A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (27 page)

The family background and political journey of Ho Chi Minh were representative of the Vietnamese who became his followers. He was the youngest son of a Confucian scholar-aristocrat, born in 1890 in Nghe An, a coastal province in the northern part of Central Vietnam noted for anti-French agitation. The family was impoverished after his father, who had been a district magistrate in Binh Dinh, later a province of the South, was dismissed for nationalist activity. The political context of the colonial power inevitably influenced the politics of colonized Asians. Lansdale’s Filipinos had American democracy, where elements of both major parties believed in anticolonialism, as their political model. Jawaharlal Nehru and a number of the leaders of Indian independence were British Socialists in their politics. After Ho had made his way to France and settled in Paris during World War I, he joined the French Socialist Party, because its more radical members were the only French political grouping that seriously advocated independence for the colonies.

In 1920, the French Socialist Party became entangled in one of the most important political debates of modern French history—whether to remain with the socialist parties allied under the Second International convened at Paris in 1889, or to join the far more revolutionary Third International (subsequently known as the Communist International or Comintern) that Vladimir Lenin had organized in Moscow in 1919 to rally support for the Bolshevik cause. Ho recalled in an article forty years later that he attended the initial debates, listened carefully, did not understand many of the issues, but did notice that the question of colonialism was not being argued. He therefore asked: “What I wanted most to know. … Which International sides with the peoples of the colonial countries?” He was told that the Third International did. That spring one of his French friends gave him a copy of Lenin’s “Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions,” which had been published in
L’Humanité
, later the official newspaper of the French Communist Party. He described his reaction on reading it in his scruffy hotel room:

During future debates he was not silent. He ridiculed the opponents of Lenin with a single question: “If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you making?” At the Socialist Party congress at Tours in December 1920, he voted with the radicals and became a founder of the French Communist Party.

Within five years he was in Canton in southern China founding another organization that was the forerunner of the Vietnamese Communist Party—the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth League. The French Party had sent him to Moscow in the summer of 1923 as its delegate to the Congress of the Peasant International. He was elected to its executive committee and stayed on, studying Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary tactics for a year at the University of Toilers of the East. At the end of 1924 the Comintern dispatched him to Canton as an interpreter with its political and military training mission to the party of China’s national revolution—Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang, in which the Chinese Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s faction were then still allied. Shortly after his arrival he wrote an enthusiastic report saying that he had formed
the first secret Communist organization in the history of Vietnam. It was the first chapter of the Youth League and consisted of himself and eight other Vietnamese in Canton, most of whom were from his home province. He traveled to Hangchow and Shanghai and other cities, talking up among Vietnamese exiles who had led abortive revolts and then fled to China the need to give the national cause better organization.

As word of his activities passed down the exile’s resistance grapevine into Vietnam, young Vietnamese made their way to the house on Wenming Street in Canton where Ho established a school of revolution for his Youth League. Some found his ideas too radical. Those who accepted him and Communist economic and social concepts did so for the same reason that he had followed Lenin. Through his lessons on Leninist revolutionary strategy and tactics they heard the message he had heard—that while a Communist society was the ultimate salvation, the way to it lay through the achievement of national independence. Most of those who did find what they were seeking in Ho, either in Canton or later as his ideas spread through Vietnam, were also sons, and some daughters too, of disenfranchised scholar-gentry. One of the first to come to him in Canton was a seventeen-year-old student named Pham Van Dong, the son of a mandarin who had been chief secretary to the youthful Emperor Duy Tan. Dong’s father had lost his position when the French had deposed Duy Tan at the age of eighteen and exiled him to the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean for plotting a revolt among Vietnamese troops recruited by the French Army for World War I battlefields. Dong was to become one of Ho’s closest associates, to lead the Viet Minh delegation to the Geneva Conference of 1954, and to serve as prime minister of the North. He was also to spend six of his young years on the penal island of Con Son, also known as Poulo Condore. The French had constructed a prison there of sunken cells, barred across the top, that were to become notorious during the American war as “tiger cages” when they were used to confine Viet Cong insurgents.

A proletarian political institution led by an indigenous aristocracy made the Vietnamese organization an oddity among Communist parties. Alexander Woodside, the Canadian historian whose pioneering scholarship discerned the nature of the Vietnamese leadership, invented a term for these men. He called them “Marxist mandarins.” Truong Chinh, the senior theoretician of the party; Le Duc Tho, the deft negotiator whom Henry Kissinger was to meet at the table in Paris; and Vo Nguyen Giap, the great military leader of modern Vietnam and the best-known of Ho’s disciples to Americans were all from scholar-gentry families. The absence of men of worker or peasant origin among the
senior leadership was notable by the conspicuousness of those few who could genuinely claim it. One was Giap’s friend and protégé Van Tien Dung, who was to lead a division in the war against the French and then to serve as the chief of staff of the armed forces in the North. Dung started life as a weaver at a textile mill in Hanoi. In 1963 the Party officially admitted that the majority of its members traced their parentage to “petit bourgeois elements.”

The turn of this uncorrupted core of the Vietnamese aristocracy to respond to the need of their nation came on February 8, 1941, when Ho Chi Minh crossed the South China border into Vietnam after thirty years of exile. With World War II underway and the Vichy French colonial administration alienated from the Allies by its cooperation with the Japanese forces occupying Indochina, Ho had decided that the time was propitious for a successful revolt. The Central Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party that he convened at the remote hamlet of Pac Bo in May 1941 was by now composed of canny men mature in the school of struggle. They agreed to adopt the sophisticated strategy he advocated. They toned down the Party’s proposals for social revolution in order to form the broadest possible alliance with non-Communist groups and individuals in a national front organization. They named the new organization the Vietnamese Independence Brotherhood League (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi), henceforth to be known by its Vietnamese abbreviation—the Viet Minh. The task of the Viet Minh, Ho’s proclamation announcing its formation said, would be to wage a war “of national salvation” and “overthrow the Japanese and French and their [Vietnamese] jackals.”

Over the next four years these Communist mandarins accomplished a prodigy of revolutionary preparation. Their common heritage was one of the major reasons they were able to do so much in so short a time. It gave them a special cohesiveness and led them to reach back into their history for guidance on how to adapt Marxist-Leninist concepts to the peculiar conditions of Vietnamese society and make their revolution a Vietnamese one. Unlike many small peoples who have been victimized by large neighbors, the Vietnamese have more than martyrs to inspire them. They have historical examples of victorious resistance to foreign domination which they can imitate. They can say to themselves that if their ancestors prevailed, they will prevail too.

It took the Vietnamese a millennium of revolt and sacrifice to win their independence from China in
A.D.
938. During the next near millennium, from 938 until the arrival of the French in the 1850s, every new dynasty that came to power in China invaded Vietnam. The recurrent
necessity to drive out big invaders from the north, and incessant warfare with less menacing neighbors in the course of their expansion southward down the Indochinese Peninsula, lent a martial cast to Vietnamese culture. Chinese civilization, as it developed in later centuries, did not admire the soldier. China produced the intellectual who was also a man of action—the Confucian mandarin-governor. He was a figure worthy of emulation because of his learning and the ethical standards of his conduct. The warrior was regarded as an inferior human being, to be tolerated when he was necessary, but never to be admired. There was nothing intrinsically good in his art of war. This Chinese ideal underwent a mutation in Vietnamese society. The Vietnamese ideal became the intellectual and man of action who was also a great soldier, a mandarin-warrior. The Vietnamese had few gentle heroes like Lincoln. Their heroes, as a foreigner might notice after studying the porcelain figurines on shelves and tables in Vietnamese homes, were men on horseback or elephants, clad in armor, swords in hand. The same held true for their legendary women heroes, the Trung Sisters, who drowned themselves in
A.D.
43 rather than submit after their rebel army was defeated by the Chinese. Physical courage was highly prized for its own sake in Vietnamese culture. Le Loi, the mandarin who overthrew two decades of Chinese domination in a nine-year war in the fifteenth century and consequently founded a new dynasty, made an observation that was often repeated: “We have been weak and we have been strong, but at no time have we lacked heroes.”

The wars with the big power to the north also led the Vietnamese to elaborate a particular idea as the central concept of their military thought. The concept is that an ostensibly weaker force, properly handled, can defeat a stronger one. This idea is hardly unique to universal military thought, but in Vietnamese doctrine it became the main arch. Vietnamese military teaching emphasized historically that to bring this concept to fruition, the more powerful enemy had to be worn down by protracted warfare. The Vietnamese forces had to employ hit-and-run tactics, delaying actions, and the ravages of ambush and harassment by guerrilla bands. The enemy had to be lured into wasting his energy in the rain forests and mountains and other formidable terrain of the country, while the Vietnamese used the same terrain as shelter in which to build their strength. Finally, when the enemy was sufficiently drained and confused, he was to be finished off by sudden shock offensives delivered with flexible maneuver and maximum surprise and deception. The most famous of the early Vietnamese generals, Tran Hung Dao, used this strategy to destroy the Mongols, the warrior race that burst
out of the Gobi to terrorize the world from Korea to Hungary and subdue China under Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, when they invaded Vietnam in 1284 and again in 1287. A manual on the art of war which Tran Hung Dao wrote for the training of his officers became a Vietnamese military classic. Le Loi employed similar means to break the Ming-dynasty generals nearly 150 years later.

Another three and a half centuries passed, and the lessons were not lost. In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, the general admired by Giap and his disciple Dung as the most accomplished Vietnamese practitioner of the swift maneuver and the surprise blow smashed the last premodern invasion out of China, this one by the Manchus. Nguyen Hue, the Tay Son leader who later ruled under the imperial name Quang Trung, advanced up the central coast into the Red River Delta by a series of forced marches and violated the sanctity of Tet, the lunar New Year holiday observed by both Vietnamese and Chinese. He caught unawares and shattered a much larger Manchu army encamped near modern Hanoi. He attacked at midnight on the fifth day of the holiday, while the Manchus were sleeping off the food and wine of the day’s feasting. His victory was henceforth celebrated on the fifth day of every Tet as the finest single feat of arms in the history of Vietnam.

This martial prowess and tradition of resistance to outside aggression was institutionalized in precolonial Vietnam, ingrained in the folklore and mentality of the peasantry as much as it was in the heritage of the mandarin class. Colonies of soldier-farmers were an important element in the Vietnamese expansion south from the Red River Delta and the settlement by conquest of Central Vietnam and the Mekong Delta. This other victorious epic of Vietnamese history, the “Southward Advance” (Nam Tien), took place over a period of more than 450 years, from the beginning of the fourteenth until late in the eighteenth century. The ancestor worship that Vietnamese peasants practiced along with animism and Buddhism included cults devoted to the spirits of famed mandarin-warriors. Temples dedicated to these heroes were common in the village centers, and the performance of the worship rites was part of the cycle of peasant life. An office in the hero cult was one of the most prestigious positions a farmer could hold in the village. The Vietnamese peasant might appear submissive to a foreigner watching him bent over in a rice paddy. The foreigner mistook restraint and work discipline for submissiveness. Once enthused with a cause and trained, the Vietnamese peasant was a formidable combatant, and not much was required to turn him into a soldier. His farmer’s life fitted him to endure the rigors of campaigning, and the group discipline necessary
for the cultivation of irrigated rice fields prepared him for the group discipline of the battlefield. He was tenacious and cunning in combat, and he was driven by the value his culture placed on physical courage to demonstrate his bravery if he wanted respect from his comrades.