas of the Resistance War started coming to life clandestinely in the South. The old Nam Bo (South Region) Central Committee, which had directed the Viet Minh from the tip of the Delta through the rubber plantation country above Saigon, was revived and resumed its former mission under a new name—the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN). The Interzone Five Headquarters reappeared to command a second generation of guerrillas in the provinces where the Annamite Mountains meet the sea along the Central Coast. The infiltrators joined the cadres who had stayed as a framework of experienced officers and noncoms around which to organize fighting units and as political agitators and administrators in the secret revolutionary government the Party began to erect in imitation of the Viet Minh government of the French years.

  By the end of 1960 the insurrection had gathered sufficient momentum for Ho and his associates to create another replica, one they were to display publicly. (The guerrilla fighting forces quintupled from the roughly 2,000 surviving cadres of 1957 to about 10,000 fighters who captured at least 5,000 weapons from the Saigon side in 1960. By the time Kennedy made his decision to intervene in November 1961, they were to grow to more than 16,000 fighters and to capture another 6,000 weapons.) This replica was a copy of the Viet Minh League. Formally organized on December 20, 1960, it was called the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF). The difference between this new national front organization and its predecessor model Ho had headed was that most of its announced leaders were carefully chosen nonentities. Its chairman, Nguyen Huu Tho, was a left-wing Saigon lawyer with strong nationalist convictions who had cooperated with the Party in the past. He had been arrested during the Denunciation of Communists Campaign and later escaped with Communist help. Like most of those whose names appeared on the “Central Committee” of the NLF (including a representative of a purified Binh Xuyen), Tho had no authority. The front was run by clandestine or relatively unknown Party members inserted among the nonentities.

  Their experience with the Viet Minh League had taught the Vietnamese Communists the value of a national front organization, and the NLF fulfilled several needs of this second war. It made joining the rebellion easier for non-Communists in the South. They did not have to join the Communist Party itself. As an institution, the NLF was also the mechanism for waging guerrilla warfare and simultaneously conducting social revolution that the Viet Minh had been. At the same time, it was a sham organization behind which the leaders in Hanoi could shelter while directing the conflict below the 17th Parallel. The United States had rhetorically converted the Provisional Military Demarcation Line of the Geneva Agreements into a national boundary, and the voice of the greatest power on earth had weight. A number of non-Communist countr
ies that subsequently recognized the NLF as the official representative of the Southern guerrillas would have found this difficult to do had the front been run openly by Hanoi. Many of the American intellectuals who were to participate in the peace movement during this second war, and Europeans who were also to agitate against U.S. intervention, would have had problems of conscience supporting a rebellion in South Vietnam publicly controlled by the Vietnamese Communist Party. Clandestine control permitted anyone to believe what he or she wished to believe.

  With the passage of years and the repetition of the denials, the NLF was to acquire a credibility of its own. American and European authors were to devote books to it. The U.S. government was finally to recognize its “independent” existence by granting its delegation, headed by Mrs. Nguyen Thi Binh, a secret Party member whose mandarin grandfather had fought the French in the early twentieth century, a seat at the peace table in Paris on an equal basis with Washington’s Saigon surrogate. When pretense was no longer necessary, Huynh Tan Phat, the secretary-general of the NLF, a Saigon architect who became a secret Party member after joining the Viet Minh during World War II, was to settle the argument with an example of the candor that Vietnamese revolutionaries could display in equal measure with duplicity: “Officially, we were separate [Hanoi and the NLF], but in fact we were the same thing all the time; there was a single party; a single government; a single capital; a single country.”