Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  It was not something that an American could argue — or rather, he could argue it for hours only to have his Vietnamese friends agree completely while continuing to regard him with eyes shuttered by disbelief. The Vietnamese of the cities seemed to take a miraculous view of the Americans. It was not that they overestimated the ultimate power of the United States, but that they misjudged the American desire and capacity to use it in the small, personal world of GVN politics. On the one hand the Vietnamese believed the United States had an absolute power over the actions of their enemies; on the other hand all of them, even the generals, behaved in such a way as to demonstrate that the United States had no influence at all. On that paradox rested the whole surreal course of the Buddhist crisis — and perhaps of the whole future of U.S. relations with the Saigon government.

  In coming to Vietnam with their advisers and troops, the Americans assumed a particular kind of relationship with the Vietnamese: they had expected the Vietnamese to trust them, to take their advice with gratitude, and to cooperate in their mutual enterprise of defeating the Communists. The Buddhist crisis came as a terrible shock, for it showed that a good proportion of the urban Vietnamese had no confidence in American policies. Not only the Buddhists, but General Ky and Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan seemed to resent American interference. The crisis exposed the contradiction between the Americans’ desire to put the GVN on its own feet and their desire to maintain some control over GVN politics. The Vietnamese recognized that contradiction, but they reacted to it in a way that Americans could not understand. Did their view of the United States as a ruthless, omnipotent force have something to do with their long history of colonial rule? If so, could the Americans, whatever their intentions, cope with these suspicions any better than the French in Saigon? The questions were crucial ones, for if the GVN officials continued to regard the Americans in this light there could be no possible basis for cooperation between the two governments or between the Vietnamese government and the rest of the non-Communist groups in Vietnam.

  The whole notion of an overwhelming power was, of course, an important theme in Vietnamese life. As anyone with a knowledge of Freud might suspect, it had something to do with the relationship of the Vietnamese child to his father, with the idea, conceived in early childhood, that the father, and behind him the ancestors, have far-reaching control over the child. As men tend to see the world according to their earliest and strongest impression of it, the Vietnamese had transferred this image of childhood to the relationship between two different nations. In his study, Prospero and Caliban, the French ethnologist and psychologist, Otare Mannoni, gives an interesting insight into this process. His subject is colonial society in Madagascar, but much of his analysis seems to fit Vietnam, and understandably so, for the Madagascans, like the Vietnamese, were ancestor worshipers.1

  When the French first arrived in Madagascar, so Mannoni reports, the natives received them not with hostility but with fear and then a kind of elation. A popular Malagasy song of the period describes the French as almost supernatural creatures and tells how they frightened the king and queen and then brought peace and order to the country. What impressed the Malagasy was not so much the French military power (there were in fact few French soldiers involved in the pacification, and few battles fought) as their readiness to take command and the freedom with which they violated all of the traditional Malagasy customs. Instead of looking upon the French as simply foreigners with different customs, the Malagasy placed them within their own context and concluded that the French had superhuman powers. Because their ancestors were also superhumans, they by analogy accorded the French a position similar to that of their ancestors. The French became their masters, protectors, and scapegoats, all in one.

  Obscurely, the French understood that their rule over Madagascar depended not so much on their superior weapons as on the psychological power they held over the Malagasy. Whenever a disturbance arose, they would show panic by taking spectacularly violent actions that, if transferred to Europe, would seem quite irrational as political or military strategy. In their view, once the Malagasy showed any sign of independence, all was lost. And they were right in a certain respect. What they could not understand, however, was that their power did not derive from the Madagascans’ humiliating sense of their own inferiority, but from their acceptance of a dependent relationship. To the Malagasy, the French were not “better” than themselves, they were simply people who (for obscure reasons of their own) wished to take on the responsibility for their country.

  The French conquest of Vietnam had certain startling similarities. As in Madagascar, the French troops met small resistance, partly because the state had already been undermined by Catholicism and by the emperor’s dependence on foreign weapons. Some of the mandarins gathered guerrilla armies around them and fought to the end, but the imperial armies disintegrated quickly under direct assault, and the French succeeded in pacifying all but the northern mountains with a very few men. For almost sixty years they ruled Vietnam with only fourteen thousand troops in the country. A few of the old mandarins never gave up their resistance, but others acquiesced to the French in fascination with the strange sciences, the strange customs. While educated Vietnamese felt that the French would eventually leave Vietnam, they, by their acquiescence, accorded them the mantle of legitimacy that had always been known as the Mandate of Heaven, the collective power of the ancestors over their national life.

  The French in Vietnam, like the French in Madagascar, accepted the position that the Vietnamese offered them as their just due. In the opinion of the old colons, all the Vietnamese needed was a firm authority (in that phrase lay all the echoes of the British in India and Africa, the Germans, Spanish, and Portuguese in their colonies). “Behave in the royal manner” towards the Vietnamese, the French ethnologists, Huard and Durand, counseled their countrymen. In Saigon in the 1960’s an old French doctor who had lived in Vietnam most of his life continued to follow the same principle. Looking at his two neat, competent nurses, he said, “The Vietnamese are excellent people as long as they are kept in second place. But you Americans do not understand them. You have not given them the proper authority, and you have corrupted them.” His remark was interesting in that it implied he knew his treatment of the Vietnamese was a manipulation. But he did not know why it worked. To him and his compatriots, les Annamites, les jaunes, were inferior beings. They might be “bestial,” “childish,” or “good-natured” and “receptive to improvement,” but they did not belong in the same category as Frenchmen.

  Unable to understand the natives, the French colonialists of the nineteenth century, along with their American and European counterparts in the rest of Asia, invented all the racist clichés that have passed down into the mythology of the American soldier: that Orientals are lazy, dirty, untrustworthy, and ignorant of the value of human life. The persistence of these clichés, despite all evidence to the contrary, suggests that they have derived not from observation but from a fantasy. Just what did the American soldiers mean when they called the Vietnamese “gooks”? Again, Mannoni is of help. The colonialist is, he says, by nature a Robinson Crusoe; he is a man who has chosen to escape the society of men and to build an empire for himself in a world that will unquestioningly accept his dominion. The natives to him do not constitute human society, but an extension of the world of nature. In a sense, then, it is the colonial and not the native who is a “child,” for his desire to escape rises out of the sense of insecurity and inferiority he felt within his own culture. In the native he finds a fulfillment of his childish dreams of domination and an object (for the native is to him an object) upon which to project all his repressed desires. In calling the native “dirty,” “bloodthirsty,” or “cruel,” he relieves himself of his own guilt. The “colonialist,” according to Mannoni, is a distinct type who selects himself out of his society for the role. The colonial impulse is nonetheless present in varying degrees within most Westerners and will tend to emerge when the situation permi
ts it.

  In Mannoni’s judgment the best portrayal of the relations between colonial and native lies in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. On the one hand there is Prospero, the European, who, unable to get along in his own society (his brother, he says, has betrayed him), has invented a world that he with his “magical powers” can dominate. In Caliban, the “bestial” native of the island, he sees everything he detests in himself — including a desire for incestual relations with his daughter Miranda. On the other hand there is Caliban himself, the native who hates his master not because Prospero dominates him but because he treats him so badly. As Mannoni points out, Caliban remembers a time when his master loved him and treated him kindly. He looks forward not to independence, but to finding a new and better master. This temporal sequence is in fact a representation of his own ambivalence towards authority: on the one hand he desires it, on the other hand he feels it will harm him. (The temporal succession is also curiously representative of the Vietnamese view of life, where it is hoped that the “golden age” of childhood will return once again in old age.) Ariel, the third character in the drama, combines features of both of the others. An important figure in colonial society, he is the houseboy, the intermediary between the colonial and the native Calibans. He desires independence, but he cannot take it for himself, for in exchange for his master’s “magical powers,” he has relinquished his independence of spirit and bound himself in servitude. (Prospero keeps insisting on the debt Ariel owes him for having “saved” him from the curse of Caliban’s mother. Prospero is here the missionary who “saves” his houseboys from the “darkness,” “misery,” and “paganism” of native life — but who will not let his houseboys go.)

  As The Tempest indicates, the relationship between colonial and native must eventually end, for while there is some superficial correspondence, the attitudes of both colonial and native are based on false, and finally contradictory, assumptions.

  During the 1920’s and 1930’s the character of colonial society in Vietnam changed appreciably with the influx of men from the metropolis — professional civil servants, journalists, and party organizers — who in demanding liberal reforms, shook the very foundations of the paternalistic colonial authority. The colonial type did not disappear (indeed it often cropped up among those who came out to destroy it), but the reforms indicated to the Vietnamese that the French were no longer sure of themselves. Because they were no longer sure of their right to power, the Vietnamese intelligentsia began to conclude that they had no right to rule.2 On their own many Vietnamese had, like Caliban, concluded that the French were not their patrons but tyrants who treated them as inferiors. During the 1930’s Hanoi and Saigon were riddled with subversive groups, all of which wanted to drive the French out of Saigon. (Their cause was later aided by the Japanese invasion and coup d’etat that demonstrated to the people of the villages that the Westerners no longer had heaven’s will behind them.) Among the subversive parties the Viet Minh alone succeeded in their object, not because they hated the French any more than the others, but because they managed to create a real alternative to French rule, a state with sufficient authority to mobilize the peasantry and direct their long-suppressed anger against the French to the achievement of national independence. But the resistance war was a political revolution and not a transformation of the Vietnamese personality. Through the Viet Minh the Vietnamese merely found a new “master,” and it was themselves.

  In the north the drama was ended, but in the south in merely passed into a new phase. The peasants, even those who once belonged to the Viet Minh, looked upon the Americans much as they had looked at the French. Afraid of the Americans, afraid of their own anger, they tended to avoid the confrontation by blaming the sufferings caused by the American bombs and soldiers on Fate. One major effort of the NLF went into convincing the southern peasants, so long dominated by foreigners and landlords, that they had a real and vulnerable enemy in the regime created and supported by the Americans. While they taught their cadres to hate the Americans, they taught them also not to overestimate them — that is, not to attribute to them all the hostile forces of Fate or Nature. In the 1947 rebellion in Madagascar the peasants charged the French guns uttering incantations that would, so the witch doctor assured them, turn the French bullets to water.3 The NLF propaganda was not so contrary to science, but it served somewhat the same function, at once demystifying the Americans and creating a bond between the fighters that attached indirectly (through the structure of Vietnamese society) to the Americans. To the well-indoctrinated cadre, the contest appeared to be more or less equal: the Americans had powerful bombers and artillery, but the NLF had the strength of the Vietnamese people behind them.

  The attitude of those who lived under the aegis of the GVN was, however, very different. Those who supported the Bao Dai government and later the Diem regime were the “Ariels” of Vietnam — the people that grew rich and powerful under the French and who could not maintain their status without them. When the French gave them their independence, they found a willing new master in the Americans. And they and their successors made the same transference. They assumed the Americans were endowed with an invincible power, an omnipotent intelligence and a ruthless desire to control them. But their assumption was more wish fulfillment than fact: they wanted the Americans to feed them and take responsibility for them. An incident this writer witnessed illustrates this attitude perfectly. In Washington a young Vietnamese girl of a “good family” who had come to teach Vietnamese to American foreign service officers was invited to a party at the house of a high official in the U.S. government. When introduced to the official, she, without a word of prologue, asked him whether he would help her find a small diamond ring that she had lost in a washbasin at the Foreign Service Institute. The official, greatly taken aback, mumbled some excuse about having nothing to do with the Foreign Service Institute and moved away. What the girl could not explain was that she had only a marginal interest in finding the ring: she wanted a protector — and the more powerful the better — among the Americans.

  But the Vietnamese view of the Americans as ruthless and invincible also carried within it a terror that quite contradicted this desire for protection. Their image of the United States was in fact the expression of an ambivalence similar to that the young man, Huong, had faced in relation to his stepfather. They wanted the Americans to save them from their own people; but as the Americans were not their own people, they sought to preserve their autonomy from a power that was by definition untrustworthy. During the Buddhist crisis one student committee issued a manifesto calling for the United States to increase its military and economic aid to the GVN and at the same time to stop interfering in Vietnamese politics. The generals, the Saigon politicians, and the Buddhists echoed both of these sentiments alternately. That the Americans were already interfering in Vietnamese politics was a connection that neither they nor the Americans were willing to make. This contradiction between desire for, and hostility to, the American presence was to govern the whole history of the relationship between the Americans and the Vietnamese under the GVN aegis. In their struggle movement the Buddhists gave this contradiction its most violent and dramatic expression.

  In beginning their protest against the Ky government, the Buddhists had much the same division of purpose that plagued all the other non-Communist parties. On the one hand, they were merely attempting to redistribute the power and wealth of the GVN. On the other hand, Tri Quang saw this attempt as a step towards the final goal of creating a community strong enough to unite the nation and banish both the Americans and Communism from Vietnam. The difficulty was that to separate tactics from strategy Tri Quang required a much more disciplined organization than he had in hand. In initiating the anti-government protests he ended by breaking down the Confucian restraints and unleashing the deep-running rivers of resentment against the new authority, the Americans. He had not meant to, for while he believed with an absolute religious conviction that Buddhism would one day un
ite the Vietnamese, he knew perfectly well that for the moment his organization was divided, weak, and finally as much dependent upon the Americans as the generals.4 But he failed in his attempt to control the outburst. The Americans turned against him, and the movement could not survive their opposition, for even in their anger the Buddhists remained divided between resentment of the American presence in Vietnam and fury that the Americans did not support them against the junta.

  Nearly half a century earlier the French ethnologists, Huard and Durand, wrote of the Vietnamese:

  The rupture of dependency has… provoked violent feelings of inferiority [sic] with their habitual successions of manic and depressed activity… [leading among a minority] to a fierce will to destruction, a desire for the holocaust and an aesthetic of oblivion, which in turn leads, collectively, to a scorched earth policy and, individually, to suicide.5