by Tom Bissell
Of course, a compilation of the lies North Vietnam told during the war would have Tolstoyan heft. Its Party paper, for instance, routinely claimed that its guns had shot down eight enemy planes, when actually it had shot down one, or none. But a crucial area in which the Communists did not lie was to themselves. As a PAVN major general once told an American journalist, “We knew that it would not be enough just to make propaganda saying that we were winning. We had to study how to fight the Americans.” Among themselves, the Communists drew a line between propaganda and reality, and it was in no NLF insurgent or North Vietnamese soldier's interest to lie about the challenges they faced on the battlefield, where PAVN and NLF commanders were allowed far greater independence in their decision making than were their U.S. counterparts. “We should,” a piece of captured NLF samizdat from the early 1960s read, “teach them [NLF inductees] to win without arrogance and to lose without discouragement.”
This was not the case, unfortunately, for the U.S. military. To read the letters of the average U.S. soldier on the ground in Vietnam is to be shocked by the anger with which many of them responded to the common practice of inflating enemy battlefield casualties. It went like this: After a skirmish, if one man said he had seen two bodies and another said he had seen five, the number of enemy dead would be calculated as seven, even if there was a reasonable amount of certainty that the men had seen the same bodies. Or if one arm was found, and one leg, and nothing else, the number of enemy casualties would be counted as two. The numbers of enemy dead were more greatly exaggerated the higher they wended up the chain of command, so that when a captain claimed, say, ten more enemy dead than was accurate, a lieutenant colonel claimed thirty and a brigadier general claimed sixty. “There is no way to really figure out exact body count,” one U.S. soldier later admitted. “I generally knew that if I lost a troop, I'd better come back with a body count of ten.” The speaker was Lieutenant William Calley, the lead perpetrator of the My Lai massacre.
A famous story, retold in Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, finds North Vietnam's prime minister Pham Van Dong running into a Polish diplomat in Hanoi. Pham Van Dong had something he wanted to discuss: “The American generals are always boasting of how they are winning the war in the South. Do they believe it?” The Polish diplomat said, Yes, it appeared they did. “You're joking,” Dong said in exasperation. “Perhaps they boast for propaganda, but the CIA must tell them the truth in its secret reports.” The Polish diplomat said, No, they really seem to believe they are winning. “Well,” Dong replied, “I find it hard to believe what you say. Surely the American generals cannot be that naive?”
It is curious, though, that the U.S. belief system that encouraged such lying during the war eventually recalibrated in order to tell the truth about what really happened, while the Communist belief system that encouraged such frank honesty during the war eventually recalibrated in order to lie about what really happened. That the United States in defeat, Rostow notwithstanding, has proved less evasive than the victorious heirs of Pham Van Dong is, surely, a kind of victory.
IV
On our way to Chu Lai, the former site of a U.S. military base, the road was full of everything but traffic. Truong, consequently, was driving much faster than usual. This was not actually all that fast, since the Vietnamese do not seem to be much compelled by the theoretical ideal of speed. All the same, the road's chickens, dogs, cats, children, and rice farmers took several decisive steps away from the road moments before our car whizzed by. Even a few large, burdened cattle looked over, saw us coming, and plowed slowly head down toward the safety of the berm. It was early yet, the sun still turning from orange to white, the sky from pink to blue.
Soon enough we passed a martyrs’ cemetery, where NLF and PAVN dead were interred in endless white rows of small square tombstones. Hien translated the words emblazoned upon the cemetery's arched front gate: “The Fatherland Will Never Forget Their Sacrifice.” In many martyrs’ cemeteries a number of the dead had tombstones that read CHUA BIET TEN: “Not yet known.” During the war it had been fairly common for U.S. forces to bury enemy dead in large unmarked graves after relieving bodies of their diaries and letters, which sometimes contained useful intelligence. The particular cultural trauma of this practice was significant, for it effectively erased these fallen soldiers’ identities. In the Vietnamese belief system a body was needed to secure safe passage into the afterlife. Those Vietnamese whose bodies were never found or identified—a considerable number, given the soldiers vaporized by napalm alone—were referred to as “those for whom no incense was burned”; their ghosts wandered the earth, in the words of the Vietnamese writer Bao Ninh, “whispering as they floated around like pale vapors, shredded with bullet-holes.” I thought of the grief of the American families whose loved ones’ bodies were similarly never found. As in so many instances when it came to the war, the shared grief of those Americans and Vietnamese whose sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers had never been recovered was similar but not quite analogous. Not that this mattered. War italicized the differences between people just as it made the differences ultimately futile to consider.
I studied my father as we passed by the cemetery. “How did you feel about seeing that?” I asked him.
“I'm excited. I want to see it.”
“Not Chu Lai. The cemetery.”
He cast a quick backward glance through the rear window. “Oh. That.
I don't know. It's just a cemetery.” He lowered his voice and leaned in close to me. “You know, this morning at breakfast Hien astounded me. I said I wanted to try to find one particular place at the base and he said, ‘We'll have to ask the old people.’ I thought, ‘You little twerp. You have to ask the old people?’ I then realized that seventy percent of the population of Vietnam is under twenty-eight years of age. And Hien's … what, in his fifties? He was a kid during the war. He doesn't remember. Hardly anyone here does.”
“It must feel like you never came here sometimes.”
He regarded me pityingly. “I sure wouldn't say it ever feels like that.”
“No, I guess you wouldn't. So how much time did you spend at Chu Lai?”
“I was stationed in Chu Lai. I lived there for five or six months.” Suddenly he put on his sunglasses, and in a moment the man I knew as my father transformed into a tan, obliquely confident CIA field agent.
“What's with the shades?”
“The base is right on the ocean. The sun was always a killer here.
You'll need yours, so put ‘em on.”
“Sir, I don't have any sunglasses, sir.”
“Why have you not come prepared, corporal?”
“Sir, I suppose because I'm a fuckup, sir.”
He let this charade drop gently. Then: “It's raining again.”
“Did it ever actually stop raining? It's always a little raining here.”
He tapped on his window. “In case you ever wondered why the jungle looks like the jungle—don't.” Indeed, the well-watered vegetation beside this road was so preposterously dense you could walk five steps into it and be completely lost. Much of the tangled foliage grew right out into the road, all of it bright in so many different shades of green. Wherever your eyes fell was a chlorophyll contest. Tapioca plants grew in stunning emerald layers. Rubber trees were tall and slender and had a little green pompom on top. Coffee plants’ big chunky leaves were as glossy green as poison ivy. Light green pepper vines grew around tree trunks as though strangling them. Then there were Vietnam's many varieties of palm tree: plain old palm trees, their trunks ringed white and black; banana palm trees, which had the most massive leaves; coconut palms, which had testicular bundles of fruit growing beneath green crowns that sat atop fat trunks; betel nut palms, which were towering and skinny and had dangerous-looking rostrate leaves. Occasionally, just off the road, a water buffalo stood out against the endless green backdrop, a huge breathing slab of flesh furred with hair the color of stale chocolate.
Everywhere here
something was growing. This was Vietnam's great strength, as Ho Chi Minh understood. He once spoke of how, after “the American invaders have been defeated, we will rebuild our land ten times more beautiful,” and in his will he requested that a crypt not be constructed for him, as the land would be better used for growing. He instead asked to be cremated. His ashes, he hoped, would be scattered in northern, central, and southern Vietnam. Then, Ho wrote, he would meet Marx and Lenin in the scarlet afterlife. Naturally, all mention of Ho's wish to be cremated and scattered was elided from the version of the will that was published in the Party paper. Shortly after he died on September 2, 1969—the Party even lied about the date of Ho's death, placing it a day later so as not to befoul the twenty-fourth anniversary of Vietnam's declared national independence from France—Soviet mum-myologists were brought into Hanoi to do for Ho what they had done for Lenin.
As we neared the coast and the site of the former U.S. base, the jungle gave way to duney reaches of intensely yellow sand and spotty growths of evergreen trees and low shrubs. Hien explained that the sudden landscape switch was due to something he called “selective irrigation.”
“Selective irrigation?” my father asked.
“Everything near the American Road is selectively irrigated.”
I piped in. “This is called the American Road?”
“I sure hope so,” my father said. “We built it.”
“Marines built this road?”
“Not Marines, no. American engineers. Civilian contractors, I guess. I remember them well. Those guys were civilians, but they were tough. They carried weapons. And used ‘em sometimes, too, as I recall. This road was all dirt when I first got here, and after a few weeks they'd paved the whole thing.”
Truong swerved to avoid a pothole. I said, “It doesn't seem to have held up very well.”
My father shrugged. “I doubt that anyone's much touched it for the last forty years.”
“When was the base itself built?”
“I guess 1964 or so. But it was ongoing. They were always adding stuff. Keep in mind, it took at least two years before we had any solid logistical grounding beneath us anywhere in Vietnam.” A humorless smile. “Do you know who owned controlling interest in the construction company that built these roads? Or the runways on the airstrip?”
“Uh. Dick Cheney?”
“No, but you're close. Lady Bird Johnson.”
“Is that true?”
“I think it is. That was our understanding back then.”
We passed a long roadside strip of huts and food shacks, the proprietors and customers of which regarded us impassively. Military men with assault rifles slung over their shoulders smoked while standing near low blue plastic tables, where older Vietnamese men played some checkerslike game. Beyond the shacks a little boy using a thin wooden switch tried to propel forward a fairly large herd of calves. He was failing spectacularly. The calves, with their devilish horns and enormous black eyes, had amassed alongside the road and were chewing on the nearby vegetation. In the distance, beyond the barren cactus and shrubby fields of sand, loomed some shadowy, haze-embraced mountains.
At this point a man walked out toward the middle of the road holding a snake. Truong shot a dismissive wave at this individual and gently maneuvered around him. While I was attempting to open the door, dive out of the car, and sprint to lower Manhattan, my father's large hand found its way to my shoulder. While he reassuringly gripped my deltoid, I fell back against my seat, swearing with quiet, steady thoroughness.
“What's wrong?” Hien asked, laughing.
“My son,” my father explained, “is afraid of snakes.” He nudged me. “Isn't that right, Guts?”
We stopped in a lonely parking area. From here a number of grown-over paths led off to the former base. After Hien gave the area a thorough sweeping for snakes, I followed my father out of the car. Running around us were any number of small, brown, bat-eared, runty dogs. Dogs in Vietnam, I had noticed, tended to wear vaguely worried expressions. Before I came here I was told to make sure that, whenever I ordered something in a restaurant, I knew what it was before I ate it. Now that I was here I realized that this was needless. Thit cho, or “dog meat,” was listed straightforwardly by the establishments that served it. More popular in the north than in the south (or so southerners always claimed to their American friends), dog was a delicacy usually eaten by men, as it was said to assist one's sexual appetite. (They ate cats—” little tiger”—in Vietnam, too, to less certain copulative ends.) I stopped to pet a few of these unhappy-looking little dogs, but not before Hien made a joke about eating them.
Truong elected to smoke cigarettes and wait with the car while we surveyed Chu Lai. Hien and my father and I started off down one of the trails. I took up the rear and while watching my father saunter confidently through the scrub—his large feet lifting high with each step, his head up and alert, his shoulders squared—had a vividly aggregate memory of all the times I had gone bird hunting with him as a boy. He hunted birds exclusively because, after Vietnam, my father found he could no longer hunt “mammals.” The starkness of this morally Lin-naean line had often troubled me as a boy. I was not a particularly able hunter. I tripped over every stump and branch, surrendered pints of blood to mosquitoes no matter how fragrantly I stank of repellent, could never spot birds even after they had been repeatedly pointed out to me, and once nearly perforated the chest of one of my father's hunting friends with an errant blast of my four-ten shotgun. This last near disaster earned me the nickname Accident Happening. Yet, wanting only to please my father, I went with him into the woods again and again.
He was different in the forest: more patient, but also more humorless; more fatherly, but also less friendly. He had a ranger's silent confidence even in areas I knew he had never hunted before. My father was good in the forest. He knew every answer and did everything so well, from the delicacy with which he loaded a shell to the mechanical ease with which he raised his gun and fired. When he knocked a bird from the air, he did so without emotion. He would crouch beside his downed pheasant, looking at it neutrally, then lift the carcass up by its legs and gently lower it into his game bag. Our black Lab Zorro would be in some feral ecstasy after a shotgun blast and often pranced droolingly around the heap of lifeless brown feathers, but my father would coax Zorro's brain back to domestication by working his fingers into the slack folds of black skin beneath his neck and softly, methodically scratching. I had always loved my father a little more while we were hunting, and now I wondered why I had ever stopped going with him. Then I remembered. I had shot a mallard, blown its beautiful Christmas-ornament green head right off, and in the car cried all the way back home. My father said nothing to comfort me but also nothing to chastise me. He was silent while I shivered and wept. The erasure of a life—its totality—was something my father understood. Mammals. I was a mammal. So was he. I loved him so much that day. I loved him so much. He never took me hunting again.
After a while the trail widened and the scrub dwindled from waist-to-knee-high. Somewhere ahead I could hear waves rolling ashore and the faint foamy hiss with which they died upon the sand. Within that sound larger waves were atomizing upon unseen shoreline rocks, a terrific sound not unlike huge watery cymbals crashing together. The breeze underwent a wind-tunnel hardening, the flesh on my forearms turning pocked and prickly. Sunglasses were not needed here. Along the ocean, the morning sky had become a low leaky ceiling of slushy grays and whites.
“I know Chu Lai was a Marine base,” I called ahead, “but were there any other U.S. personnel here?”
My father neither slowed nor turned around. “It was about ninety-five percent Marines, I'd say. Some Coast Guard. Some Army intelligence. But mostly Marines. You know how Chu Lai got its name?”
I did. In early 1965, the Marine Corps's Lieutenant General Victor “Brute” Rrulak first arrived at these windblown, grown-over wilds and deemed them suitable for a U.S. base. But a subaltern pointed out that this ar
ea was not indicated on any maps. Krulak said that was nonsense—this area was known as Chu Lai. But “Chu Lai” was merely Kru-lak's name in Mandarin Chinese transliteration. By the time someone figured that out, Krulak had gotten his base.
Despite Krulak's fearsome nickname—and his early confidence that the methods of conventional warfare would succeed in Vietnam—he ultimately came to believe that “pacification” was the key to defeating the NLE Pacification changed conceptually throughout the war's early years. It went from a 1965 plan to “Find the enemy…. Fix the enemy in place so that he can be engaged successfully…. Fight and finish the enemy” to the MACV's later, more nuanced view of pacification as “the military, political, economic, and social process of establishing or reestablishing local government responsibility.” Pacification was supposed to have worked hand in hand with the simultaneous war of attrition being waged by General William Westmoreland and his advisers. The thinking was that while the enemy was being hunted, areas of former enemy activity would be pacified, fortified, and safeguarded. Pacification ultimately fell under Marine Corps jurisdiction. Krulak, like many Marines, grew skeptical that one could defeat an enemy army that enjoyed a bottomless pool from which to recruit replacement soldiers. Rejecting the Pentagon's stated belief that the war had to be won “militarily” first, Krulak said, “You cannot win militarily. You have to win totally, or you are not winning at all.” He also viewed body-count strategies as “a dubious index of success since, if killing is accompanied by devastation of friendly areas, we may end up having done more harm than good.”