Fire in the Lake Read online

  At the time of the Buddhist struggle in 1966 the Buddhist leaders claimed, “Ninety percent of the Vietnamese are Buddhists… the people are never Communists,” while the NLF leaders claimed by contrast, “The struggle of the religious believers in Vietnam is not separate from the struggle for national liberation.” The two statements were mutually contradictory, and an American might have concluded that one or both of their proponents was telling an untruth. But neither the Buddhists nor the NLF leaders were actually “lying,” as an American might have been under similar circumstances. Both groups were “rectifying the names” of the Vietnamese to accord with what was no longer the “will of Heaven” but “the laws of history” or “the spirit of the times.” They were announcing a project and making themselves comprehensible to their countrymen, for whom all knowledge, even the most neutral observation, is to be put to use.21

  With this intellectual framework in mind it is perhaps easier to see why the pilots of the People’s Republic of China should read Mao’s Thoughts in order to learn how to fly an airplane. The Vietnamese Communists look upon technology as an independent discipline in certain respects, but they insist that political education should be the basis for using it. During the period of conflict and change in their society, this emphasis on politics is not, perhaps, as unreasonable as it seems to most Americans. Without political education it proved useless or destructive for the cadets of the Saigon air force to learn how to fly airplanes.

  For Americans the close relationship the Vietnamese draw between morality, politics, and science is perhaps more difficult to understand now than at any other time in history. Today, living in a social milieu completely divided over matters of value and belief, Westerners have come to look upon science and logic alone as containing universal truths. Over the past century Western philosophers have worked to purge their disciplines of ethical and metaphysical concerns; Americans in particular have tended to deify the natural sciences and set them apart from their social goals. Under pressure from this demand for “objective truth,” the scholars of human affairs have scrambled to give their own disciplines the authority and neutrality of science. But because the social scientists can rarely attain the same criteria for “truth” as physicists or chemists, they have sometimes misused the discipline and taken merely the trappings of science as a camouflage for their own beliefs and values. It is thus that many American “political scientists” sympathetic to American intervention in Vietnam have concluded that the NLF’s subordination of science and “objective truth” to politics has its origins in Communist totalitarianism.

  For Westerners who believe in the eternal verity of certain principles the notion of “brainwashing” is shocking and the experience is associated with torture. But in such societies as those in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam, it is in one form or another an activity of every political movement. Under the traditional Vietnamese empire there was only one truth, only one true way. And all modern Vietnamese parties have had to face the task of changing the nature of the “truth.” Among people with an extremely pragmatic cast of mind, for whom values depend for their authority upon success, the task has implied a demonstration that the old ways are no longer useful, no longer adapted to the necessities of history. During the course of the war both the Saigon government and the NLF held “re-education” courses for defectors and prisoners, with varying degrees of success. Those Americans who objected to the process (and most Americans singled out the NLF) saw it in European terms as the forcible destruction of personality, a mental torture such as Arthur Koestler described in Darkness at Noon. But to the Vietnamese, Communist and non-Communist, it did not imply torture at all, for the reason that they have a very different kind of commitment to society than do Westerners.

  And it is this commitment that lies at the basis of intellectual organization. Unlike the Westerner, the Vietnamese child is brought up not to follow certain principles, but to accept the authority of certain people. The “Three Net Ropes” of the traditional society consisted in the loyalty of the son to his father, of the wife to her husband, and the mandarin to his emperor. The injunctions to filial piety and conjugal obedience were unconditional. Traditional Vietnamese law rested not upon the notion of individual rights, but the notion of duties — the duty of the sovereign to his people, the father to his son, and vice versa. Similarly, the Confucian texts defined no general principles but the proper relationship of man to man. Equal justice was secondary to social harmony. This particular form of social contract gave the individual a very different sense of himself, of his own personality. In the Vietnamese language there is no word that exactly corresponds to the Western personal pronoun I, je, ich. When a man speaks of himself, he calls himself “your brother,” “your nephew,” “your teacher,” depending upon his relationship to the person he addresses. The word he uses for the first person (toi) in the new impersonal world of the cities originally denoted “subject of the king.”22 The traditional Vietnamese did not see himself as a totally independent being, for he did not distinguish himself as a acutely as does a Westerner from his society (and by extension, the heavens). He did not see himself as a “character” formed of immutable traits, eternally loyal to certain principles, but rather as a system of relationships, a function of the society around him. In a sense, the design of the Confucian world resembled that of a Japanese garden where every rock, opaque and indifferent in itself, takes on significance from its relationship to the surrounding objects.

  In central Vietnam, where the villages are designed like Japanese gardens, a young Vietnamese district chief once told this writer that he had moved a group of villagers from a Liberation village to his headquarters in order to “change their opinions.” He had not lectured the villagers on the evils of Marxism and he did not plan to do so; he would simply wait for them to fall into relationship with his political authority. Had the villagers, of course, received an adequate political education, his waiting would be in vain. A “hardcore” NLF cadre would understand his community to include not only the village or the district but all of Vietnam. His horizons would be large enough in time and space to encompass a government-controlled city or years of a harsh, inconclusive war. But with regard to his refugees, the district chief was probably right: the old people and the children had left their NLF sympathies behind them in the burning ruins of a village only two miles distant.

  In the old society, of course, a man who moved out of his village would find in his new village or in the court of Hue the same kind of social and political system that he had left behind him. During the conflicts of the twentieth century, however, his movement from one place to another might require a change of “ideology,” or of way of life. In 1966 one American official discovered an ARVN soldier who had changed sides five times in the war, serving alternately with three NLF units and three GVN battalions. Clearly this particular soldier had no political education to speak of and no wider sense of community. But even for those that did, the possibility of accommodation and change remained open. When asked by an American interviewer what he thought of the GVN, one Front defector found it necessary to specify that “with the mind of the other regime” (i.e., that of the NLF) he felt it was bad for the people. At that point he was preparing himself to accept a new interpretation.

  Such changes of mind must look opportunistic or worse to Westerners, but to the Vietnamese with their particular commitment to society it was at once the most moral and the most practical course. Indeed, it was the only course available, for in such situations the Vietnamese villager did not consider an alternative. In the old language, a man depended upon the “will of Heaven”; it was therefore his duty to accommodate himself to it as well as possible. In a letter to his subordinates of the southern provinces Phan Thanh Giang described this ethic of accommodation in the most sophisticated Confucian terms:

  It is written that he who lives according to Heaven’s will is in the right way; he who departs from Heaven’s will is wrong. To act according to He
aven’s will is to act according to one’s reason. Man is an intelligent animal created by Heaven. Each animal lives according to its proper nature, like water which seeks its own level or fire which spreads in dry places.… Man to whom Heaven has given reason should endeavor to live according to that reason.23

  In conclusion Phan Thanh Giang requested that his officials surrender without resistance to the invading French forces. “The French,” he wrote, “have huge battleships, full of soldiers and armed with powerful cannons.… It would be as senseless for you to assail [them] as for the fawn to attack the tiger. You would only draw suffering upon the people whom Heaven has entrusted to your care.”24 Loyal to the Vietnamese emperor, Phan Thanh Giang could not so easily accommodate himself to necessity. Branding himself as a traitor, he chose the same course that, throughout history, his predecessors had taken at the fall of dynasties. Suicide was the only resolution to the unbearable conflict between loyalty to the emperor and obligation to what he saw as the will of Heaven, to the will of the community as a whole.

  But such protests against the will of Heaven were only for the mandarins, the moral leaders of the community. They were not for the simple villager, for as Confucius said, “The essence of the gentleman is that of wind; the essence of small people is that of grass. And when a wind passes over the grass, it cannot choose but bend.”25 In times of political stability the villager accommodated himself to the prevailing wind that clearly signaled the will of Heaven. Only in times of disorder and uncertainty when the sky clouded over and the forces of the world struggled to uncertain outcome, only then did the peasant take on responsibility for the great affairs of state, and only then did the leaders watch him carefully, for, so went the Confucian formula, “The will of Heaven is reflected in the eyes and ears of the people.”

  This ancient political formula clarified the basis on which twentieth-century Vietnamese, including those who no longer used the old language, would make their political decisions. Asked which side he supported, one peasant from a village close to Saigon told a Front cadre in 1963: “I do not know, for I follow the will of Heaven. If I do what you say, then the Diem side will arrest me; if I say things against you, then you will arrest me, so I would rather carry both burdens on my shoulders and stand in the middle.” Caught between two competing regimes, the peasant did not assert his right to decide between them, rather he asked himself where his duty lay. Which regime had the power to claim his loyalty? Which would be the most likely to restore peace and harmony to his world? His decision might be based on personal preference (a government that considered the wishes of the people would be more likely to restore peace on a permanent basis). But he had, nonetheless, to make an objective analysis of the situation and take his gamble, for his first loyalty lay neither with the Diem regime nor the NLF but with the will of Heaven that controlled them both. At certain periods attentisme was the most moral and the most practical course.

  As a warning to Westerners on the difficulties of understanding the twentieth-century conflict in Vietnam, Paul Mus told an ancient Chinese legend that is well known to the Vietnamese. There was trouble in the state of Lu, and the reigning monarch called in Confucius to ask for his help. When he arrived at the court, the Master went to a public place and took a seat in the correct way, facing south, and all the trouble disappeared.26

  The works of Vo Nguyen Giap are but addenda to this legend, for the legend is the paradigm of revolution in Vietnam. To the Vietnamese it is clear from the story that Confucius was not taking an existential or exemplary position, he was actually changing the situation. Possessed of neither godlike nor prophetic authority, he moved an entire kingdom by virtue of his sensitivity to the will of Heaven as reflected in the “eyes and ears of the people.” As executor for the people, he clarified their wishes and signaled the coming — or the return — of the Way that would bring harmony to the kingdom. For the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai, the traditionalist sects of the south that in the twentieth century still believed in this magical “sympathy” of heaven and earth, political change did not depend entirely on human effort. Even the leaders of the sects believed that if they, like Confucius, had taken “the correct position,” the position that accorded with the will of Heaven, all Vietnamese would eventually adopt the same Way, the same political system that they had come to.

  Here, within the old spiritualist language, lies a clue as to why the Vietnamese Communists held their military commanders in strict subordination to the political cadres. Within the domestic conflict military victories were not only less important than political victories, but they were strictly meaningless except as reflections of the political realities. For the Communists, as for all the other political groups, the vehicle of political change was not the war, the pitch of force against force, but the struggle, the attempt to make manifest that their Way was the only true or “natural” one for all Vietnamese. * Its aim was to demonstrate that, in the old language, the Mandate of Heaven had changed and the new order had already replaced the old in all but title. When Ho Chi Minh entered Hanoi in August 1945, he made much the same kind of gesture as Confucius had made in facing south when he said (and the wording is significant, for he was using a language of both East and West), “We, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam solemnly declare to the world that Viet-Nam has the right to be a free and independent country — and in fact it is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”27 His claims were far from “true” at the time, but they constituted the truth in potential — if he, like Confucius, had taken the “correct position.” For the Confucians, of course, the “correct position” was that which accorded with the will of Heaven and the practice of the sacred ancestors. For Ho Chi Minh the “correct position” was that which accorded with the laws of history and the present and future judgment of the Vietnamese people.

  Fire in the lake: the image of REVOLUTION.

  Thus the superior man

  Sets the calendar in order

  And makes the seasons clear.

  — I Ching 28

  In August 1945 the whole city of Hanoi turned about on itself within the space of a few days. The highest officials of the Emperor Bao Dai’s government fled, and their subordinates joined the Viet Minh. In a city that the French had thought passive, acquiescent to foreign rule, there were suddenly Viet Minh flags in every window and vast crowds cheering for the independence of Vietnam.29 In Hue in 1966 at the beginning of the Buddhist struggle, much the same phenomenon occurred. Overnight the Buddhists, led by the brilliant rhetorician Thich Tri Quang, took over the administration of the city. Arriving at their desks the next day, the American officials suddenly found that the city government was at war with Saigon — though its personnel had hardly changed and there had been no violence. By the beginning of the next week the troops of the ARVN First Division stationed near the city had either fled, complied with the Buddhists, or given their active support to the struggle against their own command in Saigon.

  Time after time Westerners have been surprised by the suddenness of political change in Vietnam, by its seeming lack of motivation. But the motivation is always there. It is just that, given the commitment the Vietnamese have to their society, it remains hidden, and for the majority of the people, hidden even below the surface of consciousness, until in the old language the will of Heaven manifests itself and the success of the rebellion appears assured. At that moment the wind shifts, and if all goes for the best, the whole society changes from unanimity to unanimity. In such a change, the element of personal leadership is of the highest importance, for the Vietnamese do not look upon government as the product of a doctrine, a political system that hangs somewhere over their heads, but as an entire way of life, a Tao, exemplified by the person of the ruler.

  Over the years those American officials concerned with the Saigo
n government occupied themselves almost exclusively with the development of policies and programs, with organization and reorganization. That the Vietnamese showed much less interest in the programs than in the people who ran them proved a continual source of discomfort to the Americans. This discomfort they manifested in their complaints about the “underdevelopment” of Vietnamese politics. In part, of course, this American preoccupation with programs and instrumentalities arose out of the ground rules of their involvement in Vietnam. (Officially, the U.S. government was “not interfering in Vietnamese domestic politics.”) In part, however, it came from the basic American — or Western — view of government as a complex machine. Americans tend to speak of “governmental machinery” and to look upon the problem of government as one of programming the machinery correctly to attain the goals desired. For Americans it is ideas, principles, and organization that count: men are replaceable and their “personalities” almost incidental to their functions. (In Vietnam it was simply embarrassing that gossip about the Vietnamese generals described the workings of the government better than all of their organizational charts.) But the Vietnamese look at government in a very different light. To them it is not merely one organization among others, but a complete enterprise that comprehends much of what Westerners would consign to personal life and private morality. In looking for a leader they look not merely for a man with ideas and administrative skills; nor do they, as many Americans assumed, look only for a charismatic figure, a magical authority. They look for a man who expresses in his life how the government and the society ought to behave. In coming to the court of Lu, Confucius made no speeches and gave no orders. He gave the people a picture of the “correct” way of life; he showed them what had to be done.