JFK (39 page)

The Rhade have worked hard to clear more ground and to harvest more crops. But crops alone do not make an economy. Produce must be moved to market; there must be a place where one can buy and sell. Without this, produce rots. When the French and Chinese no longer came to the Rhade regions, the produce rotted, and the basic economy staggered to a halt.

When a basic economy deteriorates in a marginal area—in Indochina, in Africa, or in Oklahoma—the people must move on. When war, pestilence, flood, drought, or some other disaster strikes a primitive society, the people must search elsewhere for food and other necessities. Often this search becomes banditry, and banditry, that last refuge of the desperate and starving—is a violent business—so violent that in this case it led the uninitiated to believe that there was a wave of “Communist-inspired subversive insurgency” in the land, under the command of General Hunger.

During the early, amateurish days of the ten-year Diem dynasty, in that newly defined piece of real estate that was called South Vietnam, there was considerable misinterpretation. Little did Ngo Dinh Diem, that foreign mandarin and erstwhile Father of His Country, realize that by issuing an edict removing French influence he was bringing an end to law and order, such as it was. Nor did he realize that by promulgating a second edict banning the Chinese, he was causing the basic tribal economy—marketplace bartering and produce movement—to vanish.

The French did not return; neither did the Chinese. But one day the old padre came back. The tribesmen turned out to greet the familiar face. This fragile gentleman had new clothes and new shoes, and he rode into the village in a jeep. The Rhade had not seen such a thing since the return of the French after the Japanese had gone—the French lieutenant and his family had arrived in a jeep back in the mid-1940s. The padre dismounted and spoke to his old friends. Then he introduced the young driver of the jeep, explaining that this young white man was American, not French, and that the other passenger was a Vietnamese from the faraway city of Saigon.

The padre said that the French no longer governed the country but that a great man named Ngo Dinh Diem was the president of this new bit of land called “South Vietnam” and that his palace was in Saigon.

The padre avoided mention of Ho Chi Minh and the northern government. He knew it would be useless to try to explain that Ho Chi Minh’s Nationalist government was not the government of all Indochina. It would be too complicated, it would not be believed, and the Rhade would not care much one way or the other anyhow. The Rhade had lived in their ancestral areas for centuries and cared little for the outside, whether it was represented by Japanese, French, American, Vietminh, or Saigonese officials.

The padre, the young American, and the Vietnamese official returned many times. After a while, the American was welcomed without the priest and often stayed for weeks. He was interested in animal husbandry and agriculture. He brought with him some poultry and a new breed of hog that he taught them to raise. He carried with him new seeds and tried over and over to encourage the Rhade to plant them as he directed. On countless occasions he would persuade the villagers to dig holes in the fields and to plant the seeds as he had learned to do at the university in Ames, Iowa.

He never did understand the Rhade farmers and their primitive “slash and burn” farming. And they never could explain to this young expert that the seeds could not grow in that heavy grassland of the open fields. In any event, the American became a familiar figure, and his hard work and gifts of chickens, pigs, candy, and cigarettes were always welcome. Then one day he came with the Magic Box.

The padre, the American, and the Huong-ca sat in earnest discussion all that day. The Magic Box rested on the hood of the jeep while several young men dug a hole in front of the patriarch’s hut. They were unaccustomed to the American’s shovel, and work progressed slowly. Meanwhile, the American felled a tree and cut out a section to be used as a post. This post was put into the hole and the dirt replaced.

Now a tall, sturdy, upright pedestal stood in front of the chieftain’s hut. To this, the American affixed a tin roof as shelter. Then he removed the shiny jet-black Magic Box from the jeep and nailed it firmly to the post, about four feet above the ground, just the right height for the Huong-ca and above the prying hands of the children.

After the box was secured, the padre told the villagers all about the Magic Box and how it would work, about the wonders it would produce to save them from communism. He told them that this box was a most miraculous radio and that it would speak to their brothers in Saigon. It was, in their language, powerful medicine.

At the same time, he warned that only the village patriarch could touch the box. If anyone else did so, the kindly government in Saigon would be most angry, and the village would be punished. The padre told the villagers that whenever they were attacked, the patriarch should push the big red button on the box, and that was all.

At this point in their Village Defense Orientation Program, the Viet soldier and the American interrupted the padre and ordered him to repeat that if the village was attacked by the Communist Vietcong from the forest—emphasizing the “Communist Vietcong”—the patriarch was to push the button. To the Viet soldier and the American, the men in the forest were not starving and frightened refugees; they were the enemy.

Because the elderly padre knew that these native people had never heard of the Vietcong, he explained that his friends called all bandits from the refugee camps in the forest “Vietcong” and that the Vietcong were to be greatly feared because they were the puppets of the National Liberation Front, who were the puppets of Hanoi, who were the puppets of the Chinese, who were the puppets of the Soviets, ad infinitum.

The padre explained that when the patriarch pushed that shiny red button on the Magic Box, the powerful gods of Saigon would unleash vengeful armies through the air, and the dreaded Vietcong would be blasted by bombs from airplanes and napalmed from helicopters. And the village would be liberated and pacified. He also told them that every village that had been selected by the Father of His Country in Saigon to receive the Magic Box would forever thereafter be furnished food, medicine, and special care.

The Rhade would receive these “benefits” whether they wanted them or not. For they knew only too well that the villages that had plenty of food and medicine and that were the special elect of Saigon were always the first targets for the starving bandits. They knew enough to know that they would live in fear of the Magic Box and its munificence.

Ever since the day when the padre had returned with the American, the village had received special medicine and food relief. The “Extended Arms for Brotherhood” program of the new president in Saigon was caring for these tribesmen. Shortly after the first time this extra food had been delivered, the village had been visited by some young men from the camps in the woods. They sat with the patriarch all day and quietly but firmly explained that they came from a refugee camp that was hidden in the hills and that was caring for thousands of homeless natives from the south (Cochin China) who had been driven from their homes by the Diem-backed police and hordes of northern (Tonkinese) invaders.

These people had fled from their wasted homes. They had been enemies in every new region they came to, and now, terrorized and starving, sick and dying, they had had to turn to that last resort of mankind, banditry and pillage. These countless refugees, in their own homeland, had fled the careless deprivations and brutal massacres of the benevolent forces of Saigon. They wished to be peaceful, but they desperately needed food and medicine. They demanded that the village share some of its plentiful goods with them. This arrangement, although unappealing to the village, was accepted, and for a while it kept a fragile peace between the two worlds. However, the refugee numbers swelled, and their demands became greater and greater.

It wasn’t long before the Saigon political observer and the padre reported to the American that they suspected that the patriarch was collaborating with the “enemy.” This sharing of their meager goods with the refugees was called “the payment of tribute” by the Vietnamese. The refugees had become the “enemy,” and the Americans’ word for “enemy” was Vietcong.

The political leader had explained to the patriarch that collaboration with the Vietcong meant death for him and removal of the village people to a Citizens’ Retraining Camp or a “Strategic Hamlet,” as the Americans liked to call it. No matter what their benefactors chose to call these displacement centers, they were prisons to the natives.

The more or less peaceful demands of the refugees became adamant orders as their needs increased. What had begun as a reluctant sharing of food became submission to force and banditry. The ranks of the refugees swelled as the exodus from such areas as the no-man’s-land of the once-prosperous and fertile Mekong Delta area of the Camau Peninsula turned into a vast and relentless human wave.

A situation not unlike that of the Native American migrations westward took place. Each tribe, displaced from its ancestral homeland by the white man, became marauders and attackers in the territory of the next Indian nation. Thus it was that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of once-peaceful, docile, and reasonably well-to-do rice farmers became the feared, terrorized bandits called the Vietcong.

Several nights later, the village was raided. The dogs barked, chickens and pigs ran about, the food huts were ransacked and burned, and several young men of the village were kidnapped. For the first time since the installation of the radio, the old man crept out of his hut and stood before the Magic Box. In the deep darkness of the forest night, the red glow of the buzzer filled the sky with its talismanic power. The chieftain had often wondered what would really happen if he pushed that red button. Even though the padre had told him of the wonders that would take place when he did push the warning device, he had never been able to fully comprehend it all.

The political observer had warned the patriarch of the punishment he would suffer if he turned in a false alarm. At times the red-eyed Pandora’s box proved too much for the villagers, and they dared the patriarch to push the button. He had steadfastly resisted these temptations. But now, in the heat of a raid by the starvation-crazed refugees, he stood before the box, knowing that he would be calling down the might of the Village Self-Defense Forces and that he would bring down the full wrath of the dread People’s Arms of Brotherhood
¹
upon his village.

Yet if he did not push that button, he and his people would suffer the fate of collaborators. He had no real choice. It was his turn, and that of his village, to become part of this war that was being made in Saigon with the expert advice of the American men of goodwill.

He called upon the wisdom of his ancestors. Banditry, pillage, and rape were not unknown in Asia. Whenever starvation, pestilence, and war had ravaged the land, the thin veil of civilization had been torn away, and the destitute had turned to banditry as the last stage of community life before surrendering to the relentless death of the ravaged.

Hunger is the general of these armies. Hunger provides a terrible motivation of its own. It needs no ideological boost from Moscow or Peking. The blind, ignorant actions of General Hunger are all it takes to create a war. In a lawless, unorganized society, this was the natural and inevitable reaction. This is especially true in a country where the natives eat by nibbling most of the day. They do not sit down to a hearty three meals a day. Tropical peoples eat a bite at a time, and as a result their stomachs are small, and they have very little fat. For these people, starvation sets in much faster than it does for the people to the north, who are fatter and who eat at longer and more regular intervals. Thus, the time between deprivation of food and the driving necessity to eat is much shorter, and such people strike out hard for food as soon as their supply is wiped out. This explains why napalm, bombings, and defoliation tactics created more instead of less war and created it in a short time. The victims were deprived of food and had to fight for it, without delay. The people who had raided the village were of this hungry, refugee populace.

As the patriarch sought the wisdom of his ancestors, he found nothing to explain this new terror, that is, the unknown “Vietcong.” Bandits and refugees he understood. But the ideological dilemma posed by his new friends, the American and the Saigon political activist, made him, the patriarch, their enemy if he rationalized and sympathized with the refugees, even under duress. This left him no alternative.

He knew that many other elders had resisted the refugees and had been slain by them out of the necessity for food. He knew that others who had sympathized with the refugees had been brutally taken to retraining camps (prisons) by the political observers and had suffered cruelly there. He knew that there was no hope. No alternative. The food, the medicine, and “Operation Brotherhood” from Saigon had sealed the fate of the villagers and doomed them to the dread final tactic called “Pacification.” He pushed the glowing red button. The Magic Box did the rest.

A sleep-dulled South Vietnamese Special Forces elite trooper saw the flickering warning light on the situation map. Grid Code 1052 was hostile! Grid Code 1052: The village of Thuc Dho in Rhade territory was under attack. There was no two-way capability with the village radio equipment, no way to discuss the attack or to evaluate the warning from the village chieftain. Any signal was hostile in the Village Defense Network, and “hostile” meant “retaliate.” The system could say only that there was an attack and automatically identify the location. It could not say that the “attack” was nothing more than a small raid by a few starving natives intent on stealing food.