by Laura Lam
This injection by the United States, of a President for the South, chosen for his family history of service to the colonial French, was taken by the Nationalists as a slap in the face.
For the minority group of French collaborators, the converted Catholics, and those who sought new political opportunity to gain personal status and wealth, this was an excellent chance to exploit the changing situation and to cultivate the incoming power. They would cooperate and advance themselves under the Diem regime. My granduncles Hai and Cuong, and Cuong’s son-in-law had been contacted by the network of Colonel Edward Lansdale with offers of attractive positions in the ARVN regime. Negotiations between Landsdale and various Vietnamese groups and individuals had taken place while the Americans were still organizing for Ngo Dinh Diem to assume power. Cuong would never accept any such offer. But Hai did and became deputy chief of the city of Can Tho. Cuong’s son-in-law became one of Diem’s ministers – with the condition that he would convert to Catholicism before taking the post. For my uncle Nam, this situation was also favourable in shaping his military career. He was promoted to major shortly after his superior became Diem’s most trusted colonel. In the mid 1960’s Nam was promoted to colonel. During the height of the American War, he became deeply involved in the “Operation Phoenix” (Chien Dich Phung Hoang), which raised the level of aggression against the “Viet Cong” to an unprecedented ferocity. This left Nam marked for assassination by his enemies.
* * *
As for my father, in 1949, the French authorities appointed him to the Economic Committee in our home district of Long My. He was put in charge of issuing permits for the transportation of rice and other commodities in the area. He stayed at this position until mid- 1954. Granduncle Cuong was based in the Mekong Delta during this same period to oversee the medical services for the Viet Minh army in the southern war zone.
After the Geneva Agreement, the Viet Minh had left themselves with fallback positions, in case the breaches of faith they suspected turned out to be justified. While the regrouping of Viet Minh forces (Tap Ket) and moving them to the North was taking place, Ho Chi Minh left certain members in the South, undercover, to await the unfolding of events and to gather intelligence. My father was one of those. The permission for him to stay was given on account of his being the only child responsible for an aging mother.
In the autumn of 1954, my father started teaching at a village school he set up himself. It consisted of one huge classroom in a vacant palm-leaf hut that had been used earlier to shelter buffaloes at night. The hut had no walls. The ground was covered with dried hay. Wooden tables and benches were donated by Uncle Phan and other villagers. This was the only school for the whole village. Since the classroom was not big enough to accommodate all the students, several had to sit on the ground outside the hut while listening to lectures. Some students brought their own reed mat or cushion to school. Each day I collected my father at the school and escorted him home for lunch. I was only four years old but determined to go on my own; my paternal grandmother was equally determined to protect me. We compromised, “Little Hoa Lai, I will take you as far as the monkey bridge, and I will cross over with you. But I won’t go any further.” So she would wait at the foot of the bridge. From her vantage point, my grandmother could follow my passage along the rice paddies to the school and watch us make our way back.
My father would return to his afternoon class on his own, while I had an afternoon nap. In the evening, before sunset, I would always be waiting at our front gate with something for him -- a banana, a mango, a piece of watermelon, or a stick of sugar cane.
He never received any fees for his teaching. The village people were too poor. Yet they felt their children must at least learn how to read and write, and so from time to time they gave him tokens to show their gratitude – a live fish, a live chicken or duck, a bunch of cucumbers, a basket of fruits, a bag of homemade cookies.
Deeply influenced by Confucianism, the Vietnamese have always made education a central part of their lives. However, by 1930 – after eighty years under the French regime – only fifteen percent of schoolage children were receiving any kind of schooling. Eighty-five percent of the population therefore was illiterate. For a population of twenty million, there was only one university, in Ha Noi, with seven hundred students. During colonial times the entire country could count on only three high schools for the Vietnamese and three for the French themselves. That meant three schools for ninety-nine percent of the population and three for the remaining one percent. As my father once commented, “So much for the French preaching of egalité.” It is worth noting that in 2000, less than half a century after the French were thrown out of Viet Nam, the country enjoyed a literacy rate greater than ninety percent.
In May 1955 the administration of the new Diem regime set up a village council for Truong An and insisted that it be staffed with Catholics. The regime also ordered the construction of four Catholic churches – an amazing number just for Truong An. We were all expected to convert to Catholicism. The village was considered a stronghold of the Nationalist forces – the “Viet Cong”, which the regime was determined to wipe out. In addition to its role of running the village, the council was formed to keep an eye on “enemies of the people” and to pass on the names of suspects to the intelligence services of the ARVN police.
From the entire population of Truong An – with forty-five hundred people – not a single person volunteered for a seat on the council. For one thing, no one wanted to convert. For another, everyone feared the Viet Minh.
The district chief of Long My, himself a Catholic, knew and liked my father and summoned him.
“How would you yourself like to be the head of the Truong An council?” he asked him.
My father declined most diplomatically. “I don’t think there is any way that would work,” he said. “I’m not a Catholic and my family would refuse to let me convert. But you’re Catholic and, more important, all the military at Constance Garrison are Catholics too. Do you really believe they will deal with a council led by a non-Catholic?”
The district chief had looked high and low for a suitable candidate and had failed to find one. His superiors in Sai Gon were growing impatient.
“Let me see what I can do,” my father said. “I will report to you again.”
In fact, my father saw this as an opportunity not to be wasted. The first man he approached refused him categorically but the second, an elderly friend called Quang, appealed to his reason. “If I take the job,” he told my father, “you know what will happen. The Viet Minh will throw grenades at my house. I have a family. What do you expect?”
My father thought Quang could be convinced. He and his family were Catholics. There were protracted secret negotiations and my father succeeded in obtaining a Viet Minh guarantee of Quang’s safety. Quang took the job. As part of the agreement, my father became the council’s financial secretary. I remember Quang as a pleasant and soft-spoken man, who was quickly able to fill out the other places on the council to the satisfaction not only of the district chief but the Viet Minh too.
* * *
Under the new ARVN regime, my family’s experiences were similar to those of most Vietnamese living in the South. First was the frustration with a puppet government abusing basic human rights – such as the right to vote. The general population had nothing but contempt for the intolerance and favouritism associated with Catholicism. The overt religious preference was a bitter and costly reminder of the Vietnamese people’s subjugation under the French and a pedantic platform from which to attack Buddhism. Second was the indiscriminate use of arrest, imprisonment, torture, and summary execution. People lived in fear. The regime’s aggression was not just limited to obvious political targets but also struck the common people. It began with the merciless implementation of the Strategic Hamlets program and was followed by the growing number of direct raids on villages as the war escalated.
Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in November 1963. There w
as a succession of several “Diem like” governments consisting of the same men who had served under the Diem regime. President Johnson believed that South Viet Nam could not hold off what he and other American political leaders and policymakers saw as an inevitable Communist victory. In pure political terms, the American president had no choice but to escalate America’s military involvement. In 1965 there were two hundred thousand American combat troops in Viet Nam. In 1966 the number had increased to four hundred thousand. Following the Tet Offensive in 1968, despite the rise of domestic protests against the “Vietnam War”, the American government continued to send additional troops to stave off a “total fall” of the region to Communist-backed forces. By the end of the year, the US Army’s strength in Viet Nam reached more than half a million personnel.
The tragic irony of America’s military adventure in Viet Nam lies in the fact that the two countries were fighting different wars. The Americans were fighting to contain a communist monster they saw as intent on world domination and enslavement to the State. The Vietnamese, in contrast, were fighting to reclaim their right to self-determination and self-rule, a war of independence. From the perspective of the Vietnamese, how Viet Nam would be governed and whether it would prosper were not issues for “outsiders” to decide. For them, the issue focused on the decisive return of its “self-evident” right to be free from imperialist domination. In waging their crusade against Communism, the Americans were seen as new imperialists clinging to an old position.
The effects on American morale from this political disconnect would become apparent. American soldiers could not understand what they were doing in Viet Nam and why they were fighting. They could not adjust to a climate of extreme heat and humidity and persistent rain. And far more lethal than the enemy were the jungles. These terrains were infested with poisonous snakes, blood sucking leeches, scorpions, malaria carrying mosquitoes, ticks, and invisible but equally deadly parasites. This same condition had earlier been observed by Professor Michael Bodin in his evaluation of the French military in Viet Nam, “The failure of members of the Expeditionary Corps to adapt to the natural and human condition of Indochina often appeared to be the essential element in France’s overall failure.”
To cope with fear and anxiety in a foreign territory, opium and heroin addiction would come to affect a third of American troops by 1971. Mindless bombing and senseless deaths would rock their morale. Back in the United States, opposition to the war mushroomed as stories of atrocity leaked out. The financial cost to continue a foreign war would sky rocket and the general population would have to make sacrifices. Eventually, the Americans were forced to find a means of exit. Before doing so America would lose fifty-eight thousand lives and three hundred thousand injured in combat. America’s international prestige, as well as its national pride, suffered heavily as a result of backing a losing regime and engaging a resolute enemy.
Fighting America’s “Vietnam War”, President Nixon had boasted about American superior military power:
Today there are well over a million men on our side. The United States air power is 1,000 to 1 over the enemy’s. Our ground fire superiority is at least 10 to 1. The enemy has a few tanks, practically no planes, no warships, and only a fraction of the material resources available to the US.
By the end of the war in 1975, American forces would drop eight million tons of explosives on Viet Nam’s soil. In addition, seventyfive million litres of defoliants were poured over Viet Nan’s agricultural lands, jungles, and villages. The American War killed three million Vietnamese civilians and wounded at least four million others. The Americans succeeded in eliminating no more than two hundred thousand Nationalist fighters – the “Viet Cong”. To the majority of the Vietnamese, it appeared that achieving a maximum level of destruction to the country and its people had been America’s ultimate, if not only, goal.
General Curtis Lemay, the US Air Force Chief of Staff during the war, had said to American troops in Viet Nam, “If you kill enough of them, they’ll stop fighting.” His policy of mass destruction with advance military technology was implemented indiscriminately. An example was the campaign against North Viet Nam from March 1965 to November 1968 under “Operation Rolling Thunder.” The air strikes went on daily for three and a half years, dropping a million tons of bombs, and eight hundred tons of rockets and missiles. In 1966 alone, the Americans conducted seven thousand air raids against roads, five thousand against vehicles, and more than a thousand against railroad yards. The American strategy was to weaken the morale of the Nationalist fighters. However, to the surprise and disappointment of Washington, this failed. As General William Westmoreland later noted, “[there seems to be] no indication that the resolve of leadership in Ha Noi has been reduced.”
Robert McNamara – as Secretary of Defense, the principal American architect of the “Vietnam War” – finally confessed his errors of judgment, in his memoir on the tragedy and lessons of Viet Nam:
We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.
He eventually realized, as the US campaign began to rot from the inside, both on the battlefield and in the campuses back home, that the fighting had no publicly acceptable moral purpose. Even many soldiers lost faith in America’s mission in Viet Nam; within five years after the war, nine thousand returning American veterans had committed suicide.
With jungle warfare, the Americans also learned that their troops had not only failed to cope with the terrain conditions, but also to match the skills and courage of Vietnamese fighters. The French had already learned this costly and painful lesson.
SCENTS OF WAR
The submerged country, river and rice field, is a battleground
How can people enjoy wood cutting and fuel gathering?
I charge you, sir, not to talk of high honours
A general achieves fame on the rotting bones of ten thousand
Tsao Sung
I went to my first school at age five. The classroom was attached to the house of an elderly friend of my father, Mr Can. He was also my teacher. There were seven students in the class, some were much older than me, who learned how to read and write for the first time. My mother had expected me to write well in the first few weeks and she became irritated every time she looked at my handwriting. I wasn’t able to write g, p, q and y properly and they looked like crawling snakes, she said. One evening, while checking my homework, she hit my head very hard with her fist and said I was stupid. My head hurt so much and I told my grandmother, who was furious with my mother. They had a big argument that night. Less than six months later Mr Can’s house was destroyed by an ARVN raid. It was the same raid that burnt our house and reduced all of my grandmother’s furniture to ashes.
A new school was opened north of the village and my father sent me there. It was in the middle of a meadow. The roof and walls were made of water palm leaves and golden bamboo. There was one large classroom, with two windows overlooking beds of wild flowers. Uncle Phan had volunteered to make some new tables and benches. The rest were donated by other villagers. On the wall behind the teacher’s desk was a long blackboard, in a beautiful bamboo frame. A large map of Viet Nam, donated by my father, was hung on the next wall, at the teacher’s right. There were twenty students in my class, mostly Vietnamese with a few Cambodians. Several students were too poor and couldn’t afford to buy supplies for school. They made their own pens by sharpening bamboo sticks with a knife. Their pots of ink were also homemade. All our notebooks were beige, with a rough texture, no lines, and quite thick. When my father returned to the village for a visit he provided me with proper tools for writing. Father also gave each of my classmates a new pen. My two best girl friends at this school were Cambodians and we loved to play hide and seek. The surrounding greenery was a great playground for us; sometimes we ran past
rows of shady coconut palm trees and hid in a giant bamboo hedge.
Our teacher’s name was Cong. We all called him Thay-- an honorary term used only when speaking to a father, a teacher, a senior Buddhist monk, or a prominent astrologer. I’d been in school only a week, when Thay visited our house. To my great relief, he told my mother, “Your daughter is very bright and she possesses a remarkable memory, Madame! I am very pleased to have her in class. Great parents often produce intelligent offsprings!” For a brief moment I thought I saw my mother’s expression of pride. Then I heard her saying to the teacher, “I will leave all the teaching and discipline to you, Thay! And please don’t hesitate to beat her with a stick when necessary. She is quite stubborn sometimes.” I was standing at a corner in the back room and pretended I didn’t hear anything. I knew my mother would not want me to feel proud of myself.
My earliest lessons began with the writing and reading of Viet Nam’s national language, Quoc Ngu. Thay explained to us that Vietnamese had originally been written in complex Chinese characters. The language had been transcribed into the Roman alphabet by a French Jesuit, Alexandre de Rhodes, in 1628, to facilitate the teaching of Catholicism. The effort of conversion failed for the majority of the Vietnamese – much to the disappointment of the French missionaries – but Quoc Ngu today remains the official written language.
At age seven I started to learn mathematics, geography, and history, as well as poetry reading and composition. History and poetry were my favourites and I was also good at mathematics. Thay had a textbook for each subject but we students only had notebooks. We never owned a printed book of any kind. For me the classroom was like heaven, insulated from the tension and misery that had become routine in my home life. School, furthermore, was the place I could excel and where I was never condemned as an “idiot.”