Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (12 page)

I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I’d bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields.... Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?... Isms and ocracies. Give me facts.”

Of course Pyle is impervious to Fowler’s logic. He continues with the best intentions to ruin lives and kill innocent people. When one of his plans goes awry and several innocent Vietnamese are killed, Pyle observes: “They were only war casualties... it was a pity but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause.... In a way you could say they died for democracy.”

Greene intended his novel to expose the absence of a moral vision in American policy in Vietnam. Stationed in Saigon as a war correspondent in the early 1950s, Greene witnessed the transference of power from France to the United States. He watched the arrival of fresh Pyles—men with crew cuts and “wide campus gazes” who seemed “incapable of harm” and were determined to do good “not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” But harm was implicit in a mission that framed good and evil in universal abstract terms. Yet Americans were not prepared to listen. In 1977, after the war was over, Michael Herr would observe in his brilliant book
Dispatches
, “Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs full of mud.”

Robert Gorham Davis, reviewing
The Quiet American
for the
New York
Times Book Review
, declared that Greene’s work was anti-American: “Pyle... does not remind Fowler of the thousands of individuals who make desperate escapes from Communist countries every week in order to live as humans.” For Americans in the mid-1950s this was the crux of the matter: Vietnam was fighting communism and communism was a threat to humanity. That confidence kept the United States in Vietnam and wedded to Ngo Dinh Diem. In October 1954 the Eisenhower administration decided to channel economic and military assistance directly to Diem rather than through the French mission in Saigon. Late in 1954 the CIA foiled several coup attempts against Diem. On the shoulders of Ngo Dinh Diem rested American hopes to save Southeast Asia, strengthen the Japanese economy, rebuild Europe, and preserve the American defensive picket line in the western Pacific.

It would have taken a political genius to control the centrifugal interests of Catholics and Buddhists, Hoa Hao and Cao Dai, Montagnard and Khmer, Chinese and Binh Xuyen. Ngo Dinh Diem was not a politician; he was a Confucian mandarin who expected to rule with “the mandate of heaven,” to preside over a people who looked to him as their father and behaved obediently. The word “compromise” was not in Diem’s vocabulary. Nor was “democracy.” In Diem’s words: “Our political system has been based not on the concept of management of the public affairs by the people or their representatives, but rather by an enlightened sovereign.” His sister-in-law, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, stated it more symbolically: “If we open the window not only sunlight but many bad things will fly in also.” Diem, writes the historian William Turley, was “heir to a dying tradition, member of an elite that had been superbly prepared by birth, training, and experience to lead a Vietnam which no longer existed.” Instead of opening the window, Diem tried to shut out every ray of sunlight. He brooked no opposition and expected total obedience, nothing less.

Diem began against an opponent who deserved to be shut out. In April 1955 he asked Bay Vien and the Binh Xuyen to lay down their arms and close the opium dens and brothels. Bay Vien refused and dared Diem to come into Cholon. Diem called his bluff and invaded Cholon with tanks. As the Binh Xuyen retreated, they set fire to hundreds of homes and buildings. French authorities in Saigon, hoping Diem would fall, assisted the Binh Xuyen. It was civil war in Cholon. Bay Vien escaped to the jungles northwest of Saigon and from there to Paris. By that time thousands of people were dead, most of them Chinese civilians. Diem crushed the Binh Xuyen but in the process earned the enmity of the Chinese. Thousands of Binh Xuyen soldiers fled into the Mekong Delta and Central Highlands, where they vowed to continue the fight against Diem.

The crushing of the Binh Xuyen resolved the dispute between Edward Lansdale and J. Lawton Collins. Diem had exercised brutal power, but successfully. American praise was quick in coming. John Foster Dulles cabled the French: “Diem is the only means U.S. sees to save South Vietnam and counteract the revolutionary movement.... U.S. sees no one else who can. Whatever U.S. view has been in the past, today U.S. must support Diem wholeheartedly.”

Flush with victories in Saigon and Washington, Diem in his determination to consolidate his power turned next on Bao Dai. He considered Bao Dai a morally bankrupt whoremonger whose ties to the Binh Xuyen were unforgivable: Imagine—the Nguyen emperor, the symbol of a dynasty that had ruled Vietnam for centuries, taking kickbacks from pimps and drug dealers! In 1955 Diem called for the abdication of Bao Dai. He set up a national referendum to decide the question. In an election in which 605,000 of Saigon’s 405,000 registered voters cast ballots, Diem received 98.2 percent. On October 23, 1955, he proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president.

Late in 1955 Diem sent troops into the Mekong Delta to destroy another obstacle to absolute power, the Hoa Hao army. The Hoa Hao fought a bloody guerrilla war against the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), but in April 1956 Ba Cut was arrested. He had a curious look about him. The short finger still reminded him of the French, but when he heard news of the partitioning of Vietnam in 1954, he had vowed not to cut his hair until the country was reunited. Uncombed and unwashed, the hair tangled down his shoulders. To the sharkskin-suited Diem, Ba Cut was disgusting and dangerous. In July 1956 Diem sent him to the guillotine. Surviving Hoa Hao soldiers scattered throughout the countryside.

There was also the Cao Dai to dispose of. Diem bought off some Cao Dai leaders. It took $1 million to get General Trinh Minh The to change sides. ARVN troops invaded Tay Ninh Province late in 1955 to disarm the Cao Dai army. The Cao Dai fought for a time, but they knew of Diem’s ruthlessness and did not want to go the way of the Binh Xuyen and Hoa Hao. In February 1956 Pham Cong Tac, the Cao Dai leader, escaped into Cambodia. Most Cao Dai soldiers surrendered their arms, but others escaped into the Mekong Delta.

With Bao Dai in France, the Binh Xuyen crushed, and the sects in disarray, Diem was able to fulfill his nationalist dream. In a speech on January 19, 1956, he announced, “The presence of foreign troops, no matter how friendly... [is] incompatible with Vietnam’s concept of full independence.” He told the French to leave. The French empire in Vietnam finally died on April 10, 1956, when the last of 10,000 French troops left Saigon.

The Khmer Kampuchea Krom remained as a challenge to Diem’s rule. Krom troops were powerful in An Xuyen Province, and early in 1956 ARVN troops moved against them. Dressed in the distinctive button-down jacket and skirts with the lower end brought between the legs and tucked in at the waist, Krom soldiers were indistinguishable from Khmer peasants working the rice paddies. ARVN troops, indiscriminate at best, killed thousands of Khmer civilians in their operations against the Krom. In return the Krom launched their own guerrilla war against Diem.

Ngo Dinh Diem soon had the Khmer even angrier at him, along with the Buddhists and the Montagnards.

As soon as the Geneva Accords divided the country, Diem, Lansdale, and CIA operatives had encouraged northern Catholics to move south, warning that the communists would persecute them if they stayed where they were. Agents sent messages that the Virgin Mary was living in Saigon. More than 600,000 Catholics moved to South Vietnam. Another 300,000 North Vietnamese—former soldiers in the Vietnamese National Army, colonial administrators, and businessmen afraid of what the communists would do to them—also left. They emigrated in complete village units, led by the parish priest, with nothing but what they could carry. Once in South Vietnam these people increased the Roman Catholic population to 1.5 million people. Those with good educations moved into the South Vietnamese civil service. For others the government established 319 villages, giving the immigrants land and financial support until they could establish an economic foothold. More than 400,000 settled in the Mekong Delta, most of them on land that had traditionally been worked by the Khmer. The Khmer sense of alienation strengthened. Diem also placed nearly 100,000 immigrant Catholics in the Central Highlands, giving them Montagnard land. Diem believed the Montagnard should learn to speak Vietnamese, leave the mountains, study a useful trade, and adopt Vietnamese values. He approached the Montagnard much as Americans had treated the Indians in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The South Vietnamese developed programs to relocate the Montagnard and provided them with schools, all the while giving their land to other Vietnamese. The expulsion gave the Vietminh the opportunity to promise the Montagnard that once the Diem government was eliminated their land would be returned.

Northern Catholics were intensely anti-Buddhist. Led by Father Hoang Quynh, they joined the Luc Luong Dai Doan Ket, or Greater Unity Force, which demanded the conversion of all of South Vietnam. Quynh asked Diem to promote Catholics over Buddhists and destroy infidelity. Diem’s personal inclinations were less militant, but northern Catholics were his strongest supporters. Large numbers of Buddhists as well as Montagnard and Khmer saw their land go to Catholic refugees. And taking land from well-to-do South Vietnamese for redistribution to the landless and the expelled would rob Diem of a loyal constituency. By 1960, in the Mekong Delta, nearly half of cultivated land was owned by two percent of the people.

Finally, to reinforce his power in the countryside, Diem abolished local elections and appointed his supporters to official village posts. For centuries, even under the Nguyen imperial court and the French, local politics had been governed by the ancient slogan, “The empire stops at the village gates.” Peasants elected their own officials to govern local affairs, and neither the emperor nor the French interfered. Diem destroyed the only democratic institution functioning in South Vietnam.

Diem then turned on the national elections that the Geneva Accords had guaranteed for 1956. The CIA chief Allen Dulles sent a memo to President Eisenhower in 1956 predicting an overwhelming victory by Ho Chi Minh in both North and South Vietnam. The Vietminh had assumed that France would stay in South Vietnam, honor the accords, and supervise the elections. But the French were gone. South Vietnam was an independent nation wallowing in American money. The United States was the new Western power in Vietnam, and its entire foreign policy revolved around anticommunism. The United States wanted an anticommunist government in Saigon—democratic or not. In 1955 Diem canceled the scheduled elections. Ho Chi Minh denounced the decision, but there was little he could do about it since the United States had no intention of forcing Diem to keep an agreement he had never signed.

Diem ruled South Vietnam as close to an absolute monarch as he could come. But he was always worried, with good reason, about conspiracy, revolution, and assassination. He led a monklike existence inside the presidential palace, sleeping on a narrow cot, covered by a mosquito net, and cooled by a slow-moving ceiling fan. Diem got up early, went to pray in a private chapel near his room, and breakfasted on a soup of noodles and pork. He visited with staff members after breakfast and then underwent a medical examination every morning. On his desk was a crucifix and a picture of the Virgin Mary. Diem received visitors in the afternoon, but the Saigon diplomatic corps dreaded his summons, knowing that it meant listening to a monologue of anywhere from three to ten hours. He worked all day and much of the night, falling asleep at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., with documents on his lap. And since he could trust nobody outside his immediate family, Ngo Dinh Diem created a family dynasty.

Ngo Dinh Thuc, the oldest surviving brother, was a relaxed man blessed with congeniality and a fine sense of humor. With great political skills as well as a genuinely spiritual nature, he had risen steadily in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, becoming a monsignor during World War II and then bishop of Vinh Long. In 1957 Pope Pius XII named Thuc the archbishop of Hue, the Roman Catholic primate for all of Vietnam. Diem’s younger brother, Ngo Dinh Luyen, was international spokesman for the family. Born in Hue in 1909 and educated at the French lycée there, Luyen was bright and articulate. In 1956, Diem named Luyen ambassador to Great Britain and roving ambassador to the rest of the world. Luyen preached a single message: Survival of the Republic of Vietnam was essential to the future of Asia.

The next youngest brother was Ngo Dinh Can. Unlike the others, Can was poorly educated and had never traveled abroad. He lived a simple, reclusive life in Hue with his mother, and although he held no official position in the Diem regime, he was warlord of central Vietnam, absolute ruler of the region between Phan Thiet Province and the seventeenth parallel. Protected by his own secret police and private army, Can was autonomous, the law in the northern half of South Vietnam. Diem deferred to him in all matters concerning that region.