Fire in the Lake (7 page)

On the more detailed scheme of official reasoning, Vietnam was thought to be composed of two countries: a) North Vietnam, which was Communist and therefore intent upon invading the south; and b) South Vietnam, which was “a member of the Free World family striving to preserve its independence from Communism.” The United States became involved in Vietnam because the South Vietnamese government, under the terms of the SEATO pact, asked for American help against armed aggression by a foreign power — North Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government was having certain internal difficulties, but the United States would not be interfering in its domestic political affairs. Its sole purpose was to defend South Vietnam from outside attack. Its intervention would be limited, for with some American help, the Saigon government would in time build a democratic nation as strong as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north. The United States was bombing South Vietnam in order to help its people build a strong, democratic government.

Whether or not the American officials actually believed their own propositions, they repeated them year after year with a dogged persistence and a perfect disregard for all contradictory evidence. In the course of a decade these propositions were transmuted into fact: fact, that is, for large sections of the American public; fact for the AID economists promoting such schemes as the cooperation of South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand on a Mekong River development project; fact in those realms of the Pentagon where systems analysts planned to end the insurgency with an electronic barrier circling South Vietnam. Ten years of American political rhetoric about North Vietnamese aggression and anti-Communist solidarity in Southeast Asia left even Washington insiders like Clark Clifford ill-prepared for such events as the Joint Chiefs’ request for a total of seven hundred thousand American troops in Vietnam and the refusal of the “Free World” countries to help the South Vietnamese government unless the United States paid them to do so. For most Americans, Southeast Asia came to look like the most complicated place in the world. And naturally enough, for the American official effort to fit the new evidence into the old official assumptions was something like the effort of the seventeenth-century astronomers to fit their observations of the planets into the Ptolemaic theory of the universe.

On the official propositions about Southeast Asia rest all the strategic wisdom of, and the moral justification for, the American war in Vietnam. This being the case, it is interesting to take a look at those propositions in the light of the political history on which they are based. What was Vietnam’s relationship to China and to the other countries around her? What was the relationship between northern and southern Vietnam, and what, precisely, was Vietnamese nationalism? To answer these questions it is necessary to go back beyond 1954 to see how Vietnam initially developed as a nation, how Vietnamese society changed as a result of the French colonial occupation, and how Ho Chi Minh and his compatriots fought and won the struggle for independence. While history does not give precise answers, it does give certain clues, certain indications as to the shape of the future. Vietnam is, after all, much older than the “threat of Communism,” and below the ideological conflict lie older oppositions, older lines of force that articulate that conflict profoundly.

Unlike the other countries of Southeast Asia, Vietnam has always lived in the orbit of China. First as a Chinese colony and then as a small tributary state, Vietnam was until the fifteenth century no more than a planet in the great solar system of the Celestial Empire. Vietnam came out of China and survived as a nation in a strange — and strangely stable — balance of attraction and repulsion.

In 207
B.C.
a Chinese warlord marched into the Red River Delta and opened an avenue to the south by which a century later the imperial armies would take his kingdom of Nam Viet for a Chinese colony. Vietnamese national mythology places several “Vietnamese” kingdoms in the Delta before the coming of the Chinese, but scholars now maintain that the region previously contained only a flux of tribes and feudalistic principalities, whose populations came from a variety of ethnic sources, tangentially related to the Vietnamese. Like the French or the English, the Vietnamese are not a “pure race” but a nation created within a particular landscape by a political process. According to ethnologists, the Vietnamese derive not from a single Chinese tribe, but from a mixture between tribes of Mongolian and Austro-Indonesian origin; their language has grown from both Chinese and Southeast Asian roots. In the third and fourth centuries
B.C.
the Red River Delta sustained two kingdoms, Au Lac and Van Lang, whose people the Chinese called simply southern, or
Yuéh
(
Viêt
in Vietnamese). During the ten centuries of Chinese suzerainty the Viêt peoples settled slowly into a new ethnic and cultural pattern. Vietnamese history began in Chinese writing, and the Vietnamese nation took shape along the political and cultural lines of force emanating from China.

Given the Chinese capacity for empire-building, it is somewhat remarkable that the Vietnamese had a history at all. Hardly more broad-minded than the emissaries of other imperial powers, the first Chinese governors made no distinction between the Viêt tribes of the Delta and those that inhabited what is today Yunnan and Canton. They regarded them all as savages whose religion and customs showed only a pitiful lack of cultural development. Enlightened rulers, these governors took up the Chinese burden of educating the Viêt peoples to behave as much like the Chinese as possible. The Celestial Empire was universal, so they considered their
mission civilisatrice
to be a comprehensive project that would end with the complete assimilation of all the southern peoples into the body of the empire. Ten centuries later a Chinese historian might well have judged that they had succeeded. The Viêts had adopted Chinese technology and the Chinese religions; their aristocracy sent its sons to compete for the mandarinate in the regional examinations. With his long imperial perspective the historian would probably have persisted in his opinion even when in the tenth century this same aristocracy raised troops to expel the armies of the declining T’ang dynasty from the Red River Delta. Such warlord revolts had occurred many times before in the Delta, just as they had occurred throughout China in times of imperial weakness. But the historian would have been wrong: the Vietnamese were then in the process of taking their independence from China. When, forty years later, the armies of the Sung dynasty descended to reconquer the Red River Delta, they confronted not the scattered forces of the warlords but the united armies of a man who called himself the emperor of Vietnam, the Land to the South.

Just why the Vietnamese alone among the
Viêt
tribes should have resisted grafting onto the great trunk of China remains a matter of scholarly debate. The most southerly of the Viêt peoples, they alone possessed a distinct territory: the circle of mountains all but isolated the Red River Delta. But the Chinese empire had broken through so many natural frontiers. Of course, even after ten centuries the inhabitants of the Delta had not become precisely Chinese — but then neither had the peoples of what is today Yunnan and Canton. Secreted within the demotic language of every southern tribe, the old gods and the old customs lingered like the memories of early childhood. How much more the Vietnamese differed from their northern conquerors was a matter of subtle distinction, a difference of degree that approached a change in quality. From the tenth century onwards they defended themselves from China with a ferocity that perhaps could only come from a consciousness of the fragile borders of their identity. In the great patriarchate of the empire Vietnam was the unfilial son.

The Emperor of the South rules over the rivers and mountains of the southern country.

This destiny has been indelibly registered in the Celestial Book.

How dare you, rebellious slaves, come violate it?

You shall undoubtedly witness your own and complete defeat.
²

The declaration of Vietnamese independence was in itself ironic. Writing in Chinese, the great Vietnamese military leader, Ly Thuong Kiet, rebuked the Chinese for claiming sovereignty over a state whose very identity depended on her relationship to the Empire of the Center. But then the claim to independence was no more paradoxical than the method of achieving nationhood.

Like their rivals, the Ly princes were warlords. They took control of the Red River Delta shortly after the first war for independence, in
A.D.
1010. They united the nation and established a dynasty — but only at the price of rebuilding the entire apparatus of government by which the Chinese had ruled them. Though fervent Buddhists, they called upon the sacred powers of the Confucian tradition to establish a claim to legitimacy. Through the institution of the mandarinate with all its rank and ritual, they persuaded the other warlord families to give up their armies and compete for power as dutiful sons within the one great household of the empire. In effect the Ly took on the role of the Chinese governors, adopting the Chinese universal empire in order to reject the universalism of the Chinese. After a new war with China in the fifteenth century the court poet to the hero-emperor Le Loi wrote in defense of Vietnamese autonomy:

Our state of Dai Viet [Greater Vietnam] is indeed a country wherein culture and institutions have flourished. Our mountains and rivers have their characteristic features, but our habits and customs are not the same from north to south. Since the formation of our nation by the Trieu, Dinh, Ly and Tran, our rulers have governed their empire in exactly the same manner in which the Han, Tang, Sung and Yuan did theirs.
³

In other words, according to the poet, the justification for Vietnamese national independence rested on the double foundation that while Vietnamese “habits and customs” differed from those of the Chinese, their governments conformed most faithfully to the Chinese models. Five centuries later Ho Chi Minh invoked the same reasoning to explain Vietnam’s relation to China within yet another universalist system:

The Chinese Communist Party, under Mao Tse-tung’s leadership, succeeded in combining the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the revolutionary practice of China, thereby taking steps proper to the Chinese society.… At present, in building socialism, although we [the Vietnamese] have the rich experiences of brother countries, we cannot apply them mechanically because our country has its own peculiarities.
⁴

Given the geographical and cultural proximity of Vietnam to China, it is perhaps understandable that the two major historical changes within Vietnamese society — the building of a Confucian state in the tenth to eleventh centuries and the Communist revolution in the twentieth — should follow the same pattern. In both cases the Vietnamese leaders assumed Chinese political culture while rejecting, or at least attempting to reject, Chinese political domination. The relationship of Vietnam to China runs not only through lines of force but through the deep channels of a civilization.

Today Vietnam’s continued success in maintaining her independence from China rests on a very different set of conditions than it did in the past. In medieval times the mountains and the limited technology of war served as insulation for Vietnam. Now the Vietnamese can defend themselves only by opening themselves out to other countries. Ho Chi Minh, who spent many years in France, China, and the Soviet Union in preparation for the struggle for independence against the French, understood that Vietnam’s survival depended upon her putting an end to her isolation. During his lifetime he counseled his countrymen to become internationalists, to learn from other nations and to take from them what would be useful in the development of their small and backward country. In the 1950’s and 1960’s he looked to the Soviet Union and to Eastern Europe to compete with China for influence in Vietnam. But the French and then the American war restricted his choices and threatened from time to time to close off even those apertures he had made onto the rest of the world.
⁵

Historically the Vietnamese have been accustomed to isolation and to encirclement by larger rival powers. Until the fifteenth century Vietnam remained confined to the Red River Delta, to the small basin of arable land pressed against the China Sea. To the south the great kingdom of Champa, the last on the arc of Hindu states that ran eastward from India, occupied the coastal plain of what is today central Vietnam. Always hostile to the Vietnamese, the Chams had warred with them throughout the period of their colonization by the Chinese, threatening occasionally in the slow lurch of the military balance to crush them and take over their territories. Only when Vietnam had gained her independence and closed her border with China did she grow strong enough to check, and finally turn, the waves of invasion from the south. In the fifteenth century, after defeating an invasion by the Ming dynasty, the Emperor Le Loi began the “March to the South,” the succession of military campaigns by which, a century later, the Vietnamese armies would reduce the kingdom of Champa and push the frontiers of Vietnamese settlement down to the bottom of the Annamese littoral.

As the Vietnamese empire breached the Gates of Annam, near the 17th parallel, its whole history changed course. From a small kingdom that had looked only north towards China, Vietnam became a major power in Southeast Asia. During the seventeenth century the Vietnamese entered the nearly virgin plains of the Mekong Delta, and under pressure from a continual growth of population pushed south to the Gulf of Siam and west across the Bassac river deep into the kingdom of the Khmers.

Once the Vietnamese had reached the plain of Southeast Asia, they entered into the battle for territory that the kingdoms of the south had intermittently waged across the lowlands for the centuries of their history. These wars seemed to have no end and no beginning. Like the wars in Europe before the Reformation, they went on through the rise and decline of a dozen kingdoms. At the time the Vietnamese entered the conflict, the fortunes of Siam were in the ascendant over those of the princedoms of Laos and the other two Buddhist states, Burma and Cambodia, the kingdom of the Khmers. Though beset by Burmese armies from the west, Siam was in the process of building an empire out of the territories of Laos and Cambodia. From the point of view of Laos and Cambodia, the Vietnamese arrived at exactly the right moment — except that they too had territorial ambitions. After a series of battles with the Thais that lasted over a century, the Vietnamese concluded a treaty with Siam whereby the Khmer kingdom recognized the suzerainty of both empires and gave each of them rights over the provinces adjoining their territories. Laos was similarly embattled and overcome. At last one Lao prince offered himself as a vassal to the Vietnamese emperors in Hue and ceded some of his territory to the capital beyond the mountains in return for protection from the Thais, against whom he had no geographical defenses.