Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  Since the days of the Diem regime, the Americans had assumed that technical changes such as a retraining program, an increase in aid, a change of priorities or province chiefs, would change the nature of the GVN and start it on the road to improvement. But year after year those administrative reforms were attempted, if not achieved, and they made no difference at all. The ARVN soldiers fought badly not so much because they were badly trained as because they had nothing to fight for (the proof of this being that they often fought bravely and well when cornered or when defending their own villages). Those soldiers who allowed the Front forces to burn the hamlet on Route 4 and those that in 1967 permitted the destruction of seventy-five million dollars’ worth of American airplanes in Da Nang13 obviously saw no connection between that hamlet, those airplanes, and the welfare of their own families. Had they risked their lives for that hamlet, those airplanes, they would have gained neither the immediate reward of a promotion nor the long-term reward of knowing they had brought the goal of a just society nearer. The same was true of the bureaucrats, the police, and all the various groups of cadre. The CIA trained them to use many of the NLF techniques, but the cadres saw no reason to use them. Unlike the NLF they did not depend on the support of the villagers for their lives and they did not feel that their efforts would be rewarded by those in authority. And they were correct in that assumption.

  The injustice and the anarchy were not, however, the responsibility of the Saigon generals. As the Front leaders perceived most clearly, the generals were themselves as much victims as their subordinates. When they stole from the government or mistreated their own men, they did so out of much the same motives as their subordinates. Without any larger system of social security, they obeyed only the morality of the kitchen — the commitment to feed themselves and their families. Exiled by General Ky after the Buddhist crisis, the defense minister, General Nguyen Huu Co, wrote to a former colleague from Hong Kong:

  My family of 12 children is now fine. My oldest child, nineteen years old, passed the first exam and is still studying at the Lycée Yersin, Dalat. The other children are also in school and I don’t have to worry much about my family. Luckily, while General Khanh hated me, I took my cue and constructed a house in Nha Trang on government land which the Americans rent for three million [piastres] per year. After annual taxes and maintenance, I still have half that for myself, enough to raise my 12 children. If it weren’t for that, I don’t know what I would do for a living. In our career as generals, and once we are turned to pasture, it is very difficult to change profession.14

  General Co was perhaps too modest. One of the biggest profiteers of the period, he continued after his exile — or so the story went — to make a comfortable living by acting as financial liaison for the generals remaining in power. Still, his letter shows the reason and the necessity for much of the profiteering. What is more striking, it shows that General Co had a real sense of virtue about his undertakings: he had fulfilled his social obligations; he had in fact fulfilled them a great deal better than had those many honest and improvident officers who were fired for similarly arbitrary reasons. Evidently Co, like so many of the generals, felt himself isolated and (in the most precise sense of the word) alienated from his fellow officers, from the Americans, and from the state to which he belonged. Even while in office he did not think of himself as the defense minister, but rather as an obscure officer who for a moment held that title in a disorderly, Malthusian world.

  In 1963 the Buddhists had protested against a small-time tyrant, but in 1966 they had protested this anarchy, this Shanghai-ism emanating from Saigon. The most sophisticated of them saw the irony of it: the Americans who despised the corruption had collectively visited it upon the Vietnamese. From the bar girls with their PX transistors to General Ky with his helicopter and his silver jet, the Saigonese were engaged in little more than a scramble for their own selfish interests. And the Americans could do nothing to stop it, for by their very presence they made the city people into prostitutes, parasites. Saigon was the first to go, for, so recently a dependency of the French, it was not strong enough to stand up to the Americans. Nor had it really wished to. As the perpetual middlemen, the servants and translators for the foreigners, the Saigonese wished for a new master to replace the French and to defend them against their own countryside. Now once again feeding in safety on the foreigners, they gave up their own independence of spirit, their own will to reform themselves.15

  In his first major speech of the 1968 campaign, Senator Robert F. Kennedy cited the corruption and the general frailty of the Saigon government as reasons for a withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. It was a conclusion that did not seem at all just to many urban Vietnamese, even those who had long and staunchly opposed the military regime. At a meeting at the American Council of Foreign Relations Senator Tran Ngoc Chau, a former Viet Minh officer soon to become the foremost Vietnamese proponent of a negotiated settlement, replied with restrained anger: “As a politician, I understand him very well. But as a Vietnamese I must be angry with him. We are to blame for the Government’s failure, but so are you Americans. When you took over the war, you took on a responsibility towards us, and you must recognize that responsibility.”

  Chau’s remark had a double edge to it. He was speaking of the morality of the “objective” situation, but he could also have been speaking of the psychological effects of the American occupation on the Vietnamese leaders. As the generals saw it, the United States had taken on total responsibility for their country. After his fall from power Ky called the Americans “colonialists,” though he himself had requested American money and air and troop support. Despite their fierce struggles for position and power, he and the other generals felt themselves to be no more the government of their country than when they were subalterns under the French regime. How should they resist the overwhelming power of the United States? Where were the terms of equality? Now that the United States had come to Vietnam in force, it would, so the generals assumed, do what it had set out to do with or without their participation. The ARVN officers took an aggressive nationalist stance in public, but they expressed other feelings in their actions. In 1966 the American command discovered that only one Vietnamese field grade officer had been wounded in action since 1954 (this by contrast to the NLF, the North Vietnamese, and the American forces, whose officer corps took many casualties), and out of the hundreds of officers graduating from the military academy in the past few years, only two or three cadets had requested assignments outside of Saigon. The American military briefers spoke of the ARVN officers’ “tiredness,” but the condition was more like that of apathy and a sense of impotence. Why should they expose themselves to danger in a war that was not theirs? What possible function would it serve? Ironically, their passivity only convinced the Americans that the Vietnamese were not capable of running their own country.

  In an interview with Pham Van Dong, one American asked the North Vietnamese foreign minister how he could call the Saigon government an “American puppet” when it acted with such consistency against American interests. “Ah,” replied the minister, “it’s a puppet, all right. It’s just a bad puppet.”

  The paradox explained the situation perfectly, for with regard to the United States, the generals, like the Buddhists, stood at the crossroads of two contrary emotions, one of which was a real desire for American protection. Like the Emperor Dong Khanh, who first submitted to the French, they made a bargain with the foreigners, abdicating their legitimacy in return for the attributes of foreign power. Since the beginning of the Indochina War the generals had been the Ariels par excellence of Vietnam — and appropriately enough, for it was in the army that the believers in a superhuman power, whether magic or technology, found each other. They were therefore “puppets” in the sense that until the Americans broke with them, they would not overstep the limits and risk the withdrawal of American support. Presented with reports of American massacres or the damage done by nine years of American defol
iation in South Vietnam, they would not defend their own people; they would ban the subject from the newspapers. On the other hand they, like the Buddhists, feared domination by what they saw as a vast and implacable power. Angered by journalists’ questions, Premier Ky once said, “There is no reason you or other people should impose on us to surrender or accept domination from the Communists. Now we want to be free men. We are willing to fight.”16 His statement said two things at once: “we do not want you to abandon us” and “we are afraid of losing our independence to you.” Ky expressed his hostility to American domination — a sentiment that he, like most Vietnamese, sincerely felt — but it was clear that he could do little to create a counterforce, and that his only power lay in his ability to manipulate the Americans.

  In this enterprise the generals, unlike the Buddhists, were largely successful. Appearing at conferences with the American brass to pledge “the work of the social revolution” and “the attack on hunger, ignorance, and disease,” they would return home to their speculations in American goods and their anti-American intrigues. In late 1966 General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then the Saigon chief of police, arrested a man whom he described to the newspapers as a “Viet Cong spy on his way to the American embassy with peace proposals.” Whether or not such a man existed, and whether or not the embassy knew anything about him, Loan’s little public relations job was carefully calculated to fan the suspicions of the Saigonese that the Americans would sell them out in secret — were it not for the vigilance of the Ky government.17 The American embassy could do nothing to counteract his move. As the Buddhist crisis showed, they had only one lever of influence over the Ky regime, and that they would not use, for to withdraw support from the Ky regime would, they calculated, be far too great a risk to take in the middle of the war. The situation was therefore a most curious one: the Americans dominated the GVN but could not make it work for them.

  Beyond this central conundrum, the difficulty for the Americans was that not only the Communists, but all Vietnamese in the opposition — a category that by 1966–1967 included most politically conscious Vietnamese — considered the Ky regime to be an “American puppet.” In a realm that lay beyond the reach of argument, even such men as Dr. Dan Van Sung, the most pro-American of Vietnamese, believed that the Ky regime was corrupt, inefficient, and unjust because the Americans wanted it that way. If they had not wanted it that way (so the logic went), they would have done something about it. As a solution to the dilemma, the editor of a Saigon English-language newspaper, the Jesuitical Ton That Thien, quite seriously suggested that the Americans depose Ky and find themselves a good puppet who would stamp out corruption and carry out their reform program. Thien himself knew that the Ky government did not obey American wishes (his implication was that everyone else believed it did), but he believed that the Americans had the power to change it for the better. His argument revealed a strange parallel between Vietnamese and American thinking: even in the most sophisticated circles, both peoples believed that the United States could control the Vietnamese government — a belief that, while wholly misplaced, was comforting to both parties. As Lieutenant General Stanley “Swede” Larson once said, “What’s wrong with those Americans down in Saigon? Why can’t they produce a decent civil government to match the military effort?”18 Clearly the Ariels had found their Prosperos.

  11

  Elections

  My birthday is in late August. The greatest birthday present you could give me is a national election.

  — President Johnson to Generals Ky and Thieu at Guam, March 19671

  You journalists make things so complicated. Elections are really quite simple. You can’t expect most voters to know who is good and who is bad. Either they don’t bother to come and vote, or else they choose their candidates at random. Far better to let us choose the candidates for them.

  — a Vietnamese district chief2

  Candidates are like birds without feathers. We, the voters, give a candidate his feathers — each vote being another feather. When he has enough feathers, off he flies — and we never see him again.

  — a Vietnamese villager3

  A month or so after the bloody end of the Buddhist crisis, the public relations machinery of the U.S. mission went into high gear on the subject of the elections scheduled for early fall. The press corps was alerted; ranks of distinguished Americans were invited to watch the balloting for a constitutional assembly that would in the succeeding months write a constitution for South Vietnam. To the mission, at least, the elections appeared a momentous event in Vietnamese history. The Vietnamese, said Ambassador Lodge, “never had elections on a national basis and a national question. It’s never happened in their whole history.” As Bernard Fall pointed out, the ambassador had not got his facts quite straight: the South Vietnamese had participated in something like twelve elections, the last two of them financed by the Americans under the Diem regime. The last election had taken place just a few months before Cabot Lodge’s arrival as ambassador.4 But then historical memory was never the forte of Americans in Vietnam.

  In the United States the liberal social scientists who favored the war delivered themselves of a torrent of Latinisms on the subject of “consensus-making bodies in a fractionalized political system” and “viable institutions for power-sharing which would gradually lead to the legitimization of the entire governmental framework.” While expressing some hesitation about the usefulness of a constitution, Professor I. Milton Sacks, a teacher at the Saigon and Hue universities and a consultant to the American mission, concluded that the elections would at least produce “spokesmen who can claim legitimacy through popular mandate and speak with authority on the issues of war and peace for their constituency.”5 While in private the American officials expressed anxiety about the possibility of election fraud and Viet Cong terrorism, in public they claimed the election as the crowning achievement of the Vietnamese government: the GVN would be a real democracy with a real constitution. The message, as received by the American public, was that the United States was generously bringing all the virtues of its own political system to this underdeveloped country, that it was creating a democracy to win the Vietnamese people away from Communist totalitarianism. So clear was the message that none of the distinguished Americans arriving to view the elections remembered that the embassy and the Ky government agreed to elections in the first place only under the threat of defection of the entire northern half of the country and total anarchy in Saigon. Within the new embassy perspective, the near civil war had become a minor incident and the Buddhist militants non-persons. According to the officials, the Ky government was holding the elections merely to redeem the pledge it made at Honolulu — a pledge most gratifying to Americans. “Of course,” said one embassy official blandly, “the embassy has always been in favor of elections for a civilian government. Look, we've had these elections on our agenda for the past three years.” His argument was incontrovertible: the project of elections had been on the American agenda for the past three years.

  The American buildup of the elections was quite typical of the attitude of embassy officials in all their dealings with the GVN. While they patronized the Vietnamese and consciously deceived the American public, they managed at the same time to maintain a perfectly pristine faith in the efficacy of their endeavors. Even those who spoke cynically of the public relations campaign in the United States believed that the elections might help to knit up the snarl of political factions into a few stable, non-clandestine parties and legitimate the government in the eyes of many Vietnamese. They believed it despite all the evidence of history and the opinions of all politically minded Vietnamese.

  For the Vietnamese view of the elections offered a rather sharp contrast to the American serendipity. From the Buddhists on one side to the generals on the other, the spectrum of opinion seemed to range from indignation to indifference. Charging “American interference in Vietnamese affairs,” the same Buddhist leaders who three months before had packed the squares
of six cities with crowds shouting for elections, now announced that they would organize a boycott against the balloting. Though hostile to the Buddhists, the southern politicians and sect leaders did not give out the expected air of triumph. Dutifully going about the task of selecting candidates and combining them into slates, they displayed as little interest in the elections as they might have in the organization of a new National Day. The GVN officials expressed a weary annoyance about the prospect. “I've had to put off everything,” complained one Delta province chief, “budget revisions, tax schedules, military operations, building programs. I've wasted a whole month on voter registration and there will be another month gone on the election campaigns. But it can't be helped. It's orders from Saigon — highest priority. They want all of the people to vote.” From the way the province chief pronounced the last phrase, it was not difficult to see why he felt the whole enterprise a waste of time. Still, he had some reason to feel put upon. As usual, the district and province chiefs bore the brunt of the work. Under heavy pressure from Saigon, they had to vet all the candidates for “Communist” or “neutralist” sympathies and interpret the voting laws, which, perhaps for a purpose, were more complicated than any ever devised by the ingenious politicians of the French Fourth Republic. Moreover, they had to register a number of voters proportionate to that part of the population they had previously declared “pacified.”