Fire in the Lake (48 page)

Colonel Loan’s clearing operations dragged on. It was a full month after the attack on Da Nang before Hue surrendered completely. With a certain consideration for the feelings of the Americans and the rich Buddhists in Saigon, the junta determined not to imprison the senior bonzes of Hue, but merely to put Tri Quang under house arrest in a Saigon clinic. The Saigon generals were similarly careful with the ranking First Corps officers, many of whom had close relations with their American advisers. Arresting General Thi, General Ton That Dinh, and the commander of the First Division, they took them to Saigon and kept them there under house arrest before exiling them abroad. But they showed no mercy to the student leaders, the trade unionists, and the other lay members of the struggle movement. Imprisoning many of them in their foulest political camps, they left the rest no alternative but to join the NLF. The Buddhist struggle movement was never to recover.

9

Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel

William Shakespeare,

The Tempest
, act 1, scene 2

In the fall of 1966 the Buddhist crisis passed into history. It had disrupted the war effort for some months and disabled the Vietnamese government in the critical area of the First Corps for the rest of the year. Still, the war continued and the Ky junta remained in power. The importance of the crisis lay not so much in what it did as in what it showed about the relationship between the United States and its non-Communist Vietnamese “allies.”

The Buddhist crisis, first of all, forced U.S. officials to clarify and substantiate their policy towards the Saigon government. During the course of the crisis they made clear that the United States would support the military junta against all opposition, whatever its political weight. In effect they were giving the Vietnamese the choice between the generals and the NLF. The Buddhists had, of course, suspected that from the time of the Honolulu Conference. They created the struggle movement to show how repulsive that choice was to the urban Vietnamese. And they successfully demonstrated that fact. The curiosity was that they finally went down to defeat. While many Americans simply assumed that they could not prevail against U.S. opposition, the serious American journalists were impressed by the lack of influence the United States appeared to have over its “allies.” Despite its subvention of the regime, despite the two hundred thousand American troops in Vietnam, the embassy failed to control the three generals it supported, much less the Buddhists and other political groups. Granted, it managed to maintain the junta in power and to continue the war on the same terms, but that was all. Except for the resignation of General Thi, all of the American initiatives, diplomatic and otherwise, ended in failure. For the past three months the world had watched the ludicrous spectacle of the largest power on earth occupying one of the smallest and hopelessly trying to unknot a civil war inside a revolution.

The reason for this failure the journalists found difficult to fathom — and particularly difficult if they talked to the Vietnamese. For the Vietnamese seemed to see the crisis in a completely strange light. According to many of the politicians concerned, the United States had planned and orchestrated the whole sequence of events in order to further its own interests. Sometime in the weeks between the Honolulu Conference and the first Da Nang assault, one student leader (a man in his thirties) wrote a strongly worded manifesto charging that the U.S. embassy had deliberately and selectively cut off the electricity in various portions of Saigon in order to undermine the Vietnamese government, Vietnamese sovereignty, and the aspirations of the Vietnamese people. At the time the American reporters (who suffered from the lack of electricity a good deal more than the Vietnamese) simply laughed, but the student’s complaint began to seem less and less out of the ordinary as the Buddhist crisis progressed. More outspoken and possibly more courageous than their elders, many of whom echoed the same sentiments sotto voce, the student leaders would regularly stand up and accuse the embassy or the CIA of responsibility for every event that displeased them, from the activities of the Ky junta to the corruption of the provincial officials. Some of their complaints were justifiable — the United States was indeed supporting the Ky junta, despite all its claims of neutrality in “internal Vietnamese affairs” — but others were simply inexplicable. Just after the promulgation of the election decree, for example, the militant Catholics (probably inspired by the junta) demonstrated before the American embassy with signs charging that Ambassador Lodge had supported the Buddhists against the junta in their bid for power. When asked why they held such an opinion after all the evidence to the contrary, they merely answered that the Buddhists could not have succeeded in doing what they did without the help of the Americans.

It was not something that an American could argue — or rather, he could argue it for hours only to have his Vietnamese friends agree completely while continuing to regard him with eyes shuttered by disbelief. The Vietnamese of the cities seemed to take a miraculous view of the Americans. It was not that they overestimated the ultimate power of the United States, but that they misjudged the American desire and capacity to use it in the small, personal world of GVN politics. On the one hand the Vietnamese believed the United States had an absolute power over the actions of their enemies; on the other hand all of them, even the generals, behaved in such a way as to demonstrate that the United States had no influence at all. On that paradox rested the whole surreal course of the Buddhist crisis — and perhaps of the whole future of U.S. relations with the Saigon government.

In coming to Vietnam with their advisers and troops, the Americans assumed a particular kind of relationship with the Vietnamese: they had expected the Vietnamese to trust them, to take their advice with gratitude, and to cooperate in their mutual enterprise of defeating the Communists. The Buddhist crisis came as a terrible shock, for it showed that a good proportion of the urban Vietnamese had no confidence in American policies. Not only the Buddhists, but General Ky and Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan seemed to resent American interference. The crisis exposed the contradiction between the Americans’ desire to put the GVN on its own feet and their desire to maintain some control over GVN politics. The Vietnamese recognized that contradiction, but they reacted to it in a way that Americans could not understand. Did their view of the United States as a ruthless, omnipotent force have something to do with their long history of colonial rule? If so, could the Americans, whatever their intentions, cope with these suspicions any better than the French in Saigon? The questions were crucial ones, for if the GVN officials continued to regard the Americans in this light there could be no possible basis for cooperation between the two governments or between the Vietnamese government and the rest of the non-Communist groups in Vietnam.

The whole notion of an overwhelming power was, of course, an important theme in Vietnamese life. As anyone with a knowledge of Freud might suspect, it had something to do with the relationship of the Vietnamese child to his father, with the idea, conceived in early childhood, that the father, and behind him the ancestors, have far-reaching control over the child. As men tend to see the world according to their earliest and strongest impression of it, the Vietnamese had transferred this image of childhood to the relationship between two different nations. In his study,
Prospero and Caliban,
the French ethnologist and psychologist, Otare Mannoni, gives an interesting insight into this process. His subject is colonial society in Madagascar, but much of his analysis seems to fit Vietnam, and understandably so, for the Madagascans, like the Vietnamese, were ancestor worshipers.
¹

When the French first arrived in Madagascar, so Mannoni reports, the natives received them not with hostility but with fear and then a kind of elation. A popular Malagasy song of the period describes the French as almost supernatural creatures and tells how they frightened the king and queen and then brought peace and order to the country. What impressed the Malagasy was not so much the French military power (there were in fact few French soldiers involved in the pacification, and few battles fought) as their readiness to take command and the freedom with which they violated all of the traditional Malagasy customs. Instead of looking upon the French as simply foreigners with different customs, the Malagasy placed them within their own context and concluded that the French had superhuman powers. Because their ancestors were also superhumans, they by analogy accorded the French a position similar to that of their ancestors. The French became their masters, protectors, and scapegoats, all in one.

Obscurely, the French understood that their rule over Madagascar depended not so much on their superior weapons as on the psychological power they held over the Malagasy. Whenever a disturbance arose, they would show panic by taking spectacularly violent actions that, if transferred to Europe, would seem quite irrational as political or military strategy. In their view, once the Malagasy showed any sign of independence, all was lost. And they were right in a certain respect. What they could not understand, however, was that their power did not derive from the Madagascans’ humiliating sense of their own inferiority, but from their acceptance of a dependent relationship. To the Malagasy, the French were not “better” than themselves, they were simply people who (for obscure reasons of their own) wished to take on the responsibility for their country.

The French conquest of Vietnam had certain startling similarities. As in Madagascar, the French troops met small resistance, partly because the state had already been undermined by Catholicism and by the emperor’s dependence on foreign weapons. Some of the mandarins gathered guerrilla armies around them and fought to the end, but the imperial armies disintegrated quickly under direct assault, and the French succeeded in pacifying all but the northern mountains with a very few men. For almost sixty years they ruled Vietnam with only fourteen thousand troops in the country. A few of the old mandarins never gave up their resistance, but others acquiesced to the French in fascination with the strange sciences, the strange customs. While educated Vietnamese felt that the French would eventually leave Vietnam, they, by their acquiescence, accorded them the mantle of legitimacy that had always been known as the Mandate of Heaven, the collective power of the ancestors over their national life.

The French in Vietnam, like the French in Madagascar, accepted the position that the Vietnamese offered them as their just due. In the opinion of the old colons, all the Vietnamese needed was a firm authority (in that phrase lay all the echoes of the British in India and Africa, the Germans, Spanish, and Portuguese in their colonies). “Behave in the royal manner” towards the Vietnamese, the French ethnologists, Huard and Durand, counseled their countrymen. In Saigon in the 1960’s an old French doctor who had lived in Vietnam most of his life continued to follow the same principle. Looking at his two neat, competent nurses, he said, “The Vietnamese are excellent people as long as they are kept in second place. But you Americans do not understand them. You have not given them the proper authority, and you have corrupted them.” His remark was interesting in that it implied he knew his treatment of the Vietnamese was a manipulation. But he did not know why it worked. To him and his compatriots,
les Annamites, les jaunes,
were inferior beings. They might be “bestial,” “childish,” or “good-natured” and “receptive to improvement,” but they did not belong in the same category as Frenchmen.

Unable to understand the natives, the French colonialists of the nineteenth century, along with their American and European counterparts in the rest of Asia, invented all the racist clichés that have passed down into the mythology of the American soldier: that Orientals are lazy, dirty, untrustworthy, and ignorant of the value of human life. The persistence of these clichés, despite all evidence to the contrary, suggests that they have derived not from observation but from a fantasy. Just what did the American soldiers mean when they called the Vietnamese “gooks”? Again, Mannoni is of help. The colonialist is, he says, by nature a Robinson Crusoe; he is a man who has chosen to escape the society of men and to build an empire for himself in a world that will unquestioningly accept his dominion. The natives to him do not constitute human society, but an extension of the world of nature. In a sense, then, it is the colonial and not the native who is a “child,” for his desire to escape rises out of the sense of insecurity and inferiority he felt within his own culture. In the native he finds a fulfillment of his childish dreams of domination and an object (for the native is to him an object) upon which to project all his repressed desires. In calling the native “dirty,” “bloodthirsty,” or “cruel,” he relieves himself of his own guilt. The “colonialist,” according to Mannoni, is a distinct type who selects himself out of his society for the role. The colonial impulse is nonetheless present in varying degrees within most Westerners and will tend to emerge when the situation permits it.