Fire in the Lake (21 page)

The image of SPLITTING APART.

Thus those above can insure their position

Only by giving generously to those below.

— I Ching
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His refusal to “give generously,” to “yield” and “conciliate” as a correct sovereign should, resulted perhaps not so much from a quirk in his nature as from a realistic assessment that it would not work. Because he could create no political system, no political constituency apart from his family, his subordinates would have no compunction against behaving like unfilial children: they would try to exploit and finally to replace him.

But Diem could not admit his failure. Given his position — his very identity as president of the republic — he had to believe that the people supported him, and that they had no other choice as long as he held the Mandate of Heaven. Within this circle of logic, closed off by the fact of American support, he could only assimilate the dissension by blaming it upon outside enemy agents — the “colonialists,” the “Communists,” or the “demoralized elements.” These elements could not, so Nhu assured him, be “re-educated” or brought back into the community. Unable to conceive of an alternative, Diem gave way to the ferocity of Nhu and to the attempt to exterminate these “enemies” wherever they were, in the villages and in his own administration. It was here that Diem’s alliance with the United States became a disaster for the Vietnamese people. Not only did the Americans give him the power to carry out his repression, but they gave him little alternative to a policy founded on the use of force.

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Even as late as 1968 many American liberals, including many of the journalists in Saigon, believed the official claims that the United States was at least making an effort to develop South Vietnam and to improve the welfare of the South Vietnamese people. But as a look at the aid budget would show, the claims were, and always had been, false. Even in the period 1954–1960, before the guerrilla war began, the United States spent only a minute fraction of its aid on industrial or agricultural development — two sectors that required heavy investment if South Vietnam were to become an economically independent country. The land reform program of 1956 failed in part because the United States did not allocate capital for the Diem regime or the peasants to buy the land the large proprietors had by law to relinquish. Throughout the Diem era the United States spent approximately 90 percent of its aid on the creation of an army and a military bureaucracy.
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This distribution of aid was not arbitrary; nor was it the result of mere shortsightedness on the part of the local American officials. In Washington U.S. officers conceived of their policy not as an attempt to help the Vietnamese, but as an attempt to hold the line at the 17th parallel against the Communists. These officials justified the entire aid and assistance program on the basis of this essentially negative, military goal. When it appeared that the main source of trouble for the Diem regime would come from below the 17th parallel, they made no attempt to change their priorities. All the social scientists notwithstanding, the Americans had no real theory of development, no firm belief that development would reduce the insurgency. And they would make no large-scale appropriations for humanitarian purposes. For the United States government, “security” — or the attempt at a military occupation of the countryside — always came first. The final shape of the Diem regime reflected that concern.

Beginning in 1955, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group under the command of General Samuel T. “Hanging Sam” Williams dismantled the small, mobile units of the French-trained armed forces (the
groupes mobiles
) and replaced them with seven regular divisions armed with American infantry weapons. The reorganization exemplified the usual military obsession with precedent — in this case for the Korean War. The regular divisions were to prove perfectly unsuitable for a domestic guerrilla conflict. But the MAAG, instead of correcting its initial error, merely added to it by forming a new group of units — Marine, Ranger, and paratrooper battalions — from its own repertoire, so that with the addition of a navy and an air force, the armed forces of the Saigon government became a complete scale model of the American army, its soldiers all dressed in American uniforms labeled combat, Asian, men’s, large or small. At the same time the civilian side of the American mission, with the help of the Michigan State University teams, built up territorial forces that more or less paralleled the Viet Minh-NLF formations: a self-defense guard (later called the Popular Forces) to patrol the villages, and a fifty-thousand-man civil guard (later, Regional Forces) to provide provincial defense.
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The very size of the American military commitment insured that the Vietnamese armed forces would eventually dominate the civil administration. By 1962 village chiefs were installed in most of the villages and military officers assigned to almost all of the crucial territorial posts of province and district chief. The “security” and “control” system was then complete. The village chiefs reported to the military district and province chiefs, the province chiefs to the three (later, four) corps commanders, and the corps commanders to the presidential palace. The whole system brooked no interference from any representative institutions, or indeed from any civilian body whatsoever. The United States had, in other words, made the Saigon government into a military machine whose sole
raison d’être
was to fight the Communists. The only difficulty was that the machine did not work. That the regular army divisions could not effectively cope with the domestic guerrilla warfare was only the superficial aspect of the problem. The real problem was that these divisions bore no relation to Vietnamese politics. From the American point of view, the ARVN appeared to be solid, a group of men in the same uniform trained and ready to do battle against the Communists. But within the Vietnamese context the ARVN was more like a collection of individuals, all of whom happened to be carrying weapons.

In 1961 it became quite clear to the inner circle of the Kennedy administration that the NLF was threatening the very life of the Diem regime. New measures were required if the regime were to survive for long. After a trip to South Vietnam to survey the military situation General Maxwell Taylor recommended to President Kennedy that the United States send eight thousand regular troops to Vietnam for the purpose of raising the morale of the GVN and showing the Communists the seriousness of the American intent to defend South Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara queried the value of a token force, warning, “We would be almost certain to get increasingly mired down in an inconclusive struggle.” He recommended that the United States make a clear commitment to the defense of South Vietnam and support that commitment with the introduction of U.S. forces on the “substantial scale” that would be necessary to achieve military victory.
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President Kennedy did not accept McNamara’s recommendation or Taylor’s proposal as they stood. But over the next two years he doubled the number of troops Taylor requested, posting sixteen thousand American soldiers as advisers to the ARVN. At the same time he increased military aid to the Saigon government, reinforced the Vietnamese units with squadrons of American helicopters and airplanes, and undertook a CIA-sponsored program of clandestine sabotage operations in Laos and North and South Vietnam, all directed against the DRVN.

As McNamara had predicted, these new measures did not deter the NLF. The success of American policy thus continued to rest on the capacities of the Saigon government. In 1961 American officials presented the Diem regime with a new list of demands for political, economic, and military reform. Possibly they thought that the Diem regime would now meet these demands, for with the increase of military aid the Americans took steps to transform their “advisory” relationship to one of “limited partnership” with the Saigon government.
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In 1962 the Military Assistance Advisory Group became the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) — “something nearer — but not quite — an operational headquarters in a theater of war.”
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Foreign advisers — British and American — were inserted into every part of the GVN bureaucracy with the authority not only to advise but to insist on the adoption of new programs. Within this new arrangement the Diem regime undertook a new pacification plan, designed by Diem’s British advisory team and called the Strategic Hamlet program.

The centerpiece of American strategy in Vietnam for the next two years, the Strategic Hamlet program was by far the most ambitious of the Diemist land programs and by far the most destructive. In its very conception the program was a study in misplaced analogy. Sir Robert Thompson, the head of the British team of advisers to Ngo Dinh Diem, proposed to build up a system of fortified villages such as the British had used against the Communist insurgency in Malaya. The difficulty was that while in Malaya the British had fortified Malay villages against Chinese insurgents, in Vietnam the Vietnamese would have to fortify Vietnamese hamlets against other Vietnamese who had grown up in those hamlets. The plan purported not to involve the displacement of the villagers from their homes and fields, as the other failed resettlement programs had done. But it involved precisely that in most regions of the Mekong Delta. Anyone who took an airplane trip across the Delta could have seen that the villagers did not live in concentrated settlements, but in farmhouses scattered through the paddies and along the edges of the dikes. Because the new program made no provision for the allotment of new land to the villagers, many of the peasants who moved into the strategic hamlets ended up with no land at all — five miles being the same as five hundred to those who had to walk to their fields each day and back. The American and British advisers overlooked this basic economic difficulty. The strategic hamlets offered them the military advantage of concentrating people into small, fortified settlements that the armed forces could actually surround. And by 1962 the military situation appeared to be desperate.

The Ngo brothers had from the beginning favored the new program in the expectation that it would give them more direct control over the villages. Once they learned how much money the Americans were willing to commit to the new plan, and the possibility of direct American intervention if they did not concur, they rushed ahead to implement it.
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Ngo Dinh Nhu took charge of the program himself and insisted that two-thirds of the sixteen thousand hamlets in South Vietnam be fortified within the next fourteen months. His theory — or rather the theory he explained to the Americans — was that with the help of Personalist indoctrination the peasants would be all too glad to defend their own villages against the Communists without any military or financial support. Sir Robert Thompson argued that the program had to proceed more slowly, so that at every stage the government could protect the hamlets from large-scale Viet Cong attacks. But Nhu went ahead with his own plan, whereby the Americans shipped in vast quantities of commodities to enable all the villagers both to construct their own defenses and, as the press releases had it, to build new and better communities for themselves.

By the end of 1962 Diemist officials reported that though they had not quite reached their objective, half of the country’s hamlets had been fortified and provided with some means of self-defense. The figure reflected no real achievement but rather the amount of American aid that had gone to the various province chiefs for such a purpose. As one American study later showed, only fifteen hundred, or less than 10 percent, of the hamlets possessed any military security.
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Actually, even that figure might not have been achieved without the new American commitment of firepower. With artillery, helicopters, and tactical bombers at its disposal, the Allied command declared whole areas outside the strategic hamlet belt “free fire zones,” where anything moving might be shot. Inside the belt it permitted the artillery to fire out almost at random every night on suspected Viet Cong concentrations, trails, and staging areas — a tactic known as “harassment and interdiction.” All this unguided firing naturally dissuaded many peasants from following what would have been their normal course of slipping away from the crowded, squalid enclosures. At least one American admitted that the NLF were not far wrong in calling these settlements concentration camps.

In those areas where it was actually applied, the strategic hamlet program did give the Saigon government a short-term military advantage. Politically, it proved a disaster. If the American and British officials really envisioned happy and prosperous peasants standing up to defend their villages against the insurgents, their wishful thinking was mighty indeed. Except for the Catholics, the peasants had no possible reason for doing anything of the sort. The amount of American aid that actually trickled down to the villages hardly gave them a motive to support the government — in the Delta it barely permitted them to survive. Armed with Personalist slogans on the virtues of self-sufficiency and self-sacrifice, the officials took the peasants away from their fields and forced them to construct mud and barbed-wire fences that made them liable to NLF attacks and thus put them in some jeopardy. Even those officials who conducted themselves in an exemplary manner induced anxiety among the villagers by their very physical presence. Under constant surveillance and in constant fear of attack, many of the hamlets lost even such unity as they possessed. As one village lawyer said of his hamlet not far from Saigon, “We have no solidarity here, no cooperation. And so if the Viet Cong come, no matter where we are, they can take advantage of us.” In his hamlet as in so many others, the circle of artillery and barbed wire enclosed a political void that waited for the NLF.

And from the Plain of Reeds, from the Ca Mau peninsula and the central Vietnamese highlands, the NLF moved slowly in to fill the vacuum. They drove the government forces completely out of many areas. In other places, near heavy troop concentrations, they simply drained away government authority and acted as the government of the nighttime. In the view of the American command, the Viet Cong seemed to have arisen by spontaneous generation. The Americans had not perceived the anarchy of the villages, for to them the first sign of anarchy was unorganized violence, and there was no violence inside the villages until the NLF began to mobilize them in the most compulsively methodical manner, Not until their military offensive of 1962–1963 did the Front persuade at least some Americans that it had extended its influence to over 80 percent of the rural population.
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