The Father of All Things

by Tom Bissell

  Shortly after Saigon's fall, a Communist official exhorted the city's worried masses not to worry, that the only people who had been defeated were “the American imperialists…. Anyone with Vietnamese blood should take pride in this common victory of the whole nation. You, the people of Saigon, are now the masters of your own city.” But Truong Chinh, one of North Vietnam's most bloodthirsty ideologues, soon announced that the Party would “level” all differences between the North and South. The “poisonous weeds” of capitalism had to be pulled up and burned. In this way the long and ongoing process of Communist refurbishment began.

  One can guess with minimum imagination most of what the Communists did after reunification. First they banned all books whose titles did not include the words “Ho,” “Lenin,” “Marx,” or “Communism.” Then they emptied the libraries. Absolutely. This was done right away. Then they got to work on the schoolbooks. Some Soviet educators were brought in to help out, since properly removing all the facts from history can be challenging. Next the Communists closed all Buddhist pagodas. Every single one of them. Then, in every city but especially in Saigon, the Communists renamed many of the streets and parks and buildings and schools. Freedom Street was renamed General Uprising Street (leading to the common Saigonese joke “After the General Uprising we lost our Freedom”), and so on. In Saigon, though, the Communists did keep a few of the French street and school names. Pasteur, for instance. He was a nice man. And Marie Curie. She won the Nobel Prize. But the rest had to go. Then came the reeducation camps. The Party has always stressed that it never carried out the “bloodbath” promised by the U.S. and Saigon governments and that it “treated with clemency not only the Vietnamese who collaborated with the enemy, but also military prisoners.” That would depend on how one defined “clemency.” It would also depend on how one defined “bloodbath.” Most scholars believe that 5,000 South Vietnamese military and civil officials were executed outright for “crimes against the people” in the aftermath of reunification. Considering the length and viciousness of the war, this is not a shocking number. The number of people sent to reeducation camps is another matter. Despite Ho's statement during the war that the “puppet soldiers are also sons of Vietnam,” the first year of the South's liberation saw at least 300,000 Vietnamese being told to report for a month of hoc tap, or political reeducation. Bags were meagerly packed, families kissed goodbye—but none of these people returned after a month. Most did not return after a year. While a relatively small number of people were killed in the camps and surprisingly few were tortured, the conditions were brutal: starvation rations, no contact with loved ones, forced labor. These 300,000 reeducated souls, a chagrined former minister of justice was careful to stress, were all notable South Vietnamese officials. In other words, the figure did not “include people who were arrested in the sweeps by government organs and military authorities that terrorized Saigon and the provinces during that period.” The number of these less prominent reeducated South Vietnamese may be more than a million.

  Two kinds of people had it the worst in the camps: those employed by ARVN's psychological warfare department, and writers. Scholars inclined to forgive Vietnam's Communist regime claim that 90 percent of those who survived reeducation were released by 1978. This is debated. The Vietnamese offered to empty their reeducation camps in 1982 and send everyone to the United States, but when the United States could not promise that those released would not discuss reeducation camp conditions, the offer was rescinded. Throughout the 1980s, former ARVN generals were still being set free. In 1988 alone, eleven were released. At any rate, with reeducation fully under way, the Vietnamese Communists then decided to collectivize the country's agriculture. In the past many Communist countries had collectivized their agriculture, which is to say that many Communist countries had abolished the private ownership of land and turned it all over to the state. The end result of nearly every Communist collectivization known to history had been famine and misery. This was widely known by the time the Vietnamese were planning collectivization. Famine and misery followed the collectivization of Vietnamese agriculture.

  The Party's vision for its reunified nation also had less classically dogmatic aspects. For instance, morning exercise. The Vietnamese Communist Party decreed that all people had to wake up at six, walk out into the street, and engage in morning exercise. The Communists also decreed that people everywhere in Vietnam had to sit through all movies until the very end. Then, for the fun of it, they banned all of South Vietnam's most popular musicians, even those who were not political, even some who had supported the insurgency. Then the Communists began to destroy the cemeteries of the 200,000 ARVN war dead. Yes, they destroyed cemeteries—just as the South Vietnamese had destroyed Viet Minh war memorials in the 1950s. These ARVN soldiers’ names, units, and identities were lost forever, their bodies interred beneath stones engraved only with UNKNOWN or PUPPETS. The North's war dead, known as MARTYRS, were buried in grand cemeteries that government volunteers were instructed to keep meticulously clean. The mothers of these soldiers received lifelong pensions, free health care. The mothers of ARVN soldiers received nothing, and for years many were denied basic government services. Then the Communists banned the ao dai. The ao dai is a ceremonial, somewhat kitschy garment worn by Vietnamese women. Its roots are in the ancient past, but its modern design— swooshy silk pantaloons beneath a bright tight dress that is slit up the side so that it reveals a tiny triangle of waist flesh—comes from the 1930s. The ao dai, both extremely revealing and extremely discreet, is by general consensus one of the world's sexier garments. Nevertheless, the Communists banned that too. No ao dais. They also banned ancestor worship, the most important and widely shared form of religious devotion in Vietnam. That had to go. Then they tried preventing families from selling pho, the national dish of Vietnam, from homemade stalls. Most of Vietnam's traditional foods were frowned upon by the Communists for years. Instead eat this imported Bulgarian cabbage. Have this good Communist borscht. Then they banned martial arts.

  On most of these forbiddances and edicts it took the Party a decade to lighten up. Amazing. It was truly amazing to me, as I lay there. Obviously, no one had been expecting reunification to be candy and sunshine. But rather than encouraging the most educated and highly trained remaining citizens of South Vietnam to work with them to lift up their devastated country, as most were prepared to do, the Communists, with their vindictiveness, drove a million Vietnamese away and ruined the lives of millions more. And that was not all. Just as no statues honor the puppets, none, astonishingly, honor the National Liberation Front—that is, the Viet Cong. Late in Frances FitzGerald's 1972 Fire in the Lake, one finds this passage:

  With North Vietnamese help the NLF has fought the United States for over a decade and remained undefeated. Standing in the place of all Vietnamese, it has carried on the tradition of [the fifteenth-century patriot] Le Loi and those other Vietnamese heroes who waged the millennium-long struggle against foreign domination. … Their victory would not be the victory of one foreign power over another but the victory of the Vietnamese people— northerners and southerners alike…. [I]t is possible that success might cause the revolutionary movement to disintegrate, just as it all but dissolved the Liberation Front in Algeria. But it seems unlikely.

  FitzGerald's somewhat disquieting enthusiasm for the NLF failed to foresee the possibility that what would dissolve the NLF would be not victory but the leadership of North Vietnam.

  It is not out of fussiness that I refer to the NLF rather than the Viet Cong. Viet Cong, or Vietnamese Communist, is actually not correct, as the Front was not an exclusively Communist movement. Most NLF guerrillas would not have known the dialectic from a diacritic. The secret ruling core of the NLF was ardently Communist—its public ruling core was composed of various left-wing insignificants—but the Front was given its name by its masters in North Vietnam to avoid alienating South Vietnam's non-Communist nationalists.

  Even Ho Chi Minh was sometimes ir
ritated by the independent-mindedness of the South's insurgents, complaining in 1949 about their excessive individualism. The NLF also had many factions, which troubled the North's leadership. Many in the North believed that the NLF was undisciplined. Here the old men of Hanoi had a point. There are on record numerous NLF desertions to the South (overseen by the Chieu Hoi, or “Open Arms,” amnesty program, which racked up an amazing 47,000 deserters in 1969 alone) but hardly any recorded desertions from the North Vietnamese Army. The NLF, for its part, never forgave the northern leadership for the Tet Offensive, the military failure of which nearly wiped out the NLF—particularly a useless second offensive Hanoi ordered months after it was clear that the first assault had resulted in a massacre.

  So when in 1975 NLF members joyously rushed to fly the Front's colors from Saigon's Presidential Palace flagpole, it would prove premature. While Ton Due Thang, Ho Chi Minh's elderly successor as president of North Vietnam, said publicly in Saigon that “the whole Vietnamese people will share a new happiness,” it soon became obvious that the North Vietnamese intended no such happiness sharing. As Truong Nhu Tang, a prominent NLF leader who later went into exile, wrote, “our police and security were being handled exclusively by various [North Vietnamese] departments.” Tang does note that this “was not a new development” but goes on to say that “before … we had been involved in a common struggle, in which our organizations had faced severe manpower and expertise shortages. Now, with victory, it was somehow different.” North Vietnam's staunch Maoist Truong Chinh quickly made it known to NLF members that they “had no further role to play,” in Tang's words. These NLF men and women, who had joined the insurgency out of belief and desperation, who had suffered and died by the hundred thousand, were no longer important. They were, Tang writes, an “obstacle” to what he bitterly calls the North's own “imperialistic revolution.” Tang writes finally that “there was no way to swallow the gall in our mouths or to shrug off the shroud that had settled on our souls. We knew finally that we had been well and truly sold.” Tang's NLF comrades would bring up the rear in the victory parade after the liberation of Saigon.

  Only in the late 1980s did the betrayals of many who had aided the Party's long grasp for power begin to come to light in Vietnamese society. One Party veteran who had defected to the West while ostensibly getting medical treatment in East Germany wrote scathingly of how the “Le Duan clique” had betrayed Ho Chi Minh's revolution. Duan, a jug-eared neo-Stalinist who after Ho's death went to great lengths to encourage the Uncle Ho personality cult, had in actual fact worked to isolate Ho politically in the last decade of his life, even purging some of Uncle's allies. Other former Party luminaries—among them Bui Tin (the northern colonel who accepted President Minh's surrender in 1975), Hoang Minh Chinh (a war hero), and Nguyen Ho (an early comrade of Le Duan who memorably wondered how Vietnam could reconcile with the United States but not itself: “Are dollars the condition for reconciliation?”)—emerged as critics both within and without Vietnam in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Former NLF Colonel Pham Xuan An (who doubled as a Time magazine correspondent during the war) spoke for many NLF veterans when he said, “All that talk about ‘liberation’ twenty, thirty, forty years ago, all the plotting, and all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished, broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists.” Unfortunately, these critics were quickly brushed aside by the obedient Vietnamese press, occasionally jailed by the authorities, only fitfully noticed by the Vietnamese public, and largely ignored by much of the West.

  Meanwhile, a block away, a frozen child lay across the frozen lap of the frozen icon who had founded this frozen government that my poor father had fought a doomed, misguided war in order to prevent. It was going to be an interesting trip.

  Query: Was Ho Chi Minh a Stalinist?

  In Ho Chi Minh we have a man playful enough to have sent messages to his staff members in the form of paper airplanes and ruthless enough to have said of his purged and executed friend Ta Thu Thao, “All those who do not follow the line that I have set out will be smashed.” In the view of Ho's longtime comrade Pham Van Dong, “Ho Chi Minh is high but not far; new but not strange; great but does not make up greatness…. Seeing him for the first time, one has a feeling that one knew him long ago.” One American agent of the pre-CIA Office of Strategic Services (OSS) remembered Ho this way: “If I had to pick out the one quality about that little old man sitting on his hill in the jungle, it was his gentleness.” The French diplomat lean Sainteny, who unsuccessfully negotiated with Ho to prevent the outbreak of the First Indochina War, claimed his Vietnamese counterpart was a man “of the highest caliber … [with] his intelligence, his vast culture and total unselfishness.” A description of Ho Chi Minh from a French intelligence dossier: “Fearless, sly, clever, deceptive, ruthless—and deadly.” As an American psychological warfare expert in Saigon once complained to a journalist, “You know, it's damned difficult to go out and tell people to hate a guy who looks like a half-starved Santa Claus.”

  Ho Chi Minh: Che Guevara with an epicanthic fold? Who else has been compared to Lenin and Gandhi? Probably the most rhapsodic mainstream Western appraisal of Ho remains David Halberstam's 1971 biography: “In his lifetime Ho had not only liberated his own country and changed the course of colonial rule in both Africa and Asia, he had done something even more remarkable; he had touched the culture and soul of his enemy.” The least favorable recent look at Ho (which angrily cites the above passage) comes in Michael Lind's fiercely argued 1999 polemic Vietnam: The Necessary War, in which Ho Chi Minh is “Stalin's Vietnamese disciple.”

  Ho Chi Minh (Chinese for “he who brings enlightenment”) was the final identity of a complicated man. Like the wispy beard he would make famous, the name was initially taken up as a disguise. He was born Nguyen Sinh Cung, renamed by his parents Nguyen Tat Thanh, left Saigon on a French steamship in 1911 as Van Ba, made his revolutionary name abroad as Nguyen Ai Quoc, attacked the French in pamphlets as Nguyen o Phap, traveled to the USSR as Chen Vang, served as a Soviet translator as Ly Thuy, wrote articles for the Soviet press as Nilovsky, infiltrated rival Vietnamese revolutionary groups as Wang Shan-yi, traveled in Siam as Father Chin, worked in Hong Kong as L. M. Vuong, was arrested in Hong Kong as T. V. Wong, was interrogated in Hong Kong as Song Man Cho, served China's People's Liberation Army as Major Hu Guang, wrote inflammatory anti-French articles as P. C. Line, chaired the Vietnam National Liberation Committee as Hoang Quojun, picked up in a Chinese prison the name Hu Lao Bo, fought the Japanese as Mr. Hoo, worked as a U.S. agent in World War II under the code name Lucius, attacked the United States in the North Vietnamese press as CD., and finally wrote biographies of himself as Tran Dan Tien. There are more aliases, but one gets the idea. In a file somewhere there is an old visa request for one Ho Ting-ching, whom the U.S. Office of War Information wanted to send to San Francisco to broadcast pro-American propaganda in Vietnamese during the early 1940s. Just as Fidel Castro failed his tryout for the Washington Senators, this idea was rejected. Ho Ting-ching, or Ho Chi Minh, had a different appointment with fate.

  Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890 in a three-room hut to a low-level imperial bureaucrat father and a literate storytelling mother in the central province of Nghe An. According to Ho's biographer William J. Duiker, Nghe An's people are “known as the most obdurate and rebellious of Vietnamese,” and, in time, they would rebel against even Ho Chi Minh. Educated in French schools in Vinh (a city whose population U.S. bombing would decades later literally reduce to zero) and Hue, Ho engaged in his first political activity when he offered his translation services to a crowd of peasants seeking redress from the French authorities. In return the young man received several wallops from an intemperate French policeman's baton. Ho got off easy: within hours the French opened fire into the crowd. The next day at Ho's school French officials turned up looking for a “tall dark student” who had been involved in the demonstration. Ho was expelled that day, wandered the co
untryside for months, earned money by teaching Chinese and martial arts, and, after taking a trade school course in pastry cooking, ultimately hopped a steamship out of Saigon and traveled around the world, eventually mastering seven of its languages. Whether he was in Africa, the Americas, Asia, or Europe, Ho Chi Minh noticed black and brown and yellow men laboring beneath European whips (he also claimed, somewhat dubiously, to have seen a KKK lynching in the American South), and those experiences created in him the realization that Vietnam was merely one flower in a planetary garden of human exploitation.

  But was he a Stalinist? By the time Ho was thirty he was living in Paris and had become a founding member of the French Communist Party, the only group that took his critiques of colonialism seriously. As World War I ended, Ho wrote his first, fairly moderate tract, “Demands of the Annamite People” (“Annam” being the French protectorate that today corresponds to the central third of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam), and attempted to bring it before President Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. Despite what one historian has heartbreakingly described as Ho's “spiffy suit” (it was a rental), Ho failed to catch Wilson's eye. Ho went on to publish “Demands” in several Socialist magazines under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc, or Nguyen Who Loves His Nation. The French police figured out that Nguyen Ai Quoc was actually Nguyen Tat Thanh, the expelled radical from Hue who had disappeared several years before, and began to track him. (Ho sometimes left notes for his pursuers cheekily outlining his day's itinerary.)