Fire in the Lake (70 page)

There are street gangs now in every quarter of Saigon. Led by army deserters and recruited from among the mobs of smaller children, they roam like wolf packs, never sleeping in the same place twice, scavenging or stealing what they need to live on. Many of their numbers are orphans; the rest are as good as orphans, for their parents remain helpless peasants in the city. As a result, these boys are different from other Vietnamese. In a society of strong parental authority and family dependence, they have grown up with almost no discipline at all. Like the old street gangs of Harlem and Chicago, they have special manners, special codes. It is as though they were trying to create an entire society for themselves — a project in which they cannot succeed.

“In an absentminded way,” wrote Professor Samuel Huntington in 1968,

the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to “wars of national liberation.” The effective response lies neither in the quest for a conventional military victory, nor in esoteric doctrines and gimmicks of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can [succeed.]
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But there was nothing absentminded about the manner in which the U.S. armed forces went about their program of “forced-draft urbanization.” Nor was it a simple oversight that they neglected the corollary of “modernization.” Since 1954 — indeed since 1950 with the American sponsorship of the French war in Indochina — the United States has had only one concern and that was the war to destroy the revolutionary movement. It has not won that war and it has not destroyed the revolution, but it has changed Vietnam to the point where it is unrecognizable to the Vietnamese.

In 1966 the ministry of social welfare in Saigon wrote in preamble to its program: “With respect to this nation, this Ministry intends to stir up by all ways and means people's patriotic and traditional virtues with a view to shoring up our national ethics [which are] on the verge of ruin.” Such a statement would have been perfectly appropriate coming from the priest of a rural Catholic village, but issued by the “government” of a country where numbers of prostitutes, beggars, orphans, juvenile delinquents, war wounded, and the otherwise infirm comprised an important percentage of the population, it seemed a kind of insanity. And in some sense it was, for over the years of war the GVN officials and bourgeoisie of the cities lost their grip on external reality. Cloistered within the high garden walls of their city houses, they looked back through the city, as if it were a transparency, to their old life of the family, the village, and the landed estate. They were dependent on the Americans for plans and programs as well as for the machinery to carry them out, and they lived intellectually in a state of suspended animation. They expected that the Americans would protect them in their sheltered existences, as the French had before them. But instead of protecting them, the Americans drove the peasantry into the cities with them. They created a mass where none had existed, and then they threatened to abandon their protégés.

In April 1968, just after Johnson's announcement of the bombing halt and his withdrawal from the presidential race, a young GVN official sat talking with an American reporter in a café in Tu Do Street. Asked his opinion of the speech, he blurted out suddenly, “You Americans can leave, you can leave whenever you wish. We cannot leave Vietnam. We have little choice.” He leaned forward across the table. “Everything here is a theater. Everything is part of the play, even this table is a prop. We are just pawns. We have no say. But we are to be blamed. We have always been pawns.”
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In a moment of crisis, or seeming crisis, the young official had without thinking confirmed the NLF analysis of the relationship between the Americans and those Vietnamese who cooperated with them. Instead of helping the Saigon government to stand on its own, the Americans made it more and more dependent upon them, economically, politically, militarily. And now the Americans were threatening to withdraw their support, leaving their “allies” as helpless as puppets to control their own destiny.

The American war did not so paralyze the revolutionary movement, but it removed much of its original base and changed the terms under which it operated. The NLF had, after all, pursued a peasant revolution designed to take power from the hands of the foreigners and the few Vietnamese — landlords and officials — who profited from their rule. The Russian, the Chinese, and the North Vietnamese revolutions were also in varying degrees peasant-based, but on a continuum of the four the NLF lay at the extreme end, for there was no industry in the south, and the bourgeoisie, preempted from the trade market by the Chinese, did not constitute a true class. The peasantry was all that existed as a productive force in South Vietnam, and the Front leaders based their program of development upon them. The Stalinist program of bleeding agriculture for the sake of industry was in fact useless to them, for the south had no mineral resources, and the country as a whole no potential to compete in the world market with heavy industry. Out of economic as well as military necessity, the NLF program consisted of agricultural development and the building of small, almost cottage, industries throughout the countryside. Now, after years of exile from the cities, they had to confront a social and economic situation completely new to them.

The economic problem of South Vietnam is not, however, primarily intellectual. It is easy enough to construct theories of development, but not so easy to deal with the chaos that the American war has left. In 1954 South Vietnam held great promise as an economic enterprise. Unlike so many countries, it could feed its population and, with some agricultural development, produce enough raw materials to create foreign exchange. Its rich farmland perfectly complemented the mineral resources and the industry of the north. Given a modicum of outside aid, the Vietnamese with their relatively skilled population might have succeeded in breaking through that cycle of poverty and underdevelopment that affects so many countries of the world. But the American war has undermined those possibilities — by the side effects of its own military presence as much as by the bombing. The phenomenon is a curious one. The United States has had no direct economic interest in Vietnam. Over the years of the war it has not taken money out of Vietnam, but has put large amounts in. And yet it has produced much the same effects as the most exploitative of colonial regimes. The reason is that the overwhelming proportion of American funds has gone not into agricultural or industrial development but into the creation of services for the Americans — the greatest service being the Saigon government's army. As a whole, American wealth has gone into creating and supporting a group of people — refugees, soldiers, prostitutes, secretaries, translators, maids, and shoeshine boys — who do not engage in any form of production. Consequently, instead of having no capital, as it had at the moment of the French conquest, South Vietnam has an immense capital debt, for a great percentage of its population depends on the continued influx of American aid. The same was true to a lesser degree in 1954, and Saigon experienced an acute depression in the months between the French withdrawal and the first direct American commitment of aid. But now the balance of the population has changed so that the agriculture of the country scarcely suffices to feed its population, much less to create foreign exchange.

To be sure, as the American troops depart and the supply of dollars declines along with the shooting, many of the refugees will return to their villages and to agriculture. But for many the return will not be so easy. It is not merely that the population has grown and some of the arable land has been permanently destroyed. It is a social problem. Some millions of Vietnamese have now lived in the cities for five, ten years, or more; a half a generation of their children has grown up without ever watching a rice plant harvested. A certain number are used to the luxuries of the West and the freedoms of a Western-dominated city. The life of the peasantry is almost as foreign to them as it is to Americans, and yet they lack the very foundation upon which American society rests. These new city people have no capital — most of the money the United States invested in Vietnamese officials and businessmen has flown to safer investments abroad — and they have no industrial skills. They are not producers, but go-betweens who have engaged in nothing but marketing and services. The American war has altered them and rendered them helpless.

In considering the future of Vietnam, American officials have naturally tended to see these social and economic problems as amenable to American solutions. In 1969 David Lilienthal and a team of economists under commission from AID prepared a plan for the postwar development of the south. The plan, indeed the very fact of its commission, was perhaps the ultimate expression of American hubris. The officials of AID obviously believed even then that the United States could win the war and “modernize” the country to the point where it would pass the “phase” for a “rural insurgency movement.” They had, it appeared, learned nothing and forgotten nothing from all those thousands of plans and programs, all those studies produced by MSU professors, the RAND Corporation, and other consultancy firms. They had not learned that economic development does not exist in a void. A political matter in all countries, it is most essentially political in a society that is not organized to make that development possible. AID itself demonstrated this truism in Vietnam. The politics of development were visible even in the landscape.

On the roads outside of Tay Ninh, Dalat, and Bien Hoa, an American visitor could for years see the same constellation of three hamlets. In each case the central hamlet, nominally Buddhist, consisted of no more than a group of palm-leaf hovels where one or two chickens scratched in the dust. The two surrounding Catholic hamlets might have belonged to another country, for they had ample concrete houses, herds of pigs and water buffaloes, and a church — nearly a cathedral — made of US AID cement and embellished with stucco and plaster statuary. For years the local AID advisers tried to bring the Buddhist hamlets up to the status of their Catholic neighbors, but they found it impossible to reverse the order of favoritism. The Catholic communities alone had the organization to demand GVN aid and to put that aid to use.

In many respects the GVN was a larger replica of that nominally Buddhist hamlet. When it received aid, it could not channel it into constructive purposes, nor could it even follow American plans to put it to work. This inability to organize was not “natural” to the GVN leaders, but rather the result of years of dependence on the French and the Americans. With the influx of people into the cities and into the American economy, the disorganization now extended down from the small elite to the very base of the population.

There are no counterparts to the Catholic hamlets in the cities. Though initially Catholic in population, Bui Phat never responded to Catholic leadership as did the villages. The political cadres of the Buddhists and the NLF tried for years to organize in the slums of Saigon, but they never succeeded in forming long-lived, disciplined movements. Their failure owed in part to the difficulty of reaching people who did not belong to any other form of organization — a village or a factory — and who had few interests in common. More profoundly, however, it owed to the fact that the city people did have one thing in common: they depended on the foreigners for their livelihood. When a nationalist political party aimed to assert Vietnamese power, Vietnamese independence, it aimed also to destroy the subsistence of the city people. Beyond the threat of American military power, it was this economic dependency that prevented the city people from rising up to support the NLF during the Tet offensive. And it will be for this reason of dependency that the cities will remain corrupt, anarchic, and miserable so long as the United States continues to dominate the economic life of the country.

If the Lilienthal plan proposed to reconstruct Vietnam through the Saigon government, then it was a contradiction in terms. Like all other aid plans and programs that preceded it, it was designed for a hypothetical country that did not, and furthermore could not, exist while the Americans continued to make plans and programs for it, The United States could, of course, build factories and introduce agricultural extension programs that would benefit a few Vietnamese. It could suppress city politics and maintain the current state of anarchy for many years. But it could not (Professor Huntington to the contrary) build an independent government and move the society beyond its revolutionary “phase.” The solution to Vietnamese problems would have to be Vietnamese — and all attempts at such a solution would be suspended for as long as the United States maintained the anti-Communist struggle.

In looking beyond the American withdrawal to a Vietnam governed by Vietnamese, American officials have generally seen nothing but disaster ahead. They have predicted a long period of armed struggle culminating in a severe political repression and the massacre of thousands of their “allies.” Many of these predictions have been no more than self-serving propaganda designed to camouflage the destruction the United States itself is perpetrating in Indochina. Others have been sincere expressions of doubt that the Vietnamese can recover from the war without further upheavals and violence. The officials may be right in their predictions. The Vietnamese, after all, have to deal with over a million soldiers and a vast disorganized mass of refugees as well as with the personal and political hostilities that have grown up over the years of war. The difficulty of this task will only increase for as long as the United States continues to fight the war by proxy and to give the Vietnamese no latitude to make a political settlement. In the future the possibility exists that the ARVN will disintegrate into banditry and the NLF and North Vietnamese will repeat their performance in Hue, slaughtering thousands of anti-Communist partisans in an attempt to take control. The American war has devastated the economy while at the same time it has broken down the political power — sectarian as well as Communist — that is necessary to restore it. If no group, or coalition of groups, has the authority to govern by rule of law, the chances are that there will be a severe political repression followed by a draconian attempt to force the urban masses back into some form of production. Such organized violence may in its turn lead to a disorganized reign of terror such as succeeded the North Vietnamese land reform of 1956. But these disasters may well not occur — or at least not on a scale that would make them significant beside the past horrors of war. It is a notable fact that with all the new Vietnamese troops the level of violence has decreased wherever the American troops have pulled out. It is also notable that the Vietnamese who depended economically upon the Americans have survived their withdrawal without any form of community organization or government help. South Vietnam is still a rich country. The withdrawal of all foreign aid would bring a serious economic crisis, but not starvation for thousands of people. Then, too, the American officials, who have witnessed only the division and paralysis their presence has created among their own “allies,” tend to underestimate the capacities of the Vietnamese. The American war has created a social and economic chaos, but it has not stripped the Vietnamese of their vitality and powers of resistance. The Vietnamese survived the invasions of the Mongol hordes, and they may similarly survive the American war.