Fire in the Lake (57 page)

But the American aid to the Saigon government was not merely useless. In the days of the Diem regime the desire for profit persuaded at least some of the officials to try to keep the peasants alive, productive, and only moderately discontented, but now they could forget the peasants entirely and concentrate on filling out forms. The aid program had, in other words, relieved them even of their desire to exploit the peasants. If the farmers starved, died, or moved into the provincial capitals, the GVN officials had merely to change their requisitions from agricultural extension to refugee relief. It was the culmination of a logical development: the more money the GVN had, the less attention it had to pay to the peasants. Under the Diem regime the paternalistic landlords were replaced by officials; under the Ky and Thieu regimes, the officials themselves began to disappear from the peasants' horizons. And as the “problem” for the Americans was even further from solution, General Westmoreland began to discover new “requirements for” and “shortages of” American troops and advisers.

By 1967 the U.S. presence in Vietnam had reached the critical mass where Vietnamese officials, down to the level of district chief, spent most of their time dealing with Americans. On days when there were no visiting congressmen, no intelligence analysts, no AID supervisors, charity representatives, or journalists to see, the province and district chiefs would meet with their two sets of advisers and coordinate their operations with the local U.S. military command. The Vietnamese government, like the Vietnamese economy, had become little more than a service to the Americans. As it was not always a very efficient service, the Americans in some cases managed to dispense with it almost entirely. In the First Corps, for instance, the U.S. Marines carried out their own “civic action” programs on a scale that quite overwhelmed the government aid. (Granted, of course, they were doing a more than equivalent amount of destruction: even in 1966 fully a quarter of the population of Quang Nam province turned refugee.) Many of their commanders were indeed convinced that only the Vietnamese government kept them from driving out the Communists and pacifying the population. The goal of Colonel Corson's scheme to turn one hamlet into a bastion of capitalism was not, as the colonel explained, “the official one of ‘paving the way for the GVN to assert its control over Phong Bac and to engender the support of the people for the GVN’ but rather to make Phong Bac strong enough to resist the encroachments of
both
the GVN and the Vietcong against the rights of the people.”
¹⁰

What did it matter now that the Vietnamese province chiefs were corrupt and the peasants had no affection for the government of General Thieu? The Americans had not taken over the Saigon government, as many would have liked, but they were now in occupation of large parts of the countryside — only the lower Delta remained exclusively policed by Vietnamese. And they had changed the entire life of the cities. Into a country that even under the French lived close to the economy of barter, the Americans poured hundreds of millions of dollars. The actual amount was impossible to compute, for it included not only the direct military and civilian aid to the GVN, but the value of the Vietnamese labor in all the construction projects and the private spending over the years of occupation by more than half a million Americans. The cities were flooded with piastres. Between January 1965 and the end of 1967 the cost of living in the cities by conservative estimate rose 170 percent; the price of rice and the supply of money rose by 200 percent. The inflation had been kept to the minimum by the issuance of scrip instead of dollars to the American GIs and by the Commercial Import Program. But these devices, too, exacted their toll on the Vietnamese economy. The black market flourished near every American base on dollars, scrip, and PX goods. The CIP, designed on the model of the Marshall Plan to deliver aid in the useful and uninflationary form of production equipment, did something altogether different in Vietnam from what it had done in Europe. Rather than buying tractors or industrial machinery with their dollars, the Vietnamese importers bought what could be sold to that proportion of the population that made the most money from the Americans. The result was a vast influx of luxury goods, including watches, refrigerators, radios, Hondas, television sets, sewing machines, and motorcycles. With the decline of rice production (owing to the bombing and the defoliation), the United States had also to import millions of tons of rice to Vietnam to keep the price somewhere near the means of the huge city populations. The peasantry therefore did not enjoy any of the profits: the Commercial Import Program maintained the two entirely separate economies, the barter economy of the country and the inflated economy of the cities. In addition it destroyed all nonagricultural types of production. Most of the cottage industry and such larger industries that the Vietnamese possessed — the textile mills around Saigon and the small mining concerns — went down before the flood of American goods. But it could not be helped: the country's economy was simply not strong enough to support the vast American military presence.

There were, of course, people who profited: the hotel owners, for instance, the licensed importers, the brothel keepers, pharmacists, real estate dealers, diamond merchants, and distributors of American luxury goods. The big businessmen knew the value of a dollar; many of them had made similar profits during the last war when the French drained
their
gold reserves to support the piastre. As the only people in Vietnam who profited enough by the war to hope it would go on forever and to take what steps needed to be taken vis-à-vis the GVN officials to see that it did, these people held an absolute veto over the existence of the Republic of Vietnam. (Not that they would ever use it as long as the supply of dollars continued.) Behind them — indeed invisible both in the streets and in the pages of any economic analysis — were a number of non-Vietnamese: the Chinese merchants, who dealt in rice and war materials between Saigon and Hong Kong, Paris, Singapore, and perhaps finally Peking; the Indian merchants, money traders, and black marketeers. These men leeched from the Americans as they had once leeched from the French. Servicing them or stealing from them — it made little difference, as few of them had any commitment to the aims of the American war.

These men had some experience at their trade, but they could not initially have imagined the magnitude of the current transaction. In the single year of 1968 an estimated two hundred and fifty million dollars went into the black market traffic in currency. Whereas only a small elite had profited by the first war, now a considerable sector of the urban population was involved: the restaurant owners who put up their prices to New York rates, the hotel managers who demanded a sizable bribe to rent a room, the PX clerks who stole from the commissaries (with or without the help of U.S. supply sergeants), government clerks who demanded ransoms for exit visas and other necessary papers. Finally there were the bar girls and prostitutes of Tu Do Street, those lovely girls in their floating
au dais,
who told the soldiers sad stories about their widowed mothers, took their money, and invested it in another bar in Nha Trang or Da Nang. There were professional beggars, pimps, drug dealers, and thieves — a Brechtian cast of characters in the midst of a new Thirty Years' War.

Saigon had a long and well-integrated tradition of corruption that only a revolutionary upsurge could have rejected. Now that corruption took on a new dimension. In the fall of 1967 a young American embassy officer told David Halberstam that he had recently listened to the wife of the chief of staff, General Cao Van Vien, giving orders to a group of provincial officials on the distribution of San Miguel beer. “What was so amazing,” he said, “was not the extent of her financial interest, which was very considerable, but the
flagrancy
of it — the absolute indifference to what we thought. She knew I spoke Vietnamese and she simply did not give a damn.”
¹¹
A few months before, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan's police arrested a leading member of the French community and the head of all the beer and soft-drink concerns in the country, alleging that he was giving payoffs to the Viet Cong. The gentleman in question had granted distributorships to the wives of four generals and his company had been paying NLF road taxes almost openly for years; it was therefore not hard to imagine just why he had gone to jail and just how he had managed to walk out of jail a week later with no more questions asked.

Under the Diem regime the corruption was covert and restrained by the barriers of practicality and good form; it was now unlimited, all-pervasive and naked of hypocrisy. The mayor of Quinhon, for instance, turned his official residence into a “massage parlor” for American soldiers, and the American officials could not persuade his superiors to order him to get the girls out. When AID imported forty garbage trucks to clean the fetid streets of Saigon, the GVN ministry concerned left them at the docks for a few days. Upon going down to check on them, an American official found some of them missing and the rest empty shells from which all the movable parts had been taken. On a rather grander scale, the head of the Saigon city council, La Thanh Nghe, took thousands of dollars every year in kickbacks from American drug companies for his pharmaceutical business. According to Halberstam, the corps commanders sold the job of district chief for a going rate of a million piastres (somewhere around ten thousand dollars, depending on the rate of exchange), and that of province chief for three million.
¹²
Given the total size of the American war budget, the price of a Vietnamese official was not, perhaps, excessive — if thereby the job was done. But there are two types of corruption in this world — the first, which permits an ill-made system to function; the second, which becomes the
raison d'être
of the system — and the corruption of the GVN was of the second type.

“Saigon has become an American brothel,” said Senator William Fulbright in 1967. And he was right. A Tokyo or a Berlin could perhaps accommodate an American occupation and survive with some of its privacy intact, some of its leaders uncorrupted. But Saigon was a small and terrified city, and though money could not kill, the vast influx of American dollars had almost as much influence on it as the bombing had on the countryside. It turned the society of Saigon inside out. Almost every night a young man stood on his Honda at the end of Tu Do Street, waiting to take the American soldiers from the bars and brothels back to their bases: the young man was an under-secretary in the ministry of revolutionary development. The French war had sustained the old professions of land ownership and government service, but this war profited only those who served the Americans. In the new economy a prostitute earned more than a GVN minister, a secretary working for USAID more than a full colonel, a taxi owner who spoke a few words of English more than a university professor. Small wonder, then, that many GVN officials were corrupt and that the students, so criticized by the Americans for their refusal to “participate” and “take responsibility,” put off taking their final exams year after year. The old rich of Saigon had opposed the Communists as a threat to their position in society; they found that the Americans took away that position in a much quicker and more decisive fashion — and with it, what was left of the underpinning of Vietnamese values. As one soldier complained ironically, “We people in this society curse the Communists because we live in a free society. Thus, crooks, cheats, thieves, and prostitutes are free to climb the ladder of values.”
¹³
For many Vietnamese the life of the cities had become a carnival-like existence, a permanent
Fasching;
Generals Ky and Thieu reigned as the Lords of Misrule over a country where all laws were suspended, all license permitted.

Just before his departure for a two-week tour of Vietnam in 1967, the defense analyst, Herman Kahn, listened to an American businessman give a detailed account of the economic situation in South Vietnam. At the end of the talk — an argument for reducing the war — Kahn said, “I see what you mean. We have corrupted the cities. Now, perhaps we can corrupt the countryside as well.” It was not a joke. Kahn was thinking in terms of a counterinsurgency program: the United States would win the war by making all Vietnamese economically dependent upon it. In 1967 his program was already becoming a reality, for the corruption reached even to the lowest levels of Vietnamese society. Around the American bases from An Khe to Nha Trang, Cu Chi, and Chu Lai, there had grown up entire towns made of packing cases and waste tin from the canning factories — entire towns advertising Schlitz, Coca-Cola, or Pepsi Cola a thousand times over. The “food,” “shelter,” and “job opportunities” that Westmoreland had promised came to this: a series of packing-case towns with exactly three kinds of industry — the taking in of American laundry, the selling of American cold drinks to American soldiers, and prostitution for the benefit of the Americans. But to Robert Komer and General Westmoreland these towns meant only more Vietnamese under “government control.” They had become obsessed, these important people from Johnson to McNamara to the patrician Cabot Lodge, with the eradication of a few thousand Front troops and cadres. In their pursuit of “pacification” it did not seem to matter how much the United States spent, how many soldiers it took, or what happened to the millions of other Vietnamese. Nor could they build the Vietnamese government to stand on its own; at least, if that were their intention, they were coming no closer to their goal. In fact, quite the contrary.

In the spring of 1967 Westmoreland authorized the 199th U.S. Light Infantry Brigade to integrate its operations with those of the Vietnamese Fifth Ranger Group, placing all of the troops, from squad to battalion, under the joint command of an American and a Vietnamese officer. In November the brigade's commander, Brigadier General Robert C. Forbes, decided to terminate what he then called an “experiment.” “Quite frankly,” he said, “integrated operations are relatively good if they don't go on too long.… Six to eight months is enough. Other than that, you're going to get involved in a situation where the underdeveloped forces are going to become totally dependent on the developed forces. That's not the name of the game here.”
¹⁴
The general, it appeared, was somewhat understating the case. According to his subordinates, the Vietnamese officers were already dependent on the Americans to the point where they sometimes forsook their commands in the field, leaving the Americans with two companies instead of one to command. “They became dependent on us for rations, for medical supplies, for calling in air strikes, even for leadership,” said one American officer. “Well, they're not supposed to be mercenaries, they're supposed to be an independent fighting group.” The truth was that all the other Vietnamese units, to the degree that they received U.S. aid and support, were becoming similarly dependent on the Americans.