by Tom Bissell
Arguing that the caution with which U.S. policy makers regarded China's possible entry into the war was “self-defeating,” Walton writes that “[e]ven very energetic action against North Vietnam might not have brought China into the war, although there certainly would have been a substantial possibility of this outcome.” But that does not matter, Walton claims, because we could have whipped ‘em: “Chinese intervention most likely would not have prevented a positive outcome of the Vietnam situation for the United States.… When Chinese capabilities and disadvantages are weighed dispassionately, it is even imaginable that, if the United States had invaded North Vietnam and been met with PLA [China's People's Liberation Army] resistance, the resulting US casualties would have been fewer than occurred in the drawn-out war that actually did take place in Vietnam.” That this is precisely the type of thinking the United States had going into its struggle against Vietnam's Communists and insurgents is utterly lost on Walton, who is not stupid—though he can be astonishingly obtuse: “In American war reporting and anti-Saigon propaganda there was considerable comment about the allegedly disastrous effects of the US presence on traditional Vietnamese culture and morality.” His parenthetical admission that foreign troops “inevitably disrupt a small society” is akin to kicking down someone's door, blasting his living room with a flamethrower, and then lamenting the inevitability of fire burning things.
However, it is true that China was not in its best shape during the Vietnamese War. Mao's Great Leap Forward of the 1950s devastated Chinese society for a generation (anywhere between 30 to 60 million Chinese starved to death), and the more directly murderous Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, with its “cudgels roaming the land,” ushered in a largely hermetic phase in Chinese international relations. The Chinese military had its own problems, with anti-Maoist “professional” soldiers greatly resenting the ideological, and illogical, war strategies insisted upon by the military's growingly consolidated Maoists. It does not take much to imagine what might have united China and temporarily stanched many of its internal wounds: war with a foreign power every Chinese citizen had been indoctrinated to believe wanted to overtake and destroy it. Only when the final links in the Sino-Vietnamese relationship were broken in 1972 with Richard Nixon's cunning visit to the People's Republic did China finally trust that the United States had no wish to attack it. But this trust was possible only because China, and the United States, knew the war in Vietnam had effectively been lost.
Walton's major argument is that “conducting the war with a less constrained approach would have had a salutary effect on public opinion.” The United States did fight a constrained war—that is clear and inar-guable. Here are some of the realities of this constrained war: 14,592 American soldiers dead in one year (1968) alone. Mental breakdowns accounting for 50 percent of all U.S. medical evacuations from Vietnam in 1971. Massively criminal operations such as Cedar Falls, in which sixty square miles of South Vietnamese territory saw their inhabitants forcibly removed, their homes bulldozed (the U.S. military boasted of having created “a military desert”), and the entire area pounded by air strikes while the majority of the NLF guerrillas operating there, tipped off to the operation, went underground or simply moved on to another quadrant. The growing use of “free-fire zones” (known officially as Specified Strike Zones), which allowed the military to fire on anyone or anything it desired in a given area, despite the fact that the general who had come up with the original and far more limited idea behind the free-fire zone said, as more and more of South Vietnam was designated a slaughterhouse, “If we wish to serve the interests of the Communists, this is the step to take.” The fact that one in every twenty adult males in South Vietnam had been killed or wounded by 1970. That more than 25 percent of South Vietnam's people had to leave their homes, at some point during the war, to avoid being killed. The journalist Jonathan Schell, who rode on many U.S. helicopters during the war, told the historian Christian G. Appy: “The idea that the U.S. military was operating under constraints in South Vietnam is ridiculous. We pulverized villages from the air if we merely imagined that we received hostile fire. I witnessed it with my own eyes…. U.S. planes were actually bombing churches. They would see the church, target it, and blow it up. I saw that happen.”
“If,” C. Dale Walton writes, “there had been no Watergate scandal… the Republic of Vietnam would today be a functioning state.” Nonetheless, one must wonder whether functioning, unnaturally divided states were truly the most preferable outcome of the Vietnamese War. South Korea today is independent, after all—home of the world's largest Starbucks, its twelfth largest economy, and the popular song “Fucking USA.” North Korea, on the other hand, is currently the single largest source of potential global destabilization. That is the war America “won.” Vietnam, home to the war America “lost,” is today independent, unified, a member of the global community, and a threat to no one. All available evidence indicates that the Vietnam that will exist even a decade from now will be a better and, most likely, freer Vietnam than the one that exists today. Vietnamese people will be the reason for this. That is why young South Koreans sing “Fucking USA” in the cafes of Seoul while in the cafes of Hanoi any attempt to plumb the depths of anti-Americanism among young Vietnamese is met with quizzical stares. This is not good enough for Walton, who still wonders why the United States did not win without ever asking himself if the United States should have won. After all, he writes, “the expansion of Mongol power under Genghis Khan and his successors presented far more difficult challenges than the ones the United States faced in Vietnam.”
Walton fails to note one of the world's few nations that managed to resist and then defeat all three of its Mongol invasions: Vietnam.
V
By the time we reached the edge of Qui Nhon, the capital of Binh Dinh province and home to some beautiful beaches (and a leper colony), the taller trees and two-story buildings stood in etched black silhouette against an orange, dusk-streaked sky. The steeple of a ramshackle Catholic church thrust up from the foliage on a forested sunlit slope outside the city proper. The steeple's moss-fuzzy cross appeared majestically misplaced among the surrounding palm leaves and coconut bundles: Jungle Christ.
In provincial Vietnam one saw little of the frantic pace common to Saigon, Danang, and Hue, and as we came into town I noted the easy manner with which Qui Nhonese bicycled. Every rider looked to be a mirror of every other rider. They sat weightlessly, straight-backed, their heads held as high as their ratcheted-up seats, their legs working as steadily and gently as clock gears. Our car coasted along an oceanside road while on our right city structures flowed by: a government building, a park, a cafe selling dog meat. While we were stopped at a red light, I looked over to see a little coffin shop. Outside, the caskets were piled like cordwood. Some were plain and unvarnished, others stained a rich gold; some were stamped with a lotus, others with Buddhist swastikas, others yet with crosses. The shop's proprietor, an old man with a Ho ChiMinh beard, sat outside beside the caskets, as peaceful as death, smoking a long curved wooden pipe.
By the time we got to the hotel, the lowering darkness was colored with sudden scribbles of nighttime neon, though the ocean beyond our hotel's rear veranda was nebular. We asked Hien if, tonight, we could bypass the tourist traps and have dinner someplace that catered to a more exclusively Vietnamese clientele. We also insisted that he and Truong join us. Hien shortly squired us to a seafood restaurant packed with more Germans than the Reichstag. We sat down at a table that appeared hewn from tin. Almost immediately a squirrel-sized rat ran between my legs, then somehow reduced its body mass by 70 percent and squeezed into a wall nook at the dining room's opposite end, just below a Buddhist shrine. A strike force of pretty twenty-year-old Vietnamese women abruptly surrounded our table. All were employed by Vietnamese beer distribution companies and wore T-shirts indicating the beer of their particular allegiance: Tiger, Saigon, Heineken, Carlsberg. The more orders each woman racked up (measured by the number
of empty bottles beneath one's chair at night's end), the more money she took home. I chose Carlsberg, whose T-shirt the least attractive of these young women was wearing. My father ordered a Tiger, as did Hien and Truong. I could see why: the Tiger woman was stunning, and, most fetchingly, wore camouflage pants. As our beers were poured, an older woman came along and with plastic tongs dropped small icebergs into our glasses.
My father asked Hien to order for us “a real Vietnamese meal,” and Hien quickly devolved into a rice-paddy dictator, ordering around everyone within sight. A couple of the young women, including the Tiger girl, still hovered around the table, sometimes speaking to Hien and Truong and sometimes marshaling their bravery to chat a little with us: Why were we in Vietnam? How long were we staying? Was it our first time here? Their degage reaction to the news that my father was a veteran of the war was no longer surprising. He might as well have told them he had been Colonel George Washington's boot polisher during the Indian Wars.
A few tables away, some young, doughy-faced German men in soccer jerseys scowled. We had stolen their beer girls. There was some barbed thrill to this, and I could not deny that being peppered with questions by a trio of lovely young women filled the air with voltage. The lightning of attraction struck one all over Vietnam, all the time, every day. But this was not wartime, they were not prostitutes, I had already learned that the Tiger girl was married, my father was absolutely not interested, and neither, really, was I. But even among all these contingencies of forbid-dance the charge remained.
The charge was not merely a by-product of travel, which has the tendency to eroticize even the boldly unerotic: body odor, bus travel, rats. It was, rather, my first fully felt sense of the mutual fascination that often existed between Vietnamese women and American men. One side of this fascination was relatively straightforward. Vietnamese women, with their sylphlike bodies and apparent invulnerability to dumpiness, were, quite simply, heartslayers. A goatish observation, yes, but when thinking or writing about Vietnam the question of Vietnamese women always managed to rear its head. On my first reading of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, I flinched when Fowler describes Vietnamese women to Pyle (this is around the time when Pyle describes a friend's most profound sexual experience as having had a “chink and a negress” in bed together). “It's a cliche,” Fowler admits, “to call them children— but there's one thing which is childish. They love you in return for kindness, security, the presents you give them.” Of course, Fowler and his Vietnamese lover Phuong's relationship is basically founded upon her feeding him opium nightly. I had snorted at these Greenelandian mores—until I found myself involved in something that instantaneously escalated into a relationship with a Vietnamese woman, for whom I bought a present, after which she told me she loved me.
During the war, the first lecture many U.S. soldiers were given concerned the hazards of sex with Vietnamese women. Prostitution in Vietnam was such an overriding fact of life that the military actually monitored whores to make sure they were not overcharging GIs. U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker once said, “There's a lot of plain and fancy screwing going on around here, but I suppose it's all in the interest of the war effort.” Needless to say, Vietnamese women's sleeping with Americans (to say nothing of the French) has always been a sensitive matter to Vietnamese men. For the Communists and insurgents it had been a thrown gauntlet. One piece of NLF propaganda read, “In Saigon there are some Americans that put their penis outside of their pants and put a dollar on it to pay the girls who sell themselves. The Americans get laid in every public place. This beast in the street is not afraid of the presence of the people.” It also had its comical aspects: one historian writes of an establishment known as the Million Fingers Massage Parlor, Laundry and Tank Wash, which sprang up in the Central Highlands near a U.S. Army base. When a number of his soldiers had been venere-ally struck down, the U.S. division commander demanded that the place be closed. The establishment's owner changed tack and put up this sign: “No More Whorehouse, Only Laundry.” For years after the war, there were numerous sightings of unimprisoned white men lingering around Vietnam's villages—even a few in Hanoi. There was only one plausible explanation for these haunted laggards: Vietnamese women.
The attraction between American men and Vietnamese women had many headwaters, not all of them ignoble. Many times the American man and Vietnamese woman become partners in a secret exchange that could offend and enrage not a few around them. No doubt a large part of the desire drew its energy from this disapproval, and sometimes even from mutual suspicion. Was the Vietnamese woman simply fixating upon escape? Was the American man merely anticipating the docile, uncomplaining nature of his partner? But once one comes to know them, most Vietnamese women are not very docile at all, and many American men had no intention of marrying their Vietnamese lovers, as these women well knew. The crude and commonly accepted causes of the attraction were, then, something of an evasion.
So was it some misguided attempt to make amends? Some baser form of apology? These women! They giggled, they teased, they left, they came back, they pulled you down a path the end of which they had no intention of letting you reach without a proper courtship—and you were dazed, dazed by all this broken-English coquetry and decorous-ness. It was what courting must have felt like for a nineteenth-century English country gentleman. But such cogitation did not allow for the dislocated intimacy an American man and a Vietnamese woman could create together. Lying in bed, the woman complaining about her boyfriends who wanted to control her, keep her home; the American man telling her no, that is wrong, it should not be like that; the woman, perhaps touching his face, saying in the darkness, “You are so different, so different,” and the man knowing he is not, not really, because what was he offering her but a different, less obvious form of control? At this attraction's lambent core was something both manipulative and caring. One heard some strange, alarming, and possibly even true things from those who had thoroughly caverned into this attraction: that when you had sex with a Vietnamese woman it often pained her, that Vietnamese women were notoriously lousy kissers, that after love had been established they could transform into shrieking harpies. These poor women. What could they do in a culture with folk sayings as troubling as “One boy, that's something; ten girls, that's nothing” or “A hundred girls aren't worth a single testicle.” What could they do? Among other things, they could stare into your eyes with so much longing you wished to take them into your arms but then look away the moment you asked them about their husbands.
The following morning, as my father and I made our way down a devas-tatingly bright beach, which felt like nothing so much as having been swallowed by a postcard, I found myself comparing my constitution with his. My father imbibed a fraction as much as he used to, but he still possessed the cast-iron disposition every alcoholic needs if he or she is looking to make a life of it. I looked and smelled as though I had spent the night in a halfway house urinal, whereas he looked and smelled as though he had just slept fifteen hours in some enchanted flower bed. I was reminded of the various times I had, while growing up, seen my father triumphantly insensate after a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, wearing only underwear and a winter jacket, off to do some 3 a.m. snow shoveling. Mere hours later he would be healthfully pink and whistling as he knotted his tie before work. Constitutionally, I was not this man's spawn. Two shots of vodka gave me a protuberant headache, four beers annihilated the proceeding twenty-four hours, and five glasses of red wine landed me in intensive care. I pictured my father's alcohol-processing unit as some deafening, barn-sized combine. My own alcohol-processing unit, which was evidently powered by a gerbil, could not keep up with it, or him, and here on the beach he patted my back as I dry heaved into some bushes.
We were looking for the exact spot where my father had come ashore with a thousand other Marines in April 1965, one month after the deployment, in Danang, of the first U.S. Marines sent to Vietnam explicitly as combat troops. Men such as my father took the Corps's princi
ple of being the first into combat quite solemnly. At this impulse the Army, Navy, and Air Force often rolled their collective eyes. Indeed, during the war the Army's chief of staff chastised the Marines for the “heads down and charge” manner in which they fought.
The Marines who landed at Danang a month before my father were greeted by cheering Vietnamese, and several young women stepped forth to hang wreaths of flowers around their sunburned necks. By this point the war was universally viewed as being lost, governmental chaos reigned in Saigon, and General Westmoreland no longer had any trust that the ARVN could defeat the insurgency. (One of the ARVN's most elite and expensively trained units had been ambushed and nearly wiped out at Bien Gia by NLF guerrillas on the eve of 1965.) Marines would no longer stand impotent guard beside airports and radio towers and hospitals but would hunt down and kill insurgents. Many expected a quick victory, as it was assumed that NLF and PAVN troops could not withstand America's superior firepower. “We are going to stomp them to death,” one U.S. major general said at the time. A Gallup Poll conducted shortly after the Marines landed revealed that the percentage of Americans who believed that the war would end with a Communist victory or the United States pulling out was precisely zero.