It is the observation rather than the analysis that is interesting here.
6. According to the Vietnamese sociologist, Phan Thi Dac, the hunger strike is one of the ways in which the Vietnamese child registers discontent with the strictures of his parents. In the case of particularly strong-willed children these hunger strikes last two or three days. In general, says Miss Dac, “the parents try to find a way of getting out of the difficulty that will leave everyone's honor intact, because the child who has recourse to this procedure is profoundly wounded, because whether or not it is true, he believes himself the victim of an injustice (correction or reprimand). If he obstinately refuses all attempts at conciliation, all diversionary maneuvers, and remains deaf to all appeals, the parents send him discreetly to an aunt or a cousin for a short visit so that, away from the ‘guilty’ parent, he can forget his misadventure and feed himself again without too much loss of pride.”
(Interestingly enough, the other method of opposition, and the one most feared by parents, is simple inertia. The child does not complain, he does not avoid punishments, but he continues to repeat his past conduct. In this case the parents take what seems to be their only recourse and send the child away to relatives or friends for a while.)
(Phan Thi Dac, Situation de la personne au Viet-Nam, pp. 126–127.)
In other words, far from revolting against the Americans, the Buddhists were behaving towards them as child to parent. They were trying to force the Americans to make a correction in their behavior by inflicting suffering upon themselves. The difficulty — which Tri Quang certainly realized — was that the Americans were not their parental rulers.
7. Don Luce and John Sommer, Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices, p. 279.
8. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 43.
10: Bad Puppets
1. William C. Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, p. 114.
2. Newsweek, 27 March 1967.
3. Ibid.
4. Time, 31 March 1967.
5. Newsweek, 27 March 1967.
6. David Halberstam, “Return to Vietnam,” p. 52.
7. Samuel L. Popkin, “The Myth of the Village,” pp. 169–172.
8. Halberstam, “Return to Vietnam.”
9. This attitude, largely shared by the central Vietnamese factions, posed a most perfect dilemma for the GVN that on the one hand needed to establish its legitimacy and, on the other hand, needed all the help it could get against the NLF. When in 1967 a fraction of the VNQDD began to infiltrate the pacification program in central Vietnam, the Americans, like the French before them, tended to support the party because it was disciplined and passionately anti-Communist. The GVN officials, however, resisted the VNQDD because they knew they would have little more influence over the villages thus pacified than over those in the grip of the NLF.
10. On 6 January 1971, the New York Times reported that Mme. Nguyen Cao Ky had claimed the right to more than five square miles of montagnard land in the Central Highlands as a public domained concession. The land had been under the control of the Front for the past several years, she argued, so it ought to be declared a public domain. Naturally the Vietnamese officials were not disposed to recognize the montagnards' ancestral rights over the claim of the vice-president's wife, but a public scandal was made. Madame Ky had by this time come a long way from her pretty stewardess days, under the competitive influence of Mesdames Co and Thieu.
11. William R. Corson, The Betrayal.
12. William J. Lederer, Our Own Worst Enemy.
13. Corson, Betrayal, p. 86. The Regional Forces outside Da Nang neglected to lay their ambushes that night, and the NLF mortared the air base.
14. Don Luce and John Sommer, Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices, pp. 97–98.
15. Frantz Fanon never went to Vietnam, but much of what he says about the colonized bourgeoisie in Africa is peculiarly appropriate to that of Saigon. For instance:
The national middle-class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime is an under-developed middle-class. It has practically no economic power, and in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace.… [It] is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labour; it is completely canalised into activities of the intermediary type.… In its wilful narcissism, the national middle-class is easily convinced that it can advantageously replace the middle-class of the mother country. But that same independence which literally drives it into a corner will give rise within its ranks to catastrophic reactions, and will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country.…
The national middle-class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary.… [It] identifies itself with the Western bourgeoisie from whom it has learnt its lessons. It follows the Western bourgeoisie along its path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention.… It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.
The national bourgeoisie will be greatly helped on its way towards decadence by the Western bourgeoisies, whom come to it as tourists avid for the exotic.… It will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe.”(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 122–125.)
16. Washington Post, 21 March 1967.
17. General Thieu would repeat the same maneuver in 1970 with the trial of Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau, now the deputy elected by the largest number of votes to the lower house of the legislature. When accused of having secret contact with his brother, an NLF officer, Chau claimed to have done so only with the full knowledge of the CIA. That was his mistake. After his confession a large number of opposition deputies, newspapermen, etc., supported Thieu's unconstitutional attempt to put him in jail on the grounds that he was selling them out by establishing a link between the Americans and the Viet Cong.
18. Richard Critchfield, The Long Charade, p. 157.
11: Elections
1. Newsweek, 3 April 1967.
2. Takashi Oka, in the New York Times, 15 July 1970.
3. Ibid.
4. Bernard B. Fall, Last Reflections on a War, p. 163.
5. I. Milton Sacks, “Restructuring Government in South Vietnam,” p. 526.
6. Richard Critchfield, The Long Charade, p. 309.
7. Newsweek, 3 April 1967.
8. Paul Mus, “Cultural Backgrounds of Present Problems,” p. 12.
9. Fall, Last Reflections, p. 164.
10. Robert Shaplen, “Letter from Saigon,” New Yorker, 7 October 1967, pp. 152–153.
The meeting had its own interest. Had the same confrontation taken place in 1964, it almost certainly would have been resolved by a military coup. The meeting was, then, a substitute for a coup under conditions that made even a show of force impossible. From the American perspective, it looked something like a cross between an encounter group and a meeting of ward bosses. From the Vietnamese perspective, it was a self-criticism session. Without any ideological training, or indeed any foreign interference, the generals quite unconsciously adopted the technique that the Viet Minh had institutionalized to settle personal and political conflicts without violence. What the Americans failed to appreciate in both instances was that the whole drama looked both natural and necessary to the participants. Self-criticism is, in other words, as acceptable to the Vietnamese as majority rule is to Americans.
Ky himself declared in public afterwards, “All Vietnamese must make sacrifices in order to achieve unity and maintain the prestige of the armed forces. We can sacrifice our very life… or anything, including the renunciation of titles.” (Critchfield, Long Charade, p. 339.)
11. Shaplen, “Letter from Saigon,” p. 154, and Jean Taillefer, “Les Elections au Sud-Vietnam,” pp. 453–456. According to the French journalist Taillefer, certain of these officers did not even bother to hide the fact that they reported a 90 percent turnout when only 20 percent of the people who registered actual
ly voted. “In certain districts,” he concluded, “it would be difficult to argue that the elections took place at all.”
12. Shaplen, “Letter from Saigon,” p. 154.
13. Ibid., and Taillefer, “Les Elections.”
14. Shaplen, “Letter from Saigon,” p. 157.
15. Ibid., p. 157.
16. Ward Just, in the Washington Post, 28 October 1968.
17. The election marked the beginning of the decline in the real, as opposed to the symbolic, power of Nguyen Cao Ky. Over the next few months Thieu slowly but systematically went about the business of removing all of Ky's supporters from the provincial commands until there was nothing left to support his establishment in Saigon. Towards the end of the process both the Americans and the NLF helped Thieu substantially in their own characteristic ways. During the Tet offensive an American helicopter pilot accidentally dropped a rocket into a suburban building where Ky's three or four closest political supporters happened to be standing. Not long afterwards, the NLF in full malice aforethought shot and badly wounded General Nguyen Ngoc Loan.
12: The Downward Spiral
1. Robert Komer. Press conference.
2. This rectification of figures and ambiguity of names undoutedly accounted for an experience Dr. Henry Kissinger had as a consultant to Governor Nelson Rockefeller. While visiting Vietnam one year, Kissinger went to see a certain Vietnamese province chief and asked, among other things, how the pacification program was going. “Very well indeed,” said the province chief. “We've made great gains this year. Eighty percent of the province is pacified.” The next year Kissinger returned to Vietnam and put the same question to the same province chief. “Excellent,” was the answer. “We've been making great progress since you were last here. Seventy percent of the province is pacified.”
3. Robert Komer, Press conference.
4. Richard Critchfield, The Long Charade, p. 173.
5. Robert Komer. Press conference.
6. William C. Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, p. 137.
7. Thomas Whiteside, “Defoliation,” p. 32, 38.
8. Newsweek, 27 March 1967.
9. Frances FitzGerald, “The Tragedy of Saigon.” This article is a description of the condition of Saigon in late 1966 and an argument concerning the uses of American aid in Vietnam. The city budget of Saigon for 1966 was equivalent to that of Lynchburg, Va., or Allentown, Pa.
10. William R. Corson, The Betrayal, p. 173.
11. David Halberstam, “Return to Vietnam,” p. 53.
12. Ibid.
13. Pham Ngoc Nguyen, “House for Rent,” in Between Two Fires, ed. Ly Qui Chung, p. 70.
14. New York Times, 26 November 1967.
15. R. W. Apple, “Vietnam: The Signs of a Stalemate.” The irony was that though Apple used the story to illustrate the perfidy of the Vietnamese officer corps, certain analysts in Saigon might well nave assumed that the adviser told it to illustrate his success at getting a unit of the Twenty-fifth Division out of its base at night.
16. Alec Woodside, “Some Southern Vietnamese Writers Look at the War,” pp. 54–55.
17. Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale psychologist and social historian, also mentions this phenomenon, which he labels “counterfeit nurturance,” in his paper, “The Circles of Deception — Notes on Vietnam.”
18. Woodside, “Writers Look at the War,” p. 54.
13: Prospero
1. In 1966 the mission, after a trial run, decided to increase the numbers of IVS workers severalfold.
2. Don Luce and John Sommer, Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices, p. 316.
3. William Pfaff, “A Vietnam Journal,” p. 20.
4. The Advanced Research Projects Association (ARPA) was the cover-all name for Defense Department research projects based in Vietnam.
5. Simulmatics first achieved prominence by doing the polling and voter analysis for the John F. Kennedy campaign in i960. The company was dissolved in 1968 as a result of overdependence on, and difficulties with, the Defense Department.
6. Richard M. Pfeffer, ed., No More Vietnams?, p. 146.
7. “The Michigan Winter Soldier Investigation,” Harvard Crimson, 14 May 1971. Testimony from Scott Camile, 24, Sergeant (E-5), First Battalion, Eleventh Marine Regiment, First Marine Division. (In Vietnam, August 1966 to September 1967.)
“The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC, VC had weapons and civilians didn't and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, ‘How do you know he's a VC?’ and the general reply would be, ‘He's dead,’ and that was sufficient.”
8. John T. McAlister, Jr., “America in Vietnam,” p. 10.
9. In 1967–1968 the journalist, Harvey Meyerson, documented this process in detail during his several months' stay in Vinh Long province (Harvey Meyerson, Vinh Long). The syndrome was by then well established in history. In 1962 Colonel John Paul Vann, the Seventh Division adviser in My Tho, was known to American reporters to be the only adviser who reported on the deterioration of the GVN. Vann had to leave the Army as a result.
10. In a televised interview some of the prisoners said that many of them had become partially paralyzed by the confinement, that they had lung diseases from the lime the guards flung down at them, and that they were given so little water that occasionally they were forced to drink their own urine. Those prisoners interviewed were Buddhist students. The American official who later briefed the press in Saigon said that the “bulk of the inmates are either hard-core Communist defenders or they are serious professional criminals” and that he “thought” the prisoners were “reasonably well-treated and that they looked in reasonably good health.” (New York Times, 17 July 1970.)
11. New York Times, 18 July 1970.
12. Ambassador Bunker also played an important role in the affair of Tran Ngoc Chau in the spring of 1970. President Thieu arrested and imprisoned Deputy Chau on charges of cooperating with the Communists. Though these charges were false and Chau had important friends in the U.S. mission, Bunker washed his hands of the matter and allowed Thieu to imprison Chau.
13. The Vietnam Hearings, pp. 182–183.
14. The argument was often made by those people far from power, but the logic existed — and sometimes just below consciousness — for those people whose job it was to make the distinction. When asked in 1968 why he believed the United States could win the war in Vietnam, one high CIA official not directly concerned with the war gave a long speech about the virtues of democracy and the vices of Communism — a moral argument to a power-political question.
15. Boston Globe, July 1970.
16. “Michigan Winter Soldier Investigation,” p. 7. Testimony of Steve Pitkin, 20, SP/4, “C” Company, 2/239, Ninth Infantry Division. (In Vietnam from May 1969 to July 1969.)
The training that they gave us, the infantry, really amounted to nothing but familiarization with the small-arms weapons and the explosives you would use once you got over there. We attacked a mock Vietnamese village in the snow at Fort Dix. An interesting point: a lot of times when we were put on line to attack a point of something, you were told not to fire until your left foot hit the ground. I remember asking a drill sergeant, “Do they really do this in Nam?” “Yeah, you know.”
When I got to Nam, it was like black had turned to white because I was totally unprepared. I was put into a recon unit operating in the Mekong Delta. I hadn't been taught anything about the weather, the terrain. I had been taught a little bit about booby traps, but that's really up to the guy who lays them; they can just be anything. It was just a hit and miss thing. You go over there with that limited amount of training and knowledge of the culture you're up against and you're scared. You're so scared, that you'll shoot at anything.
17. “Michigan Winter Soldier Investigation,” p. 3. Testimony of Scott Camile.
18. Ibid., p. 7. Testimony of Steve Pitkin.
19. Ibid., and Richard Falk et al., letter to the New York Times, 22 April 1970.
20. New York
Times, 31 March 1971.
21. Calley's statement reminds one of the “legalism” of one Marine unit that, as one GI testified, “went through the villages and searched people [and] the women would have all their clothes taken off and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure they didn't have anything hidden anywhere and this was raping but it was done as searching.” (“Michigan Winter Soldier Investigation,” p. 3. Testimony of Scott Camile.)
22. McAllister, “America in Vietnam,” p. 12.
23. Jonathan and Orville Schell, letter to the New York Times, 26 November 1969.
24. New York Times, 7 January 1967.
25. Douglas Pike, “The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror,” p. 9.
26. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
27. Ibid., p. 8.
14: Guerrillas
1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 43.
2. Alec Woodside, “Some Southern Vietnamese Writers Look at the War,” p. 55.
3. Le Monde (sélection hebdomadaire), 14–20 May 1970, by Jean-Claude Pomonti.
4. Ibid.
5. Woodside, “Writers Look at the War,” p. 55.
6. New York Times, 10 October 1967.
7. Ibid.
15: The Tet Offensive
1. Newsweek, 12 February 1968.
2. William C. Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, pp. 157–164.
3. Newsweek, 12 February 1968.
4. All the information on troop movements, on Giap's plan, and on Westmoreland's own estimates come from Westmoreland's Report.
5. Westmoreland, Report, p. 160.
6. New York Times, 21 February 1968.
7. Ibid., 9 February 1968.
8. Newsweek, 12 February 1968.
9. These discussions were so general in Saigon that Ambassador Bunker and General Thieu finally had to issue statements denouncing the rumors (Washineton Port, 11 February 1968).
10. Washington Post, 1 March 1968.
11. New York Times, 15 March 1968.
12. Ibid., 8 March 1968.
13. Washington Post, 1 March 1968.
14. Observer (London), 3 March 1968. See also Westmoreland, Report p. 160
15. New York Times, 1 March 1968.
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