by Tom Bissell
After Tu Due's death in 1883, Hue's throne was occupied by a series of young monarchs—one ruled for a day, another killed himself within months of becoming ruler, one died mysteriously, another was all of twelve years old—which made conquering the remainder of Vietnam occasionally literal child's play for France. When China (the nation that in Vietnam's history plays the twin role of opportunistic ally and meddling kraken intent on extending its tentacles south) abandoned Vietnam to France's designs in 1885, Vietnam's native resistance was weakened considerably, though some clashes between insurgents and French soldiers remained fierce. One of the nastiest battles took place shortly after Tu Due's death. As French warships sat anchored near Hue, a French official warned Due's successor, “Imagine all that is terrible and it will still be less than reality. The word ‘Vietnam’ will be erased from history.” Once the ships’ cannons began to lay waste to Hue, the city quickly surrendered. Two years later, another burp of resistance led to Hue's second destruction at French hands. As for erasing Vietnam, the French were as good as their word: “Vietnam” did cease to exist, and a three-zoned colonial entity made up of regions known as Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China replaced it. The brutal French promise of national erasure brings to mind U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay's thought from 1965 that, when it came to Vietnam, “We could bomb them into the Stone Age.” These echoes abound. The following statements, for instance, both concern Vietnam—but who said them, and when?
“When our soldiers are again threatened, as they are today, we will be asked for more money and more men. We will not be able to refuse. And millions upon millions, fresh troops on top of fresh troops will lead to our exhaustion.”
“The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”
The first was said by Georges Clemenceau, then a French parliamentarian, in 1885. The second was said by John E Kennedy to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in 1961.
Not a few historians regard comparisons between the French and U.S. ordeals in Vietnam as only superficially illuminating. There are exceptions. The historian Fredrik Logevall believes that the French experience in Vietnam is of “central relevance” to that of the United States and laments the lack of thought U.S. officials gave to France's defeat. While John F. Kennedy was apparently sobered by French President Charles de Gaulle's warnings about Indochina (“For you, intervention in this region will be an entanglement without end”), many others in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, particularly Secretary of State Dean Rusk, believed that France had met with failure in Vietnam because it was a faltering old power, relied too often on untrustworthy Algerian and Moroccan soldiers, and as a colonialist nation was only seeking to exploit the Vietnamese people.
So who said these things, and when? “We have had enormous difficulties in enforcing our authority…. Rebel bands disturb the country everywhere. They appear from nowhere in large numbers, destroy everything, and then disappear into nowhere.” That was a French commander in 1862. “We kill scores and scores of them. But there are always just as many left—in fact more. There's an inexhaustible supply. And then it's not always the real, full-blown Viet that we kill…. Often they are just villagers, people's militia.” That was a French lieutenant in the 1940s. “[The people] have the impression that… we are fighting aimlessly without a clear objective. What is painful is not so much the fact of fighting without accepting the sacrifices, it is that we are apparently fighting without any goal.” That was a French writer from 1953. By then the French war in Vietnam had the nickname it deserved: sale guerre, dirty war.
In the aftermath of Dien Bien Phu, a French journalist wrote of his belief that “the Americans would never have fought as we did. They would have fought a different war. And by crushing the country and the people under a hail of bombs and dollars, they might very well have had more success than we.” Ho Chi Minh told a journalist in 1962 that the “Americans are much stronger than the French, though they know us less well.” Karl Marx famously said that history occurs first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx was being characteristically dyspeptic. History occurs first as tragedy, then as needless tragedy.
We parked near a row of food stalls and walked over to Hue's Citadel, the city-within-the-city of Hue and since 1993 a UNESCO World Heritage site. At one point the Citadel contained three separate cities, and within them lived and worked all the batteries of Vietnam's royalty, from its mustached emperor to its assiduous mandarins to its secluded and spoiled princesses. The outer wall that surrounded the Citadel was twenty feet tall and in some places thirty feet thick. Enclosed within these massive stone walls were five square miles of land. Some of the wall's bricks, watered by centuries of rain and humidity, were dark algae shades of gray or green; others, the clear product of restoration, were the dulled red of clay. We approached the Citadel across one of its surrounding grassy esplanades. These flat areas guaranteed that those seeking to attack the redoubt would enjoy little cover. Schoolgirls in white ao dais walked around the Citadel's perimeter, some selling flowers, others visiting with their friends, yet others having their pictures taken. A light, cool rain fell from a still-sunny sky.
“Wow,” I said to my father as Hien rushed ahead to buy our tickets.
He nodded. “It's neat.”
I punched him on the shoulder. “Come on. ‘Neat’?”
He glanced at his shoulder, then at me. “What am I supposed to say? It's pretty neat.”
“Did you know that Vietnam had things like the Citadel when you came here?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Something I read. As French rule went on, a lot of the French, naturally enough, got interested in Vietnamese culture. Some realized that this culture was in fact hundreds of years older than French culture. It was humbling, and it made such people a lot more willing to negotiate when the war started.”
My father looked around. “I suppose that's why the Marine Corps is not known for its cultural understanding. To answer your question, no. I knew very little about Vietnam when I came here. Few of us did. No great emphasis was put on the culture. I had no idea, for instance, that there were so many ethnicities inside of this country. When I found out, I was flabbergasted. I had no idea, furthermore, as to the religious needs of the people. I had no idea how much like the French we would seem to them and how much that would determine whether they would like us or hate us.”
“Are you bitter?”
“About what?”
“How stranded you were by your training in understanding this place?”
Before answering he sucked on his teeth thoughtfully. “Oh, I don't know. These people just wanted to be left alone. Grow their crops, raise their animals, love their children, live as good a life as they could.”
“Dad? Topic sentence, please?”
His eyes again found mine and narrowed. “We quickly learned, when we came in, that close to half of the children in rural parts of this country died before they were twelve—many of diseases that were unknown in the U.S. Hardly anyone had a balanced nutritious diet. And they had very little, if any, medical attention from the South Vietnamese government. That sure as hell didn't help the situation. Yeah, I wish we'd known some of this. I also wish, in retrospect, that all the money that was pouring in from the U.S. had been used more for humanitarian purposes. That right there could have wreaked wonders.”
“So are you bitter?”
His hands lifted, palms out. “I'm not bitter.”
“Said so convincingly.”
“I'm not bitter! I'm more just…”
Before my father could figure out what he was, Hien, holding our tickets, waved us toward the entrance. On our way to him we passed over the Citadel's moat. Resting upon its water was an inch-thick layer of pond scum that looked like shredded mermaid and smelled like a cross between chlorophyll and
a yeast infection. A large sign listed all of the activities we were not to engage in, such as “twig-breaking.” We entered the Citadel's main gate, a deep stone portal that retained many bullet gouges. My father removed his glasses and while cleaning the lenses with his shirttail leaned in toward the rough gray wall to have a look at one of the bullet holes. “Small-arms fire. A Kalashnikov, I bet.”
“Do you remember the time you admitted to me that you actually kind of liked war?”
He winced and put his glasses back on. “Did I say that? I must have been locked and loaded.”
“You said you loved war, you hated war, war scared you, you couldn't get enough of war.”
“War,” my father said finally, “is an illness caused by youth.”
We emerged on one of the Citadel's huge brick patios. Vietnamese culture is notably Sinophobic despite its many similarities to Chinese culture, though within any cultural phobia lurks a good deal of furtive philia. The Citadel, then, was an assemblage of Chinese architectural cliches, though parts of it bore strong French influence as well. A major difference between the Citadel and the architecture of traditional China was how many trees the more countrified Vietnamese had planted throughout its grounds. Of course, the consequences of the finally ineffable Sino-Viet relationship can be overstated. Just as surely, they can be understated. Many historians have argued that the major explanation for Vietnam's soldierly culture is its relationship with China. When a mouthwatering nation exists directly south of a large and extremely hungry nation, militarism becomes a mind-set the former nation enthusiastically promotes among its people. A corollary argument has it that the long-held Vietnamese idea that a small force, cunningly operated, can defeat a larger one—in other words, the intellectual basis of all guerrilla warfare—is equally traceable to Vietnam's troubled proximity to China.
The Citadel's buildings were not its only Chinese element. The old Confucian system of governance administered from Hue was in key ways a Chinese replication, as were the clothes its emperor wore, as were the symbols festooned upon its architecture, as were the symmetries by which the Citadel's three cities were arranged. The names of the Citadel's structures alone had Chinese aromas: the Temple of the Generations, the Purple Forbidden City, the Imperial City, the Palace of Supreme Harmony. Many of the Citadel's buildings had been destroyed—some more than once—and those standing today had been heavily restored, an ongoing, decade-old process begun only after Vietnam's leaders opened up to the possibilities of tourism and put to bed their Communist bugbear for anything that could be construed as a celebration of feudalism. Brightly painted and restored buildings existed alongside decrepit and unrestored shells, many of the latter's exposed, tree-branch joists rottenly infested with ants.
Soon Hien was no longer leading us. Instead he seemed pleased simply to stand amid the astonishments of such a storied place. It was clear he was proud of it, if a little bored, and I envied the closeness he felt to his culture. Even at an American site as splendid as the Lincoln Memorial, say, it would not have occurred to me to be proud of my culture. Why was that? I wondered aloud to my father. “Because you're an ungrateful little prick,” he answered.
Alone I passed carp-filled ponds and potted bonsai trees, then journeyed across a wide stone walkway stained gray from the moss that had just been swept off it. On one patio I found an array of gigantic four-hundred-year-old bronze urns, a specialty of the Nguyen Dynasty. Many of these urns were scored with bullet strikes. Thanks to my father, I could now identify the little dings and dents as having been caused by small-arms fire. But also upon these urns were huge .50-caliber gashes that looked less like the product of impact and more like the result of a blowtorch.
We walked past the Royal Theater, stepped off a restructured portico, and walked amid an abrupt pasture of thigh-high grass and crumbling stone walls. Dragonflies swooped around us in the cold, clammy humidity. The grassy field we were standing in was all that remained of the Palace of the Queen in the Purple Forbidden City. Here was an occasional foundation, there the odd section of wall. From this empty field we could see two things. The first was the Imperial City's central bastion, also known as the King's Knight, a large though somehow squat-looking three-story tower from which, traditionally, the emperor's colors were flown. Today flying from the King's Knight, just visible over the treetops, was the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's flag, which had the additional interest of being the largest flag I had ever seen.
In 1945, the last Nguyen emperor, Bao Dai, abdicated his throne, turned control of his country over to the Viet Minh, and allowed the Viet Minh's red, blue, and yellow flag to be run up the King's Knight pole. There the Nguyen Dynasty terminates. Although Bao Dai had been looking for a way out of Vietnamese politics—his truest self was found at a blackjack table with two French hookers on his arm—he did not have much choice but to abdicate. His government was riddled with Viet Minh sympathizers. Bao Dai himself was agnostic on the Viet Minh, and though he suspected that the mysterious patriot Ho Chi Minh was actually the Communist Nguyen Ai Quoc, he accepted a brief role in Ho's government as an adviser. None of this lasted long. Bao Dai abandoned the Communists when he realized he was being used by them for propaganda purposes and was for a short time looked upon by the United States as a potential leader of South Vietnam. The “Bao Dai Solution,” this was called. A thirty-two-year-old tennis-loving emperor who could barely speak Vietnamese was called by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson a representative of Vietnam's “true nationalist spirit.”
The second thing we could see was the Royal Reading Pavilion—the Citadel library—and the stunning rock garden that girdled it. This was the only structure in the demolished Purple Forbidden City that managed to survive the Tet Offensive.
The sudden sense I had in this place of being surrounded by ghosts felt thick and silencing. Today a number of people living within the Citadel's perimeter still found human bones in their backyards, and many claimed that their houses were haunted. This was not unusual in Vietnamese culture, in which the existence of ghosts typically went undebated. When I asked Hien if he gave the ghost stories any credence, his nod was instant and solemn.
“I don't know about ghosts,” my father said, “but an Army buddy of mine got syphilis from a Citadel whorehouse.”
“The Marines were here in the Citadel, too,” I said to him.
My father looked at me. “Yes. Yes, they were.” His face creased, and then, as he considered this further, became slightly stricken. “I'm finding out that this is a pretty emotional place for me. I have to say I didn't expect that.”
In one of the many little museums scattered across the Citadel's grounds, I had noticed my father linger before a photo that showed General Vo Nguyen Giap visiting the Citadel to celebrate one of the innumerable holidays the Communists had concocted to commemorate themselves.
“Back there—I saw you staring at that photo of Giap.”
“I was. I was thinking about him.”
Hien, suddenly, spoke up. “And what do you think of General Giap?”
I sensed several responses solidify and disintegrate in my father's mind. “I think … he was very smart.”
The brilliance of Giap was debated. It was easy to be a brilliant general, his detractors claimed, when you were willing to accept a catastrophic number of casualties. A typical example of this debate is the Tet Offensive—though, when Tet was first proposed by Hanoi's ranking general in the South, Nguyen Chi Thanh, Giap opposed the idea, as did Ho Chi Minh. (Thanh died before the attack took place, allowing Giap to take over its planning.) Nonetheless, Tet was both Giap's most audacious and brilliant attack and his biggest military disaster. The offensive was, in fact, what caused Giap's Politburo star its final dimming.
A triumph, a failure: the Tet Offensive seemed peculiarly Asian in its ying-yangedness. It began in the valley near the city of Khe Sanh, in 1967, in Quang Tri province, only miles south of the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam. Barricaded withi
n a besieged base atop a plateau, U.S. Marines held out for months against the violent parries of what many anticipated would become a massive Dien Bien Phu-style assault. As the area around the Marines’ plateau became what has been described as “the most heavily bombed target in the history of warfare,” General William Westmoreland, the commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), waited for the NLF and PAVN forces skulking around the valley to bring the fight to the Marines. He had sought such a decisive confrontation for months and was certain it would occur at Khe Sanh. (PAVN soldiers had allowed the capture of false documents outlining a planned Khe Sanh assault. “The Americans like captured documents,” Pham Van Dong once said. “We made sure they got plenty”) Two months before the Tet Offensive, Westmoreland, still waiting for the Khe Sanh attack, announced, at President Johnson's urging, “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” He claimed that the enemy's hopes were “bankrupt.” Only days before the Tet Offensive commenced, Westmoreland boasted, “I hope they try something because we are looking for a fight.”
The Tet Offensive—so named for the Tet holiday that in Vietnamese culture celebrates the lunar new near—began at 3 a.m. on January 31, 1968, and is believed to have been launched in order to win the war before the death of the fast-weakening Ho Chi Minh, who used the occasion to scribble out some of his last bits of poetry: “Forward / Total victory shall be ours!” Tet saw South Vietnam invaded by 70,000 PAVN soldiers and the activation of nearly every NLF guerrilla. It also involved the attack of virtually every major city in South Vietnam—with the notable exception of Khe Sanh. The months of testing assaults there had been a diversion to draw away the attention of Westmoreland and his medley of tacticians.