Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  One exception to this rule of bureaucracy was to be General Edward Lansdale. Again at the behest of the CIA, Lansdale returned to Vietnam at the end of 1965 with a team of enthusiastic young men and the general mission of injecting some new ideas into the counterinsurgency program. This vague definition of role did not serve him as it once had. Lansdale’s zeal for political conversion and his disapproval of the very scale on which the American operations were now conducted made him an uncomfortable neighbor for the “regulars” at the mission. In a series of careful jurisdictional maneuvers, the bureaucrats narrowed his “area of responsibility” to the point where they had effectively cut him off from the mission command and from all work except that of a symbolic nature. For the next few years Lansdale would spend most of his time in talk with Vietnamese intellectuals, a few ex–Viet Minh officers, and his own American devotees. Living in his grand villa, isolated from the press, he would become an American counterpart to the elusive Vietnamese “Third Force,” a hero to idealistic young American officials who saw the failure of American policy as a failure of tactics.

  Lansdale’s bureaucratic defeat was only an indication of the general shift in emphasis of American policy. With the commitment of American troops Washington began to look upon the war as an American affair. The Vietnamese seemed to recede into the background, and along with them those Americans who had spent years in Vietnam and believed in the regeneration of a non-Communist nationalism. The romantic warriors, such as Frank Scotton and Jean Sauvageot, who, like Lansdale, spoke and thought Vietnamese, who loved the exoticism of the villages and believed with fervor in a non-Communist liberation front — they were to remain merely the “characters” in a generally faceless enterprise. With all the civilian infighting, the talk of political strategies and “winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people,” the American war was to be a conventional military operation. As commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam and head of the advisory and assistance mission, General William C. Westmoreland was to exercise the primary influence and bear the primary responsibility for it.

  In his Antimémoires, André Malraux wrote that he found it instructive when dealing with generals mentally to strip them of military uniform and reclothe them in civilian dress. In the case of Westmoreland the mental disrobing would have been most useful, for Americans in Vietnam tended to regard him as a man above praise or censure, the commander par excellence. With his square, jutting jaw and his ramrod bearing, Westmoreland certainly looked like the essence of general. And to a great extent he was the model representative of the post–Second World War American army. A Southerner and the son of a textile manufacturer in South Carolina (the contrast is nice with his civilian counterpart, Cabot Lodge), he had in conformity with family loyalties gone to West Point, where he had succeeded not so much by intellectual achievement as by that mysterious quality that army officers and corporate managers know as “leadership.” During the Second World War he saw action as an artillery officer in North Africa and Sicily, ending up as chief of staff of the Ninth Division. Afterwards he moved quickly up through the ranks by way of Maxwell Taylor’s General Staff, the 101st Airborne — the elite helicopter-mobile unit that Taylor and later Kennedy saw as the advance guard of the entire army — and finally West Point again, where at the age of forty-six he held the august position of superintendent. An innovator in artillery and helicopter assault tactics and an administrator who had learned McNamara’s cost-effective approach to large organizations at the Harvard Business School, Westmoreland possessed those credentials that the modern army required. His personality seemed to suit his experience. He lacked the brilliance and eccentricity of the great Second World War generals, but he also lacked the towering ego and political ambition of a man such as Douglas MacArthur. So much was invaluable to Johnson in this particular war. He worked well in committees, maintained excellent relations with superiors, and was liked rather than feared by his troops. The French commanders in Vietnam had been counts and cardinals in military dress; Westmoreland was a clean-living, upright, corporate vice-president, his professionalism tempered by decency and good manners. In all, he made a perfect representative of the United States in Vietnam — with the perfectly representative blind spot that he neither understood, nor particularly cared for, the Vietnamese.9

  Westmoreland arrived in Vietnam at the beginning of 1964 to serve for a few months as deputy commander before taking up his new post. During his first year — a year of chaos within the GVN — he undertook a large-scale program for the pacification of the guerrilla-held provinces around Saigon. The theory behind the program was that the GVN troops would move outward from Saigon, clearing and securing the adjacent ring of hamlets and then moving outwards again while the GVN established its administration behind the troop shield. This so-called “oil slick” theory had a long ancestry tracing back to the French concept of quadrillage — the pacification of small squares of the countryside at a time — and to Sir Robert Thompson’s ideas for the Strategic Hamlet program. Westmoreland’s program (known as HOP TAC) worked no better than its predecessors, for the undertaking was something like that of trying to stop a brush fire with rotten sticks. As even Westmoreland admitted, HOP TAC was a disaster. Moved precipitously down from its old territorial base in the Second Corps area, the ARVN Twenty-fifth Division fell apart; its soldiers deserted in droves to escape their enemy or to rejoin their families in Second Corps.10 The police hid from the experienced NLF political cadres, and the Vietnamese ministries failed to deliver the American supplies that were to show the peasantry the desirability of life in the GVN-held areas. The experience removed whatever illusions Westmoreland had had about the Saigon government. After 1965 he concentrated his attentions almost exclusively on the American troops — a narrowing of perspective that was to explain much of his later reporting. Like most American officials, he believed that if only the Saigon government would cease their interminable wrangling, the U.S. forces could accomplish the task the President had set for them.

  The expansion of the war brought a proportional expansion in the American press corps in Saigon. By the beginning of 1966 some five hundred journalists were accredited with MACV — the television crews and administrators far outnumbering the reporters. The news corps included senior editors from New York, cub reporters from home-town papers, Ivy League graduates, crime reporters with two-syllable vocabularies, spaced-out young photographers, combat veterans of Korea and the Second World War — everything, in fact, except a determined opponent of the war. But such was the sense of the country at the time. With the commitment of American troops the old, and perhaps natural, reaction to support the troops and believe in the wisdom of the President once again triumphed — though there was no great enthusiasm for the war. The reporters would express doubts and make criticisms of American tactics, but almost all of them, including the old Vietnam hands — Robert Shaplen of the New Yorker, Sol Sanders of U.S. News and World Report, François Sully of Newsweek, and Takashi Oka of the Christian Science Monitor — accepted the broad lines of American policy. The important question for them was whether or not the United States could win in an acceptable amount of time. And the arrival of the American troops brought a new confidence on this score. The conflict that these experienced reporters had been watching for years now seemed to have changed in character.

  Certainly the atmosphere of the war had changed substantially. The two hundred thousand U.S. troops made a profound impression on the cities. The troops carried with them the businesslike atmosphere of a country where the telephones worked, where schedules are kept and teamwork is assumed. They carried with them the sense that Americans long in Vietnam tended to lose, of the disproportion between Vietnamese politics and American power. Arriving in their starched summer uniforms from Honolulu, Wake, and Guam, the GIs seemed to overawe the small stucco terminal with its public flowers and its damp, tropical smell. The stiff, square carriage of their shoulders set them apart from the limber Vietnamese. Physically, S
aigon seemed to change in their direction, the rectilinear shapes of the new American office buildings, billets, and hotels towering above the sloping red-tiled roofs of the French and Vietnamese city. Having established such a visible presence, the United States would surely do what was necessary to maintain it. It seemed only natural that the United States should take control of the war.

  To the reporters recently arrived in Saigon, American control over the GVN was already an assumption. How should it be otherwise? The assumption was to be reinforced by the type of experience they were to have in Vietnam. Unlike the old Vietnam hands, who spent their time attempting to understand Vietnamese politics, these new reporters thought of themselves primarily as war correspondents attached to the U.S. armed forces. The American war filled their horizons. Every day at five they would gather in the windowless theatre in the JUSPAO building to watch colonels pointing out the sites of American actions on four-color overlay charts and toting up the figures of “structures destroyed,” “enemy dead,” and missions flown against “targets” in the north. Few of them went to the seedy room across the street where the Vietnamese held their briefings, and, as the American officers refused to report on ARVN operations, these operations and their results — or lack of them — were generally ignored. With the insatiable demands for combat coverage from their home offices, the television and newspaper correspondents spent most of their time with American units, visiting aircraft carriers, and watching demonstrations of new weaponry. Though it was difficult to find the battles and to write the kind of stories that came out of the Korean War, the new American presence appeared to have a certain solidity to it. Besides, there had been no political activity to speak of in Saigon for several months. By the beginning of 1966 the Ky junta was the longest-lived government since the Diem regime.

  The stability of the Ky government took most American officials by surprise — a not very pleasant surprise at that. Gloom had, after all, reigned in the American embassy that preceding June when the Armed Forces Council had announced the formation of a new triumvirate. On principle, Maxwell Taylor had opposed the dissolution of the civilian government. To him the new junta seemed merely a middle term in an endless progression: each junta being ousted by a coup, each coup skimming off a new layer of generals and promoting a new group of colonels, majors, and captains, onward ad infinitum through the ranks of the army. The new National Leadership Council was certainly the youngest and least experienced of all the juntas yet formed. Most of the generals were under forty; they had risen to power by virtue of the fact that they controlled the air force, paratrooper, and Marine battalions stationed near the Armed Forces Headquarters in Saigon. In particular, General Ky — or Air Vice-Marshal Ky, as this commander of a handful of Skyraiders and training aircraft entitled himself — seemed to have very few qualifications for the job of government. Among Americans he had achieved a certain notoriety for threatening to bomb Hanoi with his own aircraft a good six months before it was American policy to do so; and then, when he was permitted to fly north, for leading his squadron to bomb the wrong target.11 He had also twice threatened to bomb Saigon. Apart from these exploits, his political experience was confined to one coup, two demi-coups, and a counter-coup. Upon hearing of his nomination to the role of acting premier, Taylor tried to block the appointment out of fear that he would prove both insensitive to American policy and unacceptable to the Vietnamese. Taylor thought Ky positively dangerous.

  Taylor perhaps exaggerated the differences between Ky and the other Vietnamese generals. Still, it was true that Ky did not resemble any leader the Vietnamese had ever had before. He was thirty-four years old, a slight, rather elegant, figure who, as one writer put it, suggested a tango instructor rather than a general. His tastes ran in somewhat the same vein, from nightclubs to cockfighting to fast cars. His new wife, a beautiful stewardess from Air Vietnam, was to accompany him on trips throughout the country dressed, like him, in a black flying suit and batting her long lashes over newly doctored, “Westernized” eyelids. General Ky was a pilot at heart as well as by training. He played the part well, and his troops adored him for his mastery of these important American machines. As his chief of staff, General Cao Van Vien, once said of him, “He can fly so well bombers, helicopters, fighters — anything. You should see him. He is…” Vien paused, searching for a suitable epithet. “He is Superman!” Outspoken to the point of rashness, Ky had all those qualities that usually go into the making of a successful juvenile gang leader. That Ambassador Taylor tried and failed to prevent the gang from electing him as its chief did not increase his modesty or his sense of responsibility to the Americans.

  Much to the ambassador’s chagrin, Ky not only became premier, but then refused to follow his predecessors into the obscurity they no doubt deserved. Despite his seeming lack of qualifications for office, the young general showed an extraordinary capacity for survival. Two months, three months, and then six months passed without a single coup attempt. The American officials gradually began to reconcile themselves to him. When Henry Cabot Lodge replaced Taylor as ambassador, the adjectives surrounding Ky’s name began a slow migration over from “immature” and “irresponsible” to “informal,” “colorful,” and “charming.” After seven months passed without a single coup, embassy officials began to speak of “that young man who is maturing so rapidly in office.” The phrase “transitional regime” no longer passed their lips. In February 1966, even Maxwell Taylor made his peace with the Ky government, testifying before a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee that “this is the first government which is solidly backed by the armed forces; and as long as they are behind this government in the present sense, it is not going to be overturned by some noisy minority as some governments were overturned in the previous years. So I do feel there is some encouragement, indicators of growing stability in the political scene.”12

  The Honolulu Conference in February 1966 came as the final confirmation of this new American view of the Ky government. President Johnson’s decision to meet with Generals Ky, Co, and Thieu signified that the United States would support the junta in a way they had supported no government since the Diem regime. As most reporters recognized, of course, Johnson looked upon the conference as having more relation to American than to Vietnamese politics. His primary concern was perfectly expressed by a remark he made to Barry Zorthian, his chief information officer in Saigon. “Barry,” the President said, “Barry, every time I see a picture of a battle in the papers, I want to see a picture of a hog.” But with all his interest in putting a good face on the war by means of public relations, Johnson no doubt did believe in the efficacy of his new alliance. That is not to say that he and his aides attributed any extraordinary virtues to this new junta. They simply believed in the power of the United States to put the Saigon government on the right track. From their perspective, all the Vietnamese generals had to do was to deliver a stable government and an effective pacification program — the United States would do the rest. And in the opinion of most high American officials the generals were well on their way to the first objective. In Saigon, embassy officials sagely concluded that the generals had worked out their political differences and were settling down to the real work of the war. The new reporters nodded sagely back at them. It seemed only natural that the generals should do so. It was their responsibility to the American troops. The whole two-year history of coups and riots was forgotten as if it had never existed.

  8

  The Buddhist Crisis

  In April 1966, just two months after the Honolulu Conference, two American journalists were wandering through the Vietnamese military headquarters inside the old imperial city of Hue. They were wandering in the vague hope of finding someone — a general, a flack for the ARVN First Division, anyone whom they might quote on the position of the government in this crisis. But the offices were empty. Doors banged, and their steps echoed hollowly on the stairs. After a while they began to debate whether or not they should give up the attempt a
nd join the student demonstrators in the street. They turned a corner, opened another door and finally, to their surprise, came upon an official who looked as if he were of some importance. In the succeeding interview they managed to establish that this personage was the chief of police for Hue. Just what he was doing in this empty office, just what he had been doing for the past few weeks of near civil war, and which government he now represented — these questions remained unanswered. Quite clearly the chief of police had come to that office with the express purpose of avoiding anyone with such inquiries. For the last few weeks he had been pretending with some success that he did not exist at all.

  For the American journalists new to Saigon the Buddhist crisis began in Robbe-Grillet fashion from middle to beginning and proceeded in a series of apparently disconnected events. On March 10, 1966, Premier Nguyen Cao Ky announced that the First Corps commander, General Nguyen Chanh Thi, had tendered his resignation because of a sinus condition and was en route to the United States for treatment of his nasal passages. The U.S. military briefers could give no clarification of this report, not considering the matter within their jurisdiction. When pressed for an explanation, the chief civilian information officer, Barry Zorthian, said that Ky had fired Thi with the full approval of Ambassador Lodge as the first step towards strengthening the powers of the central government. The next day, however, the United Buddhist Church issued an obliquely worded communiqué demanding that the junta hold elections for a civil government. Advised by their more experienced colleagues that the two events were probably related, the newly arrived journalists dutifully reported that the Buddhists were protesting the dismissal of General Thi. The Buddhists, however, claimed that this was not true. The next day a series of demonstrations broke out in the capitals of the First Corps — Hue, Da Nang, and Hoi An — and cloth banners appeared in the streets of Hue demanding the resignation of Generals Ky, Co, and Thieu.