Embers of War (110 page)

Fall sought out the minister of the interior and said to him, “Your Excellency, you are in trouble in Vietnam. Do you know that?”

“Yes, I know that,” the minister answered.

“Did you tell President Diem?”

“Nobody can tell President Diem we are in trouble. He believes we are doing fine.”

“Do the Americans know? ”

The minister shook his head. He did not think so.
²⁶

In fact, though, some Americans did know. Ambassador Durbrow, in a 1957 year-end report produced not long after Fall left Vietnam, declared that the Diem “miracle” was increasingly a mirage. The South Vietnamese president’s autocratic style and suspicious nature, combined with his lack of vision and his seeming unconcern with broadening his base of support, augured poorly for the future. So did his seeming inability to delegate authority, or to differentiate the vital from the trivial. In Durbrow’s analysis, the regime’s concentration on security at the expense of the economic and social needs of the mass of southerners was fraught with risk, and its easy resort to repression and intimidation to suppress opposition played into Communist hands by alienating key groups in society. He concluded by hinting at America’s lack of leverage: It was regrettable, he wrote, that the United States had not found more ways to make her influence more effective.
²⁷

Durbrow’s cautionary notes were sounded also by the CIA and by the military attachés from the three branches of the armed services. But they were resolutely rejected by General Samuel Williams, head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). Williams thought Durbrow far too critical of the Saigon regime, and he disliked him personally. The ambassador, he told an aide, was “better suited to be senior salesman in a good ladies shoe store than to be representing the U.S. in an Asian country.”
²⁸
Officially Durbrow outranked Williams, but the general did not like it and sought whenever possible to make decisions on his own. Frequently their meetings degenerated into shouting matches. Williams sharply rejected Durbrow’s claim that Diem was headed for trouble. The people supported the Saigon leader, Williams insisted, and he was adamant that the guerrilla threat could be contained without undue difficulty.

It was a welcome message in Washington in early 1958, where President Eisenhower had more pressing foreign policy concerns—notably tensions over the status of Berlin and the fallout from the Soviets’ successful launch, in October 1957, of their unmanned Sputnik satellite. In November 1957, moreover, Mao Zedong had paid a seemingly successful visit to Moscow, boasting to students that “the East wind prevails over the West wind.”
²⁹
South Vietnam’s problems loomed small in comparison. In May 1958, on the anniversary of Diem’s visit to Washington, Eisenhower sent the Saigon leader a warm personal note, extolling him as “the foremost advocate of our interests in the area” and praising the Republic of Vietnam as an example to free nations everywhere.
³⁰

Even as the president wrote these words, however, there were fresh signs of the deterioration, from the northern provinces of Quang Nam and Thua Thien to the Ca Mau peninsula in the extreme south. In Tay Ninh province, in the heart of the rubber plantation region near the Cambodian border, revolutionary leaders began to integrate their local military forces into combined units to defend against sweeps by government troops. In August, soon after the U.S. embassy reported that “in many remote areas the central government has no effective control,” guerrilla units attacked and briefly captured the province capital in Tay Ninh.
³¹

Nor did it help Diem’s popularity that his government remained so dependent on American power, a fact that led to increased anti-U.S. animus as well. “For many Vietnamese peasants,” a Pentagon chronicler would write of this period, “the war of Resistance against French–Bao Dai rule never ended; France was merely replaced by the U.S., and Bao Dai’s mantle was transferred to Ngo Dinh Diem.” Consequently, when resistance to Diem increased in the late 1950s, the “opprobrium catchword
‘My-Diem’
(American-Diem) thus recaptured the nationalist mystique of the First Indochina War.” Or as Robert Scigliano would write of the period, “So deeply has the
My-Diem
relationship been established in the minds of the peasants that Vietnamese government officials have been addressed, with all respect, as
‘My-Diem’
by peasants doing business with them.”
³²

IV

THE GROWING DISCONTENT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE IN SOUTH VIETNAM
, and the corresponding rise in insurgent attacks, pointed to the need for party leaders in Hanoi to make a decision: Should they move away from their policy of pursuing reunification through peaceful means? That they were wrestling with this choice at such a late date is exceptionally important in historical terms—far from imposing the insurgency on the south, as successive U.S. administrations and some scholars would later assert, the DRV leadership went through a wrenching series of deliberations about whether to support it; some Politburo members argued for the need to focus exclusively on building a socialist state in the north. Moreover, they wondered, could an insurgency against the Saigon regime even succeed, given Diem’s success in thwarting all challenges to his rule?

Contributing to Hanoi’s caution was the restraining influence of its principal allies, China and the Soviet Union. The Chinese had no objection to a low-level insurgency in South Vietnam—after all, such a conflict could increase Hanoi’s dependence on Beijing while avoiding the risk of major U.S. involvement—but they continued to warn against the resumption of large-scale war as had existed up to 1954. Conditions were not yet ripe for such an escalation of the struggle, Mao Zedong warned Ho Chi Minh when the latter came calling at Mao’s summer retreat at Beidaihe in the summer of 1958, and might not be for a very long time—a decade, perhaps, or even a century. The Soviet leadership, meanwhile, were even more adamant that revolutionary fires in the south must not be stoked, not now and perhaps not ever. So eager was the Kremlin to avoid renewed international tensions over Vietnam that it even floated the idea of admitting both Vietnams into the United Nations, a move that left DRV authorities sputtering with impotent rage. (The Western powers, fearful of the implications for Germany, quietly rejected the suggestion.)
³³

But the North Vietnamese could not ignore the increasingly desperate appeals of their southern comrades. Slowly they moved toward a more aggressive policy.
³⁴
A central figure in the shift was Le Duan, a former political prisoner of the French who had been a top Viet Minh leader in the south before being named acting secretary-general of the party in Hanoi. The son of a carpenter in Quang Tri province, Le Duan was small in build and plainspoken in manner, and he lacked the educational pedigree and elite family credentials of many party leaders, some of whom mocked his coarse accent and his early job as a railway attendant. But he possessed a formidable intellect, and he did not want for self-confidence. Beginning in mid-1956, when he penned a short report titled “The Path to Revolution in the South,” he nudged his comrades to do more to support the revolution below the seventeenth parallel, even as they continued to give primary emphasis to building socialism in the north.
³⁵

In late 1958, Le Duan conducted a secret inspection tour of the south. Upon his return, the Politburo gathered in special session to assess the situation and decide on future actions. Conditions in the south, Le Duan warned, were dire. The Diem government’s brutal crackdown had left the revolution drastically weakened. People were suffering terribly. At the same time, the broad popular hostility to the Saigon government represented a golden opportunity that should be grasped to hasten the reunification of the country. If Hanoi did not take charge of the effort, southerners would proceed on their own, and the DRV would become irrelevant. Henceforth Le Duan concluded, liberation of the south must have equal priority with consolidation of the north.

Le Duan’s argument won the day, but not before intense debates during the Central Committee’s Fifteenth Plenum in January 1959. Ho Chi Minh, who at almost seventy no longer involved himself in the DRV’s day-to-day decision making, urged continued restraint. A return to armed violence on a broad scale could create a pretext for American intervention, Ho stressed, and therefore the southern revolutionaries should remain content with small victories. The plenum’s final resolution reflected Ho’s cautionary words, even as it approved Le Duan’s call for a return to revolutionary war to press for victory in the south. The measure hedged, in other words, on the relative degree of political and military pressure to be applied:

The fundamental path of development for the revolution in South Vietnam is that of violent struggle. Based on the concrete conditions and existing requirements of revolution, then, the road of violent struggle is: to use the strength of the masses, with political strength as the main factor, in combination with military strength to a greater or lesser degree depending on the situation, in order to overthrow the ruling power of the imperialist and feudalist forces and build the revolutionary power of the people.
³⁶

Diem’s policies, the resolution underscored, were responsible for the decisive shift in strategy: “Because the enemy is determined to drown the revolution in blood, and because of the … revolutionary mood in the South, it will be necessary to a certain extent to adopt methods of self-defense and armed propaganda activities to assist the political struggle.” And then, another vow of restraint: “But in the process of using self-defense and armed propaganda units, it is necessary to grasp thoroughly the principle of emphasizing political strength.”
³⁷

In the wake of this crucial decision—which has been called Hanoi’s opening shot in the Second Indochina War—North Vietnamese planners took a number of steps to expand their involvement in the south. In March 1959, they ordered southern leaders to begin construction of a revolutionary command area in the Central Highlands, a strategically vital area populated mostly by minority peoples. Some weeks later two units, Groups 559 and 759 (so named because of the date of their formation—May and July 1959), were formed to enhance the DRV’s ability to infiltrate matériel and men into the south through Laos and by sea. The land trails, which had been hacked out of the jungle during the war against the French, would become known to the world as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In short order, the first organized shipment of cadres and supplies began to move, initially by bicycle or on foot, later—after the trails were expanded—by truck. Most of the personnel in these early trips were “regroupees,” former Viet Minh supporters from the south who had gone to the north for training and indoctrination after the Geneva Conference. Their task now was to return home to provide the insurgency with a solid nucleus of experienced and loyal cadres.
³⁸

Tran Van Tra, at that time a junior official in Hanoi, offers his own explanation for the dispatch of the first regroupees. Late one summer evening in 1959, Tra was relaxing at home, catching the nighttime breeze after a sweltering hot day. He tried to tune in some light music on his radio when his dial came across a BBC report of a platoon-size engagement on the Plain of Reeds in the northern Mekong Delta. Tra was stunned: Could real fighting already be taking place? On the spot, he determined that the insurgent forces must receive military instruction if they were going to stand a chance of prevailing, and that this meant sending a training group to the south. Tra presented his idea to Le Duan, suggesting a force of one hundred regrouped southerners. Le Duan liked the idea but said a force that size would have to be approved by the Politburo. “Can you make do with fewer?” he asked. “Maybe fifty,” Tra replied. Le Duan thought for a moment. The figure might still be too high. “If it is only a small number I could approve it and take personal responsibility,” he offered, “and then report it to the Politburo. OK, let’s settle for twenty-five.”
³⁹

The trek southward was often excruciatingly taxing. “The further south we got,” one cadre recalled, “the worse our situation became. Finally we were down to a few kilos of rice which we decided to save for the last extremity. For two months we ate what we could find in the jungle—leaves, roots, animals, jungle birds.” Arrangements were made to create “way stations” along the route, which were to be stocked with rice, vegetables, and water. They often ran short. “So each individual learned to save his own food and water,” another regroupee later said. “The farther along we got, the worse the hunger we faced. As food grew scarcer, comradeship broke down. People became more and more intent on saving their own lives.”
⁴⁰

Yet the infiltration continued, and the pace gradually quickened. Simultaneously, Hanoi moved to give organizational structure to the new politico-military struggle, a process culminating in the founding in late 1960 of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam or, for short, the National Liberation Front (NLF). Modeled on the Viet Minh, the NLF would seek to be a broad-based organization led by Communists but designed to rally all those disaffected by Diem by promising sweeping reforms and the establishment of genuine independence.
⁴¹
Militarily, the scattered forces in the south were brought together into a new People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). Like the Viet Minh armed forces in the French war, the PLAF was given a hierarchical structure, with local self-defense units operating at the village level, guerrilla forces under regional command, and regulars directed from southern headquarters. Overall direction would be provided by a Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), which in turn would report to the Central Committee in Hanoi. The political apparatus, meanwhile, would closely resemble that of the Diem government, with officers at hamlet, village, district, and provincial levels, and numerous organizations designed to draw as many people as possible into the cause.
⁴²