Fire in the Lake (28 page)

People were favorable towards these [GVN assistance] programs, but they doubted they would get much because of official corruption. They did get something, but the VC told them that the GVN tried to gain their sympathy only during wartime. There are a lot of people who still believe the VC. The GVN must improve their way of giving so that the recipients will be more satisfied.
¹⁰

While the GVN officials simply gave without asking, the NLF took the opposite approach — ironically, the same that President Kennedy took to the American people in his inaugural address of 1961. Instead of “giving generously” and showing their “self-control” as “superior men,” they asked the people for support and explained that they had an ulterior motive for their good conduct. By reversing their roles with the villagers and becoming the “children of the people,” the NLF cadres gave the villagers a position of power such as they had not had even in the days of the empire. Once the cadres had convinced the villagers that they behaved well
out of necessity
, the villagers let down their traditional defenses, trusted them, and tended to believe their propaganda — often despite evidence that belied it.

Q. What has prompted the people to support and join the Front?

A. It is a social problem. The population believes that the GVN does not care for them. For instance, [Vietnamese] physicians treat the villagers with contempt, though they pocket their money. The Front accordingly made propaganda to the effect that those who go to the hospital will die sooner because of the injections they get there.… A villager who receives from an American’s hand medicine which will cure his illness will believe in the Americans without daring to express it. And later on when the Front puts out some anti-American propaganda, he will no longer believe it.
¹¹

As if by magic, the Front cadres had undermined the best of the American aid programs. Alchemists, they had transmuted something into nothing, and nothing into something — giving “jam tomorrow” a reality that “jam today” lacked for the villagers. But their alchemy was no mere sleight of hand. They had made a bargain with the villagers, and, as individuals, they paid for it by renouncing all claims to rank and privilege, all rights to feed at the great pipeline of American money and supplies. To become an NLF cadre a Vietnamese had to take what amounted to the oaths of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He had to renounce the city with its bright lights, its wealth, its cosmopolitan interests, and go to live, perhaps until death, in the poor, the boring, and the brutal world of the villagers.

Rebellion: Self-control Is the Root of Exploitation

To the French colons long resident in Indochina, the hesitations of General Leclerc and the new French government of 1946 to take action against the Viet Minh had seemed perfectly inexplicable. Why not attack Ho Chi Minh and end the whole foolish notion of Vietnamese independence once and for all? The idea as advanced by General Leclerc’s staff, that there might be some military difficulty involved, that the war might cost France an unacceptable price in money and soldiers, appeared fantastic to them. Not only did Ho Chi Minh have no troops, but he faced the task of recruiting them from among “les Annamites,” “les jaunes,” from a people utterly lacking in military virtues, completely submissive before their masters, before Fate and
force majeure
. To the colons all that Leclerc had to do was to march a French army into Hanoi, cause a few heads to roll, and that would be the end of the rebellion. The Vietnamese knew their place, didn’t they?

By the beginning of the second Indochina War in 1960, such sentiments were, of course, not so common among foreigners in Vietnam. Still, they did crop up occasionally among the American advisers to the ARVN, expressed in such phrases as, “With a division of American troops, what we couldn’t do in this country.… Just give me one American battalion and this province would turn to the right of Calvin Coolidge.” Certainly in 1965 some of the American commanders believed that the NLF and the North Vietnamese would surrender their hopes under the determined application of American airpower.

Such opinions might be dismissed as the product of racism or of the sense of superiority natural to an undefeated army — which in some sense they were. Still, to dismiss them outright would be to neglect certain pieces of evidence that the Westerners — and particularly the French — possessed about the Vietnamese.

For seventy years, from the time of the French conquest until the Second World War, fourteen thousand troops had sufficed to keep all of Vietnam under French rule. The French who had grown up in the colony could hardly have forgotten the Scholars’ Revolt in Hue, the Yen Bay mutiny, and the other “nationalist” uprisings that had collapsed almost as soon as the governor called in the troops and showed that he meant business. And then they themselves had watched the tenant farmers crawling to their landlords with presents and obsequious speeches; they had seen the mandarins, who treated their inferiors with such disdain, humbling themselves before their French masters. Few Americans had ever seen the Vietnamese in such a situation — and few knew the Vietnamese as well as the French. Yet many of their in-depth interviews and sociological studies led them to a similar conclusion: that the NLF would disintegrate under stress and the war would be a short one.

Q. Do you know why the other people in your unit became active in the Front?

A. I think that they were like me, they were attracted by the VC propaganda that “The Revolution is ripe and the Front will win over the American imperialists.”… At first… their morale was very high because the GVN troops had left, but… then when the GVN troops came often enough to my village, their morale became more and more low.
¹

In 1965 the RAND analyst, Leon Gouré, undertook a study for the American air force of the attitude of the Vietnamese civilian population to the widespread use of American air power in the south. On the basis of just such interviews he concluded that, rather than turning the population against the government, the bombing actually helped to destroy the people’s confidence in the NLF. Quite contrary to American expectations, the villagers rarely blamed the GVN or the Americans for the damage. They assigned their sufferings to Fate, or they blamed the NLF for their inability to protect them. Gouré therefore recommended that the bombing be accelerated as planned.
²

Q. Was your village ever attacked by aircraft?

A. Once… the Government troops were conducting an operation in the village.… The aircraft were flying very low (over a group of fishing boats). Some of the fishermen were scared and took off their clothes, preparing to dive. The aircraft suspected that they were VC and strafed the boats.… Six or seven died either of strafing or drowned.

Q. What did the families of the persons killed say?

A. They did not say anything. They said they had bad luck.
⁸

One might question the validity of such interviews on the basis that the villagers were saying what they wanted the Americans to hear. But the NLF confirmed the existence of such attitudes in their own reports.
⁴
While Mr. Gouré’s conclusions were questionable on humanitarian grounds, his analysis had an element of truth to it.

The traditional politics of the Vietnamese villager was that of accommodation. “The essence of small people is that of grass,” wrote Confucius. “And when a wind passes over the grass, it cannot choose but bend.” In the days of the old empire the people of the villages did their best to avoid participation in the power struggles of their leaders. They preferred to hold themselves impassive, secret, while the warlord armies passed by, and to commit themselves only when the struggle had already been decided in the heavens. As long as the new rulers guaranteed them a minimum of security, the villagers would accept their authority. To resist was to invite destruction, for the conflict, having no rules, could not be settled except by unconditional surrender. Even the high mandarins did not resist implacable force. If unable to “bend” and serve the new sovereign, they would accept the will of Heaven and commit suicide on the battlefield.

Brought up in the traditional manner, the villagers of the 1960’s had learned that their very lives depended upon their “self-control,” or, in Western terms, their ability to repress those feelings which might bring them into conflict with others. As children they played no contact sports. (When the Westerners brought football to Vietnam, they did not perhaps realize the difficulties the game might provoke.) As adults they took pains to avoid even the smallest argument with their neighbors.
⁵
Between father and son, superior and inferior, the relationship was even more delicate. When mistreated by his landlord, the tenant, for instance, would tend not to blame the landlord for fear that the conflict might finally break all of the bonds between them. Indeed, his emotion for the landlord might not surface in the conscious mind as anger: he would feel “shame” or “disappointment” that his own behavior or his own fate had brought him to such a low status in the eyes of the landlord. One former Front soldier gave an excellent illustration of this attitude:

Q. Tell me a little about your background.

A. I was the eighth of ten children and we were very poor. We had no land of our own. I tended ducks for other people. We were moved around a great deal. Once I tried to save money and buy a flock of ducks to raise for myself, but I failed. I never married. Once I fell in love with a village girl, but I was so ashamed of my status that I did not dare declare my love to her.

Q. Were you angry at society because of this?

A. I thought if we were poor it was our own fault. I told myself that probably my poverty was the result of some terrible acts of my ancestors. I was sad but not angry.
⁶

Such acquiescence before authority had its place within a stable, family-based community, where custom and community pressure insured a measure of economic and social justice. But within a disordered and unequal society, it hardened the status quo and denied not only the poor peasants but all Vietnamese not actually in power a voice in their country’s future. The villagers often resented their government officials, but they made no complaints, for they saw them as instruments of the distant, implacable power of heaven or Fate which they had no means to influence. In the same way, the students of the Saigon university — the sons and daughters of the Diemist officials — made no protest against the Diem regime until the Buddhists led them to it. Like the poorest and most ignorant of the peasants, they simply assumed that they had no power to change the course of events.

Curiously enough, among all the political groups in Vietnam, the Communists alone recognized this political passivity as a
psychological
problem amenable to a psychological solution. One PRP directive made a very precise formulation of it:

Daily the masses are oppressed and exploited by the imperialists and feudalists and therefore are disposed to hate them and their crimes. But their hatred is not focused; it is diffuse. The masses think their lot is determined by fate. They do not see that they have been deprived of their rights. They do not understand the purpose and method of the Revolution. They do not have confidence in us. They swallow [
sic
] their hatred and resentment or resign themselves to enduring oppression and terror, or, if they do struggle, they do so in a weak and sporadic manner. For all these reasons agit-prop work is necessary to stir up the masses, to make them hate the enemy to a high degree, to make them understand their rights and the purpose and method of the Revolution, and to develop confidence in our capability.
⁷

The solution of the Viet Minh, like that of the NLF, was the systematic encouragement of hatred. In 1946, just after the French broke off negotiations with the Democratic Republic in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh began to make a series of speeches that now seem quite uncharacteristic of him. Usually the coolest and least emotional of revolutionaries, he denounced the French not only as colonial oppressors but as perpetrators of the most lurid crimes against women and children. On the battlefields as in the most remote of the villages, his cadres conducted a massive propaganda campaign to call forth the emotion of hatred. Reciting lists of the French crimes (no doubt both real and imaginary), they would produce evidence in the form of artillery shells or corpses and call upon the villagers to describe their sufferings in the hands of the “colonialists” and “feudalists.”
⁸

Hatred was the beginning of the revolution, for hatred meant a clean break in all the circuits of dependency that had bound the Vietnamese to the Westerners, the landlords, and the old notables.
⁹
Quite correctly the Party directive equated “hatred of the enemy” with the masses’ “understanding of their own rights,” for shame is anger turned against self. In calling upon the villagers to blame the “feudalists” and the “American imperialists and their lackeys” for their sufferings, the NLF was making a new map of the world on which the villagers might reroute their lives. The enemy was no longer inside, but outside in the world of objective phenomena; the world moved not according to blind, transcendent forces, but according to the will of the people.
¹⁰
In the idea that they might change their lives the villagers possessed a source of power more efficient than a hundred machine guns, for to blame Fate for all injustice was to fire into the air and render any weapon useless. As Ho Chi Minh said to the last of the French emissaries, “I have no army, I have no finances, I have no education system. I have only my
hatred
, and I will not disarm my hatred until I can trust you.”
¹¹
Hatred was the key to the vast, secret torrents of energy that lay buried within the Vietnamese people, to a power that to those who possessed it seemed limitless and indestructible. As the interview with one prisoner went: