Fire in the Lake Read online

  Praise for Frances FitzGerald’s

  FIRE IN THE LAKE

  The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

  Winner of the National Book Award

  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

  Winner of the Bancroft Prize

  “An extraordinary book… partly a history of South Vietnam, partly a study of American policy there, and partly an account of what this policy has done to a people we have destroyed in order to save from Communism. Fire in the Lake is all these and much more: a compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another, an analysis of all those features of South Vietnamese culture that doomed the American effort from the start, and an incisive explanation of the reasons why that effort could only disrupt and break down South Vietnam’s society — and pave the way for the revolution that the author sees as the only salvation.… Miss FitzGerald’s analysis should help us understand why even apparent battlefield successes of ‘our side’ provide, in the long run, no way of saving the unsavable. It should also, by its very depth and by its admirable style — cool empathy, restrained indignation, quiet irony, devastating vignettes — help us realize the monumental scope of what went wrong and what we did wrong.… A fine book.”

  — Stanley Hoffmann, New York Times Book Review

  “Frances FitzGerald writes with the controlled fire of one whose Inner Light is hot, yet tempered by the cool ice of Reason and Fact.… There has been to this point no book on recent Vietnam with the power and conviction of Fire in the Lake. Compared to Miss FitzGerald’s prodigious effort, all previous studies, of whatever persuasion, pale into insignificance.”

  — David Brudnoy, National Review

  “FitzGerald is a wonderful reporter and writer, with an eye for the telling detail.”

  — Jim Miller, Newsweek

  “FitzGerald has caught the sweep of the subject as well as the context.… The great mistakes that flowed from the basic American misunderstanding of the nature of the Vietnam conflict are set forth with stunning clarity.… FitzGerald constructs her case by a narrative of intricate facts which sharply cuts through the typical self-deceptions about the war that have been built up by official righteousness…. Her main points are hammered home with such power that doubters are bound to be shaken.”

  — S. R. Davis, Christian Science Monitor

  “Fire in the Lake somehow manages to get under the skin of this ugly war which has left so many Americans feeling bewildered and morally bankrupt. In clear, often poetic language, the author illumines the cultural incongruences which reduce most attempts at communication between the Vietnamese and ourselves to something bizarre, like the dog trying to talk to a duck.”

  — Michael Mok, Publishers Weekly

  “Fire in the Lake is a thoughtful book written in quality prose. Without claiming to be authoritative, it touches on most of the subjects that are likely to concern specialists of Vietnam for years to come.”

  — David G. Marr, Journal of Asian Studies

  “One of the best descriptions and analyses of Vietnam ever published in English.… FitzGerald has read extensively in scholarly works about Chinese and Vietnamese society, and she uses this material to give substance to her own excellent observations made as a reporter in Vietnam. She has been able to combine a basic understanding of the nature of peasant society, Confucianism, French colonial rule, and the impact of modernization to produce an exceptionally clear account of the problems of southern Vietnam. The treatment of American operations is also excellent.”

  — D. D. Buck, Library Journal

  “If Americans read only one book to understand what we have done to the Vietnamese and to ourselves, let it be this one.”

  — Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  “A superbly dramatic and informative account of current events on the other side of the globe. It is also a depth analysis, supported by a compelling thesis, of why events have proceeded as they have and why the drama is proving not only a tragedy for the people of Vietnam but also for the American people as well.… FitzGerald has unusual gifts as a narrator of large historical events.… The impact of her history is overwhelming.”

  — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

  “Rarely have we been able to regard the Vietnamese and their divided country from the standpoint of an essential unity of culture, tradition, and ethnic identity. That is what makes Fire in the Lake such an important departure.… Miss FitzGerald’s basic complaint is that the American failure in Vietnam has been our inability to perceive that all along ‘the enemy’ has been the people. And so the Fire in the Lake, the revolution being waged by the North and the Front, may be the only one capable of restoring order and unity to the wartorn society of Vietnam.”

  — Laurence Stern, Washington Post Book World

  “The best part of Fire in the Lake describes how the Americans, as they defoliated the countryside, proceeded to corrupt the cities: to turn a land of farmers into a ghetto of refugees, shoeshine boys, and prostitutes.… By the end of the book, FitzGerald has presented two Vietnamese societies with nothing in common: that of the villages and that of the bidonvilles. The ‘infra-structures’ the American army rooted out were the traditional values of the ancestral culture. With so many families scattered and gone, these values are unlikely to become the basis of a new political order — Marxist or Confucian or otherwise.”

  — Tom Geoghegan, New Republic

  “This is the richest kind of contemporary history; it places political and military events in cultural perspective.… FitzGerald is superb at clarifying the differences between Vietnamese and American cultures.… This is the best book on Vietnam.”

  — New York Times “Books of the Century

  Books by Frances FitzGerald

  Fire in the Lake:

  The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

  America Revised:

  History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century

  Cities on a Hill:

  A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures

  Way Out There in the Blue:

  Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War

  Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth

  with photographs by Mary Cross

  COPYRIGHT © 1972 BY FRANCES FITZGERALD

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. EXCEPT AS PERMITTED UNDER THE U.S. COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1976, NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, OR STORED IN A DATABASE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

  Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, August 1972

  First eBook Edition, April 2009

  Back Bay Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The Back Bay Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.

  Portions of this book appeared originally in The New Yorker, in slightly different form.

  Excerpts from testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, January 1971, reprinted with permission of the Boston Globe.

  Quotations from The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam by Robert L. Sansom © 1970 by MIT. Reprinted with permission of the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  The I Ching, or Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilhelm, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen Series XX (© 1950 and 1967 by Bollingen Foundation), reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

  ISBN 978-0-316-07464-3

  To the memory of my fat
her and Paul Mus

  Note on the Title

  Fire in the Lake comes from the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, and it is the image of revolution. This image, like all of the others in the Book of Changes, is almost as old as China itself; for Vietnamese it forms the mental picture of change within the society.

  The following note on the hexagrams and the Book of Changes comes from the introduction by Richard Wilhelm in the I Ching (Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. xlix-li.

  At the outset the Book of Changes was a collection of linear signs to be used as oracles. In antiquity, oracles were everywhere in use; the oldest among them confined themselves to the answers yes and no. This type of oracular pronouncement is likewise the basis of the Book of Changes. “Yes” was indicated by a simple, unbroken line and “No” by a broken line. However, the need for a greater differentiation seems to have been felt at an early date, and the single lines were combined in pairs. To each of these combinations a third line was then added. In this way the eight trigrams came into being. These eight trigrams were conceived as images of all that happens in heaven and on earth. At the same time, they were held to be in a state of continual transition, one changing into another, just as transition from one phenomenon to another is continually taking place in the physical world. Here we have the fundamental concept of the Book of Changes. The eight trigrams are symbols standing for changing transitional states; they are images that are constantly undergoing change. Attention centers not on things in their state of being — as is chiefly the case in the Occident — but upon their movements in change. The eight trigrams therefore are not representations of things as such but their tendencies in movement.…

  In order to achieve a still greater multiplicity, these eight images were combined with one another at a very early date, whereby a total of sixty-four signs was obtained. Each of these sixty-four signs consists of six lines, either positive or negative.

  Preface

  I went to South Vietnam in February 1966, and remained there until November of that year to write articles for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Village Voice, Vogue, and other periodicals. My arrival in Saigon coincided with the Honolulu Conference and with the beginning of the Buddhist struggle movement of 1966. The succeeding political crisis within the Saigon government dramatically exposed the rift between the Vietnamese political reality and the American ambitions for the anti-Communist cause in the south. In the following months my attempt was to follow this rift and to try and understand the politics of Vietnam and the effect of the American presence and the war on Vietnamese society.

  At the time there was little American scholarship on Vietnam and few Americans were engaged in a serious effort to understand the political, economic, and social issues at stake for the Vietnamese. Happily, not long after my arrival, I came across a copy of Paul Mus’s important work on Vietnamese culture and the French war, Sociologie d’une guerre. The book not only answered a great number of questions the American experience raised, but it indicated an entirely new way of asking them. Upon my return to the United States I was fortunate enough to meet Professor Mus and to have the opportunity to study Vietnam under his guidance. I owe most of what I have learned to his wisdom and generosity.

  My thanks also go to Mr. Joseph Buttinger for the use of his library and to the editors of the Atlantic for their kind encouragement.

  — Saigon, 1972

  Abbreviations

  AID

  (United States) Agency for International Development

  ARVN

  Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam

  DRVN

  Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam

  GVN

  Government of (South) Vietnam

  MAAG

  (United States) Military Assistance Advisory Group

  MACV

  (United States) Military Assistance Command, Vietnam

  NLF

  National Liberation Front

  PRP

  People’s Revolutionary Party

  USOM

  United States Operations Mission

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Note on the Title

  Preface

  Abbreviations

  I. THE VIETNAMESE

  1. States of Mind

  2. Nations and Empires

  3. The Sovereign of Discord

  4. The National Liberation Front

  II. THE AMERICANS AND THE SAIGON GOVERNMENT

  5. Mise en scène

  6. Politicians and Generals

  7. The United States Enters the War

  8. The Buddhist Crisis

  9. Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel

  10. Bad Puppets

  11. Elections

  12. The Downward Spiral

  13. Prospero

  14. Guerrillas

  15. The Tet Offensive

  III. CONCLUSION

  16. Nixon's War

  17. Fire in the Lake

  Afterword

  Notes

  Bibliography

  I

  The Vietnamese

  1

  States of Mind

  For ten years we have been engaged in negotiations, and yet the enemy’s intentions remain inscrutable.

  — Hoang Dieu (1829–1882). A letter from the commander of the citadel of Hanoi to the emperor just before the citadel’s seizure by the French and the suicide of its commander.

  The emperor of China sits on a raised dais in a vast hall thronged with the mandarins in their embroidered robes. The hall itself lies within the maze of a palace as large as any city on the earth; a thousand elephants and countless foot soldiers guard its towering stone walls, for the great halls of the palace contain such a wealth of precious metals that the emperor himself cannot count it, and its libraries enclose all the wisdom of the earth. Past the guards and in through the glittering streets there rides today a man on a shaggy horse wearing the outlandish dress of a barbarian. The man is a chieftain in his own country, but he is as poor as any beggar in the palace. He has ridden across the length of the known world to Peking, still it seems to him that the road from the palace gates to the interior is longer and more dangerous than any he has traveled. He does not even know how to name the great beasts and the shining metals that surround him, nor could he, the navigator of the earth, find his way back to the gates unaided. And yet the emperor and all his mandarins are waiting for him in the great hall, for there has been some trouble in the chieftain’s country that, despite the efforts of all the Chinese armies of the border, threatens to spread to the surrounding provinces.

  Somewhere, buried in the files of the television networks, lies a series of pictures, ranging over a decade, that chronicles the diplomatic history of the United States and the Republic of Vietnam. Somewhere there is a picture of President Eisenhower with Ngo Dinh Diem, a picture of Secretary McNamara with General Nguyen Khanh, one of President Johnson with Nguyen Cao Ky and another of President Nixon with President Thieu. The pictures are unexceptional. The obligatory photographs taken on such ceremonial occasions, they show men in gray business suits (one is in military fatigues) shaking hands or standing side-by-side on a podium. These pictures, along with the news commentaries, “President Nixon today reaffirmed his support for the Thieu regime,” or “Hanoi refused to consider the American proposal,” made up much of what Americans knew about the relationship between the two countries. But the pictures and news reports were to a great extent deceptions, for they did not show the disproportion between the two powers. One of the gray-suited figures, after all, represented the greatest power in the history of the world, a nation that could, if its rulers so desired, blow up the world, feed the earth’s population, or explore the galaxy. The second figure in the pictures represented a small number of people in a country of peasants largely sustained by a technology centuries old. The meeting between the two was the meeting of two different dimensions, two different epochs of his
tory. An imagined picture of a tributary chieftain coming to the Chinese court represents the relationship of the United States to the Republic of Vietnam better than the photographs from life. It represents what the physical and mental architecture of the twentieth century so often obscures.

  At the beginning of their terms in office President Kennedy and President Johnson, perhaps, took full cognizance of the disproportion between the two countries, for they claimed, at least in the beginning, that the Vietnam War would require only patience from the United States. According to U.S. military intelligence, the enemy in the south consisted of little more than bands of guerrillas with hardly a truck in which to carry their borrowed weapons. The North Vietnamese possessed anti-aircraft guns and a steady supply of small munitions, but the United States could, so the officials promised, end their resistance with a few months of intensive bombing. In 1963 and 1965 few Americans imagined that a commitment to war in Vietnam would finally cost the United States billions of dollars, the production of its finest research and development laboratories, and fifty-five thousand American lives. They did not imagine that the Vietnam War would prove more politically divisive than any foreign war in the nation’s history.

  In one sense Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had seen the disproportion between the United States and Vietnam, but in another they did not see it at all. By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of Communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives. In going to Vietnam the United States was entering a country where the victory of one of the great world ideologies occasionally depended on the price of tea in a certain village or the outcome of a football game. For the Americans in Vietnam it would be difficult to make this leap of perspective, difficult to understand that while they saw themselves as building world order, many Vietnamese saw them merely as the producers of garbage from which they could build houses. The effort of translation was too great.