Fire in the Lake Read online

  The Vietnamese Communists understood policies and programs as well as anyone else in Vietnam, but they, and in particular Ho Chi Minh, made an effort to present a picture of “correct behavior” to the people. Dressed usually in shorts and rubber sandals, the North Vietnamese leader lived as simply as a peasant in order to show that his revolution would inaugurate a truly popular regime. The same dress on Lenin would have been sheer affectation. But for Ho Chi Minh and his representatives to the people it was a necessity, for the Vietnamese do not differentiate between a man’s style and his “principles,” between his private and public “roles”: they look to the whole man.

  It was this very coherency of man and society that was to Westerners the most bewildering and unsympathetic aspect of the Vietnamese — Communists, Buddhists, and Catholics alike. In his biography of Ho Chi Minh, Jean Lacouture observed:

  However ruthlessly the people of North Vietnam may be governed, it would be wrong not to indicate how fully Ho has managed to identify with his fellow countrymen, and what an unusual relationship he has established with them. He is forever addressing ordinary citizens in an easygoing or fatherly tone, forever distributing oranges or other tidbits to the children. This is partly play-acting — why deny it? The character he projects is too well rounded to be entirely spontaneous, and his large red handkerchief has too often dabbed at dry eyes.30

  While generally admiring of the North Vietnamese leader, Lacouture could not get over the suspicion that he was “playing a part,” that he was, to put it more harshly, insincere. Lacouture was right in a sense. But the very terms he chose to describe Ho Chi Minh showed exactly how Westerners and Vietnamese differ in their view of the function of the individual. To Westerners, of course, “sincerity” means the accord between a man’s words or actions and his inner feelings. But to Vietnamese, for whom man is not an independent “character” but a series of relationships, “sincerity” is the accord between a man’s behavior and what is expected of him: it is faithfulness not to the inner man, but to the social role. The social role, in other words, is the man. To many Vietnamese, therefore, Ho Chi Minh was perfectly sincere, since he always acted in the “correct” manner, no matter what effort it cost him. And it was the very consistency of his performance that gave them confidence that he would carry the revolution out in the manner he indicated. Ironically enough, because of this very intimate relation of man to society, it was precisely those Vietnamese military men, such as Nguyen Cao Ky, who had no notion of a political system and who did not therefore “hide their feelings” or practice the Confucian “self-control,” who seemed to Westerners the most likable, if not the men most fit for the job of government.

  The Confucian world was rationalist rather than mystical, characterized by the ethical bureaucrat-scholar rather than by the heroic tribal chieftain. In times of crisis the Vietnamese looked for a particular kind of leader. A Hitler or a Joseph McCarthy or an Abraham Lincoln would have had no success in Vietnam, for they did not conform to the model laid down in the depths of Vietnamese history.

  At the beginning of the first Indochina war Paul Mus asked an old friend of his, a Vietnamese intellectual, whether he supported the Emperor Bao Dai or Ho Chi Minh. “Ho Chi Minh,” said the intellectual. “Ho Chi Minh because he is pointed, whereas Bao Dai is circular like a drop of water. Like water, he will rot everything he touches. What we want is pointed fire and flames like Ho Chi Minh.” As Mus explained, the traditional Vietnamese, like so many peasant people, saw history not as a straight-line progression31 but as an organic cycle of growth, fruition, and decay; for them these seasonal changes were associated with textures and pictures — the images as old as China itself. In times of prosperity and stability the empire appeared circular — the image of water and fecundity, or a time when, in the words of the great Vietnamese poet, Nguyen Du, “The emperor’s virtues spread like rain over all the land, penetrating deeply into the hearts of men.” Inevitably times would change: rich and secure, the dynasty would isolate itself from the people and grow corrupt — the image of degeneration, the stagnant pool. Then revolution would come — the cleansing fire to burn away the rot of the old order. At such times the Vietnamese would look for a leader who, in his absolute rectitude, his puritanical discipline, would lead the community back to the strength and vigor of its youth. And it was this picture that the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong presented to the Vietnamese of the twentieth century.

  This view of history does much to explain the fact — so long puzzling to American officials — that a peasant people who otherwise seemed to resist change and innovation could turn to the most radical of revolutions. For Westerners, even Marxists, who see history as a progression, revolution is an alarming prospect. The very word implies a mechanical operation — and one that more or less escapes human control. Revolution for Westerners is an abrupt reversal in the order of society, a violent break in history. But the Vietnamese traditionally did not see it that way at all. For them revolution was a natural and necessary event within the historical cycle; the problem of revolution was merely one of timing and appropriateness.

  Times change and with them their demands. Thus the seasons change in the course of a year. In the world cycle also there are spring and autumn in the life of peoples and nations, and these call for social transformations.

  — I Ching 32

  Vietnamese history was far from uneventful, but it was without movement of the sort that took place in Europe over the same millennium from the accession of Charlemagne to the industrial revolution. Distant from the seat of empire, the traditional villager did not fear the coming of a new regime, for like leaves in the Celestial Book the dynasties were bound to a common base in the traditional agriculture and the traditional Way. What the villager did fear was a difficult transition, an interregnum of social disorder and violence in which the conflict broke through the bamboo hedges of the village and disturbed the cycle of the rice. As long as the revolution passed over quickly, he had no reason to be conservative. Secure within his own landscape, he could accommodate himself to the dynasties that came and went like the seasons passing through the heavens. To him revolution meant no alarming break from the past, but simply a renewal. The Chinese character for revolution meant in its original sense an animal’s pelt, which is changed in the course of a year by molting.33

  In the twentieth century the Westerners are probably correct: revolution in Vietnam now implies a change of structure and a modulation in history. But the question remains whether it, too, is not in its own way appropriate. The French and the Americans tried to stop the revolution, and in doing so they created an interregnum of violence unparalleled in Vietnamese history. In the end the Vietnamese may reject them and their intervention as an organism rejects a foreign body. As one Vietnamese scholar told a Frenchman, “If you want so much to be in Vietnam, just wait a bit and perhaps in your next reincarnation you will be born Vietnamese.”

  2

  Nations and Empires

  Tzu-lu said: “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?”

  The Master replied: “What is necessary is to rectify names. If names be not correct, language is not in accord with the truth of things. If language not be in accord with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

  Saigon in 1966 was, as always, a city of rumors. It breathed rumors, consumed only rumors, for the people of Saigon had long since ceased to believe anything stated officially as fact. Rumor was the only medium. Among the stories of comets falling and bombing halts there was that year one rumor that stood out from all the rest. A work of art, a Fabergé among rumors, it was so embellished with circumstantial evidence of murders and secret meetings, so exquisitely crafted of inference, coincidence, and psychological truth, that its purveyors established its value without question. The central theme of the rumor was that Premier Nguyen Cao Ky and a number of other highly placed pol
iticians in Saigon belonged to a secret society formed in northern Vietnam before the Indochina war. The aim of this society was now to subvert the Saigon government and enlist the Americans in helping the North Vietnamese to conquer the south.1 The rumor had a certain undeniable attraction in that year when the Saigon government lost control of central Vietnam and two southern politicians were shot by unknown assailants in the streets. Few Americans, however, fully appreciated it, for as they saw it, the story had a certain internal logic for the southerners — a logic that went as follows: Premise: All northerners are alike. Premise: Nguyen Cao Ky is a northerner. Conclusion: Nguyen Cao Ky is an agent of the Politburo in Hanoi.

  Having thus reduced the rumor, most Americans would then proceed to attack it on the grounds that it was not true — a conclusion which, while undoubtedly correct, left something to be desired. The story of Oedipus was not true either, but it did describe a certain fundamental dilemma in the most graphic manner possible. In this case the dilemma was that although the United States claimed to be supporting the right of self-determination for the South Vietnamese people, it was in fact supporting a government of northerners who, to judge by their performance, were aiding and abetting their Communist compatriots. Clearly the rumor was an attempt by the Vietnamese to reconcile the claims of the U.S. State Department with the evidence before their own eyes.

  Over the years American government officials have assembled a number of theories that present similar contradictions with practice — not only in the matter of Vietnamese politics, but in that of the whole political geography of Southeast Asia. In trying to persuade the American public to support the war in Vietnam, they invested twenty-five years of political rhetoric in the establishment of certain propositions about the nature of the area. On the strategic plane they held South Vietnam to be the second in a series of domino-countries that in their black-and-white uniformity stood in a row beginning at the Chinese border and ending at the foot of Southeast Asia. If South Vietnam were to “fall to the Communists,” then it was more than likely that Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Malaya (and then, successively, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia) would “fall to the Communists” in their proper order. Just what nationality these Communists might be was not exactly clear, as U.S. officials often warned in the same breath of Chinese aggression, of North Vietnamese aggression, and of Khrushchev’s “wars of national liberation” around the world. The indefinite nature of this threat notwithstanding, the peoples of Asia (so the officials insisted) had called upon the United States to help them in their common struggle for freedom and against Communism.

  On the more detailed scheme of official reasoning, Vietnam was thought to be composed of two countries: a) North Vietnam, which was Communist and therefore intent upon invading the south; and b) South Vietnam, which was “a member of the Free World family striving to preserve its independence from Communism.” The United States became involved in Vietnam because the South Vietnamese government, under the terms of the SEATO pact, asked for American help against armed aggression by a foreign power — North Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government was having certain internal difficulties, but the United States would not be interfering in its domestic political affairs. Its sole purpose was to defend South Vietnam from outside attack. Its intervention would be limited, for with some American help, the Saigon government would in time build a democratic nation as strong as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north. The United States was bombing South Vietnam in order to help its people build a strong, democratic government.

  Whether or not the American officials actually believed their own propositions, they repeated them year after year with a dogged persistence and a perfect disregard for all contradictory evidence. In the course of a decade these propositions were transmuted into fact: fact, that is, for large sections of the American public; fact for the AID economists promoting such schemes as the cooperation of South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand on a Mekong River development project; fact in those realms of the Pentagon where systems analysts planned to end the insurgency with an electronic barrier circling South Vietnam. Ten years of American political rhetoric about North Vietnamese aggression and anti-Communist solidarity in Southeast Asia left even Washington insiders like Clark Clifford ill-prepared for such events as the Joint Chiefs’ request for a total of seven hundred thousand American troops in Vietnam and the refusal of the “Free World” countries to help the South Vietnamese government unless the United States paid them to do so. For most Americans, Southeast Asia came to look like the most complicated place in the world. And naturally enough, for the American official effort to fit the new evidence into the old official assumptions was something like the effort of the seventeenth-century astronomers to fit their observations of the planets into the Ptolemaic theory of the universe.

  On the official propositions about Southeast Asia rest all the strategic wisdom of, and the moral justification for, the American war in Vietnam. This being the case, it is interesting to take a look at those propositions in the light of the political history on which they are based. What was Vietnam’s relationship to China and to the other countries around her? What was the relationship between northern and southern Vietnam, and what, precisely, was Vietnamese nationalism? To answer these questions it is necessary to go back beyond 1954 to see how Vietnam initially developed as a nation, how Vietnamese society changed as a result of the French colonial occupation, and how Ho Chi Minh and his compatriots fought and won the struggle for independence. While history does not give precise answers, it does give certain clues, certain indications as to the shape of the future. Vietnam is, after all, much older than the “threat of Communism,” and below the ideological conflict lie older oppositions, older lines of force that articulate that conflict profoundly.

  Unlike the other countries of Southeast Asia, Vietnam has always lived in the orbit of China. First as a Chinese colony and then as a small tributary state, Vietnam was until the fifteenth century no more than a planet in the great solar system of the Celestial Empire. Vietnam came out of China and survived as a nation in a strange — and strangely stable — balance of attraction and repulsion.

  In 207 B.C. a Chinese warlord marched into the Red River Delta and opened an avenue to the south by which a century later the imperial armies would take his kingdom of Nam Viet for a Chinese colony. Vietnamese national mythology places several “Vietnamese” kingdoms in the Delta before the coming of the Chinese, but scholars now maintain that the region previously contained only a flux of tribes and feudalistic principalities, whose populations came from a variety of ethnic sources, tangentially related to the Vietnamese. Like the French or the English, the Vietnamese are not a “pure race” but a nation created within a particular landscape by a political process. According to ethnologists, the Vietnamese derive not from a single Chinese tribe, but from a mixture between tribes of Mongolian and Austro-Indonesian origin; their language has grown from both Chinese and Southeast Asian roots. In the third and fourth centuries B.C. the Red River Delta sustained two kingdoms, Au Lac and Van Lang, whose people the Chinese called simply southern, or Yuéh (Viêt in Vietnamese). During the ten centuries of Chinese suzerainty the Viêt peoples settled slowly into a new ethnic and cultural pattern. Vietnamese history began in Chinese writing, and the Vietnamese nation took shape along the political and cultural lines of force emanating from China.

  Given the Chinese capacity for empire-building, it is somewhat remarkable that the Vietnamese had a history at all. Hardly more broad-minded than the emissaries of other imperial powers, the first Chinese governors made no distinction between the Viêt tribes of the Delta and those that inhabited what is today Yunnan and Canton. They regarded them all as savages whose religion and customs showed only a pitiful lack of cultural development. Enlightened rulers, these governors took up the Chinese burden of educating the Viêt peoples to behave as much like the Chinese as possible. The Celestial Empire was universal, so they considered their mission c
ivilisatrice to be a comprehensive project that would end with the complete assimilation of all the southern peoples into the body of the empire. Ten centuries later a Chinese historian might well have judged that they had succeeded. The Viêts had adopted Chinese technology and the Chinese religions; their aristocracy sent its sons to compete for the mandarinate in the regional examinations. With his long imperial perspective the historian would probably have persisted in his opinion even when in the tenth century this same aristocracy raised troops to expel the armies of the declining T’ang dynasty from the Red River Delta. Such warlord revolts had occurred many times before in the Delta, just as they had occurred throughout China in times of imperial weakness. But the historian would have been wrong: the Vietnamese were then in the process of taking their independence from China. When, forty years later, the armies of the Sung dynasty descended to reconquer the Red River Delta, they confronted not the scattered forces of the warlords but the united armies of a man who called himself the emperor of Vietnam, the Land to the South.