(Halberstam, “Voices,” p. 48.)
11. Paul Mus quotes this remark in the documentary film by Emile de Antonio, The Year of the Pig.
12. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File G-5, p. 24.
13. Many of the NLF and GVN reports of violence by the other side seem to contain the kind of fantasy that Westerners usually connect with obscenity. One Front soldier, for instance, wrote that the “lackey troops,” trained by the Americans, had raped and beaten a pregnant woman until she aborted and had forced one of their men to eat a soup made of human heads. (Pike, Viet Cong, p. 438.) The first story is quite possibly true — such things did happen — but the second seems somewhat too elaborate to be the truth. The point is that some fantasies were executed, some remained pure fantasy.
14. Paul Mus has compared the mental landscape of the Vietnamese to that of the physical world that encloses them. “The rivers have a seasonal exuberance and must be dammed; the dams that are built up also raise — through an inevitable physical effect — the river bed; they must therefore be made a bit higher. Pushed to the limit this picture becomes one of catastrophe. Perhaps the same may be said of Vietnamese formalism.” (John T. McAlister, Jr., and Paul Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution, pp. 96–97.)
15. Ibid., p. 119.
16. Confucius, The Analects of Confucius, pp. 178–179.
17. There was, of course, some variation in these phrases — “the U.S.-Diem clique,” for instance — but the abstraction remained the same.
18. Michael Charles Conley, The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam, p. 350.
19. Sir Robert Thompson, No Exit from Vietnam, p. 40.
20. Stephen T. Hosmer, “Viet Cong Repression and Its Implications for the Future,” pp. 95, 108.
21. Ibid., p. 76.
Organization: The Liberated Village, the NLF Command Structure, and the PRP
1. Le Duan, “Under the Glorious Party Banner,” p. 25.
2. Douglas Pike's Viet Cong is to date the only published American work on the NLF. Michael Charles Conley's The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam is a report written for the Department of the Army and the American University's Center for Research in Social Systems. The RAND Corporation has done a great deal of work on the NLF for the U.S. Air Force and other defense agencies.
3. Pike, Viet Cong, pp. ix, 111.
4. Paul Valéry, extract from History and Politics No. 10. Valéry here invents a discourse by a Chinese mandarin.
5. See Virginia Thompson, French Indochina, for a discussion of the economic and social conditions of Vietnam in the 1930's.
6. Robert L. Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, pp. 35–39.
7. The story that follows comes from “Interviews Concerning the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,” RAND Corporation File AG-545.
8. Ibid., pp. 3–4, 9–10.
9. Ibid., p. 10.
10. See W. P. Davison, “Some Observations on Viet Cong Operations in the Villages,” and Pike, Viet Cong, pp. 166–194, for further information on the activities or the Liberation Associations.
11. Davison, “Some Observations,” pp. 149–153.
12. Samuel L. Popkin, “The Myth of the Village,” p. 86.
13. A recent example of this process occurred in the early spring of 1971. General Do Cao Tri, the energetic commander of the Saigon government's operations in Cambodia, died in a helicopter accident. Even though Tri had left battle plans for the operation, his successor was unable to put the operation back together again for several months.
14. See Pike, Viet Cong, pp. 210–232, for a more detailed description of the NLF command structure.
15. This fact is admitted by most American analysts of the subject, but none draw the conclusion that power thereby devolved upon the lower echelons. Only Jeffrey Race makes this argument effectively, in “How They Won.”
16. Conley, Communist Insurgent Infrastructure, pp. 321–322.
17. Davison, “Some Observations,” p. 49.
The Making of a Revolutionary
1. “Interviews Concerning the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,” RAND Corporation File AG-572, pp. 6–8.
2. Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam Will Win!, pp. 35–39.
3. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File AG-121, p. 15.
4. Ibid., File G-7, p. 14.
Q. What did you do between operations?
A. Between operations we have cultural training. Those who do not know how to read and write learn to read and write. The Front is very serious about that. It wants to raise the level of education of its members. Not like the GVN soldiers between operations; they go out and drink, gamble or do other nonsense things. Besides cultural training, there is also military training for those with less experience. Sometimes the soldiers go into the villages and make friends with the villagers.
5. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File AG-121, p. 58.
6. Ibid., File AG-68, p. 4.
7. Ibid., File AG-121, p. 59.
8. Michael Charles Conley, The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam, p. 332.
9. “Interviews,” RAND Corporation File AG-572, p. 30.
10. Conley, Communist Insurgent Infrastructure, p. 350.
11. Ibid., p. 331.
12. Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi, pp. 16–18. See also Mary McCarthy, Hanoi.
13. Conley, Communist Insurgent Infrastructure, pp. 330–331.
Marxism-Leninism in the Vietnamese Landscape
1. Whether because of the intellectual influence of Marxism or the political influence of Marxist parties themselves, many Vietnamese of the 1960's used Marxist terminology even though they did not belong to the NLF.
2. Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, p. 6.
3. Ho Chi Minh quotes this doctrine in an article reprinted in Pravda on Lenin in 1955. Ibid., p. 257.
4. See John T. McAlister, Jr., and Paul Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution, chapter 8 (“The Marxist World View and Revolutions in Modernizing Countries”) for further discussion.
5. “Interviews Concerning the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,” RAND Corporation File FD-2A, p. 5.
6. Truong Chinh, President Ho Chin Minh, p. 73.
7. Douglas Pike, Viet Cong, p. 381. Pike also notes that Vietnamese Communism was “characterized by great moralism and was far more moral than ideological” (p. 379). See also J. J. Zasloff, “Political Motivation of the Viet Cong and the Vietminh Regroupees,” pp. 115–118.
8. I. Milton Sacks, “Marxism in Viet-Nam,” in Marxism in Southeast Asia, ed. Frank N. Trager, pp. 128–129. Sacks discusses the program of the Trotskyites.
9. McAlister and Mus, Vietnamese and Their Revolution, chapter 7 (“Marxism and Traditionalism in Vietnam”). On this issue Ho Chi Minh's own party, in alliance with the Soviet Comintern, had differed with the Trotskyites (of which there was an articulate group in Saigon) as far back as the 1930's. The Trotskyites insisted on a proletarian revolution; the Indochinese Communist Party looked for an alliance with the peasants and the national bourgeoisie. (See Sacks, “Marxism,” in Marxism in Southeast Asia, ed. Trager, pp. 102–170, for further details of this ideological debate.) In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh's agents in the south assassinated six Trotskyite leaders and effectively destroyed that party in Vietnam. Just what influence the Trotskyites might have had had they survived remains unknown, but, as McAlister notes (Vietnam: Origins of the Revolution, p. 208), the fact that Ho was able to eliminate them so easily indicates that their party, like all the other urban political parties, had no mass base and no strong organizational structure. The suspicion is that the Trotskyites were just another group of urban intellectuals who in the last analysis depended upon France.
10. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 121–126, for a discussion of the dependence of the colonial proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
11. Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh, p. 341.
12.
The North Vietnamese newspapers, Nhan Dan, printed severe critiques of Party programs — so severe, in fact, that American analysts, comparing it with other Communist newspapers, tended to overestimate the seriousness of the political or economic difficulty it discussed. The paper did not, of course, represent an independent editorial position, but rather the Party's critique of itself.
13. Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh, pp. 340–341.
5: Mise en scène
1. Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, eds., The Viet-Nam Reader, p. 347.
2. New York Times, 7 February 1966.
6: Politicians and Generals
one
1. Jean Lacouture, Vietnam: Between Two Truces, pp. 99–102.
2. Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution, p. 206.
3. Lacouture, Vietnam, p. 122, gives this atmosphere.
4. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 122ff., gives an excellent description of this class.
5. David Wurfel, “The Saigon Political Elite,” p. 530. “An analysis of forty ministers in six cabinets since 1962 indicates that little more than one-third had all their advanced training in Vietnam.”
6. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 37–38.
7. The southern Catholics leaned towards the support of the anti-Communist regimes, but they were not so intransigent as to support the war indefinitely at the expense of the entire southern population. In January 1968, just before the Tet offensive, the archdiocese of Saigon issued a statement calling for peace and a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. The northerners tended to be more politically “reliable.” At least until 1970 the military regimes could count on the refugee settlements around Saigon to provide truckloads of demonstrators for them on command.
8. The Catholic organizations were the only ones whose numbers could be estimated with any degree of accuracy. In the summer of 1967, Time magazine spoke of Tri Quang's one million followers. But there the editors had performed a statistical miracle equivalent to that of determining the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. (What kind of pin? is the first objection.)
9. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 247. The Americans suspected Tri Quang because of his Communist-inspired methods (his propaganda techniques, according to Shaplen) but they themselves were to hire former Viet Minh officers to head all of their various pacification programs.
10. Lacouture, Vietnam, p. 121.
11. McNamara report to President Johnson on the Vietnam situation, 21 December 1963, in Neil Sheehan et al., The Pentagon Papers, pp. 271–274.
12. George McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam, p. 152.
13. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, pp. 232–234.
14. Ibid., pp. 227–234.
15. Lacouture, Vietnam, p. 121.
16. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 228.
17. But of course they did not. The coup against Diem was conceived by a civilian, the shrewd security officer, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, and made possible by the self-immolations of several others.
18. George Carver, “The Real Revolution in South Vietnam,” p. 404.
19. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, p. 228.
two
1. Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, eds., The Viet-Nam Reader, p. 201.
2. Richard Critchfield, The Long Charade, p. 96.
3. Raskin and Fall, Viet-Nam Reader, p. 200.
4. Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution, p. 246.
5. Ibid., p. 270.
6. Ibid., p. 277.
7. Jean Lacouture, Vietnam: Between Two Truces, p. 135.
8. Ibid., pp. 136–137.
9. Excerpts from Saigon airgram to the State Department, 24 December 1964, in Neil Sheehan et al., The Pentagon Papers, pp. 379–381. Taylor may not even have been sure to whom he was speaking. He asked at one point who the spokesman for the group was.
10. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, pp. 297–301.
11. A later example of this same mechanical logic was General Ky's behavior during the Cambodian invasion in 1970. Very much excited by the idea of ARVN troops going into someone else's country, Ky asked to head the expedition. When Thieu allowed him to conduct the negotiations but refused him a military role, Ky began to give quiet support to the disabled veterans' and students' protest against it. (New York Times, 12 June 1970.)
12. Shaplen, Lost Revolution, pp. 342–346.
13. William C. Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, p. 98.
7: The United States Enters the War
1. Neil Sheehan et al., The Pentagon Papers, p. 257.
2. Ibid., pp. 307, 313–314. 323.
3. Ibid., pp. 341–343.
4. Ibid., pp. 382–386, and Daniel Ellsberg, “Escalating in a Quagmire.”
5. Ibid., pp. 462–474.
6. William C. Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, p. 100.
7. Ibid. From Westmoreland's account it is impossible to discover what form this “concerted effort” actually took.
8. Ibid. MACV estimated that thirty-five thousand enemy troops were killed that year.
9. Blair Clark, “Westmoreland Appraised,” pp. 96–101.
10. Westmoreland apparently did not realize how attached these ARVN divisions were to their own territories — his sense of scale being somewhat different to that of the Vietnamese. In fact the Twenty-fifth did not recover from its displacement. Years later the ARVN commander-in-chief, General Cao Van Vien, was to call it, “not only the worst division in the-Vietnamese army, but the worst division in any army in the world.”
11. Sheehan, Pentagon Papers, p. 391.
12. The Vietnam Hearings, p. 183.
8: The Buddhist Crisis
1. Time magazine, 18 February 1966.
2. Zorthian had assumed that Ky had chosen to fire Thi because he was the strongest of the corps commanders. After Thi was fired, so the logic went, he could get rid of the other corrupt officers more easily. The theory, however, depended on what was meant by “strong.” Thi's honesty and devotion to duty had made him popular with many of the officers and civil servants in his own corps area, but it had at the same time isolated him from Saigon and the rest of the country. The other three corps commanders, by contrast, presided like huge spiders over a countrywide network of intrigue and corruption. An attack on one of them would have meant an attack on all of them.
3. New York Times, 5 April 1966.
4. Takashi Oka, “Buddhism as a Political Force. No. 5: Danang and Afterwards,” P. 3.
5. New York Times, 9 April 1966.
6. Ibid., 14 April 1966.
7. Richard Critchfield, The Long Charade, p. 64.
8. Ibid., p. 293.
9. That the Americans had carefully kept their troops out of Hue only increased the contrast between it and Saigon, it and all other Vietnamese cities.
10. Oka, “Buddhism,” p. 4.
11. New York Times, 23 April 1966.
12. Ibid., 15 May 1966.
13. Ibid., 17 May 1966.
14. Oka, “Buddhism,” p. 10.
15. New York Times, 1 June 1966.
16. Oka, “Buddhism,” p. 10.
17. Ibid., p. 14.
9: Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel
1. Otare Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban.
Frantz Fanon has attacked this work in Black Skin, White Masks, but he does not convincingly refute the foregoing. His argument is that the reactions and behavior patterns of the native to the European colonizer had nothing to do with a pre-existing set. “If, for instance,” he says, “Martians undertook to colonize the earthmen — not to initiate them into Martian culture but to colonize them — we should be doubtful of the persistence of any earth personality” (p. 95). The argument that colonialism (as opposed to any other form of disaster) negates personality itself cannot accord with a Freudian point of view. If Freud is correct, then men always react to new situations according to patterns set in their childhood. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon actually corroborates many of the observations made by Mannoni, only he looks at
them from a slightly different point of view.
2. Paul Mus has spoken of this period and what to French liberals seemed to be the paradoxical reaction of the Vietnamese in his Viêit-Nam: Sociologie d'une guerre.
3. Mannoni, Prospero, p. 59.
4. The movement, as Tri Quang told Takashi Oka, “did not begin as an anti-American movement. It was not even really opposed to Ky. We had only one plea — elections as a means of establishing a legitimate government.” (Takashi Oka, “Buddhism as a Political Force,” p. 11.)
The Americans never believed him sincere, but Tri Quang knew well that only the Americans could insure Buddhist success — and the elections were the only way they might be brought into making a redistribution of power.
Later on, alarmed by the anti-American tone of the demonstrations, Tam Chau had pressured Tri Quang to defuse the struggle movement and restore order to the First Corps. Once the promise of elections had been given, Tri Quang had acceded, even though he realized leaving the junta in power might be a strategic error.
5. Pierre Huard and Maurice Durand, Connaissance du Viêt-Nam, p. 87. The original text is as follows: “La rupture de la dépendance a, sous l'influence de troubles extérieurs ou intérieurs, provoqué des sentiments d'infériorité violants avec leurs successions habituelles de defoulement et de refoulements. L'angoisse de la conscience nationale essayant de se créer un sur-moi a base de compensations s'est alors traduite dans une minorité agissante par une volonté de destruction farouche, une volupté de perir dans l'effondrement total, une esthétique du néant qui pousse, collectivement, à la politique du terre brûlée et, individuellement, au suicide.”
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