Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  Of course, the syllogism was faulty, and the defenders of Calley were being disingenuous in describing the cold-blooded murder of babies and old women as necessary to the safety of his troops.21 The logic would not hold for him. But there were many other cases in which the moral issue was much less clear. When, as happened frequently, a unit received enemy fire from a village, the officer in charge would have the choice of flattening the village with artillery or ordering his troops to go in and search it. If he chose the first alternative, he might discover that the village contained only one or two snipers and a large number of civilians — many of them now dead. If he chose the second, he might find it contained an enemy company, and that he had (unnecessarily?) forfeited the lives of his own men. His dilemma pointed to the more fundamental dilemma of the highly mechanized American armed forces fighting a “people's war” in a foreign country. The basic problem was, of course, that the U.S. official picture of “the Viet Cong” as an army and a coercive administration fighting over an apolitical peasantry was simply a misrepresentation of facts. In many regions — and those where the greatest U.S. military effort was made — the unarmed peasants actively and voluntarily cooperated with the Front troops, giving information, carrying supplies, laying booby traps. Where, then, was the distinction between “soldiers” and “civilians”? In many regions “the Viet Cong” were simply the villagers themselves; to “eliminate the Viet Cong” meant to eliminate the villages, if not the villagers themselves, an entire social structure and a way of life. It is in this context that charges of war crimes against the American civilian and military authorities who directed the war have a certain validity. In the first place, by the very act of sending American soldiers to Vietnam the U.S. command was denying many of its soldiers and field officers the very power of choice over killing civilians. It was making some civilian deaths inevitable. In the second place the U.S. command's decision to use certain weapons and certain strategies insured that the number of civilian deaths would be sizable.

  From 1954 to 1968 the entire American effort in Vietnam went through many of the same changes that occurred in the most insecure and domineering of the American advisers. The central aim of the United States in Vietnam had never been to develop the economy and reform the Saigon government, but to “stop Communism” in Southeast Asia. When the military aid together with the attempts at reform and development failed as one means to that end, the United States adopted two additional strategies: the bombing of the north and the commitment of American combat troops. The second strategy the officials had hoped to avoid for the reason that it cost American lives and raised political difficulties at home. The first was much less “expensive.” In 1965 they began to prosecute the air war on a large scale and for reasons that were of dubious rationality.

  Though enclosed in “tough-minded” analytical terms, such as “graduated escalation” and “limited war,” the American bombing of North Vietnam made little military sense. As Clark Clifford pointed out when he came to the Defense Department, it did not constitute a strategy for winning the war or even for gaining the administration's “limited objectives.” During the Second World War the Allies had — it was arguable — contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany by bombing its industrial plant and thus impairing its capacity for war-making. The Americans could not, however, hope to defeat North Vietnam in the same way because that country could continue to obtain munitions from the outside, from noncombatant powers. In August 1967, Robert McNamara himself took pains to show a Senate committee that the bombing had not significantly reduced infiltration or affected North Vietnam's war-making capability. In his opinion it was not the air war that limited the infiltration but “the ability of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, operating, by the way, without, for all practical purposes, a single wheeled vehicle in all of South Vietnam, to accept the men and matériel from the North.”22 In answer to his objections, the U.S. Joint Chiefs had only psychological theories about “punishing” the North Vietnamese and “destroying their morale.” But a man does not “punish” an equal; he punishes someone over whom he has some legal or moral superiority. In thinking they might destroy North Vietnamese morale by the bombing, the generals had to assume the North Vietnamese to be psychologically inferior to the British under the German air raids of the Second World War, or indeed to themselves.

  The administration's theory proved false. The North Vietnamese refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of American “punishment” and insisted upon being treated as an equal, an enemy. At that point the administration, if it were to pursue its objectives, had very little choice but the strategy of attrition. And because of the very nature of the war, that strategy meant the attrition not only of enemy troops and military supplies but of all Vietnamese. No one in the American government consciously planned a policy of genocide. The American military commanders would have been shocked or angered by such a charge, but in fact their policy had no other military logic, and their course of action was indistinguishable from it. By 1969 South Vietnam had become one of the three most heavily bombed countries in history — the other two being Laos and North Vietnam. South Vietnam was certainly the most heavily bombarded by artillery.

  American commanders, of course, liked to interpret their whole military policy as nothing more than an impersonal exercise of their military machine. But as applied in Vietnam, the policy of “harassment and interdiction,” the creation of “free fire zones,” the use of artillery to replace ground patrolling in populated areas — these and other bombing and artillery practices would have been unthinkable for U.S. commanders in occupied France or Italy during the Second World War. In Europe the Americans rejected the use of chemical warfare, but in Vietnam they used napalm, phosphorus, tear gas, and various kinds of defoliants as a general practice and in such quantities as to render certain parts of the country uninhabitable. The use of a “body count” as an index of progress was also unique to the Vietnam War. Besides all of these unconventional military tactics, and to some extent the guiding forces behind them, was the Westmoreland-Komer strategy for pacification: to remove from the countryside all those people who could not be put under military occupation. The ARVN commanders had no great record of humanitarian concern for civilians, but even they would never by themselves have gone to the lengths of removing entire villages to refugee camps for the sake of eliminating the NLF from a certain piece of real estate. Humanitarian concerns aside, the strategy did not even bring the Americans any closer to winning the war: it merely postponed the losing of it for some time while it strained the resources of South Vietnam beyond its limits. (In the First Corps it even stretched the American resources beyond their limits. In 1967 the AID representatives in the First Corps asked the U.S. military command to stop “generating” refugees because they had neither the food nor the logistical capacity to feed the people already removed from their land. The military command agreed, but rather than stop its bombing raids or its search-and-destroy operations, it merely stopped warning the civilians that their villages would be destroyed. The omission of the warning system was a change the American commanders had wanted to make for some time because they suspected, and with reason, that the enemy units were the first to take notice of the warnings.)23

  But by the beginning of 1968 it was precisely time that mattered to the American government in its attempt to save itself from something that might look like a defeat. Whether or not Johnson ever had any greater ambitions, it now became clear that the original war aims as explained to the American public no longer held. What had looked like an attempt to “save Vietnam from Communism” was rather an attempt to save American “prestige” around the world. But the time for that had already passed by. The leaders of other nations had already seen what a small and determined group of people could do to the United States and were in the process of drawing their conclusions. The American war effort had, then, become almost entirely solipsistic: the U.S. government was trying to save “American prestige” for Amer
icans alone, to convince itself of American superiority.

  At the same time, the war was putting the American officials and politicians who favored the anti-Communist struggle in an increasingly difficult moral position. As the IVS letter to President Johnson predicted, they had either to withdraw their support from the war or to look upon its brutality as a necessary and acceptable means to an end. As few wished to do either, the majority attempted to avoid the dilemma altogether by taking the refuge of the ostrich. As Richard Nixon's closest adviser, Dr. Henry Kissinger, pointed out with some interest, a poll taken in St. Louis at the time of the My Lai disclosure showed that only 12 percent of those who had heard the story said they believed it to be true. Such a refusal of belief was, perhaps, excusable for Americans many thousands of miles removed from the scene of action, who had learned to discredit much that they heard about Vietnam; but it was the same stance taken over similar issues by Americans in Vietnam whose job it was to know the results of American actions. Asked in 1967 whether the U.S. bombing of the north did not produce as many civilian casualties as Viet Cong terrorism in the south, one American spokesman replied:

  There is no possible comparison.

  We use the most sophisticated electronic measures known to keep from killing civilians with our bombs. Our gear cross-check and double-check everything an airplane does up North.

  Here in the South, Charlie [the Viet Cong] is out to get any and all he can, without regard to political affiliation, nationality or anything else. The point is to prove to the people that Charlie can call his shots without any regard to the thousands of Government soldiers.

  We haven't even take into consideration some little guy's well, or the pagoda that the residents of an entire village might have put all their money into, a pagoda that the Viet Cong leveled.

  Any figures you get won't take into consideration the tons of groceries that never got to market, the produce that will rot where the bridge or foot bridge is blown out, of the plants that will shrivel up and die in the field because the fruit can't be gotten to market because of the Viet Cong.24

  What was interesting about the statement was the discrepancy between the impersonal, bureaucratic language the official used to describe the American actions and the vivid, almost poetic, description he lavished upon those of the NLF. Douglas Pike similarly distorted the facts in his widely circulated monograph, “The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror.” In his extended study, Viet Cong, published in 1966, Pike went to some length to show that the success of the Viet Cong came not so much from their use of violence and terror (as many Americans assumed) but from their organizational methods. By 1970 he had given the subject a new emphasis. “Terror,” he said, “is an essential ingredient of nearly all [the Viet Cong's] programs.”25 And he went ahead to show his own colors:

  A frank word is required here about “terror” on the other side, by the Government and Allied forces fighting in Viet-Nam. No one with any experience in Vietnam denies that troops, police and others commanding physical power, have committed excesses that are, by our working definition, acts of terror.…

  But there is an essential difference in such acts between the two sides, one of outcome or result. To the communist, terror has a utility and is beneficial to his cause, while to the other side the identical act is self-defeating. This is not because one side is made up of heroes and the other of villains. It is because, as noted above, terror is integral in all the communist tactics and programs and communists could not rid themselves of it even if they wanted to. Meanwhile, the other side firmly believes, even though its members do not always behave accordingly, that there is a vested interest in abstaining from such acts.26

  Interestingly, Pike's “working definition” of terror was the “systematic use of death, pain, fear and anxiety among the population (either civilian or military) for the deliberate purpose of coercing, manipulating, intimidating, punishing or simply frightening the helpless into submission.”27 And by that definition the entire American bombing policy in Vietnam, North and South, was a strategy of terror. Even within the narrower definition of “terror” as an unconventional, clandestine act of violence — an assassination or a satchel-charge bombing — the Allies had been using terror deliberately for a number of years through professionally trained paramilitary units such as the Special Forces and the Provincial Reconnaissance Units. As head of the Psychological Warfare section, Pike knew this as well as anyone in Vietnam. Only he, like many Americans who backed the Vietnam War, ascribed the best of motives to the Americans and their allies, while laying all the evil at the door of the enemy. It was the same kind of bad faith and bad conscience that in 1967 inspired all the American rhetoric about “revolutionary development” and “building democracy” in Vietnam. It was the same kind of rhetoric that inspired the unrestricted use of violence upon the Vietnamese.

  14

  Guerrillas

  MIRANDA:

  Abhorred slave,

  Which any print of goodness wilt not take,

  Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,

  Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour

  One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,

  Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like

  A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes

  With words that made them known. But thy vile race,

  Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures

  Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou

  Deservedly confined into this rock, who hadst

  Deserved more than a prison.

  CALIBAN:

  You taught me language, and my profit on't

  Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

  For learning me your language!

  William Shakespeare,

  The Tempest, act l, scene 2

  And the Vietnamese? Were the GVN officials and politicians, for instance, immune to this rage directed against them and to the destruction of their country by the Americans? Judging by appearances, one would have to say yes, for in 1967 there were no coups, no demonstrations, no protests of any kind against the war or the increasingly difficult economic situation. While the legislators bickered over small matters, General Thieu went about putting together a cabinet with one or two of Ky's protégés, one or two intellectuals, an army officer, and several technicians: a cabinet that, as usual, pleased no one. But it did not seem to matter that year. After the elections, a political calm descended over the cities, such as had not been seen since the days of the Diem regime. The Buddhists, the ironic politicians, and the brash young army officers seemed engrossed in their own petty affairs and unconcerned with the larger issues of war and peace. The American officials seemed finally to have what they had wanted for so long: stability and the acquiescence of the non-Communist groups to working with the Americans. A foreigner, in any case, might have assumed that to be true if he did not know the rhythms of Vietnamese political life, those periods of quiet that, like the damming up of a riverbed and the inevitable rise of the level of the river, led only to catastrophe.

  The French in their day preserved this state of quiescence for years. Early in the century Paul Mus, as a boy, was present when a North Vietnamese mandarin came to visit his father, the director of the first French lycée in Hanoi to accept Vietnamese students. Mus and his father knew perfectly well that the mandarin hated the school for giving his son foreign ideas along with the technical instruction, but the mandarin merely bowed, thanked the director for having educated his son so well, and walked stiffly out.

  “To show anger is to imitate the conduct of the barbarian,” said Confucius. But manners are the expression — often contradictory — of the civilization itself. The mandarin's exquisite irony betrayed a fear of showing anger, a fear that the anger would become uncontrollable and that the interview would end in irreconcilable conflict. Except for the NLF, no Vietnamese political party had decided upon the course of conflict; and thus in momen
t of crisis the rest did not show their anger against the Americans. And yet the anger was there. It was merely repressed or transferred to some other object. The peasants blamed Fate for their sufferings and abused their children after the passage of an ARVN unit through their village; similarly the Buddhists of Hue took their anger out upon themselves in hunger strikes and self-immolation.

  In his observation of the African and Arab peoples on the eve of decolonization, Frantz Fanon had seen much the same phenomena, including the belief in Fate and the symbolic killing of self, which he called “the behavior patterns of avoidance.” But he had also seen other patterns that seemed equally well to fit the Vietnamese of the GVN: the sudden crime waves that spread through the cities, the tribal warfare, and the fierce, irrational feuding of the native sects. As he explained them,