Tribal feuds only serve to perpetuate old grudges deep buried in the memory. By throwing himself with all his force into the vendetta, the native tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist, that everything is going on as before, that history continues.… It is as if plunging into a fraternal blood-bath allowed them to ignore the obstacle, and to put off till later the choice, nevertheless inevitable, which opens up the question of armed resistance to colonialism.1
For years American officials had urged the Vietnamese politicians to stop their feuding and to unite against the Viet Cong — but to no avail. The same fierce internal quarrels had been going on since the 1930's, claiming all the energies of every political group except the Viet Minh and the NLF. From this distance in history it is not to strain the limits of belief to accept Fanon's explanation of them: the Vietnamese of the cities were by their feuds expressing their anger against France and the United States, their hatred of their own dependence. The vast American presence merely tore those feuding groups into smaller and smaller pieces, and the calm of 1967 was a result of that diminution of scale. The feuds were now only the innumerable conflicts of splinter groups and individuals.
The political infighting was one form of displaced aggression; the egregious profiteering was perhaps another, more direct one. The primary motives of the GVN officials were, of course, need or greed for money and security in an uncertain world. But the corruption was so often exaggerated, the stealing so far in excess of the needs of the officials and so clearly harmful to the purposes of the United States and the GVN that it was difficult to believe there was not a double motive at work. While the Vietnamese sometimes liked to think of the Americans as being too rich and powerful to be vulnerable to them, they also liked to think of Americans as large dumb creatures continually outwitted by the small, clever Vietnamese. When the tough little slum kids stole from the American soldiers, they knew very well that they were hurting them; in the same way the district chief must have known — though perhaps obscurely — that to steal the food supplies of the PF soldiers and to cause desertions was to endanger the local American troops and to hurt the entire war effort. To believe that he and his colleagues did not understand that is to believe they were something less than human.
And then there were other forms of sabotage that could even less easily be accounted for by self-interest: the shirking of responsibility, for example. And the slowness. For an American in South Vietnam the simplest of chores often turned into endless and painful ordeals. To register a car, to move a truckload of goods from one place to another, often required weeks, if not months, of concentrated attention —of negotiation, of explanation, of filling out of forms, of argument in which the non sequiturs seemed to have very little to do with the language barrier. An American in Saigon could not help thinking bitterly of Kipling's epitaph for the colonial civil servant, “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.” Like Kipling, many Americans, particularly the “old Asia hands,” believed that slowness, lethargy, and corruption were native to the Vietnamese, and that they, as Europeans, were simply beating themselves to death against the torpid masses of Asia. But had they ever witnessed an NLF operation or watched the GVN officials smuggling American goods out of the port, they would have had to change their minds. And perhaps they would have found Kipling's explanation less plausible than that of Frantz Fanon: the slowness of the native is not natural to him, but merely a manifestation of his resistance to his colonial master — a resistance that he often does not dare to admit to himself.
That the GVN officials shared this resistance with the Viet Cong was not at all surprising, for, metaphorically speaking, every Vietnamese is brought up to be a guerrilla. Taught to observe the dictates of filial piety, the Vietnamese child learns to hide his aggressiveness and the demands of his ego behind an impenetrable mask of humility and obedience. As the guerrilla feeds off the land without owning it, so the child, without right to property or person, feeds off his family until his father dies. Unable to leave his family, unable to give open challenge to his superiors, he carries on an endless underground battle for survival that is well described by General Giap's famous dictum: “When the enemy attacks, retreat, when he retreats, harass him…” Not only the Viet Minh and the NLF, but all Vietnamese political parties have been underground parties with subversive intentions. Given this tradition of self-protection and concealed hostility between inferior and superior, it would be difficult to imagine how the GVN officials could avoid resenting the Americans, who, after all, were not their leaders. By their slowness, their profiteering, and their intractability, they were carrying on their own guerrilla war against the Americans.
But though there is only one kind of child — the child that grows up to take his father's place — there are two kinds of guerrillas. One kind expects to grow in strength until his movement becomes the majority and the government of the country. (To a Marxist who believes in the historical dialectic, this process is as natural and inevitable as the child's replacement of his father.) The second kind will never give an open challenge to the government, and expects to retain his status of guerrilla forever, feeding off the land without taking responsibility for its government. As the country par excellence of the guerrilla, Vietnam had a long tradition of both. But since the French occupation, only two groups have fit into the first category — the Viet Minh and the NLF. Dependent on the foreigners for their very existence, the other nationalist parties remained unable to assert their autonomy, feeding on the French and then the Americans while at the same time trying to sabotage their interests.
An American reporter, experienced in Vietnam, once said to me, “I finally realized we'd never win this war when I noticed that all of the streets in Saigon were named after Vietnamese heroes who fought against foreign invaders.”
The street names were in a sense the perfect metaphor for the resistance of Saigon. Though written in Roman letters and used every day by Americans, they were perfectly incomprehensible to those who did not know a great deal about Vietnamese history. The xenophobia of Saigon was hidden in plain sight. And yet the street names also deceived the Vietnamese — they were both deception and self-deception — for Saigon could never make good on its claim to the tradition of Le Loi, Tran Hung Dao, and Phan Dinh Phung, or of the street called Tu Do (Independence). Like Generals Thieu and Ky, the Saigonese fought the foreigners only from within their own service — a war they never hoped to win.
The Americans did not understand this war of the city people against the foreigners. But for them it was in a sense more destructive than the war fought by the enemy. While the Communists were attempting by relatively straightforward means to get the Americans out of the country, the Saigon government was attempting (and succeeding in the attempt) to draw the Americans further and further into Vietnam. The strategy of the generals was something like that of General Kutuzov when he retreated across the plains of Russia before Napoleon's armies. It was a scorched earth policy with the difference that the Saigon generals never expected to retake the land they had lost. Their harassment would be constant, their retreat never-ending; they would leave behind them a wasteland whose people would be killed or prostituted by the foreigners. The toll that their forces had already taken on the Americans and on the civilian population gave certain plausibility to the rumor among southerners that Premier Ky was the agent of Hanoi. And yet even that notion was too farfetched, for if the North Vietnamese were planning to take over the south, they would not have wished such devastation upon their future inheritance. Dependent upon the Americans, the GVN was, like a parasite attacking its host, engaged in a pure act of self-destruction. The corruption, the endless factional disputes, the civil war of 1966, the bombing and terrorization of the peasantry — all of them were acts of violence against the very population that might have sustained it. They were suicidal acts by a government that had not even the power to kill itself.
But the violence was only one side of this urge to self-dest
ruction. On the other side there was a strange passivity, an inertia that was the image of social death. The Buddhists had been the first of the urban groups to fall into this state. After the 1966 invasion of Hue and Da Nang, they had abandoned three years of intense political activity for cynical, apathetic silence. Now unreservedly anti-American, Tri Quang waited in the An Quang pagoda in Saigon, making no further effort to organize or to mount demonstrations. (The junta, however, liked him none the better for it. During the Tet offensive the GVN troops leveled the An Quang pagoda, where the NLF had set up a post, killing a score of bonzes. Tri Quang was lucky to escape with his life.) The American mission was pleased by the lack of Buddhist “disturbances,” but the silence of the bonzes was only a signal of what was to follow for the rest of the urban population. As Nguyen Van Trung wrote:
Truly it is difficult to make a clear-cut decision in favor of either one of the two formal positions of today.…
If the Southern Liberation Front truly was merely resisting “American imperialist aggression,” then why up until now has it not yet been able to stimulate… an ardent uprising among all the people as in the 1945 period against the French colonialists? If a policy of opposing Communism has truly only been called into existence because of the aggression of the northern Communists, why has it not been able to stimulate a positive attitude of self-defense, why do we have indifference, desertions from the army, collaboration, escapes to the enemy army?
Trung then went on almost to paraphrase the letter written by the Buddhist student after the invasion of Da Nang:
We cannot make a clear-cut choice, but we have not yet found another way out. We are being closed in, our situation is like being in a bag. The problem is how to enable all of us to avoid the plight of having to choose.2
A paralysis had descended over the urban Vietnamese. In Saigon there were in 1967 some four hundred places — not establishments but simple rooms — where the students went to smoke opium. Opium had never been a habit even for the rich, but between 1967 and 1970 those rooms multiplied until there were some three thousand of them.3 An American journalist visiting Hue just after the Tet offensive was shocked to find the students sitting back and cracking jokes about the corruption of the Thieu government. Even after their city had been ruined they refused to take sides. The journalist could not get over it, but then he could not imagine their situation. For them to join the NLF meant to leave the Westernized Vietnam they had been brought up in, to enter a strange and possibly hostile world; while to join the GVN meant to join a mercenary army that was likely to have no future after the Americans left. The idea that they might change the GVN (no doubt what the journalist had in mind) was to them absurd. As one Vietnamese intellectual said, “The young people feel impotent before the corruption; they don't know what to attach themselves to, and that's why their revolt leads to suicide. They don't have the means of confronting the situation and finding the responsible parties. They find themselves lost.”4 In this case their Confucian attitudes agreed perfectly with Marxist logic: the GVN could not be changed by attempts at gradual reform, but only by a change in the whole state of society. Without that change they saw only suicide in all directions.
The government and “opposition” spokesmen called endlessly for movements of “national unity,” but it was becoming more and more plain that even they did not believe in it as a possibility. The American military successes had divided the Vietnamese even more thoroughly than the ARVN defeats. They had given them the sense that though they might survive as individuals, their society would not: it had changed beyond recognition. In 1967 Thieu's first premier, Nguyen Van Loc, told a meeting of the new national congress: “The scale of values of our society has led to an erosion of our society with the psychological result that everyone has become discontented and cynical.” The premier was referring not only to the intellectuals and the students, but to most of the political “moderates” — the Cochin Chinese bourgeoisie, the Catholics, and many of the deputies and the ARVN officers. And the psychological result was something more than cynicism — it was despair. “People today,” wrote Nguyen Van Trung,
have become abstract people rather than concrete people. Every man among us can no longer be regarded as he himself wants to think of himself, but instead as “that person” or, even more, as an “imaginary enemy,” against whom one must defend oneself. And so we divide ourselves up into categories, and claw each other, because we have labelled each other imaginary enemies. And finally, these errors and ugly deeds always arise because of others, while we ourselves are without sin.5
Brought up within a society whose very language implies that man is a function of the people around him, the Vietnamese experienced the division of their society as the alienation of will from action. As one official American report on “Vietnamese attitudes” noted, “The hope for peace, when expressed, often reflected a dim conception of external forces beyond one's control.… Thus from Binh Thuan in the Second Corps area it was reported that the people believed the Americans will send more troops to Vietnam next year to end the war sooner and help the campaign of President Johnson for re-election to the Presidency.”6
But the war actually was out of the control of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese of the GVN had no choice. At the same time (and this was the meaning of what they told the U.S. official), they had no commitment to the future that was being decided for them. As they saw it, the only course of action that lay open to them was a refusal of choice, a passive resistance to all demands made upon them. According to the same official report, when a new mobilization law went before the congress, one legislator insisted that the law was merely an attempt to calm American public opinion. Another asked, “Why should our young men be drafted to serve U.S. interests?” In the provinces a rumor circulated that the Americans had forced the Thieu government to accept the new law in order better to carry out their real intentions of killing as many Vietnamese as possible; another rumor was that the Americans were attempting to prolong the war in order to maintain a market for their surplus production. The second rumor was an answer to what for many Vietnamese was the most puzzling question of all: why, with all its great power, had the United States not won the war already? “To counter this with the argument that it's a Vietnamese war,” the American report continued, “falls on deaf ears, as many of these people feel it's now a war between the US and Communists.”7
It was into this atmosphere of American overconfidence, Vietnamese apathy and despair, that the NLF launched the Tet offensive of 1968.
15
The Tet Offensive
We begin '68 in a better position than we have ever been before, but we've still got problems of bureaucratic inefficiency. There are still leadership difficulties that will degrade performance. There is a requirement for tackling corruption in the countryside. We've got to cut down more on the RD team attrition. There's a crying need for better province and district chiefs, which the GVN itself has recognized.
Robert Komer
(Press Conference, Saigon, January 24, 1968)
At three o'clock in the morning on the first night of the Vietnamese New Year, nineteen NLF commandos blasted their way through the outer walls of the American embassy in Saigon. They entered the compound, killed two of the U.S. military police on duty, and attacked the heavy doors of the embassy with antitank rockets. Failing to break down the doors, they took cover in the compound, pinning down the “reaction force” of six Marine guards, and held off a helicopter assault by U.S. paratroopers until daylight. Not until nine in the morning did the U.S. troops regain control of the embassy. By the time embassy officials came to work, all nineteen of the young commandos lay dead, their bodies twisted over the ornamental shrubbery and their blood pooling in the white gravel rocks of the embassy garden. The battle for the cities had begun.
In the early morning of January 31, NLF troops attacked almost every important American base, every town and city of South Vietnam. The combined force of eighty-four thou
sand men simultaneously moved in to five out of the six cities, thirty-six out of the forty provincial capitals, and sixty-four district capitals. During the same night of the raid on the embassy, elements of eleven NLF battalions entered Saigon. One unit penetrated the grounds of the presidential palace, four blocks to the south; another took over the government radio station and a third assaulted the Tan Son Nhut air base, breaking through the heavily guarded perimeter to blow up aircraft and engage in gun battles with the American troops. In the Delta, Front forces moved into the most “secure” of the province capitals — Can Tho, My Tho, Vinh Long, Rach Gia, and Ben Tre — entrenched themselves in the poorer quarters, and drove the ARVN units to the defense of their headquarters. In the Second Corps area the NLF attacked the very center of Allied operations in Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, and Tuy Hoa and the great American base at Cam Ranh bay. Dalat, the resort town for Vietnamese generals and the site of the ARVN military academy, came under attack by six NLF battalions. But it was in the First Corps, where North Vietnamese troops joined the battle, that the offensive was by far the fiercest. From a hamlet outside of Da Nang the Front troops lobbed rocket and mortar shells into the American air base, closing down the field from which most of the tactical air strikes were run. Simultaneously, other units moved in on the American bases at Chu Lai and Phu Bai as well as the Korean headquarters down the coast, destroying scores of American airplanes and forcing the American troops to defend their positions while they overran all five of the provincial capitals. In Quang Ngai city and elsewhere they opened the jails and released thousands of prisoners. In Hue battalions of local NLF troops supported by North Vietnamese regulars overcame the ARVN defense forces and marched straight into the center of the city, occupying the university, the provincial headquarters, the central marketplace, and the imperial citadel.
Fire in the Lake Page 49