by Tom Bissell
“From the outset,” Gaiduk writes, “Washington blamed the Soviet Union for the North Vietnamese offensive. Moscow had provided Hanoi with the bulk of its military aid and knew of North Vietnamese plans without trying to dissuade its friends from such a move.” The Soviets countered that many of the weapons the North Vietnamese used had been hoarded for two years, and in any case the North Vietnamese were so poorly trained in using them that much of the offensive had floundered. The Soviets also argued that the offensive had been encouraged by China in order to drive a wedge between the Soviets and the Americans. All of this was true, but Nixon and Kissinger were unmoved.
The 1972 U.S.-Soviet summit was denounced by the North Vietnamese, as they were fully aware that the major purpose of the summit was to force Hanoi to agree to the negotiations that for three years they had disingenuously claimed they were willing to take part in. Hanoi still resisted the Soviets’ efforts—until its leaders finally realized, many years too late, that if the Americans were allowed to withdraw, the final overthrow of the Saigon regime, and the reunification of their nation, would be much easier. The United States left Vietnam on March 23, 1973, and twenty-five months later, despite China's fretful advice that North Vietnam show patience in moving into South Vietnam, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army.
The 7,000 Soviet advisers who moved into a reunified Vietnam after 1975 quickly became known to the Vietnamese as “Americans without dollars.” Despite this unkind sobriquet, the Soviets would spend more in Vietnam in the latter half of the 1970s—$1.5 billion in 1979 alone— than they spent during the entire war, earning Vietnam a complete severance of Chinese aid and an eventual Chinese war. The level of Soviet expenditure is especially impressive when one considers that of all the Soviet aid given to Communist countries from 1964 to 1974, 50 percent went to North Vietnam. (By 1991, Vietnam would owe the Soviet Union more than $15 billion.) After the war the Soviets did considerable rebuilding in Vietnam. The virtual entirety of this effort was rejected by all but the most hardened Vietnamese Communists, as a song sung furtively after the war suggests: “With anger, I hate the Viet Cong. / You brought the elephant home / To walk upon our graves. / You took our pretty country, / And sold it to the Soviets.”
“For Moscow,” Gaiduk writes, “the end of the Vietnam War marked a new stage of its foreign policy.… It meant the chance of a more aggressive Soviet policy in Southeast Asia and in the third world.… Instead of seeing the U.S. defeat in Indochina as a warning against similar adventures of their own, Soviet leaders, blinded by Marxist-Leninist philosophy and by the conviction that the revolutionary trend of history was on their side, believed that where imperialism had failed they would certainly succeed.” This conviction—and what came to be an incidental achievement of Soviet policy in Vietnam—formed the basis of the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which had been used earlier to justify the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia when its Communist regime was in danger of falling. (The North Vietnamese praised the Soviet decision to invade Czechoslovakia, saying it had been done “for a noble purpose”) The Brezhnev Doctrine would be used again to justify the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when its one-year-old Communist government began to crumble against popular revolt after its attempts to, among other things, abolish marriage customs and land ownership, allow more education for girls and equality for women, forbid the veil, strictly curtail religious observance, and crush all dissidents.
Kosygin saw little good in the Soviet invasion, believing that Afghanistan (in language that eerily echoes that of the United States in the early years of the war in Vietnam) was a “complex political and international issue.” When Soviet troops came under fire from Afghan militias and Islamist groups, the Soviets quickly accused the CIA, along with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, of funding the mujahedeen. In fact, it was not until the Soviets made this accusation that the CIA had any real idea to do so. The Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979 gave the CIA an inkling of the power of political Islam, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan allowed the CIA its first chance to harness political Islam's energy for putative American benefit.
Despite the CIAs eagerness, the U.S. leadership was not sure how to respond to the Soviet invasion. As Steve Coll notes, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote President limmy Carter a memo that said, “We should not be too sanguine about Afghanistan becoming a Soviet Vietnam. The guerrillas are badly organized and poorly led. They have no sanctuary, no organized army, and no central government—all of which North Vietnam had.” Nonetheless: “We should encourage the Chinese [!] to help the rebels also. We should concert with Islamic countries both in a propaganda campaign and in a covert action campaign to help the rebels.” Brzezinski later wrote, “Our ultimate goal is the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Even if this is not attainable, we should make Soviet involvement as costly as possible.”
By 1984, the CIA estimated that the mujahedeen had killed 17,000 Soviet troops and controlled more than half the Afghan countryside.
The Soviets had lost 400 aircraft, 2,700 tanks, and 8,000 other vehicles. The CIA's director, William Casey, a fundamentalist Christian, had apparently not blanched at the idea of funding Islamist holy warriors. Casey believed that the “primary battlefield” between the Soviets and the United States was “in the countryside of the Third World” and that “Afghan freedom fighters” were the frontline forces in this new proxy struggle. Thus spake Casey: “Just as there is a classic formula for communist subversion and takeover, there also is a proven method of overthrowing repressive government that can be applied successfully in the Third World…. Far fewer people and weapons are needed to put a government on the defensive than are needed to protect it.” Vo Nguyen Giap could not have said it better.
The Soviet response to the growing insurgency was, in one writer's words, “one of the most vicious, scorched-earth counterguerrilla campaigns in history. They carpet-bombed villages, destroyed irrigation systems, and systematically sowed millions of mines across huge swaths of productive farmland.” They even dropped brightly colored ordnance upon the countryside to attract Afghan children. The massacre of civilians by Soviet troops in Afghanistan “like the one at My Lai were the norm rather than the aberration,” according to one analyst. Forty percent of Afghanistan's population became refugees, and perhaps a million civilians died.
The immediate result, however, was a Soviet experience in Afghanistan that resembled much of what had plagued the United States in Vietnam. Just as the Chinese and Soviets had competed to fund Vietnam's anti-American insurgency, Saudi Arabia matched American funding of Afghanistan's anti-Soviet insurgency dollar for dollar. Just as the United States tired of attacks launched out of Laos and Cambodia, the Soviets tired of attacks launched out of Pakistan and in the mid-1980s basically threatened to invade Pakistan if the attacks did not stop. (“Please don't start a third world war,” a CIA field officer begged one of his mujahedeen contacts.) Just as South Vietnam's leaders repeatedly incensed their U.S. sponsors, Nur Mohammed Taraki, the thuggish boss of the Afghan Communist Party, exasperated the Soviets, as did his successors: the psychotic Hafizullah Amin, the relatively suave Babrak Karmal, and the hugely self-absorbed Najib Ahmadzai (who later renamed himself Najibullah, or “Najib of God”).
Mikhail Gorbachev, who upon taking office had authorized any means of force necessary to defeat the mujahedeen, said shortly before the first Soviet withdrawals began, “A million of our soldiers went through Afghanistan. And we will not be able to explain to our people why we did not complete it. We suffered such heavy losses! And what for?” In 1987, the Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze asked Secretary of State George Shultz for help in containing the spread of “Islamic fundamentalism.” In Steve Coil's words, “no high-level Reagan administration officials ever gave much thought to the issue…. The CIA and others in Washington discounted warnings from Soviet leadership about Islamic radicalism. The warnings were just a way to deflect attention from Soviet failings, Ameri
can hard-liners decided.”
In Vietnam, the Soviets funded an insurgency inspired by its system of political governance. In Afghanistan, the United States funded an insurgency opposed in most ways to American democracy. The Soviets lost their proxy war, as did the United States. There the similarities end. The Soviet Union collapsed. After years of suffering, Vietnam is emerging as a growingly prosperous, if not yet politically open, nation. The United States maintained its power and prestige. Afghanistan remained—and remains—one of the poorest countries in the world, and within its borders metastasized a terrorist training ground begun not by the Taliban, as is often supposed, but by the very insurgents the United States encouraged and armed. In 1996, one Afghan insurgent leader funded by U.S., Saudi, and Pakistani money, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, invited Osama bin Laden to come to Afghanistan.
Considering the brigands and terrorists it willingly funded in Afghanistan, what did the United States really have to fear from Vietnam's Communists, other than their political inclination? In some ways the men of North Vietnam's Politburo were not all that different from, say, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. They hated crime, criminals, social frivolousness, and pornography. They approved of the death penalty and exalted their military. They were at least equals in social conservatism, if leagues apart in their tolerance of dissent. There is a great lesson here, surely: the Soviet Union, for all its meddling in the world, never aided an insurgency in direct opposition to its political goals or philosophical beliefs. The Vietnamese may never have learned to speak Russian very well or appreciate the efforts of Soviet civic engineers to rebuild their cities, but they never tried to kill them.
VI
We had come to discover the ways in which my father's Vietnam no longer existed—ruminants in search of lost times and past selves. By now it was clear that few tangible ligaments joined the place in which my father had fought to the landscape upon which we now looked with something less than fresh interest. My father seemed exhausted. Short of a flaming unicorn galloping alongside the car, the nap he was fighting off by occasionally widening his eyes was going to overtake him. I wondered if it was the travel itself or all the simple, impossible demands I had made that he remember himself for me. Our trip, whatever the precise nature of its exhaustions, had been hard on him. Provided one was not a member of its Politburo, Vietnam was no country for old men— but then what country is?
I tried to take some notes, found I had nothing to say, and softly folded shut my notebook. What was there to say? To travel is to become part of a larger story, to find oneself reduced to a comma in a book whose last page one will never live to read. In a story as epically tragic as Vietnam's, there was something crushing about this realization. Our trip was nearly over, we were once again passengers in Truong's car, and I felt a thorny despair sink into me. Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam: could we really have been there?
No one had managed a sound for many miles. The longer it lasted, the more curdled and awful the silence became. Finally I thrust into it a vocal stirring spoon: “So! Dad. Any thoughts?”
His mouth dropped open as though to speak, but instead he sighed. He blinked in a recalibrating way. “What do you want me to say?”
I showed him my empty hands. My tape recorder was off. My notebook was in my backpack. “I just want to know if you had any thoughts.”
“One. Which is that I have to go to the bathroom really bad.”
“I mean the trip. It's getting to the end.”
“It's gone quickly. But I've been enjoying it. Especially this.”
“What?”
“This nice comfortable silence. I was almost asleep. But I really liked going back to Nha Trang. I was just thinking about that. I'm still upset that I couldn't go to that hospital.”
“We are all fully aware of the disappointment you felt after your foiled visit to Nha Trang's hospital.”
“But I was glad to see that it's still in use because it was a very nice hospital. Did you know it's only had three owners in forty years?”
“Can we never talk about Nha Trang's hospital again?”
“Only the Vietnamese would consider a hospital top secret.”
“I can't think of more fitting final words about Nha Trang's hospital.”
More, equally intolerable silence followed.
“So! What's your general feeling?”
“I'm just sad that Carolyn won't get to see any pictures of—”
“Not the fucking hospital! The trip, I mean. How do you feel about the trip?”
“This trip?”
“No. Your trip to Nha Trang's hospital. Yes, this trip.”
He looked out his window, his chin held high as the sun shined hard on his face. An indistinct green world hurtled past his profile. “Well, I think it's just been great. The two of us being together, getting to know each other in a new way. Arguing politics and philosophy and …” He leaned forward. “Tommy, look at this. I think that's all tea farming.”
We were drifting through a southeastern corner of the Central Highlands, on our way to the city of Da Lat, and enjoying some of the first rolling, open country we had seen anywhere in Vietnam. Much of it looked like a green-and-brown quilt of tea and coffee farms. Beyond these farms were huge stony mountains, their bases edged with teak and mahogany forests and their tops as starkly empty as volcanic islands. After a while, the farms disappeared and were replaced with lichen green valleys across which roamed several hundred sheep. Much of the Highlands had been long closed to foreigners due to the fact that many of the Communist regime's reeducation camps had been located here. A good deal of the unrest that continued to exist in contemporary Vietnam had its home in the Central Highlands as well. As recently as the late 1980s, the Highlands gave birth to a speedily crushed attempt to overthrow the Vietnamese government. This putsch was sponsored by some former South Vietnamese military officers and aided by some of the region's minority-group guerrillas. Few discussed this today, and those Western journalists who attempted to explore Highlands unrest were often told to leave it alone or suffer deportation.
We began our way up a twisty series of roads to Da Lat, Truong occasionally swerving around a few bone white boulders that had apparently tumbled down the mountainside. As we ascended it was getting cooler by the foot, the tangles of jungle becoming more orderly rows of evergreen forest, and many of the people we passed on the road where wearing bright, blankety garments that amounted to the closest winter-clothing equivalent the southern half of Vietnam had. From up here the shadowy green valleys below looked even wilder and richer than they had as we passed through them.
Hien was offering little tour-guidery. When my father asked Hien if the Catholic churches we had passed by on the way here were founded by those who had fled the North after the Geneva Accords, he said, uncharacteristically, “Yeah.” His cell phone rang. He spoke for a few minutes and hung up.
“Good news or bad news?” my father wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Hien said.
“Are those tea or mango plants down there?”
“Uh-huh.”
My father turned to me. “What kind of trees are those, do you think?”
“I am sure I have no idea.”
“God. Look at that.”
I looked. Layers upon layers of pine trees growing above dense green bushes blistered with tiny red fractals of poinsettia. In many places the soil was exposed and rust-colored and as hard-looking as clay. “How does anything grow out of that?” I wondered.
“Are you kidding? That's great soil. Everything grows in it. You could spread out a little patch on the moon and you'd have a palm tree sprouting out of it in a few hours. I'd love to have some of this soil back home.”
My father had, since I moved away from Michigan a decade ago, developed an alarmingly consuming tree-planting fetish. Related to that was his ongoing Final Solution against the squirrel—in particular the squirrels that ransacked the bird feeders he hung from the boughs of his more successful trees. Occasionally,
while we spoke on the phone, I would hear my father say, “Oh, hold on a second,” put down the receiver, and, a few moments later, the crack of a .22, followed by his return to our conversation as though nothing had happened.
“How come you like planting trees so much?”
He smiled as though overcome by some near-erotic reverie concerning saplings and watering cans. “I love to watch them grow. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction. My wife thinks I'm slightly off my rocker, of course. I don't know. It's nice to grow things.”
We were now on a level, straight road majestically colonnaded by some of the most massive pines I had ever seen. And there, fixed in the distant emerald lap of several surrounding mountains, was Da Lat. Nearly every leader of South Vietnam, from Bao Dai to Ngo Dinh Diem to Nguyen Khanh to Nguyen Van Thieu, had weekend villas in Da Lat (Bao Dai's was now a tourist attraction), and with its plenitude of nearby waterfalls and lakes—only in Da Lat could one drink from the tap in Vietnam—the city was today the most popular honeymoon spot in the country's southern half. During the war Da Lat was not touched until the final weeks, and on April 3, 1975, Da Lat's people made what has been described as “their own accommodations” with the Communists, who entered the city and instantly put an end to ARVN looting. (Hours before the Communists arrived, Da Lat's CIA station helped dismantle the city's small nuclear reactor, which had been built by the United States in the mid-1960s.) But to say Da Lat was largely unaffected by the war did not mean it knew nothing of the war. An ARVN military academy had been located here, as had an NLF villa for tired, vacation-needing guerrillas. Both sides were aware of the other, but there is no record that any of them ever exchanged anything but dark glances in the market.