Fire in the Lake (20 page)

Some very old officials were good. Sometimes, they stayed in the office to work very late in order to complete the papers for the villagers. But some were bad. When the villagers came to request some papers, they let them sit in the sun for a very long time before they let them come into the office. Moreover, some of the officials received money from the rich landowners in order to take land back from the poor farmers.

But, Huong continued:

I hated the soldiers of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.… I hated them because they were very haughty. The villagers were already very poor, and yet the soldiers commanded them to build roads and bridges.… Under Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime, people had to pay high taxes. People had to pay all kinds of taxes. A person even had to pay a tax to the government if he wanted to sell a buffalo. Ngo Dinh Diem didn’t help people in any way, he made people become poor. And yet, the soldiers carried weapons to protect him and his regime. Therefore, I hated the soldiers.
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Huong’s complaint about the taxes imposed by the Diem regime was a common one — and in fact Diemist taxes on use and consumption were difficult for the peasants to bear. But they were no higher than the French taxes and they were a great deal lower than the NLF taxes were to become. By failing to explain the taxes (by failing to explain the whole notion of a national tax system), the Diemist officials raised the traditional fears of exploitation by a strange and therefore “undisciplined” authority. Rightly or wrongly, Huong believed that his stepfather would bully him and waste his inheritance. The villagers for their part needed no proof that the Diem regime, through its soldiers and officials, would actually eat up their subsistence. And in many cases their suspicions were fully justified.

During the resistance against the French many rich landowners left the village for the city. The poor, landless farmers farmed the unworked land. After peace returned, the rich landowners returned to the village.… The local officials didn’t intervene to help the poor, but they helped landowners to get their land back instead. Also, many of the villagers who formerly worked for the Viet Minh had to bribe the officials in order to avoid being arrested.

And further:

Yes, people complained very much about the soldiers’ behavior. At night the soldiers used to come to the people’s houses to drink wine and eat. After eating, they got drunk and quarreled with each other, and they used their rifles to shoot at each other. If a family had girls, the soldiers came to flirt with them and tease them. Some of the soldiers even wore masks to blackmail the rich people in the village.
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Huong’s particular story cannot be verified, but there is evidence that the GVN soldiers and officials behaved in a similar manner in many, if not the majority, of the villages of the south. And it was not so surprising. Marriage trapped Huong’s stepfather into a relationship he could not manage; similarly, their uniforms imprisoned the soldiers and officials into a position of authority for which neither their upbringing nor their training had prepared them. The soldiers were young peasants like Huong himself, yet they had no more sense of community with the strange villagers than if they had been Martians. Suspect in the eyes of the villagers, they in their turn feared exploitation both by the villagers and by the authorities above them:

I talked to many of them. They told me they didn’t want to join the army, but that they were afraid of being drafted. If they were drafted, they would not be able to be with their families. Therefore, they joined the Civil Guards and the Self-Defense Corps in order to be with their families, and they were also able to receive some money to feed their families. This was what they said, but I think many of them were bad. They were very arrogant. They took the villagers as their servants.
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The soldiers tried at least once to deny their rank, but they did not persuade Huong of their equality in misfortune. They did not, perhaps, persuade themselves. Taking on the traditional attitudes of authority, they entered the vicious circle of fear and bad faith — or “not a vicious circle, but a downward spiral,” as Ho Chi Minh’s foreign minister was to remark in a similar context.
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It was the course already charted between Huong and his stepfather, and it was to be the course followed by so many of the Diemist officials in the villages of the south.
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The officials drew back behind their masks of “haughtiness” and “arrogance,” and the villagers retreated from them. Hiding their rice from the tax collector and their sons from the army recruiter, they protected themselves as best they could. Rarely — except as a result of NLF instigation — would they make an attempt to bargain with the officials or to complain of their behavior to the higher authorities at district and province level.

“I didn’t like my stepfather, but I just hated him in my mind. I never showed my hatred.”
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Huong did not express his anger either to his stepfather or to the soldiers he considered “bad.” In the same way the villagers of the south concealed their hatred of the Diemist officials. In Huong’s village of Phuoc Khanh there was, after a while, nothing left between the villagers and their officials but the trappings of authority and submission: the villagers’ masks of respect, the soldiers’ masks of haughtiness. Finally, the soldiers donned real masks and began to make good their threats by bullying the villagers and stealing their food and money. Still the villagers made no outward sign of resistance. Trusting in no authority, they ceased to trust each other to the point where they could not organize to defend themselves. The brittle hierarchy of the village had split apart, and if it were to be put back together again, the initiative would have to come from the outside.

Asked if he had ever quarreled with his stepfather, Huong recalled the time when his stepfather nearly hit him for fighting with another child; following that incident he left home.

But the villagers of the south were unable to leave their land and their houses in order to escape the Diemist officials. Instead, they went into internal emigration. In public they claimed to “know nothing of the government”; even in private they rarely spoke of politics. (“Silence is golden, silence is golden,” said one village “notable.”) Their resistance took the form of passivity and denial. For two years NLF agents visited the village of Phuoc Khanh to distribute leaflets and recruit young men. They recruited the young man, Huong, and within daily view of the soldiers, he carried on the work of an insurgent, the silence of the villagers a shield of invisibility about him. Gradually they persuaded most of the village officials to stop working for the Diem regime. Those officials who continued to work for Diem had to work and sleep in the military outpost, for some 85 percent of the villagers favored the enemy. Openly by night, invisibly by day, the village belonged to the National Liberation Front. In the old language of Vietnam, the will of Heaven had changed.

Huong did not simply run away from home, he fled to his aunt and then to his paternal uncle. Similarly the villagers went over from the Diem regime to the NLF, substituting one authority for another in the hope that the second would prove better than the first. In villages such as Phuoc Khanh there was very little alternative, for in the sense that the Vietnamese understood government — as a complete order, a complete set of relationships — the Diem regime had been no government at all. Under the guns of the soldiers the village had been reduced to a state of pure anarchy where men did not trust their masters and where no laws held. For those villagers the years of the Diem regime, no less than the war, represented a “time of troubles,” an “interregnum” in which the regime could not give the minimum protection and nourishment to its people.

Such periods had come before in Vietnamese history — but never quite in the same way. Traditionally the villagers of the north and center found refuge behind the hedges of the village — the Confucian mask translated into the landscape. In times of trouble they retreated into the maze of interior pathways, as into the circumlocutions of the old-fashioned courtesy, to wait until one or another of the warlords gained full control over the village. Traditionally the emperors, too, had their own defenses. Spaced out across the landscape, their citadels symbolically established their claim to rule over the “mountains and rivers” of the country. But these stern towers of brick and stone also signified the distance between the emperor and his people — a distance that grew with the expansion to the south and the thinning of Confucian culture. When in the nineteenth century the Nguyen emperor Gia Long built a new imperial citadel in Hue, he chose the site for its seclusion according to the laws of geomancy, behind the Perfume River and the mountains called the “Screen of the Kings.”
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With walls over six feet thick, the new citadel was a fortress into which none but the mandarins, the ritually pure, might enter. When the French came to Vietnam in threatening numbers, the Nguyen retreated further and further into their world of rituals until in the end they behaved as though the citadel contained the nation. The walls of Hue never crumbled — at least not until the Tet offensive of 1968 — but, as the French armies moved across the Mekong Delta, the villages broke away from the capital, leaving the last of the Nguyen sacred prisoners without exit from their citadel.

The history of the Diem regime bore a striking resemblance to that of the Nguyen dynasty. Taking his mandate from the Emperor Bao Dai in 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem, like Gia Long, borrowed foreign arms to use against his own countrymen. Had he managed to design a new political community, many South Vietnamese, including the members of the sects, might have approved his military actions as necessary to the restoration of social harmony. But, like Gia Long, Diem was a traditionalist who looked only backwards into the old stream of Confucian civilization, and he regarded the political movements that grew up out of the south as mere “sources of demoralization” within the country. Initially he tried to pacify the south with moral instruction — it was that, he supposed, that had insured the harmonious working of society in the past. When instruction did not work — and perhaps he had always feared that it would not — he found himself at a loss. The idea that he might consult the people or attempt to win popular support did not occur to him as a possibility. “I know what is best for the people,” he would repeat endlessly to his American advisers.
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Seeing himself as the patriarch, the father of his people, he could not cope with the social disintegration. He scarcely knew what had happened or why. When it became clear that the people would not respond to what many Americans were pleased to call the “traditional government” of the Vietnamese villages, Diem’s reaction was to extend his own paternal rule down into the villages with the appointment of officials from the outside. But his administration would not function, and not surprisingly, for a Western-style bureaucracy could not function according to the traditional Way. The old order had rested upon two graduated pyramids, each insulated from the other by custom as well as by the time and space of the old empire. By imposing his own administration upon the villages, Diem broke down the last barriers and exposed the villagers to intolerable pressure. In the end the villagers would break away from him, as they broke away from the Nguyen emperors, leaving him helpless before the foreigners.

In a sense those villagers who, ignorant of bureaucracy, saw their new, government-appointed village chief as Diem’s own personal representative to them perceived the true “substance” of the Diem regime more clearly than anyone else. This was not because the Ngo family controlled every official, but because Diem and Nhu resembled those officials. Like the Emperor Ly Thai To, Diem believed that the sovereign exerted a deep influence over the lives of his people — an influence beyond that of cause-and-effect or of simple example. Stripped of its magical overtones, the Confucian notion of “sympathy” between the ruler and the ruled consisted in the bonds of heredity and shared experience between the father and the junior members of the great family of the empire. And more than Ho Chi Minh, more than the bourgeoisie of Saigon, Diem had that sympathy. Like the majority of his people, he grew up in a very small world — Hue in the 1930’s was hardly more cosmopolitan than a back-country village. Like them, he watched, uncomprehending, while his world gave way before the strange forces of the West. Suddenly made responsible for a country fashioned by others and altered beyond recognition, he could only react as he had been trained to in his childhood. He
was,
in a sense, the lowliest of his officials, and the history of his reign was the history of Phuoc Khanh village, repeated on a larger scale. Like his officials, he was a man out of tune with his times, a sovereign of discord.

In 1960 a group of eighteen senior Saigonese politicians met with the American press at the Caravelle Hotel to present a list of their grievances against the government. The
Groupe Caravelliste,
as it was called, denounced the regime for driving the peasantry into the hands of the Communists and called for an end to press censorship, to detention without trial, and to the measures that were demoralizing the army — the last an implied criticism of Nhu’s secret police. A few months later Colonel Nguyen Chanh Thi undertook an ill-planned and finally abortive military coup against the regime. The Ngo family used the coup as a pretext for intensifying all those measures the Caravellists objected to and slapped several of the politicians in jail.

It was, of course, quite ridiculous for the Americans to expect Ngo Dinh Diem to establish an electoral democracy or to become “another Magsaysay.” Diem believed that the Hand of God, or the will of Heaven, supported him.
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He simply assumed that the people supported, or ought to support, him. The real difficulty was that he could not take the oldest of Confucian advice:

The mountain rests on the earth: