Fire in the Lake (71 page)

The first source of strength in the south is the National Liberation Front. With North Vietnamese help the NLF has fought the United States for over a decade and remained undefeated. Standing in the place of all Vietnamese, it has carried on the tradition of Le Loi and those other Vietnamese heroes who waged the millennium-long struggle against foreign domination. Unlike the Nguyen emperors, the NLF never compromised their struggle by seeking the military assistance of a foreign power that would come to dominate their own efforts. They fought the war in a traditional manner by unleashing the vast resources of power within the Vietnamese villages. Their victory would not be the victory of one foreign power over another but the victory of the Vietnamese people — northerners and southerners alike. Far from being a civil war, the struggle of the NLF was an assertion of the principle of national unity that the Saigon government has endorsed and betrayed. With the North Vietnamese the Front leaders faced up to the threats, the promises, and finally the overwhelming military power of the United States. They held out against a country that could never be defeated by force of arms, and they provided an example of courage and endurance that measures with any in modern history.

Viewed in the abstract, it is possible that success might cause the revolutionary movement to disintegrate, just as it all but dissolved the Liberation Front in Algeria. But it seems unlikely. The Viet Minh did not disintegrate after the French war, and the NLF has an even firmer foundation in domestic politics than did its predecessor. In the countryside its success rested primarily on its revolutionary strategy, secondarily on its nationalist position. Land reform and a broad program of economic and social justice — these are the policies that gave it appeal to the rural people. If and when foreign governments cease to dominate the economy of the cities, the NLF program will seem equally attractive to many Vietnamese. The NLF has always been extremely flexible and politic in the planning and implementation of its social policies — thus it has left itself the latitude to adapt its plans to the postwar conditions of Vietnam. By contrast, its organization has been tight and disciplined. An organization that could survive the offensive of 1968 and the prospect of military defeat may eventually be able to cope with the huge tasks of resettlement, development, and rehabilitation necessary to its country.

Throughout the years of war GVN officials, like Americans, have always maintained that a coalition government would be a “disguise for surrender” to the Communists. At the time they were perfectly correct — though it was questionable, once the GVN were dissolved, how many people would have seen that dissolution as a “surrender.” Men like Tran Ngoc Chau, and the imprisoned students and priests, no longer make such predictions. It is not that they deceive themselves, it is that they have come to regard the issues of war and peace in a new perspective. In late 1970 representatives from Buddhist groups, women's groups, youth councils, and trade unions, constituted themselves into the Popular Front for the Defense of Peace and issued a manifesto calling for the departure of all American troops as “a first necessary step to end the fighting” — a demand much more uncompromising than that the NLF was making. The political program of the Popular Front with its paragraphs on independence, democracy, and social and economic reform closely resembled the program the NLF had written a decade earlier.
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This program did not represent a “surrender” to the NLF, but rather an assertion of the common ground among Vietnamese.
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The American officials argued that programs meant little, and that the important question was who ended up in control of the country. But even the distribution of political strength was not quite so clear as it once was. The demands for peace showed that many Saigonese — far more than risked loss of income, imprisonment, and torture to make such demands — had reached the end of a process begun in 1968. At first there was only fear and uncertainty about the prospects of an American withdrawal. These feelings persisted because of the continuing ambiguity of American policy, but along with that uncertainty there was now anger against the Americans. Though still economically dependent on the Americans and thus unable to express their anger in public, many Saigonese cut through the knot of conflicting emotions and looked with clear eyes at the situation in which the Americans were leaving them. That anger, that clarity, gave them the promise of a force far greater than that of all the military equipment with which the Americans had provided them. It promised all those who had for so long depended on the Americans the capacity to break that dependency and to transform themselves from passive victims of their fate into strong and active citizens. It promised an end to the constant internal feuds and the beginning of a new community.

“It is beyond imagination,” wrote Professor Kissinger just before joining the Nixon administration, “that parties that have been murdering and betraying each other for twenty-one years could work together as a team, giving joint instructions to the country.”
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It may be beyond the imagination of American officials, but it is not necessarily beyond that of the Vietnamese who have come to hold the Americans responsible for those murders and betrayals. It is true that there will never be a permanent coalition in which each party joins in an amicable agreement to disagree. The Vietnamese way is not that of a balance of power, but that of accommodation leading to unanimity. The majority of Vietnamese, in any case, do not belong to parties and have no interest in dividing themselves up to continue the fratricidal struggle. For them a coalition government would be the Middle Way so long desired that could modulate the differences between the political groups and lead to a national reconciliation.

But this reconciliation may be difficult to achieve. The Nixon administration is, after all, determined to prevent it. It is determined for the sake of what its officials imagine to be American prestige to force the Saigon government to go on fighting for as long as possible after an American troop withdrawal. At a time when all Vietnamese political parties have been shattered by the war and a half of the population depends on the United States, American economic aid and firepower will have a great deal of influence on the Vietnamese. If the force of the American peace movement has expended itself on obtaining American troop withdrawals, then Nixon may well succeed in compelling Vietnamese to kill each other for some time to come. His prediction of massacres may thus be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whatever strategy the American government uses to carry on the war, it will only be delaying the inevitable. It is not just that the North Vietnamese and the NLF will refuse to surrender; it is that after all these years of war the Vietnamese have an immense desire for peace. And peace not merely as an end to violence; but peace as unity: the unity of north and south, the unity of a way of life and the continuity of Vietnamese history from the past into the future. Over the years, Americans have grown so used to a divided Vietnam that they have come to imagine these divisions as natural and permanent, but they are not so. In 1954 it was possible to imagine that the foreign powers could maintain the barriers between north and south, as they had maintained similar barriers in Germany and Korea. But the Vietnamese did not accept the division, and now after a decade of war the maintenance of it appears impossible even in the abstract. The Americans have destroyed the economic base of that region they hoped to preserve as a separate country. Furthermore, they have, instead of ending the drive for reunification, destroyed the regional political groups that held out in resistance against it. They have uprooted the sect populations and flattened the local ethnic, religious, and cultural peculiarities beneath a uniform, national disaster. If Vietnam is to be independent, it must now have a national government.

For the Vietnamese, domestic peace implies not merely the cessation of hostilities, but the victory of a single political system and way of life. In the past, “peace” meant the rule of that Confucian monarchy that certified the traditional way of life in the Vietnamese villages. Today, however, peace implies revolution — a complete change in the order of society. The NLF has been engaged in this project from its very beginning, but it is not alone; the southern sects have also worked for a social revolution in their own various ways. Even in 1946 revolution meant not so much the overthrow of an established order as the adjustment of society to those changes that had already taken place within it: the imposition of order upon disorder. In Vietnam the scope of the revolution ranged from the redistribution of wealth and power down to the relationship of the individual to his fellow men. Just what shape the new society should take has been a matter of debate, but there has been no debate on the necessity for a comprehensive new order. The American war with its “forced-draft urbanization” policies has only sharpened this need to the point where it is felt by the majority.

The slum children and the juvenile gangs are only the most visible manifestations of the disorder and the unease that underlies much of southern Vietnamese society. The cities, the army bases, and the refugee camps are filled with people who get along in one way or another, who cause no trouble and survive. Only the meaning of their lives has gone. Brought up to regard themselves as part of a larger enterprise — brought up in a world that would seem oppressive to most Westerners — they experience the fife of the cities as a profound alienation, a division of self. “Even the bar girl,” said one Vietnamese intellectual, “even the bar girl who now has money, who lives in the city and no longer wants to return to the country, who is accustomed to independence and gets along very well, even she feels guilty. At bottom she does not feel easy with herself, even after five or ten years of such work. She feels there is something missing. To find it she will give up her independence and all the advantages she now possesses.”
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Personally, socially, politically, the disorder of the cities is a highly unstable condition — a vacuum that craves the oxygen of organized society. The Americans might force the Vietnamese to accept the disorder for years, but behind the dam of American troops and American money the pressure is building towards one of those sudden historical shifts when “individualism” and its attendant corruption gives way to the discipline of the revolutionary community. When this shift takes place, the American officials will find it difficult to recognize their former protégés. They may well conclude that the “hard-core Communists” have brainwashed and terrorized them into submission, but they will be wrong. It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society from the corruption and disorder of the American war. The effort will have to be greater than any other the Vietnamese have undertaken, but it will have to come, for it is the only way the Vietnamese of the south can restore their country and their history to themselves.

Afterword

I finished writing
Fire in the Lake
in 1971, four years before the war ended, and though I returned to Vietnam several times in those years, I never wanted to update it. Books have a certain structure, and when they're finished, they are, for better or worse, finished. Also, they are the product of a particular time in history and in the life of their author, and the time can't be recaptured. The light changes, the landscape alters, and so does one's state of knowledge and state of mind. Now, more than thirty years later, I have no intention of reflecting back on the war and trying to fill the subsequent history of Vietnam in just a few pages. But what I discovered on recent trips to Vietnam seems to me worth recording as kind of a coda to the book.

Driving across the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam a couple of years ago, Mary Cross, an American photographer, and I stopped at a cemetery with several handsome old tombs and a group of new earthen graves on mounds above the paddy land. In the distance we could see a procession coming down the lane from a nearby village to the sound of stringed instruments, gongs, and drums. In the lead were people with banners and flags from the local pagoda, and after them two lines of elderly women in brown and purple tunics carrying unlit straw torches and a long scroll with Buddhist iconography. Next came four men carrying a shrine with a photograph of the deceased — a patriarch in his seventies — an incense burner, and offerings of fruit and flowers. The musicians followed. Then, amid a crowd of family members in white headbands, six men rolled an ornate hearse with a double roof turned up, pagoda-style, at the corners. A middle-aged man, apparently the eldest son, walked backward in front of the hearse in filial deference. When the procession reached the cemetery, the coffin was lifted from its carriage and brought to the grave; incense sticks were lit, prayers were said, and the family wailed as the coffin was lowered into the ground. What we were witnessing, I realized, was a ceremony from precolonial times.

It was early March in the year 2000, just a month before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the war. While exploring the countryside around Hanoi, I often came upon processions of people in brightly colored silk robes marching to the music of flutes and drums, with parasols overhead and the young men carrying a palanquin with the gilded red-and-gold throne of the tutelary spirit of the village. In central Vietnam, on the road between Hue and Danang, Mary saw a fisherman launching a decorated paper boat into a lagoon as an offering to the sea spirits. On an island in the Perfume River near Hue, the two of us watched a mother and daughter in red and yellow robes dance before an outdoor altar to thank a favorite goddess for lifting a spell that had made the mother ill. All over the country the Buddhist pagodas we visited were filled with Vietnamese pilgrims and tourists.

Watching such ceremonies, I sometimes imagined that all the upheavals of the past century, from the French conquest to revolution and two major wars, had been no more than a parenthesis in Vietnamese history. This is hardly the case. Vietnam has been profoundly marked by all of these events. Still, there has been an astonishing revival of traditional social and religious practices throughout the country in the past few years. What is more, the revival is most pronounced in the north — in the region that most enthusiastically supported the revolution and in which there has been a Communist government for half a century. But then the north is by far the oldest part of Vietnam and the wellspring of its traditional culture.