Fire in the Lake

Praise for Frances FitzGerald’s

FIRE IN THE LAKE

The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

Winner of the National Book Award
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the Bancroft Prize

“An extraordinary book… partly a history of South Vietnam, partly a study of American policy there, and partly an account of what this policy has done to a people we have destroyed in order to save from Communism.
Fire in the Lake
is all these and much more: a compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another, an analysis of all those features of South Vietnamese culture that doomed the American effort from the start, and an incisive explanation of the reasons why that effort could only disrupt and break down South Vietnam’s society — and pave the way for the revolution that the author sees as the only salvation.… Miss FitzGerald’s analysis should help us understand why even apparent battlefield successes of ‘our side’ provide, in the long run, no way of saving the unsavable. It should also, by its very depth and by its admirable style — cool empathy, restrained indignation, quiet irony, devastating vignettes — help us realize the monumental scope of what went wrong and what we did wrong.… A fine book.”

— Stanley Hoffmann,
New York Times Book Review

“Frances FitzGerald writes with the controlled fire of one whose Inner Light is hot, yet tempered by the cool ice of Reason and Fact.… There has been to this point no book on recent Vietnam with the power and conviction of
Fire in the Lake.
Compared to Miss FitzGerald’s prodigious effort, all previous studies, of whatever persuasion, pale into insignificance.”

— David Brudnoy,
National Review

“FitzGerald is a wonderful reporter and writer, with an eye for the telling detail.”

— Jim Miller,
Newsweek

“FitzGerald has caught the sweep of the subject as well as the context.… The great mistakes that flowed from the basic American misunderstanding of the nature of the Vietnam conflict are set forth with stunning clarity.… FitzGerald constructs her case by a narrative of intricate facts which sharply cuts through the typical self-deceptions about the war that have been built up by official righteousness…. Her main points are hammered home with such power that doubters are bound to be shaken.”

— S. R. Davis,
Christian Science Monitor

“
Fire in the Lake
somehow manages to get under the skin of this ugly war which has left so many Americans feeling bewildered and morally bankrupt. In clear, often poetic language, the author illumines the cultural incongruences which reduce most attempts at communication between the Vietnamese and ourselves to something bizarre, like the dog trying to talk to a duck.”

— Michael Mok,
Publishers Weekly

“
Fire in the Lake
is a thoughtful book written in quality prose. Without claiming to be authoritative, it touches on most of the subjects that are likely to concern specialists of Vietnam for years to come.”

— David G. Marr,
Journal of Asian Studies

“One of the best descriptions and analyses of Vietnam ever published in English.… FitzGerald has read extensively in scholarly works about Chinese and Vietnamese society, and she uses this material to give substance to her own excellent observations made as a reporter in Vietnam. She has been able to combine a basic understanding of the nature of peasant society, Confucianism, French colonial rule, and the impact of modernization to produce an exceptionally clear account of the problems of southern Vietnam. The treatment of American operations is also excellent.”

— D. D. Buck,
Library Journal

“If Americans read only one book to understand what we have done to the Vietnamese and to ourselves, let it be this one.”

— Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

“A superbly dramatic and informative account of current events on the other side of the globe. It is also a depth analysis, supported by a compelling thesis, of why events have proceeded as they have and why the drama is proving not only a tragedy for the people of Vietnam but also for the American people as well.… FitzGerald has unusual gifts as a narrator of large historical events.… The impact of her history is overwhelming.”

— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
New York Times

“Rarely have we been able to regard the Vietnamese and their divided country from the standpoint of an essential unity of culture, tradition, and ethnic identity. That is what makes
Fire in the Lake
such an important departure.… Miss FitzGerald’s basic complaint is that the American failure in Vietnam has been our inability to perceive that all along ‘the enemy’ has been the people. And so the
Fire in the Lake,
the revolution being waged by the North and the Front, may be the only one capable of restoring order and unity to the wartorn society of Vietnam.”

— Laurence Stern,
Washington Post Book World

“The best part of
Fire in the Lake
describes how the Americans, as they defoliated the countryside, proceeded to corrupt the cities: to turn a land of farmers into a ghetto of refugees, shoeshine boys, and prostitutes.… By the end of the book, FitzGerald has presented two Vietnamese societies with nothing in common: that of the villages and that of the
bidonvilles
. The ‘infra-structures’ the American army rooted out were the traditional values of the ancestral culture. With so many families scattered and gone, these values are unlikely to become the basis of a new political order — Marxist or Confucian or otherwise.”

— Tom Geoghegan,
New Republic

“This is the richest kind of contemporary history; it places political and military events in cultural perspective.… FitzGerald is superb at clarifying the differences between Vietnamese and American cultures.… This is the best book on Vietnam.”

—
New York Times
“Books of the Century

Books by Frances FitzGerald

Fire in the Lake:
The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

America Revised:
History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century

Cities on a Hill:
A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures

Way Out There in the Blue:
Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War

Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth
with photographs by Mary Cross

COPYRIGHT
© 1972
BY FRANCES FITZGERALD

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. EXCEPT AS PERMITTED UNDER THE U.S. COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1976, NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, OR STORED IN A DATABASE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.

Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, August 1972
First eBook Edition, April 2009

Back Bay Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The Back Bay Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.

Portions of this book appeared originally in
The New Yorker
, in slightly different form.

Excerpts from testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, January 1971, reprinted with permission of the
Boston Globe
.

Quotations from
The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam
by Robert L. Sansom © 1970 by MIT. Reprinted with permission of the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The I Ching
, or
Book of Changes
, translated by Richard Wilhelm, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen Series XX (© 1950 and 1967 by Bollingen Foundation), reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

ISBN
978-0-316-07464-3

To the memory of my father and Paul Mus

Note on the Title

Fire in the Lake
comes from the
I Ching,
the Chinese Book of Changes, and it is the image of revolution. This image, like all of the others in the Book of Changes, is almost as old as China itself; for Vietnamese it forms the mental picture of change within the society.

The following note on the hexagrams and the Book of Changes comes from the introduction by Richard Wilhelm in the
I Ching
(Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. xlix-li.

At the outset the Book of Changes was a collection of linear signs to be used as oracles. In antiquity, oracles were everywhere in use; the oldest among them confined themselves to the answers yes and no. This type of oracular pronouncement is likewise the basis of the Book of Changes. “Yes” was indicated by a simple, unbroken line and “No” by a broken line. However, the need for a greater differentiation seems to have been felt at an early date, and the single lines were combined in pairs. To each of these combinations a third line was then added. In this way the eight trigrams came into being. These eight trigrams were conceived as images of all that happens in heaven and on earth. At the same time, they were held to be in a state of continual transition, one changing into another, just as transition from one phenomenon to another is continually taking place in the physical world. Here we have the fundamental concept of the Book of Changes. The eight trigrams are symbols standing for changing transitional states; they are images that are constantly undergoing change. Attention centers not on things in their state of being — as is chiefly the case in the Occident — but upon their movements in change. The eight trigrams therefore are not representations of things as such but their tendencies in movement.…

In order to achieve a still greater multiplicity, these eight images were combined with one another at a very early date, whereby a total of sixty-four signs was obtained. Each of these sixty-four signs consists of six lines, either positive or negative.

Preface

I went to South Vietnam in February 1966, and remained there until November of that year to write articles for the
Atlantic Monthly,
the
New York Times
Sunday Magazine, the
Village Voice, Vogue,
and other periodicals. My arrival in Saigon coincided with the Honolulu Conference and with the beginning of the Buddhist struggle movement of 1966. The succeeding political crisis within the Saigon government dramatically exposed the rift between the Vietnamese political reality and the American ambitions for the anti-Communist cause in the south. In the following months my attempt was to follow this rift and to try and understand the politics of Vietnam and the effect of the American presence and the war on Vietnamese society.

At the time there was little American scholarship on Vietnam and few Americans were engaged in a serious effort to understand the political, economic, and social issues at stake for the Vietnamese. Happily, not long after my arrival, I came across a copy of Paul Mus’s important work on Vietnamese culture and the French war,
Sociologie d’une guerre.
The book not only answered a great number of questions the American experience raised, but it indicated an entirely new way of asking them. Upon my return to the United States I was fortunate enough to meet Professor Mus and to have the opportunity to study Vietnam under his guidance. I owe most of what I have learned to his wisdom and generosity.

My thanks also go to Mr. Joseph Buttinger for the use of his library and to the editors of the
Atlantic
for their kind encouragement.

— Saigon, 1972

Abbreviations

Contents

Copyright Page

Note on the Title

Preface

Abbreviations

I. THE VIETNAMESE

 
1. States of Mind

 
2. Nations and Empires

 
3. The Sovereign of Discord

 
4. The National Liberation Front

II. THE AMERICANS AND THE SAIGON GOVERNMENT

 
5. Mise en scène

 
6. Politicians and Generals

 
7. The United States Enters the War

 
8. The Buddhist Crisis

 
9. Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel