http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pilger_John/Vietnam_Heroes.html
Vietnam
excerpted from the book
Heroes
by John Pilger
South End Press, 2001 (and 1986), paper
...
When we met in Los Angeles in 1983 Major Patti described the 'extraordinary pro-American spirit that was everywhere at the birth of Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam'. 'They didn't regard America as an imperial power,' he said. 'They thought we were different from the Europeans and they were desperate not to be associated with international communism, not with the Chinese or the Russians, but with us in America. What an opportunity it was. I remember when Ho Chi Minh called for me and said he was drafting Vietnam's declaration of independence. He asked if I could remember how the American text went and said, "The same declaration is appropriate because Americans and Vietnamese believe in the same anti-colonialism." Well, that was fine, but my problem was that I couldn't remember it word for word!'
The ironies then multiplied. Also in Hanoi that day was the French Commissioner for Indo-China, Jean Saintenay, who was to accuse Patti and the United States government of 'infantile anti-colonialism', and of endorsing 'this communist takeover of Indochina'. The French bitterness was understandable; not only had they been humbled in their own colony as quislings of the Japanese, but now the Americans, the liberators of Paris, had arrived to help not them but the Vietnamese nationalists, the Vietminh, who were led by a communist called Ho Chi Minh. Moreover, President Roosevelt had already vilified France which, he said, had 'milked' Vietnam for a hundred years. 'The people of IndoChina are entitled to something better,' the President had said, and the United States supported their 'independence and self-determination'.
Ho Chi Minh liked Americans. He told his friend Wilfred Burchett, the Australian journalist, that he enjoyed 'the openness of Americans . . . the way they get things done. They didn't seem [in 1945] to be prisoners of the past, not like the French.' Ho perhaps had a personal reason to like Americans. In June 1945 Life magazine published a family album-style picture of members of an American OSS team who had parachuted behind Japanese lines to supply the Vietminh. In the centre was Ho Chi Minh; on his left was a young American holding a pith helmet, Paul Hoagland, who had found the Vietminh leader seriously ill and had nursed him with sulphur drugs and quinine and, as Ho himself later acknowledged, had saved his life.
Ho Chi Minh was the antithesis of other emerging communist leaders in one respect: he wanted his people to open themselves out to other societies, communist, capitalist and non-aligned. Like Tito in Yugoslavia, he knew that this was the only way his people could survive as a national entity. Indeed, so anxious was Ho for American support for his fledgling republic that he addressed twelve separate appeals to President Roosevelt, to his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Major Patti later wrote that Ho 'pleaded not for military or economic aid',
. . . but for understanding, for moral support, for a voice in the forum of western democracies. But the United States would not read his mail because, as I was informed, the DRV Government was not recognised by the United States and it would be 'improper' for the President or anyone in authority to acknowledge such correspondence. [DRV stood for Democratic Republic of Vietnam, later known colloquially by the Americans as 'North Vietnam'.]
Ho Chi Minh saw America's post-Second World War strength as a counterweight to China and went so far as to propose that Vietnam should be part of an 'American Commonwealth' in Asia with a trusteeship status similar to that of the Philippines. That the Philippines then was effectively an American colony apparently did not concern him; for this was an expedient. Unless Vietnam survived in the shadow of the most populous nation, independence would never be realised.
As for relations with the Soviet Union, Ho spent fifteen years in Moscow and expressed himself well aware of the tenuous and highly conditional nature of Soviet 'friendship'. He told Patti, 'I place more reliance on the United States to support Vietnam's independence, before I could expect help from the USSR.'
During the summer of 1945 Ho Chi Minh would hold a press conference every morning at ten o'clock in his office in Hanoi, although he would ask most of the questions and direct them at a young American, Ed Hoyt, the correspondent of United Press. 'When is the United States going to do something about Mr Roosevelt's promises?' he would ask. Ed Hoyt reported Ho's enthusiasm for siding with America, only to discover later that an employee in the United Press relay office at Chungking was an agent of Chiang Kai-shek's secret police and had rewritten his dispatches to suit China's foreign policy. 'So all Uncle Ho's pleas for help from Uncle Sam never got past Asia,' Hoyt later lamented, with only slight exaggeration. 'So much for journalism as history.'
In September 1945 Vietnam was a country of artificial, overlapping, foreign-imposed divisions. The French had divided Vietnam into three, all sub-divisions of its colony in Indo-China. The Allies divided it between two military commands headquartered in China and Southeast Asia. On September 4, 1945 Major-General Douglas Gracey, a British colonial officer, entered Saigon with the 20th Indian Division and took the surrender of the Japanese. He immediately rearmed them and ordered them to put down the Vietminh, who had already formed an administration in the South. Like the Vietminh in the North, they were a popular movement of Catholics, Buddhists, small businessmen, communists and farmers who looked to Ho Chi Minh as the 'father of the nation'.
By January 1947, thanks largely to Gracey, the French colons were back in power in Saigon. Ho Chi Minh still hoped for an alliance with Washington and appealed again to President Truman while insisting to Patti that he was 'not a communist in the American sense'. Although he had lived and worked in Moscow, Ho considered himself a free agent; but he warned that he 'would have to find allies if any were to be found; otherwise the Vietnamese would have to go it alone'. And alone they went until 1950 when Ho Chi Minh believed he could no longer delay accepting the formal ties and material assistance under offer from the Soviet Union and especially from China. It was the success of the Chinese revolution in 1949 that was to give the Vietminh the means to defeat the French: military training, arms and sanctuary across an open frontier.
In 1950, with the Korean war under way, the American view of monolithic world communism prevailed. The sentiments of Roosevelt about opposing colonialism had long been blown away by the Zeus-like figure of John Foster Dulles, whose fundamentalist crusade against 'Godless communism' guided American foreign policy during the 1950s. Dulles bracketed Vietnam north of the seventeenth parallel with 'Red China', without regard to the complex and fragile relationship which had existed between the two nations for several thousand years and which always had a potential for enmity.
Of course at the root of Dulles's evangelism was a practical, imperial concern which, wrote Noam Chomsky,
. . . was over strategic resources of Southeast Asia and their significance for the global system that the US was then constructing, incorporating western Europe and Japan. It was feared that successful independent development under a radical nationalist leadership in Vietnam might 'cause the rot to spread', gradually eroding US dominance in the region and ultimately causing Japan, the largest domino, to join in a closed system from which the US would be excluded . . . The idea that US global planners had national imperialist motives is intolerable to the doctrinal system, so this topic must be avoided in any history directed to a popular audience.
Having declared a policy of 'containing communism' in Asia, the American government in 1950 gave $10 million to assist the French in winning back their colony in the North. Within four years the Americans were paying for 78 per cent of a colonial war directed by the same French whom President Roosevelt had castigated. For Washington, the French surrender following the siege in the valley of Dien Bien Phu ought to have forewarned them of the fighting qualities of the Vietnamese, but it did not. The front page of the New York Times of April 6, 1954 read:
DULLES WARNS RED CHINA NEARS OPEN AGGRESSION IN INDOCHINA.' What the 'warning' did not say was that Dulles was preparing for an 'all out war' against China, using nuclear weapons.'
The rout of the French in the North by the Vietminh took place while an international conference on Indo-China was convened in Geneva in July 1954. The final declaration divided Vietnam 'temporarily' at the seventeenth parallel into two 'national regrouping areas'. North and South would be reunited following free national elections on July 26, 1956. There seemed little doubt that Ho Chi Minh would win and form Vietnam's first democratically elected government. Certainly President Eisenhower was in no doubt of this. He wrote: 'I have never talked . . . with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that . . . 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader."
The Geneva conference held many secrets. One of them was the part China played in the division of Vietnam. It was a role of exquisite duplicity which owed nothing to the solidarity of 'world communism', the current Western bogey, and was pursued with the same fervent self-interest which has seen the 'Chinese communists' embrace a galaxy of disparate allies, from Pol Pot in Cambodia to General Pinochet in Chile. Chou En Lai, the Chinese premier, had gone to Geneva with the hope of ending China's diplomatic isolation and the aim of 'neutralising' Indo-China. The latter meant keeping the Americans away from China's southern borders and dividing the growing nationalist movement in Vietnam. According to Anthony Barnett:
Chou secretly informed the French that he recognised the reality of the South Vietnamese government they were attempting to construct. His plans misfired - with the ironic result that his country's diplomatic isolation was only ended when the war that followed between Vietnam and the United States looked like being won by a Vietnamese party no longer beholden to Peking.'
(In his book Caveat, Alexander Haig described a trip he made to Peking in January 1972 to prepare for President Nixon's 'opening to China' that year. Haig wrote that Chou En Lai 'touched on every subject that was of interest to our two countries but he dwelled on one in particular - Vietnam . . . I reported to President Nixon that the import of what [Chou] said to me was: don't lose in Vietnam; don't withdraw from Southeast Asia.')'
Dulles refused to sign the Geneva accords and less than a month after the protagonists had returned home from Geneva, according to the Pentagon Papers, the United States moved in secret to 'disassociate France from the levers of command' in southern Vietnam and to assume direct American control. This task was assigned to the newly formed CIA which, during the summer of 1954, invented a 'republic of Vietnam' with Saigon as its capital. This was known by those assigned to the task as 'creating the master illusion'.
Ralph W. McGehee was for twenty-five years a career officer in the CIA and one of the creators of such illusions. He was an expert in 'black propaganda', which is known today as 'disinformation'. In an interview with me in 1983 he described the war in Vietnam as 'the Agency's longest and most successful disinformation operation'. In 1977 McGehee retired, not as a renegade, but with the CIA's highest honour, its Medal of Commendation. He was disillusioned, he said, because the CIA had become 'not an intelligence gathering organisation but a covert operations arm of the Presidency'. In 1983 his book Deadly Deceits was published. In the following passage he describes how the CIA not only installed a regime of its choice in Saigon, its 'master illusion', but changed the demographic map of South-East Asia:
To make the illusion a reality, the CIA undertook a series of operations that helped turn South Vietnam into a vast police state. The purpose of these operations was to force the native South Vietnamese to accept the Catholic mandarin [Ngo Dinh] Diem, who had been selected by US policymakers to provide an alternative to communism in Vietnam. It was a strange choice. From 1950 to 1953, while Ho's forces were earning the loyalty of their people by fighting the French, Diem, a short, fussy bachelor, was living in the U.S. in Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and New York.
Diem arrived in Saigon in mid-1954 and was greeted by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the CIA's man in South Vietnam and the head of the Agency's Saigon Military Mission (SMM). Diem was opposed by virtually all elements of South Vietnamese society - Bao Dai's followers, the pro-French religious sects, the Buddhists, the remnant nationalist organisations, and, of course, the followers of Ho Chi Minh. He had no troops,-no police, no government, and no means of enforcing his rule. What he did have was the complete support of Colonel Lansdale and all the money, manpower, weapons, training, propaganda, and political savvy in the CIA's covert-action war chest.
To create Diem's government, Lansdale's men, operating in teams in North Vietnam, stimulated North Vietnamese Catholics and the Catholic armies deserted by the French to flee south. SMM teams promised Catholic Vietnamese assistance and new opportunities if they would emigrate. To help them make up their minds, the teams circulated leaflets falsely attributed to the Viet Minh telling what was expected of citizens under the new government. The day following distribution of the leaflets, refugee registration tripled. The teams spread horror stories of Chinese Communist regiments raping Vietnamese girls and taking reprisals against villages. This confirmed fears of Chinese occupation under the Viet Minh. The teams distributed other pamphlets showing the circumference of destruction around Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities should the United States decide to use atomic weapons. To those it induced to flee over the 300-day period the CIA provided free transportation on its airline, Civil Air Transport, and on ships of the U.S. Navy. Nearly a million North Vietnamese were scared and lured into moving to the South.
Lieutenant Tom Dooley, who operated with the U.S. Navy out of Haiphong, also helped to stimulate the flow of refugees to the South. At one point he organised a gathering of 35,000 Catholics to demand evacuation. A medical doctor, Dooley was a supreme propagandist whose message seemed aimed largely at the U.S. audience. He wrote three best-selling books, and numerous newspaper and magazine articles were written about him. Dr. Dooley's concocted tales of the Viet Minh disembowelling 1,000 pregnant women, beating a naked priest on the testicles with a bamboo club, and jamming chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing the word of God, aroused American citizens to anger and action. Dr. Dooley's reputation remained unsullied until 1979, when his ties to the CIA were uncovered during a Roman Catholic sainthood investigation.
The Agency's operation worked. It not only convinced the North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the South, thereby providing Diem with a source of reliable political and military cadres, but it also duped the American people into believing that the flight of the refugees was a condemnation of the Viet Minh by the majority of Vietnamese.
Now the scene had been set and the forces defined. The picture drawn to justify U.S. involvement was that the Communist North was invading the Free World South. The CIA was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda and, through covert operations, to make the illusion a reality. Its intelligence, with an occasional minor exception, was only a convenient vehicle to sell the lie to the U.S. bureaucracy and people. Unfortunately, nearly everyone, including later policymakers, was deceived by this big lie. While the plan was never detailed in a single available document, an examination of the Pentagon Papers, plus other related information, demands this conclusion.
The terror which the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem inflicted on people living south of the seventeenth parallel is conclusively documented. The main instrument of terror was a 50,000-strong civil guard, or secret police, which had been set up and trained by teams from the CIA and Michigan University. In 1959 the Diem regime passed a law requiring the death sentence for those found guilty of speaking out or 'spreading rumours' against the government. This was the model of a 'free world democracy' which the United States was committed to defend against the 'communist threat' and on whose behalf President Kennedy, by clear implication in his inaugural address, had called on his countrymen to lay down their lives. Colonel Lansdale, on the other hand, was more candid; in a secret memorandum to the Secretary of Defense in 1961 he wrote: 'I cannot truly sympathise with Americans who help promote a fascistic state and then get angry when it doesn't act like a democracy."
In 1960 the Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (FSLN, better known as the NLF) was established out of the old organisation of the Vietminh. It came about partly as a result of a decision by the Vietnam Workers' Party (Lao Dong) in the North, but also in response to intense pressure from southern cadres. Like the Vietminh, its membership included Catholics and Buddhists, city and country people, communists and non-communists. Two years later, in a clandestine congress, Nguyen Huu Tho, a non-communist Saigon lawyer, was elected NLF president and remained in that position after the capture of Saigon on April 30, 1975. The NLF wanted primarily to free Vietnam from the control of foreigners and those of their countrymen courted and bought by foreigners. Inevitably, by its massive presence of up to half a million men under arms, the United States ensured the alienation of those who were not communists and reinforced those who were.
In 1961 Diem's troops and their American advisers drove large numbers of the rural people of southern Vietnam into what became known as 'strategic hamlets'. These were concentration camps, surrounded by wire and watchtowers, whose purpose was to 'protect' the people from the Vietcong. Those who objected to being 'protected', and who resisted, were murdered and tortured. Such 'excesses' and the nepotism of the Diem family received wide publicity in the United States, and it was clear that 'Asia's George Washington', as Diem called himself, was becoming an embarrassment to President Kennedy. In November 1963 Diem was overthrown by a triumvirate of his generals, organised by the CIA.
One of the generals was Duong Van Minh (the Americans called him 'Big' Minh because he was six feet tall), a devout Buddhist who had approached the NLF seeking a ceasefire and negotiations toward a 'neutralist' non-communist coalition government in Saigon. According to a study by George Kahin, based on extensive interviews, the generals, who were 'seeking a negotiated agreement among the Vietnamese parties themselves without American intervention', regarded the NLF as 'overwhelmingly non-communist' and 'sufficiently free of Hanoi's control to have made [a political settlement in South Vietnam] quite possible'.
The Vietnamese were never allowed to choose. The historian David G. Marr wrote that the generals' mere countenance of peace negotiations
. . . was one of the main reasons why the US government, or at least the US military commander in Saigon, encouraged their overthrow in turn only three months later. From then on, every Saigon military officer knew that contacts with the NFLSV, or even internal discussion of negotiation options, risked vigorous American counteraction. Some were still prepared to take that risk, but with the arrival of US combat troops in early 1965 the historical opportunity vanished. Henceforth the US government had the means . . . to ensure that no 'neutralist'-inclined RVN officer came close to power. [RVN stood for Republic of Vietnam - Saigon regime.]
The creation of more 'illusions' and a legal justification for an expanded war now became an urgent necessity. American planes were already 'secretly' bombing Vietnam on its border with Laos, and American 'advised' sabotage teams were operating north of the seventeenth parallel. But to the American public the war was still a remote and perplexing affair, and domestic politics and civil rights upheavals preoccupied the news. President Johnson was then running for re-election against Barry Goldwater, an Arizona conservative whom the Democrats had succeeded in casting as a dangerous hawk in contrast with the 'statesmanlike' Johnson. However, to counter Goldwater's charge that the President of the United States was going soft on communism, Johnson needed ritually to demonstrate how 'tough' he was. The remarkable events that followed were to justify the coming American invasion of Vietnam.
During the spring and summer of 1964 the United States organised commando raids from the South against the North, using South Vietnamese and landing them from the sea. Hence, Washington was already engaged in unprovoked hostilities against Vietnam. An American spy ship, the USS Maddox, took part in this action. On August 2 the Maddox fired on two torpedo boats off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. The boats had neither attacked the Maddox nor returned its fire. Two days later Captain John J. Herrick, on the bridge of the Maddox, noticed two 'mysterious dots' on his radar screen and concluded they were torpedo boats. It was a blustering, stormy night and visibility was nil. Again, no attack materialised. However, Herrick had sent an emergency call to his headquarters in Honolulu and this was passed quickly to President Johnson, who was 'furious' and wanted to order the bombing of North Vietnam immediately. A few hours later a cable arrived from Captain Herrick. It read:
Freak weather effects on radar and over eager sonar men . . . No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.
President Johnson asked his Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, for urgent 'clarification' while he prepared to address the nation. Captain Herrick cabled back that there was 'a confusing picture', although he was now certain that the report of an attack was 'bona fide'. What he did not say, until 1985, was that this confirmation of a 'bona fide' attack was based on 'intercepted North Vietnamese communications' which he had not seen. Johnson's television speech was now written; America was going to war. But a third cable now arrived from the Maddox in which Captain Herrick reverted to his original doubts. Half an hour after this was received, and ignored, the President was on networked television telling his fellow Americans, 'Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.'
This became known as the 'Gulf of Tonkin Incident' and as a direct result, a resolution was sent by the White House to Congress seeking authority for the United States to invade Vietnam. Seven years were to pass before the Pentagon Papers, the official 'secret history' of the war, would reveal that administration officials had drafted the 'Gulf of Tonkin Resolution' two months before the alleged attack on the Maddox. On August 7,1964 Congress authorised President Johnson to take 'all measures' to protect US forces from 'any armed attack'. American-planned sabotage attacks increased against the North. Six months later the State Department published a White Paper whose centrepiece was the 'provocation' of the 'Gulf of Tonkin Incident', together with seven pages of 'conclusive proof' of Hanoi's preparations to invade the South. This 'proof' stemmed from the discovery of a cache of weapons found floating in a junk off the coast of central Vietnam. The White Paper, which would provide the legal justification for the American invasion, was, in the words of Ralph McGehee, a 'master illusion'. McGehee told me:
Black propaganda was when the US Government spoke in the voice of the enemy, and there is a very famous example. In 1965 the CIA loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons ... the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of Central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place. Then they brought in the American press and the international press and said, 'Here's evidence that the North Vietnamese are invading South Vietnam. 'Based on this evidence two Marine battalion landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.
The bombing was code-named 'Operation Rolling Thunder' and was the longest campaign in the history of aerial bombardment. Few outsiders saw its effects on the civilian population of the North. I was one who did. Against straw and flesh was sent an entirely new range of bombs, from white phosphorus (1966) to 'anti-personnel' devices which discharged thousands of small needles (1971). North Vietnam then had no air force with which to defend itself. The scale of the American bombing in the mid-1960s, both in the North and South, together with the American-directed terror of the South, eventually persuaded Ho Chi Minh to send regular army units south in support of those South Vietnamese opposing the American invasion.
This was not how propaganda in the United States explained the origins of the war. Neither is it how many people remember the war today. In the opinion poll quoted at the beginning of this chapter, in which more than a third of those questioned expressed confusion as to who were 'our allies', almost two-thirds said they were aware that the United States had 'sided with South Vietnam'. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, this is the equivalent of being aware that Nazi Germany sided with France in 1940 and the Soviet Union now sides with Afghanistan.
The accredited version of events has not changed. It is that noncommunist South Vietnam was invaded by communist North Vietnam and that the United States came to the aid of the 'democratic' regime in the South. This of course is untrue, as documentation I have touched upon makes clear. That Ho Chi Minh waited so long before sending a regular force to resist the American attacks seems, in retrospect, extraordinary; or perhaps it was a testament to the strength and morale of those South Vietnamese who had taken up arms in defence of their villages and their homeland. In 1965 the American counter-insurgency adviser, John Paul Vann, wrote in a memorandum addressed to his superiors in Washington that 'a popular political base for Government of South Vietnam does not now exist' and the majority of the people in South Vietnam 'primarily identified' with the National Liberation Front.
When the US marines finally 'stormed ashore' at Danang in central Vietnam on March 6, 1965 they were bemused to find that there were no 'Vietcong' defending the beaches, dug in like the Japanese in all those Second World War movies. Instead, there were incredulous fishermen and curious children and beautiful girls with flowing black hair, wearing silk dresses, split at the waist, and offering posies of flowers. Men in white shirts had supplied the flowers and they watched from a distance as the press photographers and the film crews recorded this moving illusion of welcome, while the jungles and highlands beyond cast a blood-red shadow no one saw. Ten years, one month and eighteen days were to pass before the last marine left, pursued by an embittered mob up the stairwell in his country's fortress embassy.
During those years the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army to Vietnam, and dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, and pursued a military strategy deliberately designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes, and used chemicals in a manner which profoundly changed the environmental and genetic order, leaving a once bountiful land petrified. At least 1,300,000 people were killed and many more were maimed and otherwise ruined; 58,022 of these were Americans and the rest were Vietnamese. President Reagan has called this a 'noble cause'.
p192
Danang: August 1967. The invasion had been under way for more than a year now and Danang, where the first marines had landed, had been transformed into the biggest single military base on earth. In the briefing room a Press and Information Officer was announcing with enthusiasm the establishment of a 'free fire zone' near An Hoa. 'Thanks to our fellows who hacked it right around the clock,' he said, 'we got the people out of those insecure villages. We got them right away from the enemy. We denied the enemy . . . and we saved those people. Like Chairman Mao wouldn't say [grin], we removed the water from the fish!'
I asked him if the people had expressed their 'insecurity' and desire to be saved from 'the enemy'. He replied that he did not understand the question and I should put it in writing to JUSTPAO. I asked him what time had elapsed between the dropping of leaflets informing people where to assemble for their helicopter ride to 'security' and the firing of the first rounds of artillery, which were known in military parlance as 'mad minutes'. He replied, 'Between six hours and one hour.'
So more than 3,000 people had as much as six hours and as little as one hour to relocate from what had been, for many of them, a modestly prosperous life dependent only on the seasons, to another life in a town and in peonage to the needs and whims of a foreign army whose ubiquitous presence underwrote an 'economy' based upon the services of maids, pimps, whores, beggars and black-marketeers. Unlike Saigon, also a refugee city but which had maintained a certain brittle sense of itself predating the coming of the GIs, Danang was wholly victim. Where there had been fishermen, there were now the human consequences of 'removing the water from the fish'. The upheaval caused was universal among poor farmers and those already on the margins of city life. Between
1964 and 1966 2 million Vietnamese were made homeless by such a strategy. By 1968 a third of the population of South Vietnam were refugees.
The ruin of lives was at once brutal and subtle. Families and networks of friends, once guardians of compassion, grace and sensuality, seemed to dissipate in the streets without sewers and tap water; fear, neurosis, casual brutality and avarice corroded lives beyond repair. People rammed each other in the markets; sons duped fathers; the elderly were neglected; rape entered the language and venereal disease entered bodies and brains, along with serious drug addiction. The Americans called the nightmare they created 'Dogpatch'.
p193
The French had allowed the disparity between city and country to grow to the point where, by the mid-1960s, up to 80 per cent of the rural people of South Vietnam owned only 12 per cent of the land. Landless farmers had been treated harshly by the French colonial administration and by the Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. And such was American ignorance or misunderstanding of the Vietnamese colonial experience that it did not seem to occur to them until it was too late that genuine land reform won 'hearts and minds' in Vietnam.
But, as Frances Fitzgerald has pointed out, the issue was not that simple; land reform was only part of the people's grievance, which had as much to do with the control of credit by the Saigon banks and the misuse of the available national wealth by city black-marketeers and a nepotic elite. It also had to do with the shift of political power away from the villages and districts. In the South the authority of local government had eroded during the post-Second World War French period and accelerated under the Americans. The NLF understood the implications of this; paradoxically perhaps for revolutionaries, they also understood the attachment of rural people to the traditional way of life, known as the Tao. This centred upon the respect for ancestral lands and burial places and for the Confucian structure of society. The Vietnamese revolution was once described to me by an NLF cadre as 'change and disturbance by stealth'.
p196
Tay Ninh province: September 1970. In June the US Senate had repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which had provided a rationale for President Johnson's land invasion. Now Johnson had retired in political ignominy and the illusion his administration had created was of no further use. Moreover, President Nixon had replaced it with his own, which he called 'peace with honour'.
When I returned to Saigon it was clear that the war was going badly for everybody. The NLF had suffered grievous losses in the Mekong Delta. The saturation 'firepower' of the Americans, combined with the use of 'anti-personnel' technology, had so damaged NLF infrastructure that former strongholds had fallen silent. For the United States, the damage was from within; its army was beginning to unravel. A minority of troops in Vietnam were combat soldiers, and most of these were 'grunts': men conscripted not only from working-class America but from among those who regarded their presence in Vietnam as anything but their 'patriotic duty'. These were sometimes known as the 'Chicago Generation', an allusion to the bloody battle fought by anti-war protesters and police outside the Democratic Party's convention in summer 1968.
This was the era of the 'drug culture' and by 1968 it was unusual to meet an American drafted soldier in Vietnam who was not using drugs. Getting stoned in your hooch made the war go away. Getting stoned on patrol made the enemy go away; and if this turned out not to be so, what difference did it make? Just as much of American society was then divided between the 'straight world' and those in or on the fringe of the anti-war movement and its attendant drug culture, so the Army was now divided between career men, known as 'lifers', and drafted men who openly displayed peace signs, beads, long hair, insubordination and not infrequently a smoldering joint of choice 'Laotian gold'. And some grunts' way of dealing with lifers who made drafted men 'hump the big pack to the boonies and get blown away' was occasionally to lob a live grenade into the officers' hooch. This was known as 'fragging'.
p234
At the school in Hongai, which was flattened, I found a letter pinned to a classroom wall. It was written by a young girl called Nguyen Thi An. 'The children wrote many letters to themselves in those days,' said a teacher.
My name is Nguyen Thi An. I am fifteen years old. This letter comes to you from Hongai, where I was born at the foot of the Bai Tho mountain and in the murmur of the sea-waves lapping against the shore. I had just done the seventh form in the Cao Thang school. It was a sunny, glorious day and my mother had just told me to lay the table. My father had come from his work. The next thing I heard the air raid siren and I hurried to the shelter nearby. I could hear the engines of the planes and then the explosions. When the siren went again I came out. My mother and father were Iying there, my brother, Nguyen Si Quan, and my sister, Nguyen Thi Binh, were covered in blood. My sister had pieces of metal in her and so did her doll. She kept shouting, 'Where is mother and father? Where's my doll?' My street, Ha Long Street, has fallen down now. The houses have no roofs; the school and the Pioneers' Club are destroyed. This is the end of my letter.
The street where the Nguyen family lived was hit by pellet bombs which sprayed darts. The darts entered Thi An's sister, Binh, and continued to move around in her body for several days, causing internal injuries from which she eventually died an agonising death. The darts were of a type of plastic difficult to detect under X-ray. They were first tested on Hongai.
p240
A former NLF cadre took me to a place I had heard many rumours l about during the war, including one that it did not exist: the NLF's 'central staging point' at Cu Chi, fifty miles from Saigon. This was the junction of a network of tunnels, 200 miles of them, through which whole regiments slid like snakes during daytime, emerging at night to resupply and ambush. The Americans were never able to find or destroy the main tunnels, and 'Operation Hades' was conceived in the 1960s to root out the subterranean enemy. Tracts of forest were defoliated and crops were poisoned by the wholesale spraying of Agent Orange. When I first came to Vietnam in 1966 I flew over Cu Chi and was told that the leaves on the trees would grow again in eighteen months. Four years later I flew over the same area; most of the trees, the pines, birch, hawthorn and hickory, stood like grey needles, twisted and broken and held aloft by choking vines. By that year, 1970, an estimated quarter of ( South Vietnam's forest had died as a result of 'defoliation'. The US Army's Handbook for South Vietnam attributed the 'degradation' of earth which had been sprayed three times over to 'the combination of iron oxides [in the spray], plus the effect of rain and sun results in the soil setting like cement'.
When I arrived at Cu Chi a bizarre and touching scene presented itself. Within sight of a bomb, a wrecked American tank, a shallow grave and a crippled child drawing water with a Napalm canister, a lunch table was being laid. The tablecloth was white linen, silver cutlery was wrapped in pink napkins, beer stood in ice buckets and cold towels were dispensed by a waiter who saw off the flies and mosquitoes. A nugget of a man with two red stars on his collar greeted me. 'My name is Minh Number Four,' he said.
Minh Number Four - that was his military code-name - had the eyes and ways of a hypogeal creature recently released into the light. This was not surprising for he and his men had lived and fought in darkness for a decade. Crouching in a narrow shaft Minh said, 'During the daylight the Americans would be directly above. We could smell their shaving perfume. To shoot them we often had to trip them up first, to get the right aim. We killed them one by one. They should not have dismissed us as children. They took too many risks because they thought we were stupid and inferior. That was a shame for them.'
The tunnels are today inhabited by insect mutants, created by the constant spraying of herbicides. The mutants cling like tiny primeval bats to walls of rock-hard earth, while outside the same lifeless earth extends without greenery or topsoil to a shimmering horizon broken only by silhouetted figures bent over their ploughs. This was where the forest I had flown over twelve years earlier had stood. In the villages nearby there are children with spina bifida and cleft palates and the rate of miscarriages is said to be higher than average: none of which is surprising in an area saturated in Agent Orange. When General William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, wrote in his book of 'some of the most imaginative and successful expedients and innovations to cope with the unusual nature of the enemy and the war that any military force has ever brought to bear', he was referring to the use of Agent Orange.
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