Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  Just after the Tet offensive Thieu, with some American prodding, attempted to put together a “national congress” of all the non-Communist political splinter groups, including the moderate Buddhists. The Americans applauded the attempt as an effort to “broaden the base” of the GVN, but Thieu contradicted them by giving the congress no share in governmental power. Just why Thieu acceded to American pressure and convened the congress at all remains a matter of doubt, but, quite plausibly, he wished to distribute the blame for the Tet disaster on as many different people as possible. In any case, the congress collapsed a few months later in much the same manner as had all the American-sponsored congresses and councils of 1964–1965, leaving little more to Thieu's own “political coalition” than a number of men susceptible to bribery by Thieu's businessman friend, Nguyen Cao Thang. In the fall of 1969, the president dismissed his conciliatory post-Tet cabinet (composed of such men as the former premier, Tran Van Huong) and replaced it with a cabinet composed almost exclusively of his old military cronies and former members of Ngo Dinh Nhu's Can Lao Party. The American officials went into high reverse gear on the subject of “broadening the base of the GVN,” discovering extraordinary virtues in these old political toughs, but they could not explain Thieu's reasons for so obviously rejecting their advice. They could not have explained them, had they understood them, for to have done so would have been to admit that Thieu was trying to gain what he was already supposed to have: some control over his own administration. In the attempt a sharp sword was more useful to him than the unmatched parts of a blunderbuss. Thieu would need that sword shortly in order to deal with the political effects of the American troop withdrawals.

  Nixon's announcement of the “Vietnamization” policy signaled much the same thing to the Saigonese as it did to the American middle-of-the-road doves. When Nixon ordered a withdrawal of ten thousand American troops per month, the Saigonese politicians, reasonably enough, came to the conclusion that he intended to end the war in the near future. Alarmed by the intransigence of their own government at the Paris negotiating table, a certain number began to seek alternate routes to a political settlement before the American troops departed. Deputy Tran Ngoc Chau proposed that a group of Saigonese legislators visit the north in order to talk with their opposite numbers in Hanoi. Students and intellectuals formed committees and put out manifestos attacking the U.S.-GVN conditions for peace negotiations. The Saigonese had, unfortunately, misjudged Nixon, and Thieu for his own protection had to silence them. In March Thieu, overriding the constitutional provision for legislative immunity, had a military court sentence Chau to ten years' hard labor. A month or so later he arrested the heads of the newly formed student opposition group.

  From these events many Americans concluded that Thieu, personally, held the extreme right-wing position in the Vietnamese political spectrum. As usual, however, the situation was not so ideologically linear as it seemed.

  In the fall of 1969 American intelligence in Saigon discovered an NLF ring consisting of some one hundred members, many of them placed in high positions throughout the GVN. When arrested by the Americans, one member revealed that he had had dealings with President Thieu's own political adviser, a man called Huynh Van Trung. While the Americans were congratulating themselves on having removed a viper from the breast of the GVN, many Saigonese were laughing at the joke on both General Thieu and the Americans. General Thieu's adviser, after all, had a well-known history as a Viet Minh informer during the first Indochina war. Recently, and perhaps as a result of his wife's infidelity, he had been going around Saigon complaining about the corruption of Vietnamese society. When Thieu's military court gave the man a sentence of only two years in jail, the suspicions of the Saigonese seemed confirmed: Thieu had known about the man all along and had been using him as a liaison with the NLF. (The fact that this man was of such a dubious background suggested that both parties had left him in an exposed place as a cover for their better-protected liaisons.)

  Had the affair never reached the press, many Saigonese would have nonetheless assumed that Thieu possessed such a contact. It was only reasonable — and besides, the war had gone on for so long that its history could only be repetitious. In 1963, at the moment when the United States threatened to withdraw its support from the Diem regime, Ngo Dinh Nhu attempted to enter into relations with the North Vietnamese while still hotly professing his anti-Communism. The present situation differed only in that now the Americans appeared to be threatening to withdraw their support from the entire Saigon regime. To the Saigonese the only illegitimate aspect of these contacts was their secrecy. Had there been any unity or responsibility within the GVN, General Thieu would have attempted to make the accommodation in public — as Chau intended — and to show the way of least resistance to the people who depended upon him. But, as even the highest officials of the GVN did not trust each other, Thieu, like many others, was doing his best to see that he did not hang separately. It was this attempt at self-preservation that led, as it always had in the past, to a political repression in the cities. Thieu would use the leverage of American support to suppress those who challenged his personal position and his own contacts with the NLF.

  Finally, after a year of accommodating the Nixon administration, Senator Fulbright and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings to argue the fact that the new American effort was having very little effect on the GVN: the ARVN remained ineffective, the Saigon government unable to meet the political challenge, and so forth. The discussion could have been put together from old newspaper clippings. But in some sense the situation was a new one and the issue was not joined.

  In his foreign policy message to Congress in January 1970, President Nixon revealed what was to be his prime moral justification for the continuation of the war through the “Vietnamization” policy. “When,” he said, “we assumed the burden of helping South Vietnam, millions of South Vietnamese men and women placed their trust in us. To abandon them would risk a massacre that would shock and dismay everyone in the world who values human life.”6 Many American doves disputed this argument on the basis that the American military had already done more damage in Vietnam than any Vietnamese group (presumably Nixon meant the Communists) could possibly do. The United States had a moral responsibility for its own actions and not for the (hypothetical) actions of every foreign political party towards its own people. So much the “doves” could say without any knowledge of Vietnam, but from the perspective of Vietnamese politics there was something more to be said. The experience of the war had shown that the buildup of the ARVN was not only ineffective as a means of “stopping the Communists” but actually destructive to the South Vietnamese people. To continue this buildup in the context of an American withdrawal was both to compound the errors of the past and to increase the chances of those “massacres” that Nixon said he hoped to avoid. As one illustration will suffice to show, “Vietnamization” was the tactic most likely to produce present and future violence against the civilian population.

  Just six months before the Tet offensive, the United States finally succeeded in pressuring the GVN to adopt its latest-model counter-insurgency scheme for “rooting out the Viet Cong infrastructure.” The Phoenix program, as the plan was known, consisted of the centralization of all intelligence data and counterespionage operations in the person of an army or police officer at each level of the bureaucracy. The aim of the program was to eliminate the rivalries between the various army units and the police which had so long prevented the Americans and the GVN from identifying, much less capturing, the political agents of the Front. In addition the GVN revived the old detention law whereby without the delay and uncertainty of trial by jury a provincial security committee could condemn a suspect to up to two years in prison. As with the Revolutionary Development program, however, the Americans managed to clear away mountains of red tape only to build another mountain. They created an efficient system of counterinsurgency in a void of any efficient agencies t
o carry it out. The results were predictable. In 1969 the United States set a goal for the Phoenix program to “neutralize” twenty thousand NLF agents during the year, and at the end of the year GVN authorities reported 19,534 agents “neutralized.” The figure was unsettling in that there had been no corresponding decline in American estimates of NLF agents at large.7 Who, then, were the 19,534 people, and what had become of them? As only 20 percent of those arrested were actually sentenced — and then only for periods of a few months — the American officials concluded that a large percentage of the “neutralized agents” were simply people whom the Phoenix agents herded in and out of the police stations in order to fill their quotas. American advisers on the spot complained of GVN inefficiency and collusion with the NLF.8 Their complaints were undoubtedly justified, but the matter was more serious than that. Despite the fact that the law provided only for the arrest and detention of the suspects, one-third of the “neutralized agents” were reported dead.9 Then, too, the survivors had stories to tell. In one village in An Giang province a woman had come to the Phoenix officials with a story that her brother-in-law had tried to persuade her husband to pay taxes to the NLF. As was later discovered, the brother-in-law was an old man with heart disease against whom the woman held a long-standing grudge. But the discovery came too late. Within the week the Phoenix agent had the old man arrested and tortured as a “Viet Cong tax collector.” In another village a conscientious village chief discovered the local Phoenix agent was extorting gold and jewelry from the people of the village on the threat of arresting them as “Viet Cong agents.” When the village chief attempted to tell the district chief about the racket, the Phoenix agent had him fingered as a “Viet Cong suspect.”10

  With the Phoenix program the United States succeeded in fashioning much the same instrument of civilian terror that the Diemist laws for the suppression of Communism had created in 1957–1958. The only difference was that given the numbers of American and GVN troops and the participation of statistics-hungry U.S. intelligence services, the terror was a great deal more widespread than it had been before. The program in effect eliminated the cumbersome category of “civilian”; it gave the GVN, and initially the American troops as well, license and justification for the arrest, torture, or killing of anyone in the country, whether or not the person was carrying a gun. And many officials took advantage of that license. Some of the district and province chiefs engaged in systematic extortion rackets, arresting the rich of their districts twice and three times a year. Other officers settled their old scores or terrorized their fellow officers. The Phoenix program permitted them to indulge in all the practices classical to an irresponsible secret police. But the corruption of individual officers was not the worst of it. The true destructiveness of the program came from the very structure of the program itself. Like any stranger to the village, the district intelligence officer, were he a model of probity, would of necessity have some difficulty distinguishing between the “hard-core” Front cadres, the marginal Front supporters, and the people who went along with the NLF for the sake of survival. Inclined by the nature of his position to arrest anyone with Front contacts, he would tend to act like the Americans when they came into a “Viet Cong-held area.” He would introduce legalistic notions of justice into what ought to have been a family affair, filling his quota and his prisons with anonymous people who had lived under the Front aegis. Rather than eliminate the “hard-core” cadres (who were, after all, the best protected and concealed), he would actually create new ones, for, as during the Diem regime, the peasants had to accept what protection they could get from such arbitrary justice. By its very nature the Phoenix program tended once again to polarize the villages and to destroy what order and accumulation existed, thus involving a new portion of the population in the life-or-death struggle.11

  The Phoenix program was in a sense a model for the entire Vietnamization program. The armed forces of the GVN everywhere contained underpaid and badly led soldiers who terrorized rather than pacified the civilian population. To augment this force meant to increase the number of bandits at large in the country — and bandits that were now supplied with modern American weapons. But again, there was another issue at stake. As American-made institutions, the armed forces of the Saigon government were structurally incapable of dealing with the political struggle. By fitting out more Vietnamese with rifles and uniforms, Nixon was merely forcing them into a conflict they could not possibly win even if there were no Front soldiers left in the south. With American support the top-heavy bureaucracy of the ARVN tended merely to crush those people at its base; without American support it threatened to topple over, crushing everyone including its own officers. In the anarchy that would ensue from such an event there was a high probability that the massacres and revenge-killings would become general: the ARVN units would turn to banditry, and the NLF would have to respond with violence. In any case the potential for domestic violence increased with the drafting of each new soldier.

  The “Vietnamization” program was, like so many American policies in Vietnam, a solution to an American rather than to a Vietnamese problem. While it permitted Nixon to claim that the United States was “saving” the South Vietnamese, it was in effect creating a social upheaval and exposing more Vietnamese to those very dangers he claimed to be saving them from.

  “Vietnamization” was not, however, Nixon's only strategy for the expansion of the war. In April 1970, the administration sent a large force of American and South Vietnamese troops to destroy the North Vietnamese base areas across the Cambodian border. It was the initiative that the Joint Chiefs had for so long requested; only now with the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk by a general of Thieu's political complexion, the administration had no fear of opposition by the Cambodian government. Nixon presented the invasion as a necessary step to prevent a North Vietnamese buildup and an eventual attack on the dwindling numbers of American troops. Despite the flimsiness of this pretext (the North Vietnamese had by then offered to refrain from attacking American troops if the United States set a withdrawal date), he was, it appeared, surprised by the force of the reaction in the United States. The American public would tolerate the buildup of the Saigon regime's army, but it would not, it seemed, stand for the invasion of another country by American troops. There were demonstrations and student strikes throughout the country, their numbers and intensity growing after the incident at Kent State University in which National Guard troops shot and killed four white students. Spurred on by this public outcry, Senate doves invoked the constitutional issue of the right to declare war and passed an amendment calling for the prohibition of American troops and air support from Cambodia after July of that year.

  From a purely military point of view, the advantage the Cambodian invasion gave the United States and the GVN was important but temporary. It was one thing for the Joint Chiefs to recommend such a strategy in the context of an American buildup in 1966 or 1967, but it was quite another for an administration to implement it during a period of American troop withdrawal. In their two months in Cambodia the U.S. troops destroyed thousands of tons of North Vietnamese equipment and supplies, but they killed very few enemy troops. The greatest achievement of the operation was indirect: it permitted the new Cambodian regime to close the port of Sihanouk-ville to the Front and the North Vietnamese, thereby cutting sharply into the flow of munitions and other supplies to the southern guerrillas. Still, by most Pentagon estimates the operation set back the North Vietnamese offensive by no more than a year. Before the operation — and in anticipation of such an event — the North Vietnamese troops drove west to occupy the northern provinces of Cambodia and to set up a new (and indestructible) supply route along the Mekong river. At the same time they began to build up a local insurgency movement, the FUNK (Front Uni National de Kampuchea), and to menace Phnom Penh itself with guerrilla units. With the removal of the American forces from Cambodia in July 1970, Nixon put himself in the position of having to defend yet another gover
nment that could not protect itself and of leaving the ARVN with a new responsibility that it could not fulfill.