Vietnam (2 page)

The Marine landings on 8 March were not altogether unopposed. When more Marines from bases on Okinawa began landing at the airstrip in Da Nang that afternoon, a sniper put a bullet through the wing of one of their C-130 Hercules transports. There were no casualties.

Nevertheless, the surreal atmosphere persisted. Although the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the South Vietnamese non-Communist forces) were fighting not two miles from the perimeter of the airbase on the night of 8 March, they did not ask for American assistance. The Marines found themselves penned up in an enclave of just eight square miles around the airbase, where they were more in danger from friendly fire than from the enemy as an ARVN training range nearby often sent rounds whistling overhead. Otherwise Marine helicopters were used to ferry live chickens and cows up-country to beleaguered ARVN bases.

A few days after the landing, officers of the 9th MEB were invited to a garden party 'replete with several orchestras and accompanying niceties' by Major General Nguyen Chanh Thi, the South Vietnamese I Corps Commander and the virtual warlord of South Vietnam's five northern provinces. Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert J. Bain, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines and a veteran of World War II, recalled that the festivities were followed by a 'return to my foxhole and C rations'.

When the US ground troops, or grunts as they were known, were allowed out on patrol they found that the ARVN detachments they were sent to relieve either refused to budge or ran away when they approached. But soon, the Marines took their first casualties on a patrol out in the hills to the west of Da Nang. It was night and the tropical air was full of exotic noises and it was easy to imagine strange shapes moving through the jungle all around. A three-man patrol ventured out. Two of its members lost their way and came up behind their comrade in the dark. He turned and fired, wounding the other two mortally. The war in Vietnam had, officially, claimed its first American casualties.

FOR THE VIETNAMESE
, the war had begun many centuries before the Marines landed. In their minds, it started in AD 40 when the Trung sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, led the first Vietnamese insurrection against Chinese rule. One woman who fought with them, Phung Thi Chinh, supposedly gave birth during the battle, but continued fighting with the infant strapped to her back. The Trungs' newly independent realm extended from southern China to the ancient city of Hué. The Chinese crushed it two years later and the Trung sisters committed suicide by drowning themselves in a river. They have been revered by the Vietnamese ever since and are venerated in temples in Hanoi and Son Tay, both of which lay in North Vietnam in 1965. But in 1962, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, sister-in-law of South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem, erected a statue of the Trung sisters in downtown Saigon, capital of the then South Vietnam, to commemorate their patriotism and promote herself as their reincarnation.

In AD 248 another woman, Trieu Au, Vietnam's equivalent of Joan of Arc, led another revolt. Wearing golden armour she rode into battle on an elephant at the head of a thousand men. She was just twenty-three when she was soundly defeated and committed suicide. Like the Trung sisters she was commemorated in a temple and is remembered for her words of defiance: 'I want to rail against the wind and the tide and the whales in the sea, sweep the whole country to save the people from slavery, and I refuse to be abused'.

China referred to Vietnam as Annam, the 'pacified south'. But it was far from pacified. There were regular rebellions, often led by Chinese colonists who, like English settlers in North America, sought independence from the mother country. In 938, the Chinese sent a flotilla to put down a rebellion by the provincial mandarin Ngo Quyen. As the junks approached, Ngo Quyen ordered his men to drive iron-tipped spikes into the river bed in the estuary of the Bach Dang river so their points remained hidden just under the surface of the water. He then withdrew his own ships as the tide ebbed. When the Chinese fleet gave chase and impaled themselves on the spikes, Ngo Quyen's boats turned back and destroyed them. The Vietnamese, it seems, had already learnt how to use guerrilla tactics to defeat a superior force.

The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan invaded Vietnam three times to take control of the spice routes of the Indonesian archipelago to the south. Each time the Vietnamese general Tran Hung Dao defeated the superior Chinese forces. Like many Vietnamese commanders since, he abandoned the cities, avoided frontal attacks, and used mobile forces to harass the enemy until they were confused and exhausted and ripe for a great defeat. In a last great battle in 1287, the Vietnamese routed 3,000 Mongol troops. Tran celebrated his victory with a poem in which he declared that 'this ancient land shall live forever'. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military strategist responsible for beating the Americans, evoked Tran's memory when he attacked the French in the same area.

At that time, Vietnam – Annam – only occupied the northern part of the country, roughly the area that became North Vietnam. After defeating the Mongols, the Vietnamese turned their attention to Champa, the kingdom occupied by the Cham people which lay to the south. The war against Champa raged on for nearly 200 years. Then in 1471, the Vietnamese captured and razed the capital Indra-Champa, leaving only its magnificent stone sculptures which can still be seen today. Even after the Vietnam War was over, the people of Laos and Cambodia, which lay to the west, feared the Vietnamese hunger for expansion – with good reason.

The conquest of Champa left Vietnam exhausted and vulnerable to invasion by China once more, the Chinese this time imposing a brutal slavery on the country. The peasants were forced to mine for gold and other ores, while the country was looted of spices, pearls, precious stones, elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns. The Vietnamese were forced to adopt Chinese forms of dress and hair styles, issued with identity cards and forced to pay punitive taxes. The worship of Vietnamese gods was outlawed, and Vietnamese literature was suppressed and only Chinese was taught in schools.

Vietnam's own King Arthur rose up against this oppression. According to legend, he was a young fisherman named Le Loi who cast his net into a lake one day and brought up a magic sword. In fact, Le Loi was a wealthy landowner from Thanh Hoa province in the north who served the Chinese before turning against them.

'Every man on earth ought to accomplish some great enterprise,' he said, 'so that he leaves the sweet scent of his name to later generations. How, then, could he willingly be the slave of foreigners?'

In 1418, Le Loi declared himself the 'Prince of Pacification', withdrew to the hills, and began a guerrilla war against the Chinese. As the insurrection spread, the Chinese held on to the cities, but their columns had to stick to the roads which were defended by fortified towers. Le Loi's adviser, the poet Nguyen Trai, set down their strategy in an essay that could be a handbook of modern-day insurgency. 'Better to conquer hearts than citadels,' he wrote.

In 1426, on a muddy battlefield west of Hanoi, in a rainstorm, Le Loi defeated the Chinese. A magnanimous victor, he gave them thousands of horses and five hundred junks to carry them home. Two years later Vietnam was recognised as an independent state, though Le's descendants, known as the Le dynasty, continued to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor, just in case.

Nguyen Trai wrote a poem celebrating the country's independence after nearly fourteen centuries of struggle:

He was a little over-optimistic. There was another abortive attempt by the Chinese to take back Vietnam in 1788.

Since the sixteenth century, the country had been divided between the Trinh family and the Nguyen family, roughly along the lines of the later division of the country into North and South Vietnam. In 1630, the rivalry became so acute that the southerners built two walls across the plain at Dong Hai, along the 18th parallel to the jungle, sealing off the north until the late eighteenth century. Meanwhile the Nguyens actively courted Chinese help in their conflict with the Trinh.

The battle to free Vietnam from Chinese domination was not entirely won until 1802, when the country was reunited under a Nguyen emperor, Gia Long, with the help of the French. Once in power, Gia Long turned against the French, expelling his French advisers and executing French missionaries. In 1858, Napoleon III sent an army to Vietnam which established a colony in the south called Cochinchina. Central Vietnam – Annam – and the north – Tonkin – were taken over as protectorates in 1883. Along with Laos and Cambodia, Vietnam was incorporated into French Indochina and the Vietnamese struggle for independence had to begin all over again.

At the Versailles Peace Conference in France in 1919 that concluded World War I, a young Vietnamese calling himself Nguyen Ai Quoc, 'Nguyen the Patriot', stood up and demanded his country's freedom. Born Nguyen That Thanh in Vietnam in 1890, he used several names during his life. He called himself Ba when he visited New York and Boston as a ship's cook in 1911. After living in London from 1915 to 1917, he moved to France, where he worked as a gardener, sweeper, waiter, photograph retoucher, and oven stoker. His 1919 appeal to the Versailles Peace Conference fell on deaf ears, but it made him a hero to many politically conscious Vietnamese. The following year, inspired by the success of the Communist revolution in Russia and Lenin's anti-imperialist doctrine, he joined the French Communists when they split from the Socialist Party. In 1923, he went to Moscow and, in January 1924, on the death of Lenin, he published a eulogy to the founder of the Soviet Union in the Communist Party newspaper
Pravda
. Six months later, at the fifth Congress of the Communist International, he criticised the French Communist Party for not opposing colonialism more vigorously and, in his statement to the congress, first formulated the revolutionary role of oppressed peasants, as opposed to industrial workers mentioned by the founder of Communism, Karl Marx. In 1924, he travelled to Canton, a Chinese Communist stronghold, under the name Ly Thuy, where he began recruiting fellow Vietnamese for his nationalist movement and, in 1930, he founded the Vietnamese Communist Party with former school friend Vo Nguyen Giap.

Vo Nguyen Giap was born in 1912 at An Xa, Vietnam, just north of the 17th parallel which later became the border between North and South Vietnam. While a law student at Hanoi University, he met Ngo Dinh Diem who went on to become president of South Vietnam and Giap's bitter enemy. Giap's anti-colonist views forced him to flee to China in1939, but his young wife was arrested and died with their child in a French jail three years later, while his sister-in-law was guillotined.

In 1940 Ly Thuy changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, which means 'he who enlightens'. It was under this name that he became the father of Communist Vietnam and, despite his authoritarian rule, the seemingly kindly 'Uncle Ho' became a symbol of resistance to his people. In 1941, again with Giap, he founded the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Vietminh. Ho Chi Minh was the political leader of the Vietminh, while Giap became its military leader. Returning to Vietnam, Giap formed 'armed propaganda teams' – guerrilla bands which would later form the nucleus of the North Vietnamese Army – while Ho found himself languishing in the jail of an anti-Communist warlord for over a year. With the backing of the US, the Vietminh fought the Japanese who occupied Vietnam during World War II. When the Japanese were defeated in 1945, Giap entered Hanoi at the head of his troops. Soon after, in a speech in Hanoi where he quoted the US Declaration of Independence, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which he led as president until his death in 1969.

However, while the Vietminh held Hanoi in the North of the country, the British had liberated Saigon in the South. To legitimise the reoccupation of its own colonies in Asia, Britain returned control of the South to the French, rearming the Japanese to keep order until French troops arrived. Under the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 which settled territorial disputes that arose at the end of World War II, the Nationalist Chinese (China only became Communist in 1949) were to disarm the Japanese in the north. A Chinese army under General Lu Han arrived in Hanoi, and began looting the city and killing all political opposition. Giap barely escaped with his life. Meanwhile the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek agreed to hand North Vietnam – Tonkin – back to the French in return for relinquishing its old concessions in Shanghai and other Chinese ports.

For five months, Ho Chi Minh tried to get other countries to recognise his government in Hanoi. The US now backed the French. The Soviet Union would not even send an observer to Hanoi. Ho's old friends in the French Communist Party also deserted him. The party boss, Maurice Thorez, was then deputy premier in General de Gaulle's post-war government and later said that he 'did not intend to liquidate the French position in Indochina'.