by Tom Bissell
The last message Diem communicated to Kennedy affirmed, per Lodge's later summary, that “I am a good and frank ally…. Tell President Kennedy that I take all his suggestions very seriously.” Diem was not a good ally, or a frank one. He was a mystical bore and the cruel messiah of a religion of three. Diem's last known words in English, made to Lodge over the telephone, were “I am trying to reestablish order.” Despite President Kennedy's personal request that Diem and Nhu not be harmed, the brothers were bound, deposited into an American-made armored personnel carrier, and shot in the back of the head, after which the hated Nhu was gruesomely disfigured with a bayonet. Their bodies were then driven out to Tan Son Nhut airport and pushed into unmarked graves.
At the time of Diem's death only seventy-eight Americans had been killed in South Vietnam. In the coming weeks, NLF attacks would increase by 250 percent, and a few months later it was clear to the CIA that the “statistics received over the past year or more from the [South Vietnamese] and reported by the U.S. mission on which we gauged the trends of the war were grossly in error.” Two months after the coup, the CIA wrote with its typical concern, “There is no organized government in South Vietnam at this time.” A coup against the generals who had deposed Diem became necessary after it was claimed that they, too, were at least notionally interested in trying to negotiate an end to the war. The womanizing Francophile General Nguyen Khanh took charge in 1964. But as his fortunes quickly soured, General Khanh, too, began to explore the possibility of negotiation with the NLF, with which his brother-in-law was aligned. As one historian writes, what was so concerning to U.S. officials “was not so much those forces that might get the United States into a war but those that might keep it out of one.” (General Maxwell Taylor actually argued that the more representative the South Vietnamese government became, the “more susceptible to an accommodation with the Liberation Front” it would be.) When Khanh proved an utter wash, Ambassador Lodge cabled Washington that “the US should be prepared to run the country, possibly from Cam Ranh Bay.”
By the fall of 1964, General Khanh was replaced by Phan Khac Suu, an agricultural engineer. Suu also indicated some interest in negotiating with the NLF. Khanh tried and failed to retake the government in December 1964 and openly called for revolt against the Americans. A concomitant NLF bomb that destroyed Saigon's Brink Hotel—the home of unmarried U.S. officers, named for General Francis G. Brink, the first U.S. commander in Vietnam and a suicide—was initially mistaken for a South Vietnamese attack on the United States. South Vietnam seemed, in Robert McNamara's words, on the edge “of total collapse.” By now South Vietnam's central government had no direct access to many of its provincial offices, and in a few cities the only way in was by helicopter. Even General Westmoreland would later write that “few in the world would have faulted us at that point” had the United States withdrawn. Two years after Diem's overthrow, the situation had gone, in the words of a British official in Saigon, “from bad to worse … nothing is to be seen but drift, back-biting, corruption—and worse.”
Why did the people of South Vietnam not care more about defending themselves? Why the constant plots and overthrows? Why the corruption? It is likely that the plots and overthrows came because, for the majority of the war, the only solution to South Vietnam's problems the United States could accept was military. The catch was that the only lasting solution to South Vietnam's problems was political. This is not hindsight-aided or even really arguable. Dozens of analysts and U.S. officials at varying levels of prominence made this very point as early as 1962. But the decision was to fight, even though by all evidence the South Vietnamese did not want to. So plots and overthrows were the rule until those who wanted to fight were found. But often those who claimed to want to fight did not actually want to fight either. Some were cowards, certainly, but a good number were simply sick of fighting. Unlike the United States and North Vietnam, South Vietnam saw the vivid horror of ground war uproot its fields and reduce its cities to rubble.
As for the corruption of South Vietnam, consider its trash. For several extended periods during the war, Saigon's sanitation services basically stopped and the garbage fragrantly piled up. A modest city job such as trash collector did not pay nearly as much as the U.S. military paid Vietnamese to mop the floors of its commissaries. Fewer and fewer Vietnamese were willing to do work that benefited solely Vietnamese. The United States tried to help by sending a fleet of garbage trucks to Saigon free of charge, but they were intercepted by corrupt ARVN generals, plundered, and sold for parts. The U.S. Army was ultimately charged with picking up Saigon's trash. Similarly, thousands of tons of cement sent to the South Vietnamese for use in building schools was stolen by the regime and replaced with sand.
But what of civic virtue? Many South Vietnamese simply took their cues from an oblivious occupying power. Because the Americans who occupied Vietnam had, in the aggregate, so little respect for or curiosity about the culture of their hosts, civic virtue and pride vanished into the ratholes of prostitution, graft, and corruption. One U.S. analyst said during the war, “We have corrupted the cities. Now, perhaps we can corrupt the countryside as well.” Amazingly, this was meant as a serious statement of strategy. While fighting Communism, the United States bankrupted South Vietnam's families with record-breaking inflation and prolonged for years a war most wanted only to end. One wonders if this is what President Thieu meant when in 1979 he maintained from exile that “without the American presence we could have beaten the Communists.” While Thieu was probably wrong, it seems certain that without the American presence South Vietnam would not have lost to the Communists quite so tragically, so completely, at such length, or with such losses.
Yes, South Vietnam's leaders were in the main corrupt, spineless, and endlessly inept. But it was the Americans who believed in them. Even when the Americans stopped believing in them, the abetment of motley crews of corrupt false democrats continued at the eventual cost of millions of lives. To have mistaken ineptitude for helplessness for so long was an American mistake that required considerable self-deception. But to be inept is not to be helpless; it is to be inept.
III
We drove for several hours, down the coast, along surprisingly well-maintained roads, through what felt like lush green tunnels of Vietnamese countryside. My father made satisfied little mouth noises as he pored over a copy of Viet Nam News, “The National English Language Daily” he had picked up at the airport upon our arrival in Ho Chi Minh City. Wherever he traveled, my father always made it a point to read the local newspapers. It was What He Did.
Viet Nam News suggested nothing so much as how crafty authoritarianism had become over the last twenty years. The paper contained two species of story. The first was about what a good job the government was doing. It was always merely a good job. Things were never ludicrously overstated. This had been the biggest problem of the Soviet propaganda found within Pravda, which apparently could not be read without appalled laughter. The second was about some difficult structural or social problem. “Education Needs More Reform,” for example. Guess who was expected to reform it? Another fascinating thing was the numb linearity created by a few days’ worth of Viet Nam News front pages: Monday: “South African President to Visit Viet Nam.” Tuesday: “South African President Meets with Viet Nam Prime Minister.” Wednesday: “South Africa, Viet Nam Pledge to Bolster Bilateral Ties.” Thursday: “Viet Nam, South Africa Bolster Bilateral Ties.” Friday: “Viet Nam Prime Minister Sees Bright Future for Ties with South Africa.” The article my father was now reading was titled “Singapore Tightens Internet Laws.”
“Interesting article?” I asked.
His head lifted with birdlike alertness, and he looked over at me. “I'm just enjoying this cultural exchange.” Once he had finished memorizing the contents of Viet Nam News, he peppered Hien with questions such as “Is that a pigeon?” “Are those tea farmers?” “Is that sugarcane?” “When was this road built?” “Do the Vietnamese use much solar power?”
We were now growing closer to my father's area of Marine Corps operations. After Hien had finished debriefing him on the overall impact of rice exports upon the Vietnamese economy, I noticed him snapping and unsnapping the latch of his blocky black camera case. He was as fidgety as a carsick boy.
“So how do you feel?” I asked.
“Marvelous. Super. I'm having a ball.”
“You're sure you're up for seeing some of your old stomping grounds?”
He waved this off. “It was a long time ago. I'll be fine.”
We passed through the rural sprawl of several villages. I saw women wearing conical peasant hats, huge vase-shaped wicker baskets full of rice, all the stage-dressing cliches of the Vietnam War. Yet these were not NLF women, no GI would be along to bayonet the rice baskets in search of hidden ordnance, and the sky was absent of any steel dragonflies whooping overhead. The cliches meant nothing. They were not even cliches but rather staples of Vietnamese life. I had discerned already that the war informed much here but defined little, and it suddenly seemed very strange that we referred to the Vietnam War, a phrase whose adjectivelessness grew more bizarre as I pondered it. It managed to take an entire nation and plunge it into perpetual conflict.
In nearly every village and town we passed through, men sat roadside upon plastic chairs, on the lookout for backseat palefaces in well-appointed cars much like ours. Once they spotted us, these scouts launched up and suicidally ran out into traffic in an attempt to flag us down so we could stop and have a bowl of pho bo at their cafes. When we passed by a gated-off regional Communist Party headquarters I learned that in Vietnam Soviet-style hammer-and-sickle flags were still earnestly flown. (A few days later I would almost fall out of the car when we drifted by a funeral procession whose coffin was embossed with a swastika. The dark visceral charge of those eight right angles had temporarily rendered me an amnesiac: in Vietnam the swastika retained its original Buddhist, not Nazi, heritage.) Rural Vietnam's omnipresent roadside shops were draped with advertisements for Honda (often rendered as “Hon Da”), Coca-Cola, Happydent gum, even Kotex. Rainbow-colored incense cones were sold beneath green-and-white Fujifilm sun umbrellas or awnings branded with the La Vie water logo. Billboards advertised Sting, an Asian-market soft drink made by Pepsi, the taste of which was well captured by its name. Ancient thin Vietnamese women with raisiny skin sold cans of Red Bull. Poorer old Vietnamese women sold the local Red Bull knockoff, Super Horse. Even poorer old Vietnamese women sold the Super Horse knockoff, Commando Bear.
On the highway around us the scooters weaved and slowed. While in the bigger cities younger women on scooters wore long operagoing gloves and bank-robber-style masks to prevent getting tan (dark skin was not prized here, and “We have enough sun” was all Hien would say of the matter), the younger women in these villages were mostly uncovered. The scooters moved in thick tadpole clusters, and they had so many names. The Future, the Viva, the Dream, the Maxi, the Custom, the Sirius, the Magma, the Atilla, the Maestro, the Warrant, the Zebra, the Wave, the Wizard New Cooler Trend, the Dynamic, the Dylan, the Spacey. Learning these names was an exercise in naked hierarchy, as everyone in Vietnam knew exactly—it was practically occult—how much each type of scooter cost. Vietnamese scooters carried and hauled all manner of cargo. A duffel-sized wire cage filled with squirming puppies, for instance. A chest of drawers. A stack of four computer monitors. A sofa. Two live hogs. A stand-up bass guitar. A family of five. Another scooter. Meanwhile Truong was beeping his horn. My father pointed out the thumb-sized pad of wear on Truong's steering wheel, where he had literally beeped the wheel's covering down to its greenish underleather. Truong's horn-per-minute usage: 14.5. In New York City I had come to believe that car horns were one of the more overrated tools of behavior modification—but that, I now knew, was because they were used without any imagination. In Vietnam there was a very real language of horns. A short beep meant: I'm behind you. Two short beeps: I'm passing. One long beep: Fuck you!
“Look at these hills,” my father said, pointing at the slopes and rises all around us. “How we fought and scratched for them.”
Some brief, terrible recognition in his voice and eyes—some distance closed too quickly, some unexpectedly recovered past—spooked me deeply. My father was softly shaking his head. “Where are we?” I asked, if only to break the mood.
“We are nearing the Hai Van Pass,” Hien said, pointing ahead to where the bus-clogged road corkscrewed up into the foothills of the Truong Son range. To our left a wall of thick, long-needled pine trees suddenly broke to reveal a steep drop. Beyond the cliff's edge was the blue universe of the South China Sea, a whitecapped chaos so astonishingly choppy I half expected to see the face of Yahweh moving across it.
“Very high, very beautiful pass,” Hien said.
“The Hoi Vun Pass?” my father asked.
“Hai Van.”
“HeyVong?”
“Hai Van.”
“Well,” my father said, sitting back defeatedly, “it's certainly a beautiful pass.”
I had sympathy for my father. Learning to speak Vietnamese, I would eventually learn, was rather like learning to sing using sounds you had never known existed. (Hearteningly, the Vietnamese had just as much trouble with English and its tricky “finishing” sounds: while many Viet namee speak Engli very well in the grammatical sense, they can still be difficult to understand.) Every Vietnamese vowel—there are twelve different vowels—has six tonal possibilities. Depending on its tone, the word chua, for instance, could mean “sour,” “pagoda,” “Jesus,” or “not yet.” Vietnamese also had many diphthongs and triphthongs, and at first these were as baffling as any aspect of Vietnamese. For instance, while Hien was saying “Hai Van” it sounded like “Hai Vang,” but with a crisp-ness to the ng sound. There were at least a dozen more unexpected and (to an English speaker) counterintuitive diph- or triphthongs. Sonic muskegs, tonal jungles…. There was a famous story of how Robert McNamara once tried to say “Long live South Vietnam” at a government rally but fumbled the tones. To the listening Vietnamese it sounded as though McNamara said, “The southern duck wants to lie down.” As we ascended the road, I whipped out my recently purchased Vietnamese-English dictionary and said that I felt I was operating at an extreme disadvantage among the local women when my name translated into Vietnamese as “shrimp.” A thin, annoyed smile from Hien. Truong beeped at a cow. And my father merely shook his head.
We climbed. Numerous cranes were dredging up the mountain's rich, shockingly red soil. These holes, Hien explained, were vents for the tunnel currently being dug through this mountain at the cost of hundreds of billions of dong. (The early twenty-first century had found the Vietnamese in a spending mood. I would later learn of a billion-dong government program intended somehow to increase the average height of Vietnamese people.) The expensive tunnel, which was being built with U.S., Japanese, and South Korean aid, would be completed in 2005.
The road did not continuously climb a lone mountain but gradually wound upward around the faces of several. We could look across the gaps between these mountains and see small, toylike trucks that only minutes later were huge and honking and charging toward us. Several of these toys transformed into Russian-made Kamaz trucks, thick charcoal smoke chugging out of their tailpipes, which were a remnant of the decade and a half when Vietnam had served as one of the few places outside the USSR's captive market into which the Soviets could dump their shoddy equipment. The mountains themselves were covered in deep green layers of eucalyptus as thick as shag. No matter how hard the wind blew, the vegetation had a toupee stillness. In 1975, Hien told us, these mountains had been as bright red and empty as Martian hills. During the Vietnamese War the defoliant Agents Orange and White had been sprayed endlessly over this entire area.
Finally, at the top of the pass, we were stopped in a mild traffic jam, and my father got out of the car to take pictures. I followed him. It felt cold enough up here to snow, the clouds soppingly low and f
oggy. An open-air market was run atop the pass, and friendly merchants selling everything from coconuts to soft drinks to trinkets instantly set upon us. All of them made a uniquely convincing case for themselves: I was learning that the Vietnamese could sell water to hydrophobes, corpses to the morgue. I purchased some rubber balls of noteworthy uselessness from a beautiful, dirty-faced young Vietnamese woman while my father snapped pictures. When he wanted some photos of himself, he handed me his camera.
I stared at this relic, called a Yashica FX-7. “What is this?”
“That's my camera.”
“Was it forged in the Third Age of the Elves or something?”
“I had that camera with me,” my father announced proudly, “the first time I came to Vietnam.”
“This is the camera you took all those slides with?” The lohn C. Bissell Vietnam Slide Show was a staple of my Michigan childhood and was always a standing-room-only occasion. I had a sudden recollection of those evenings, sitting in anticipatory wonder in our darkened living room, feeling the warmth of the bodies all around me, transfixed by the changing blasts of light, the harsh clack of the slide machine's carousel. Once I made the mistake of asking my father how many of the men in one group photo had died. He did not answer. The entire room went silent, in fact. I have no memory of any slide shows after that. I looked back to my father and held out toward him his Yashica FX-7. “Dad, this camera is thirty-eight years old!”
He looked back at me. “No, it isn't.” His hand lifted and batted about frivolously. “It's … what? Thirty-fwo years old.”
“It's thirty-eight years old, Dad. Almost forty.”
“No, it's not, because 1960 plus forty years is 2000.1 arrived in 1965, so—”