Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire

by Jerry Pournelle

  Thieu, in any event, never replied to Kissinger's letter, although he allowed Hung to include it in The Palace File.

  Phan Dinh Phung, after whom "my" street in Saigon was named, was a distinguished scholar, the leader of a 19th-century movement against the French. After the surrender of the boy emperor, Ham Nghi, he stubbornly continued the struggle, was betrayed, captured, and punished, according to Phan Boi Chau's History of the Downfall, in a particularly barbarous manner: the bones of his parents were dug up and burned. This story still causes the Vietnamese to shudder, I am told, despite the many new forms of barbarism they have experienced in more recent times, presumably because something more precious than Phung's corporeal existence was at stake: his spiritual links to home and homeland, to the generation of the departed and the generations to come, symbolized by the graves of his parents and the household altar where the ancestral spirits were enshrined.

  To what extent these beliefs still hold I never was able to learn, my friends in Saigon being of different minds on the subject, and there was little time to talk about such things. But it was because of these graves and altars that the Vietnamese were said to be so deeply attached to the villages they have been fleeing from in such surprising numbers since the war.

  For outsiders there is nothing more difficult than to understand and measure the persistence of old ways of thinking in evolving cultures, especially in those that are violently invaded by new ideas—first, because the point of departure, the original mind set, remains so foreign to us, and then because it is not a person whose thinking and behavior we are trying to understand, which would be complicated enough, but an infinitely various people who reflect the old and the new in an infinite variety of modes and combinations, so that we are driven to oversimplify what otherwise we would be unable to grasp at all.

  This can lead to gross misjudgments, as when Frances FitzGerald in her immensely successful Fire in the Lake (1972) argued that there was a profound harmony, an almost mystical accord, between the praxis of the Vietnamese Communists and the ancient system of values and beliefs—that Communism, in short, was not only the wave of the future in that unhappy country but also, curiously, the wave of the past.

  This book created a considerable stir, as I recall, because it was no longer merely saying that our intervention in Southeast Asia was ill-conceived and doomed, which many had said before, but that it would be a good thing if the other side won. But then it did win, and our allegedly wise and prescient adversaries, with their deep roots in Vietnamese tradition, proceeded to wreak such horrors and atrocities on their people, and on the Laotians and Cambodians as well, that the cleansing fire in FitzGerald's lake, the Communist victory in Indochina, must now be seen as it is seen by millions of prisoners and refugees: as one of the worst disasters of our time. (Not that Miss FitzGerald has ever made her apologies to the boat people, as many other former supporters of the Vietnamese Communists have done.)

  In Washington, once, I ran into Dang Duc Khoi, who used to serve on the staff of Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, and asked him to forget Frances FitzGerald's politics and tell me what he thought of her account of the old Vietnamese ethos. Generally, for reasons I feel rather than understand, the Vietnamese are loath to talk about their religion, but in this case Khoi was fairly rabid: "It's bullshit, she's got it all wrong." From which I concluded that Khoi was unable to forget Miss FitzGerald's politics, and let it go at that. Most of Fire in the Lake, after all, despite the promise of the opening chapter, is political: a rehash of the conventional wisdom of the Saigon press corps on the themes I encountered so often (since the correspondents came to see me every day) that I ended by keeping lists of them under such rubrics as VNNDG, meaning the Vietnamese Are No Damned Good, and VCTFT, meaning the Vietcong Are Ten Feet Tall, etc.—such being the foregone conclusions toward which questions, in that atmosphere, were almost always directed.

  The point here is not that the conventional wisdom was wrong, or, for that matter, right, but that it was terribly lacking in background and context. Frances FitzGerald at least began with an attempt—practically unique in the journalism of the war—to understand the Vietnamese on something like their own terms. But knowing little to begin with, unable to speak or read Vietnamese, she was obliged to go to France and sit at the feet of Paul Mus, a renowned sociologist who had spent much of his life in Indochina.

  There was no American Paul Mus, for the simple reason that we were not interested in the Vietnamese. We became intensely involved with them, perforce, but briefly; and what we learned about them was superficial and functional, as when our "grunts" learned to say dee-dee when they needed to move people in a hurry, or ba-mee-ba, when they wanted a beer. There were exceptions, of course, personal or professional, but on the whole we kept an extraordinary distance from these people, it seems to me now, even as we made our presence felt in every corner of the country. Indeed, the distance grew in direct proportion to our numbers.

  That Phan Dinh Phung gave his name to our street is of little consequence to our story, unless it served to remind us that there were other possible paths to national liberation available to the Vietnamese, before and after the rise of Ho Chi Minh's Lao Dong, or Communist party. As Western imperialism ebbed, exhausted by Europe's internecine wars, Asia experienced a rebirth of self-assertion, confused and tentative at first, pulled this way and that by ancient popular traditions and modernizing impulses, so that the Vietnamese in their struggle against the French had access to a wide range of ideas and models, from the Japan of the Meiji restoration to the Japan of the postwar constitution, from the China of the Kuomintang to the China of Mao, not to mention phenomena intellectually if not geographically more distant, from Gandhi to Nehru to Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

  What we now call Vietnam came under French colonial rule in the heyday of empire and had been subject to French cultural and economic influence for centuries. Vietnam's misfortune—and ours—was that the period of its decolonization coincided with the extraordinary vogue of Marxism among the French intelligentsia after World War II; and that the most talented and charismatic of its anti-colonial leaders, Ho Chi Minh, opted for Leninism early in his career and stuck to it as it evolved into Stalinism, brilliantly adapting its conspiratorial methods to local conditions, emulating (in the movement he forged) the energy and discipline of the Bolsheviks, their patience and also, alas, their peculiar unconcern with the consequences of their action on the people for whom, theoretically, it was undertaken. As they were the instruments of history, their conscience was always clear. Their task was neither to agonize about means nor to indulge in Utopian blue-printing of the future, but to smash the old state and set up a new one, after which they would "proceed to build socialism," as Lenin said on the evening of the October Putsch, with only the foggiest notion of what this entailed.

  So the accent of Ho Chi Minh's Lao Dong, or Communist, party was always on how to win, not on what it would do with its victory; and this helps to explain why the state the Communists wound up with in the North after the French gave up and went home remained essentially a war machine, geared and oiled and rigged for further fighting, and not much good for anything else.

  But very good for that—especially since the Soviets and the Chinese seemed prepared to fuel the machine forever. It took some hubris to imagine that the soft, slothful, disorganized South could prevail against it or even survive, unless Hanoi could be persuaded to turn its energies elsewhere. But this was unlikely. In his long march to power Ho was known by many other names, and so was the Lao Dong, but the main thrust of their action was always the same: first against their Vietnamese rivals to establish their monopoly of the revolutionary project, so that no nationalist would have anywhere else to go; and only then against the foreigner.

  The latter, whether French or American or Chinese, was condemned by the iron law of history; his departure could and should be accelerated by the dau tranh, the movement, but it was inevitable in the long run. The great thing was to e
nsure that it happened under the leadership of the anointed party, so that there could be no question, afterward, about who was in charge. Thus the Bolshevik praxis, carefully studied by Ho during his long exile in China, Moscow, and Western Europe, not only permitted but required him and his comrades to eliminate other nationalist leaders, even if this meant assassinating them or betraying them to the French police.

  The name of the game was power, undiluted, unshared—and unlike the interminable and insufferable chatter of the Frenchified intelligentsia, so busy plotting against one another in the South, it was played for keeps. Indeed, the very existence of an independent South was intolerable, and the major affair of the North, once it had secured its base, was to put an end to it. With military supplies assured and the Northern population thoroughly regimented, only tactical concerns dictated prudence for a time. But all this, as my friend Khoi used to say, was connu et archi-connu, "clear beyond a shadow of a doubt," except to the contemporary versions of Lenin's "useful idiots" in the West.

  He might have added that there were useful idiots in Saigon, too. The South was at once indubitably Vietnamese and indubitably different, and the number and quality of Southerners who said vive la difference were such that the Lao Dong was obliged for the moment to concoct an elaborate lie about its intentions, especially after news of how the common folk in the North were faring under Communist rule—stories of famine and bloody repression—began to seep through the bamboo curtain. Hence the creation of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and its military arm, the Vietcong, every unit (as we now know from Hanoi itself) carefully controlled by its core of Lao Dong cadres; and the constantly reiterated promise that the South, until it rallied spontaneously to Communism, would be allowed to go its own way.

  Connu et archi-connu! Instructed by experience, the Northerners who had fled to the South—now grown to more than a million—could hardly be expected to fall for this line, but there were others (increasingly as the Diem government disappointed and outraged them) who believed it and others who joined the NLF, or supported it for one reason or another, without believing it or half-believing it or simply hoping that something would happen to make it come true—enough of them to start the war against the South that was as fatal to them in the end as it was to the declared enemies of the Lao Dong.

  So much for ancient history—and by way of explaining why the street of Hung's family was called Phan Dinh Phung. Most of the streets of central Saigon were renamed after the French left in honor of the heroes and slogans of the independence movement, ancient and modern, which the Republic of Vietnam claimed to incarnate in defiance of Hanoi. The republic's writ, to be sure, did not run everywhere in the South. During the Buddhist troubles of 1963 it did not always run the full length of Phan Dinh Phung. But now that South Vietnam had got rid of the nefarious and incompetent Diem and his brother—so I was told in Washington and Honolulu when I was briefed for my new assignment—it would pull itself together with our help and offer a haven to the nationalist forces that the Communists had repressed or extinguished in the North: to Catholics and Buddhists, political parties like the Dai Viet and VNQDD, as well as to the Southern sects and ethnic groups, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, the Chams and Khmers and Montagnards, that had either survived the age-old drift of the Vietnamese from the Red River delta toward the Mekong, or sprung up during the past hundred years under French imperial rule.

  Arriving in Saigon in January 1965, with no inkling of the chaos we had unleashed by sponsoring the overthrow of Diem two years earlier, I thought it a reasonable proposition that, given time and tranquillity, the republic should be able to survive and enhance the world's varietal richness. The South had always been Vietnam's New Found Land or, more recently, its California, offering room and resources for all, and now—the curtain having come down in the North—a promise of freedom. It was a promise as yet more honored in the breach, to be sure, but the republic was barely seven years old and under siege from the day it was born. This much I had gathered from what I had heard and been able to read during the long journey from Geneva to Washington and then to Honolulu and Saigon.

  Memory has a way of proliferating; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. The point I was making to begin with was simply that I had forgotten the name of Phan Dinh Phung. And the point of my point, no doubt, was that this was the manner of our involvement in Vietnam. In a few short years, a moment on the scale of history, we went from total obsession to a sort of amnesia. The map of that country was once engraved in our minds, and most of us now can no longer remember whether Hué, the old imperial capital, is north or south of Danang. But of course we cannot leave it at that.

  Soon after my arrival, I was shocked to discover that the Communists controlled most of the countryside, in some cases outright, in others functioning as a sort of shadow government alongside the nominal authorities; and they were growing increasingly bold in the cities, where the junta of generals who had overthrown Diem had been pushed aside by Nguyen Khanh, an inept and buffoonish fellow who had been helped to power by an inveterate plotter named Thao.

  Under General Khanh the remains of the administration so carefully constructed by Diem and his brother (also murdered in the coup) were dismantled, and any notion that there might be a respectable civilian alternative was rudely put down, so that the Southerners began to suspect with astonishment and terror what was in fact the case: that they were now adrift, and that those who had destroyed Diem's government had done so without the faintest idea of what was to take its place—except, being military men already accustomed to receiving their equipment, munitions, and training from us, that the Americans would provide.

  But the Americans, for the moment, had nothing but military assistance to provide. They were willing and at that stage apparently even impatient to wage war, but aside from mouthing platitudes about freedom and justice and winning hearts and minds, and a generous readiness to bear the expense, they had no clue about how to rebuild a South Vietnamese polity. They simply had not thought that far ahead, nor did they think it their business, even now, so that years would pass before a group of the more reasonable army officers—the most capable of whom was Nguyen Van Thieu—would be able to put something viable together.

  Two incidents come back to focus the absurd disorder of that time. In the first I am walking down a broad boulevard with Howard Simpson, an embassy officer who (being slated for transfer) is bequeathing to me some of his functions and what little he can of his vast experience, having served several tours of duty in Vietnam, beginning with one in the early 50's. Suddenly down the road comes a column of tanks and armored trucks, with an odd-looking Vietnamese officer standing in the turret of the lead tank, and Simpson stops short at the sight of him.

  "Thao, you old bastard," he yells. "What's up?"

  The officer, who is wall-eyed, pudgy, and grinning, raises his hand, stops the column, and shouts back: "Howie! How you?"

  "Never mind how me! What in hell are you doing?"

  "Nothing special, Howie. I am making a coup!"

  He pronounced the p in coup, presumably to make it clear to a benighted American. And then the column moved on. What happened to the coup I do not recall. Those first weeks in Saigon were hectic, this being the period when the Vietnamese seemed to be coming up with a new government with each new phase of the moon. But far from being considered an amiable lunatic, Thao—who came of a wealthy Southern Catholic family and had a brother high in the apparatus of the Lao Dong in Hanoi—had an extraordinary talent for ingratiating himself with every faction. And throughout all this Thao held important posts in the South Vietnamese government and remained close to certain elements of the American establishment, especially the CIA—until, after Khanh fell, he was identified as an enemy agent by officers of Thieu's military security, tracked down, and killed. Ten years later the new Communist masters of Saigon confirmed that he had been one of theirs and proclaimed him a national hero, although there are South Vietnamese nationalists, I've been told,
who still believe that he was playing a double game: a Machiavellian romantic, they say, who had read too much André Malraux.

  What the CIA concluded, if anything, I never found out, but there must have been many in the agency, as there were elsewhere in the American establishment in Saigon, who were not surprised at the rapid disintegration of the republic in 1964 and 1965. These were people—the most eminent being Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins, the predecessors of Lodge and Westmoreland—who had warned that by intervening as we did, with no assurance that anything better would follow the removal of Diem, we were creating a huge vacuum and assuming a responsibility for which we were quite unprepared. And this of course is exactly what happened. In the confusion that resulted, phenomena like Thao and Khanh flourished briefly while the Vietcong all but completed their conquest of the countryside and began (but still prudently) to strengthen their urban networks.

  And this brings me to my second epiphany—a sad little joke told by my old friend Bui Diem, who was later to serve as Vietnamese ambassador in Washington. In his memoirs, Bui Diem[ In the Jaws of History, by Bui Diem with David Chanoff, Houghton Mifflin, 1987] confesses that he had supported the overthrow of Diem in the hope and expectation that it would be followed (at our insistence, if necessary) by the creation of a constitutional government to which, he believes, the great majority of the South Vietnamese would have rallied. Instead, he says, the amorphous junta drifted "from incompetence to incompetence" and the stage was set for "a firm hand at the helm" which Khanh, if only because he was willing to act at that moment, was simply assumed to be: