Finding the Dragon Lady (20 page)

The other reason to keep any bad numbers quiet was that President Diem, personally, would be mad. After the 1960 coup attempt, Diem had issued a verbal order to his army commanders not to conduct any operations that might incur serious casualties. The president had concluded that the dissatisfied army paratroopers behind the coup attempt had been angry with the regime for casualties suffered on offensive operations. Diem couldn't, or wouldn't, see that the regime's nepotism, Catholic bias, and repression of freedoms were the real triggers generating resentment. Diem didn't want another coup, so he did not want the army to suffer losses.

American advisors to the South Vietnamese army would eventually find out that orders from the very highest levels “not to fight” were completely undermining their advice to engage the Viet Cong, but that didn't stop them from passing fake body counts along to Washington. Communist losses were inflated, South Vietnamese casualties were downplayed, and no warnings on the iffy numbers were attached. Those numbers were translated into policy, and the policy was that the war was going well.
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The NLF goal—to smash the southern regime—was a top-down directive from Hanoi that was to be carried out from the ground up. The assault was to begin “in the villages . . . work its way up through the district and then provincial governmental levels until at last there would be an attack on the central government itself.” The NLF Central Committee issued specific orders about what to target to maximize the impact of sporadic and random terrorist assaults: communication centers, warehouses, airports, and US offices were “particularly” singled out.

The early victims of the NLF terror campaign were from rural areas: Long An, Tay Ninh, An Xuyen, and An Giang provinces. Terror activities included a Buddhist temple sacked, a hamlet school burned and two teachers forced at gunpoint to watch the execution of local men, and a parish priest killed when a bullet smashed through his windshield; a farmer who ignored Viet Cong orders to turn his rice field over to another farmer was taken into a flooded paddy and shot. In December 1960, the violence moved closer to the city when the kitchen at the Saigon Golf Club was dynamited, killing one worker and injuring two cooks.
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The NLF terrorists were so successful because they were making ingenious use of common materials. For example, the standard bicycle bomb was deadly, effective, and nearly impossible to detect until it was too late. The entire bike frame was filled with explosives; thin wires attached to blasting caps inside the frame led out past the brake cables, which helped camouflage them, and connected to an electric headlamp fitted with a kind of stopwatch. It took only a small flashlight-battery-powered mechanism to blow the bicycle apart and unleash its terrible destructive power in the middle of a busy street. The Viet Cong called their two-wheeled variation on the Trojan horse the “iron horse.” They recruited Vietnamese youth as terrorists—the optimum age was about eighteen, but boys as young as thirteen or fourteen were perfect “city saboteurs,” or grenade throwers. Restaurants and hotels began to install steel grilles in front of the verandahs; people were afraid to sit on patios, go to movie theaters, or even visit the market.
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On March 22, 1961, only a little over a month before the Johnson trip to Saigon, a truck carrying twenty young girls was blasted off a desolate patch of road in the Rung Sat forest. The girls were on their way home to Phuoc Tuy province from Saigon, where they had just spent the afternoon watching the First Lady, Madame Nhu, make a rousing speech praising Vietnamese women on Hai Ba Trung Day. The celebration commemorated the Trung sisters, ancient Vietnamese heroines who had fought off the Chinese. Madame Nhu held the sisters up as role models for the brave women of modern South Vietnam. For these girls, however, the day ended in tragedy. In the moments after their truck hit the planted land mine, a volley of gunfire rained down.
The driver managed to get the lumbering truck in gear and made it to the nearest military outpost, but two girls were already dead.

The next week, Madame Nhu visited the hospital in Cholon where four of the young victims of the attack were recovering. One had lost an eye, another a leg, and one woman was crippled from a spinal injury. Madame Nhu also went to see the site of the explosion and talked to the girls who had survived the ambush uninjured. In the hamlet of Ti Giay, home of twenty-three-year-old Nguyen Thi Bang, Madame Nhu placed a wreath on the freshly dug grave and expressed her sorrow to the murdered girl's mother and sister. At the gravesite of Tang Thi Ut, Madame Nhu looked at the victim's fiancé and, her voice breaking with emotion, promised that this “inhuman and cowardly outrage perpetrated by the Viet Cong” would not go unavenged.
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The day after his arrival
, Vice President Johnson met with President Diem in the palace office, where they talked about the specifics of US aid. While Johnson formally presented his gift—a set of American Heritage hardback books on US history—and his credentials, the wives took a tour of the palace with Madame Nhu to see the tiger skins. The picture of the meeting in the office downstairs shows Johnson bending deeply at the waist to meet Diem. After their meeting, the American vice president laid out an eight-point program that included more arms and more money. Later that afternoon, Johnson, ever the gregarious Texan, waded into the streets of Saigon to mingle with the South Vietnamese people. Reporter Stanley Karnow remarked that Johnson was shaking hands and smiling like he was “endorsing county sheriffs in a Texas election campaign,” but in a sense, that was his job. Johnson had been assigned to reassure the South Vietnamese that the United States would continue to provide arms and money to improve social conditions and fight communism.
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Madame Nhu was seated in a place of honor next to the vice president, on his right, at the official luncheon. They had met only briefly on the day of his arrival. Madame Nhu had been at the airport, along with other officials' wives, to greet the delegation. Upon deplaning, the vice president strode toward her, crossing over the receiving line to shake her hand. His manners tickled Madame Nhu again at lunch.
She wasn't used to men waiting for her to sit before they took their own seat, any more than she was used to being addressed ahead of men like the president and her husband. But Madame Nhu liked Johnson's gallantry even if she didn't quite know what to make of it. Over lunch, he insisted that she agree to visit his ranch in Texas. She giggled nervously, covering her mouth with her napkin, but he insisted so much that she finally agreed to come—“when you become president,” she promised. After that, Johnson took Madame Nhu's left hand in his huge paw and, in front of his wife and a table of diplomats, pulled her out to the balcony. “Show me the sights,” he drawled. She'd have had to scramble to match his giant Texas steps, but the vice president didn't seem to mind. He had smiled at her for all present at the official reception to see.

In May 1961, Madame Nhu was surer of herself than she had ever been. Her ambitious project to reshape society was taking hold, with women as the agents of change. The work was more than gratifying, she had written hastily in her journal that January; she hadn't realized she was so smart! Madame Nhu had come up with the idea for a Women's Solidarity Movement the summer before. It would be a group of civil servants dedicated to helping the families of Vietnam's armed forces. They might bring food to someone in the hospital or deliver medicine to rural families; they also held blood drives and wrote encouraging letters to soldiers at the front. The idea was to give women a purpose outside the home, a way to participate in society more fully and realize how important they were to the building of this new country.

Madame Nhu also organized another, more militaristic group. Her own daughter Le Thuy joined this reserve unit of women organized as a paramilitary unit. They were trained in gun handling and first aid and marched in parades dressed in stylish military garb that nipped in at the waist. Madame Nhu called the members of her women's militia “my little darlings.”

Madame Nhu's inspiration for her “darlings” came from the legend of the Trung sisters, two young ladies who had led their country to victory over China nearly 2,000 years before in 40 AD. The Communists used the legend too—they found a class issue in the narrative—but for her purposes, Madame Nhu emphasized the strength of women and
mothers in battle. In the story, sister Trung Trac avenges the murder of her husband by a Chinese commander. Her younger sister and a posse of noble women ride by her side. One of these ladies is so pregnant that she gives birth during battle and continues to fight with the infant strapped to her back. Madame Nhu hoped that the story would inspire the women of her day to learn the skills to defend their homes. She even commissioned a bronze statue of the Trungs, which would welcome boats into the Saigon port. But when it was erected, the Trungs' faces and figures resembled Madame Nhu so much that rumors started to fly. Did Madame Nhu want the women of South Vietnam to honor the ancient heroines or their First Lady? The sculptor very possibly imposed the likeness himself in an attempt to flatter the First Lady, but the most popular interpretation was that she was using the women's movement to serve her own ends—again.

Most of the women who joined the Solidarity group were upper-class wives in Saigon. They joined to curry favor with Madame Nhu or to insure their husband's civil service jobs. Madame Nhu still had no idea how to connect to the majority of Vietnamese women. She took people's enthusiasm for her at face value. When Madame Nhu went into the countryside to check on the integration of her women's groups into the villages, she was given flowers and greeted warmly. She told Elbridge Durbrow, the former American ambassador to Vietnam, how on her arrival the women in these villages all thanked her for the Family Code abolishing polygamy and divorce. “She had not realized how well known and popular she was.” Nor had she realized that the people might be anxious to tell the First Lady only what she wanted to hear.
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The Diem regime consisted entirely of family members or yes-men. You were either with them or against them. Government ministers and National Assembly men might go around shaking their heads and privately admitting their displeasure, but in formal matters of state, no one dared speak up. Books—whether nonfiction, novels, or, most ludicrously, poetry—were subjected to censors. Government permits that could be revoked at any time kept the local press under control, and members of the foreign press had to submit their copy to censors. The repressions were from the Communist playbook, but that was the
problem: South Vietnam was supposed to be a free country. Resentment built up, silent and corrosive.

American intelligence sent from Saigon back to Washington catalogs a range of gossip linking Madame Nhu and her husband to corruption and influence peddling and accusing them of giving the president poor advice. As one diplomat remarked astutely, “It doesn't make any bit of difference if none of the wrongs attributed to her are true, the serious thing is that people believe it.” The reports are skeptical of the influence Madame Nhu's women's organizations could really have on the country. They seem to consider them a vanity project.
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Madame Nhu shrugged off the few criticisms of her work that reached her as unserious. She was impatient with the pettiness of the people around her and wrote out her frustrations in her diary: “Intelligence breeds ambition, but isn't it terrible when one has to work with idiots to carry out great plans? God must have created those idiots to test me.” Obviously, these people couldn't see the big picture, and Madame Nhu was moving too fast to stop and explain it to them.

Still riding high
, Madame Nhu presented her colleagues at the National Assembly in 1961 with another set of grand ideas about how to protect women, the family, and the country. These she named the Morality Laws. Madame Nhu banned dancing and beauty contests as distracting to a nation at war. She also outlawed gambling, fortune-telling, cockfighting, and prostitution. She made contraception illegal—“We are underpopulated,” she said—and also banned under-wire bras. It was time, Madame Nhu preached, to practice austerity. Never mind that the outline of her own longline bra showed through the thin silk of her
ao dai.

The Morality Laws didn't accomplish much besides angering the people—who kept dancing anyway. Chubby Checker and the Isley Brothers made the twist so popular that those defying the dancing ban would go to private nightclubs known as “twisteasies.” The ban didn't just apply to imported rock and roll; sentimental Vietnamese tunes took the hit too. This was especially distressing for Vietnamese army soldiers, who sang constantly out in the field, for camaraderie or for a sense of comfort in an otherwise scary place where they could run
into an ambush or a booby trap at any moment. “Rainy Night on the Frontier” was a particular favorite: “When the sky is turning rose . . . the young man is thinking of the one at home. . . . And his heart is full of love.” Nonetheless, it was banned for not being anti-Communist enough.
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The laws were patronizing, implying that Madame Nhu knew better than her people what they should and should not be doing, wearing, and listening to. The resulting outcry over the fussy laws obscured Madame Nhu's general point—and it was a pretty good one. The dollars pouring into South Vietnam made Saigon seem like a party town instead of a city on a war footing. American aid to South Vietnam was supposed to create a middle class of businessmen and entrepreneurs who would support Diem. A comfortable lifestyle was the best defense against Communist instigation. But the commodities-import programs just subsidized an otherwise unaffordable lifestyle. The United States gave South Vietnam the goods to buy, helped the Vietnamese avert inflation, and paid for a high standard of living—plus most of the national expenditures. But it wasn't just the Vietnamese who benefited. The Pearl of the Orient was turning into a playground for 12,000 American servicemen in country. The number of bars on the rue Catinat had multiplied. Pizza shops opened, and cabbies doubled their rates for the American clientele. Businesses started with the purpose of finding Vietnamese girls as escorts for the lonely American servicemen. Advertisements promised beauty, charm, and class. It cost a GI $2.50 to look through photos of Miss Lee's girls and another $2.50 if he actually wanted to meet one in person at the agency. A real date could be arranged for under $8, plus the cost of actually taking the girl out. All of the Westernization provided more material for the Communist propaganda machine. If the South Vietnamese were trading their young girls for American weapons, it was easy to believe the country was also selling its soul.