In May 1962, in the pleasant penthouse dining room of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, an American diplomatic officer explained to me that the Viet Cong offensive in South Vietnam was merely the penultimate stage in a plan for the conquest of Asia that has been worked out in Moscow and Peking. I could not believe him.
A week later I sat in the back of an earth hut in a sun-baked little fortress in the Vietnamese highlands as a young militia officer described how he and his platoon-sized garrison defended the fortress and patrolled an area of the nearby Cambodian border. A Montagnard village lay across a stream, elegant longhouses with carved and painted beams, a few women and children, chickens, a dog. The fortress, manned by ethnic Vietnamese, was a hedgehog: a few huts connected by trenches, a tower, and weapons emplacements surrounded by a moat filled with sharpened bamboo rods. Beyond the bamboo were minefields. Beyond the mine-fields, the village, and then the Viet Cong. By night they controlled the area. Their camps were in the mountains nearby, and the previous New Year’s they had mockingly sent the garrison the traditional New Year’s gift of scarves. “Are the villagers friendly?” The question came from a visiting U.S. Marine Corps officer. The young militia leader gave a frightened glance towards the Vietnamese Army staff officer who escorted the American. “Yes,” he said. “Of course they are very friendly.” The Marine clearly did not believe him.
He did not believe him but he acted as if he did. If the villagers were not friendly, perhaps with a little more effort or some better programs they could be brought to like their defenders. The Americans in Vietnam have had to believe this; if this were not to be believed, then the United States was in great trouble in Vietnam.
A soldier said there were some elephants by the river beyond the village. We walked through the village, the women and children watching us from within the longhouses, until we reached the river and the edge of the forest. The elephant had moved away, so we took some photographs of the river and of the longhouses, we unofficial members of the party, an English newspaperman, a Nationalist Chinese spy, and myself. The “spy” was an aggressively mysterious fat man who had inserted himself into the group at an airfield. American officers from Washington thought he was a reporter; to the reporters he implied that he had official status. He was, he told us, from a research institution. He showed us a dismantled .22 rifle in his TWA flight bag; he never travelled in this part of the world unarmed, he said. He also explained to us that Vietnamese were backward and untrustworthy; he had known them from the war years and before.
We gathered at our two helicopters. The crews had without fuss set up a casual defense perimeter covered by the machineguns that were bolted in the helicopter doors. They pulled in as we arrived, and we all loaded up and flew towards a provincial capital.
Ethnic Hostilities
The Montagnard are the aboriginal tribes, Malay-Polynesian in origin, of the Southeast Asian mountains—the Thai (not to be confused with the people of Thailand proper), the Muong, the Tho, and others—whose hostility towards the ethnic Vietnamese was again demonstrated this September when those near Ban Me Thuot, armed by U.S. Special Forces, rebelled against the Saigon government. They constitute one of modern Vietnam’s problems. They despise the Vietnamese as conquerors and exploiters. The Vietnamese despise them as Moi—savages in 1962 there was criticism of Special Forces for creating private armies to defend Montagnard villages and harass Viet Cong lines of communication. The Special Forces liked the Montagnard as the French had before them; Westerners in Asia and Africa usually are partial to aborigines and nomads in preference to the “spoiled” people of the cities and the aggressive activists of local political movements. The Montagnard bands even then would as happily have fought the lowland troops of Saigon as the Viet Cong, and many served with the Viet Cong who promised autonomy to the highland tribes. For these people there was no Vietnamese nation, only their own nations, invaded by foreigners, but extending through the mountains into Cambodia and Laos.
The Chinese spy, buffoon though he seemed, was an instance of another Vietnamese problem. The Vietnamese people are ethnic kin of the Chinese and entered history as a restless kingdom lying partly in South China and partly in what now is North Vietnam. Despite their having taken much of their culture from China, including the Buddhist and Confucian systems, they have maintained a sense of national separateness and a tough and persistent resistance to Chinese political and military domination over most of the last 1,500 years. And the Chinese have never quite given up the notion that the Vietnamese are their satellites and tributaries.
After the tenth century A.D. the Vietnamese began a movement southward in which they encountered and obliterated the culturally Indian Champa kingdom of central (modern) Vietnam, and drove the Khmers (of Angkor Wat; the modern Cambodians) out of South Vietnam. The central areas fell around the fifteenth century, the south was fully occupied by the Vietnamese only at the end of the eighteenth century. Along the way the Vietnamese had conquered much of Cambodia and dominated that country until a rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century. The Vietnamese had also fought a North-South civil war that lasted some two centuries and saw the country divided by fortifications along approximately the line of its present political division. Reunification took place in 1789 under a military government that was followed by another civil war in which the eventual victor made use of French mercenaries. He consolidated the country in 1801, and in 1802 the Emperor of China acknowledged Vietnam a tributary of the Manchu Court. The French soldiers left; Vietnam deliberately isolated itself, expelled Western missionaries and traders, and persecuted its Christians. But the French returned within forty years—this time officially—began a conquest that was not substantially completed until 1888 and not completely finished until 1913. The Vietnamese, in short, are a tough and bloody-minded people who have been fighting either their neighbors or one another for well over a thousand years.
A History of Violence
Thus, despite its agricultural riches and natural prosperity, this nation is no tranquil and self-confident society being subverted by Communist aggression. There are few countries of the world whose modern history is a meaner record of war, conquest, and civil war. It exists in a zone of cultural aggression and defense, of North Asian civilization’s expansion into the area of India’s cultural influence, and in recent centuries of the West’s violent intrusion. Long before Communism was a factor in Southeast Asian affairs, Vietnamese society was giving evidence of shock and social disruption. The Mahayana Buddhism of the North has collided with the Hinayana of the South, and the “greater vehicle” tradition of the North is activist and “political”—the aggressiveness of Vietnamese Buddhism in recent months is not the anomaly it sometimes has been thought. The Confucian tradition persists in Vietnam; the old Mandarin examinations of the Chinese tradition were being given in Vietnam as late as the 1900s, after their abandonment in China, and the late Ngo Dinh Diem was a product of this tradition. Christianity and Western cultural influences have been more influential in Vietnam than in most areas of Asia, and the effects have been not only religious conversion and rivalry but syncretism.
Just as Chinese Buddhism has an ambiguous relationship with T’ao and the Confucian system, and in Japan has been susceptible to animist influences and produced a series of popular cults, in Vietnam a peculiar series of syncretic religions have been thrown up that have usually been noted in the West more for their oddity and amusement value than for their true and rather bitter significance. Most bizarre is the Cao Dai, founded in 1919, an amalgam of Buddhism, Catholic Christianity, Tao and Confucianism. The organization is hierarchical on the Catholic model with a pontiff. The god of the sect is a “Supreme Tower” or Supreme Being represented as a Great Eye. The god is surrounded by lesser deities or saints who include Jesus Christ, the Lord Buddha, and such notable liberal personages as Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-Sen. The Cao Dai has a million adherents (in a total Vietnamese population of some thirty million) and an army of 25,000 men. Another is the Hao Hao, founded in 1939 by a faith healer. The French hospitalized him as mad, and he converted his psychiatrist. He was a friend of Ngo Dinh Diem. The Hao Hao, like the Cao Dai, served the Japanese in World War II with its own army. It fought the Viet Minh after the war, was reconciled to it and fought the French after 1946, then was subsidized by the French to fight the Viet Minh.
The sects were suppressed by Ngo Dinh Diem when he came to power but their remnants, surviving underground, provided part of the fighting power of the Viet Cong when that rebel movement arose against the new government in the late 1950s. The present government has attempted to reconcile the sects. Two-thirds of the population of Cochin China, the southernmost area of Vietnam, belongs to the sects.
The sects are important political and military forces, but their real significance lies in what they reveal about the emotional and cultural disorder of modern Vietnam. Their emergence in Cochin China, the region most recently settled by the Vietnamese and most strongly affected by French influences, is in character with the experience of other disrupted colonial areas. No contest between cultures is without its costs, whatever the creative responses and valid syntheses that may result. The modern Western conquest of Asia (and Africa) has produced a cultural shock of unprecedented proportions, for the difference between the culture of the invaders and that of its victims has been a radical one. Asian conquests of the past had either been the result of wars between relatively equal and significantly related societies (as with the Vietnamese war against the Champas and Khmers ), or the conquest of civilized societies by barbarians, as when the Mongols overran China. In the latter cases the civilized nations could preserve their own self-confidence despite physical conquest, and the typical outcome was the adoption by the invaders of the superior system over which they had obtained physical control. The conquered could, and did, play Greeks to the conquerors’ Romans (or Romans to the conquerors’ Barbarians), and the result was the survival and even the strengthening of the conquered civilization.
Civilized Invaders
But when Asia was invaded by the modern West after the sixteenth century, and particularly in the nineteenth, when the intellectual and scientific revolutions of modern Europe had taken place, no conquered Asian could console himself with a belief that the invaders were barbarians or would soon be “civilized.” The invaders not only enjoyed an unprecedented power power advantage—disciplined troops, breech-loading rifles and quick-firing artillery, telegraphy, and sophisticated administrative systems—but, more important, clearly were no barbarians. The scientific knowledge, social competence, religious idealism, and moral confidence of the West was overwhelming. The Indian or Chinese or Indochinese was at loss to defend suttee, caste, infanticide, the exploitation of women, slavery or serfdom against this challenge.
As colonial schools confidently indoctrinated their Asian students with the standards of Britain and France, with Victorian idealism and self-discipline, with the Encyclopaedist ideals of contemporary France, with Christianity, the result was a profound dislocation of the local society. There were, of course, creative and sophisticated syntheses, but there also were total conversions that resulted in self-loathing by the converts; there were rebellions, and there were irrational responses—symbolic or talismanic syntheses that attempted to respond to the Western challenge by seizing elements or symbols from the invading cultures either in compromise or in defense. Thus the T’ai Peng movement in China—an amalgam of political revolt, social reform, and magical Christianity, whose leader proclaimed himself the Younger Brother of Christ. Thus the modern African messianic sects—the Kitwala, the “Zionists” of South Africa, most recently the Lumpa in Rhodesia, led by a mission-trained peasant woman, all of them naive attempts to establish their members as a “third race,” separated from the native masses by their “sophisticated” redemptive religions, yet without total capitulation to the foreign system. Thus, surely, the sects of Indochina, with their naive amalgams of native religion, French Enlightenment symbols, and Catholicism.
The French in Indochina in the nineteenth century, and particularly in the South where their control was firmest and the local system least secure, imposed their own social and legal norms in great detail—an effort which subsequently was modified, but not until it produced a near-total breakdown of social autonomy and confidence. In 1885 the French civilian governor of Cochin China admitted that “we have destroyed the past and nothing has taken its place. We are on the eve of a social revolution which began during the conquest.” It is difficult for an observer of Vietnam in 1964 not to concede the prophecy.
One more thing must be said about cultural shock and synthesis in Vietnam. This obviously is a contraversial and complex matter, but it can be argued that part of Communism’s power in Asia derives from the fact that it provides an apparent means to seize the industrial power and discipline of the West while simultaneously rejecting the West. Marxism condemns the modern West as obsolete, as a discarded stage in the dialectical development of humanity. Yet it is, itself, preeminently a system of industrialization and physical power, of social organization on a purportedly post-Western model.
The greatest of Vietnamese converts to Marxism, Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh rebellion and President of North Vietnam, came to Communism after a period as pastry-chef in the London Carlton under the great Escoffier. He had been involved in nationalist agitation in Hue where his father was a minor official with revolutionary sympathies. Ho’s association with Communism followed a period of membership in the French Socialist Party in Paris after World War I. In 1921 he was a founding member of the French Communist Party. In the 1920s he was a Comintern agent in China, an ally of Chiang Kai-shek until the Kuomintang attack on the Chinese Communists in 1927. He is, in short, the nearest thing to an Old Bolshevik that Asian Communism can claim, and his position today is strengthened by this long and influential role in the Communist movement.
A Non-Dogmatic Communist
Ho has never quite been the obedient international Communist agent that Moscow is supposed to expect. Even in the 1920s and 1930s he resisted some of the directives of the Europe-based Comintern, and like Mao Tse-tung recognized that Communism in Asia required more than a rigid application of Marxist-Leninist preconception. He worked in Siam and Hong Kong with Vietnamese refugees and published underground newspapers, and in 1941, in South China, formed the Viet Minh, the League for the Independence of Vietnam. The Viet Minh, with local Chinese support, carried out intelligence and guerrilla work in Japanese-controlled Vietnam. In 1944 they obtained American OSS support and a base inside Vietnam. It was Ho Chi Minh’s return to his country after thirty-three years’ absence.
By quite brilliant manipulation of the Americans and Chinese after the Japanese collapse, a clever and successful exploitation of the hiatus between the Japanese surrender and the return of French forces, and by means of the reputation of the Viet Minh itself as the only active and reasonably effective nationalist organization, Ho Chi Minh placed his organization in authority over much of Vietnam and Laos in 1945. His men took over Hanoi, although a British occupation force blocked them in Saigon. They staged clandestine elections throughout Vietnam and established a provisional government. The Emperor, Bao Dai, abdicated in their favor.
Their attempt to seize control of Vietnam with American acquiescence (American OSS officers continued to work with the Viet Minh) was blocked by the British in the South and by the eventual return in numbers of French troops. Paris then entered into negotiations with the Viet Minh for an agreement that would gratify, or at least appease, Vietnamese nationalism. Both sides continued to maneuver for position within Vietnam: the French pushed out their patrols to control the countryside, and non-Communist nationalist leaders were assassinated by the Viet Minh. The period of negotiations ended in November, 1946, when French forces, commanded by an inflexible colonialist (and Carmelite priest on leave from his monastery, the late Admiral Georges d’Argenlieu), under circumstances that still are unclear, bombarded the port of Haiphong causing six thousand Vietnamese casualties. Ho made a final bid for a settlement in a cable to his old acquaintance Leon Blum, new premier of France, but the cable was delayed by the Saigon censor. The Viet Minh’s General Giap had already given a mobilization order, and by the beginning of 1947 Ho and the Viet Minh leadership had gone into the mountains and the Indochina war was under way. The Viet Minh dropped its most prominent Communist members and framed a nationalist appeal; for three years they fought a moderately successful guerrilla campaign against the French. The Chinese Communists, in the final stages of their own conquest of the Kuomintang, reached the Indochinese border in April, 1949, and began to furnish counsel, training, and some logistical support to the Viet Minh.
The Viet Minh declared themselves Communists, dropping their multi-party form, and in January, 1950, were recognized as a government by Peking. Insurrectionary warfare was changed into mobile warfare, making use of organized Viet Minh formations. In 1950 Ho and Giap assumed the strategic offensive against the French and were not to Iose it until victory in 1955.
The war which began with guerrilla skirmishes and assassinations was by 1955 a struggle in which units of division size and larger engaged in formal warfare with artillery and armor. The French had some 350,000 troops committed, all of them regulars, and enjoyed control of the air and the sea, although their air force was quite small. The war was not ended by military defeat as such; the French could have fought on after Dien Bien Phu, and Premier Mendes-France in fact reinforced his troops in Vietnam after that disaster. It was ended by political decision. The French nation was no longer willing to sustain the costs that the war demanded in men and resources. American support for the French had been related to the war the Americans had been fighting in Korea, but which now was shut down by armistice. There was no American confidence in the French ability, fighting on, to do more than keep the situation open, and American interest had shifted to a “Third Force” solution.
The United States, moreover, was unwilling to intervene itself. An appeal for an air strike at Dien Bien Phu was turned down and Washington reasonably feared that an intervention by American ground forces could bring the Chinese in, as it had in Korea. Moreover, Washington understood that the American public was profoundly reluctant to undertake another ground campaign on the Asian mainland. Refusing to intervene, the United States also refused to take part in the Geneva negotiations that partitioned Vietnam. The French were left to their humiliation, and the United States entered the situation in Saigon as backer, and banker, of a new premier.
The Return of Diem
Ngo Dien Diem had returned from exile in (among other places) a Maryknoll house in the United States determined to impose upon South Vietnam a unity and a national code that would insure its survival, and, eventually, its reconquest of the North. He concentrated power in his own office and deposed the Emperor with dispatch. His support from the United States was very nearly unlimited. Bernard Fall, the best American interpreter of the recent history of Vietnam, estimates, for example, that as much as twelve million American dollars were spent in two months of 1955 by Diem to bribe dissident warlords. Political rivals in Saigon were outmaneuvered. The warlords and sect armies, at first bribed into inaction, were shortly suppressed by the national army. Diem’s early accomplishments, made from a start amidst political collapse and despair in Saigon and with the new premier virtually isolated and unknown, were ruthless but impressive.
His government received a significant endorsement when something like a million northerners—eight percent of the northern population—moved south following the armistice, most of them Catholics. He arranged a further endorsement with a national referendum (on the issue of establishing a republic) which produced a vote of 98.2 percent in his favor and 1.1 percent against. Even the Viet Minh was shocked to find their own weapons of intimidation and rigged voting used against them so effectively. He and his American advisors then launched a series of reforms, notably land reform, and began to reorganize and retrain the national army—as a conventional field force on the Korean model. The militia and the village self-defense forces were neglected.
Diem’s virtues were personal incorruptibility and intransigence; and it may be argued that they condemned him to his eventual death. He refused the nation-wide elections and the plan for reunification which were specified in the Geneva settlement. He isolated the North, imposing a ban on trade and communications. But having restored security and some self-confidence in the South, he could not reconcile the groups whose power he had broken, and these groups maintained their identity. The remnants of the sects went underground with their weapons. The liberal politicians were driven into exile or resistance, or were imprisoned. “Re-education camps” were established for political prisoners, of whom there were increasing numbers as the years passed; and the definition of political dissidence was very wide and came to include discontented peasants, troubled army officers, and liberal Catholics. The government was nominally democratic, protecting itself against subversion. It actually was an oligarchy established by coup, centered upon the Diem family, and that family was mandarin, northern and Catholic.
The old divisions of Vietnam were awakened again. The southern population was restless under this “foreign” government, southern officials and army officers dominated by exiles from the north, Buddhists resentful of a government of Catholics and the government increasingly disposed to consider Buddhism evidence of potential subversion. The “personalism” which the regime preached as national doctrine bore little resemblance to the French Catholic social philosophy from which it took its name. One Frenchman, long resident in Saigon, described personalism, after a moment’s thought, as “Petainism.” Bernard Fall quotes a French diplomat as comparing Diem to Charles Maurras, the French rightist and nationalist. Diem himself once told a visitor that he was “a Spanish Catholic.” Like Petainism, personalism in Vietnam was intensely conservative in its rhetoric, enjoining labor and discipline in the nation; and in practice it came to be an authoritarian system of ideological uniformity and corporate social organization.
The police, controlled by the brilliant and increasingly powerful Ngo Dinh Nhu, were repressive: then as now there was torture and indiscriminate killing. Local administration was rigid and exploitative. Decisions could be made only in Saigon, and then very often only by Diem. Officials and army officers were judged by their personal loyalty to the family, and usually were Catholic, northern—and even then were not trusted.
Truth and Blindness
Nearly all the criticisms made by American reporters during the last Diem years were valid. The objection to be made to them is that most of the critics suffered from a variant of the same blindness that of afflicted the American officials who insisted that Diem’s programs were successful and gave him unqualified support: both believed that social reform, reform essentially on American models, could save the situation in Vietnam, and they differed only in their willingness to believe, or make themselves believe, that these reforms were being carried out. The officials insisted, with some justice, that Diem was the only non-Communist figure in Vietnam who had demonstrated his competence to hold power and rule. If he was rigid, he also was honest and high-minded. If he was harsh, that was in the Vietnamese tradition. And in any event, the American operations and information missions in the field would be successful in making the peasants understand the justice of the democratic cause.
The critics insisted, truthfully, that the war was being lost and that many of the military measures and political programs put forward by the regime and faithfully supported by the American embassy were frauds, or actually made the situation worse. The much-publicized program of strategic hamlets was an example of both. It was publicized as a new scheme to clear the countryside of Viet Cong, whereas it was actually a new version of an old and not particularly successful program. Its progress was vastly exaggerated, and the actual accomplishment was hasty and many of the armed and fortified hamlets rapidly were reclaimed by the Viet Cong, providing the rebels with new weapons. Others, built up by means of the forced resettlement of peasants from outlying areas, were put together so brutally that the villagers, whatever their previous sentiments, were permanently embittered.
The critics also argued, justly, that the United States was increasingly in the position of prisoner of its supposed client: it loyally defended and supported the regime, and had committed its prestige to the Diem government and its programs. Mr. McNamara’s statements were less qualified with each new visit, and Ambassador Nolting had wholly committed himself and his staff to President Diem, though this may have been on orders from Washington. The result was that the United States was without leverage in dealing with the regime. It could consistently be blackmailed by a government which not only was more cynical than its sponsor, but in order to survive at all had to resist and obstruct the foreigner: it had to maintain its identity as a Vietnamese government, not an American puppet.
The critics of the Diem government, though, were victims of the illusion that there was a liberal and democratic solution to the turmoil of Vietnam which lay just beyond the Diem government: depose the Diems and liberalism would be liberated. They believed that the Vietnamese people yearned for self-expression and representative government, and that freed of the Diems they would free themselves of the Viet Cong. But there is no evidence that the Vietnamese people wanted anything more complicated than to be left alone.
The renewal of rebellion took place after 1957. Why it took place still is argued. The explanation put forward by the Vietnamese and American governments and accepted by most observers is that North Vietnam, failing to get the all-Vietnamese elections promised in the Geneva settlement, ordered a new war. Certainly Communist cadres had remained in the villages after the partition of 1955; but then they very likely had lived there. Arms were hidden for subsequent recovery. By 1957 incidents of violence and terrorism were fairly widespread, and in 1959 a significant movement of men from North to South is said to have taken place by sea and by the long walk through Laos, men originally from the South returning to their villages. A National Liberation Front which included non-Communists was established at the end of 1960, and during the following year it set up an underground administrative structure in rivalry to the Saigon Government. The National Liberation Front purportedly controls the Viet Cong forces; “Viet Cong” is merely an insulting term for Vietnamese Commumists.
Another argument is made by Philippe Devillers, author of the standard French work on the early stages of the First Indo-chinese War. He contends that the excesses of the Diem government provoked a rebellion that Hanoi feared and at first attempted to discourage. He says that Hanoi was at a loss to cope with Diem’s refusal of nationwide elections and could get little diplomatic support from either China or Russia. It feared the consequences of rebellion in the South and fully supported it only after the Diem government began to loose its grip on the countryside and the Southern rebels seemed on their way to success. Writing in 1962 (in China Quarterly) he added: “The risk now for Hanoi is that the Front, which is essentially a Southern movement, should remain open to non-Marxist influences coming from powers which, for example, considering the victory of the Front as a virtual certainty, might wish in this way at least to make some provision for the future.” Whether the Front has remained open to such influences in the two years since may be known in Paris. One would like to think so.
A History of Involvement
One more factor in the Vietnamese situation which must be noted is that the American involvement in that country goes back rather further than commonly is appreciated, and is not distinguished by consistency. Late in World War II the OSS cooperated with the Viet Minh against the Japanese—and against the French. The latter policy was derived from a general American decision to block France’s return to Vietnam and associate the United States with the nationalist successor-government. Bernard Fall, and many Frenchmen, insist with some bitterness that this was a personal and essentially irresponsible decision by Mr. Roosevelt. The President was determined that American influence would be used to end both British and French colonialism in Asia, but he was not alone in this: he spoke for a national consensus. Mr. Roosevelt’s understanding of international politics, as George Kennan and others, less courteous, have pointed out, was seriously defective, and the decision on Vietnam clearly was taken amidst ignorance of the country and of the potential consequences. But it reflected the unqualifiedly anti-colonial mood of America in the late war years.
Under this policy the American forces in South China and the OSS detachments with the Viet Minh forces inside Vietnam obstructed the Free French when they tried to return to Vietnam. U.S. officers in Hanoi after the Japanese surrender affected indifference to those French who had managed to reach the city and to the French who had remained in the country (under Vichy rule) during the war and were in prison camps guarded by the Japanese under Viet Minh authority. Pierre Messmer, for example, was one Frenchman imprisoned by the Viet Minh while OSS agents refused to help him; today, of course, he is France’s Minister of Defense. The events of this period still are bitterly resented by many French civilians and Army officers who suffered personal humiliation and even torture, and regarded it as betrayal by an ally.
The United States not only supported the Viet Minh against the French in the period of the Japanese capitulation, but according to Fall (who is supported by a Rand Corporation study) supplied arms and equipment to the Viet Minh from Thailand, Nationalist Chinese stores, and the Philippines even after the outbreak of war between the Indochinese rebels and the French. Fall says that some of the old and unmarked American C-46 aircraft still used in Laos and Vietnam in American clandestine operations bear the same serial numbers as the aircraft that French reconnaissance pilots photographed on Communist-held airstrips in Vietnam in the early years of the Indochina war.
It is not entirely irrelevant to take note of this. The American record in Vietnam is one of support for the Viet Minh against the Japanese, the Vichy French, and the Free French; apparently of support for them in rebellion against post-war France; of support for France against the Viet Minh after the Korean War had begun; of support for Ngo Dinh Diem and other nationalist figures against both the French and the Viet Minh; of support for a coup against Diem; of support for the officers who made the coup, and now for the officers who succeeded them. Each policy may be defended in terms of the conditions and prospects of the time, but the record is one neither of success nor of insight into the realities of the Vietnamese situation. If there is consistency in it, it is of a consistent search for a “third force” which would embody the supposed will of the people, for a group in Vietnam whom the United States could recognize as politically kin to the United States itself. We wanted to be midwives to Vietnamese democracy.
We found many “third forces,” but none of them met our expectations; and the search was a costly one in French, Vietnamese, and American lives, and perhaps in more than lives. Graham Greene wrote a very bitter and not very good book about precisely this eight years ago. In The Quiet American he called Americans virgins, and said “we don’t have so many in Europe. I’m glad. They do a lot of harm.”
The American Presence
Yet we Americans today are in Vietnam. We are implicated. And Vietnamese government and society are disintegrating about us. There is serious doubt that the Vietnam of today can be mobilized for anything. It is a society which is fragmented and shocked: by nearly twenty-five years of uninterrupted violence, by the intrusion of Western politics, power, and ideas, beginning with the French invasion of a century and a half ago—but so by Vietnam’s own inner violence and disorientation. Unless one understands this, Vietnam is incomprehensible. To quote Greene again, “This was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the middle ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet discovered their country.”
That we may be anachronisms in Vietnam does not discharge our responsibility. It is indispensable that the strict American interest in Southeast Asia be defined more clearly than it usually is in public discussion. In attempting to do so I will assume that the political reform and liberalization of Southeast Asia, desirable as it is, is beyond the competence of the United States to bring about. Indeed, that American efforts to reform local conditions can usually be relied upon to make things worse, not because of ill-will or necessary maladroitness on the part of American officials and agents, but because one of the things that is wrong with Indochina is that the West is there.
The American interest seems to me to be to maintain a power position in Southeast Asia that inhibits the expansion of China and provides a countervailing influence to Chinese diplomacy and military blackmail. As Frank Trager has put it, the Chinese Communists are making prescriptive claims [on Southeast Asia] based on China’s imperial past, though their strategy and tactics may vary according to Communist winds of doctrine. Peripheral territories are no longer described as feudal or tributory, but in effect these terms might well be applied to Tibet, the borderlands claimed from Burma and India, and in the relationship of North Vietnam and North Korea to Peking.” The United States has a political interest, an established commitment, to provide the countervailing force. We have tried reform and client governments in Vietnam (and Laos) and they have not succeeded: yet the interest remains, reinforced by China’s new and politically meaningful nuclear accomplishment, the recent humiliation of India, and Japan’s— present at least— political passivity and detachment from events on the Asian continent.
Alternative Policies
In default of present policies, the lines of action open to the United States would seem to be these:
1. Overt intervention with major United States forces. The usual objections to this are that China would intervene in turn and that American ground troops would be swallowed up in an “unwinnable” jungle war. These objections may be valid, and certainly are sustained by an evident public reluctance to allow an American commitment to mainland war; but they are not self-evidently true. China’s rail and road communications into Vietnam are very limited, and China’s economy is in no position to sustain a major war. Whether Russian aid would be provided by the new regime in Moscow obviously is impossible to predict; the Khrushchev government probably would not have done so. The truth is that if any power is in a position to land “hordes” of troops in Vietnam and adequately to supply them, it is the United States.
Could the United States win such a war? It seems unlikely that it would try to win a war limited to Vietnam. There almost certainly would be action against China proper. The United States could severely punish any Chinese intervention into Vietnam and probably could defeat it with conventional forces at very heavy costs in men and by means of a long and difficult struggle.
If the Chinese did not intervene, could the United States defeat the Viet Cong? An imposing case can be made that that American ground forces, aggressively led and enjoying numbers and equipment denied to the French in 1949-1955, could drive the Viet Cong into the forests, break up its concentrations, and indefinitely contain it at the level of banditry and isolated terrorism. This again would be an expensive commitment, and if it were done would have to be done suddenly and on a large scale so as to exploit the shock of intervention.
The principal argument in favor of such a policy is that it might reverse a deteriorating situation throughout Southeast Asia. The principal argument against it is the same argument that must be made against war on China proper. The United States almost certainly would not know what to do with a success once it had it. If we are not competent to impose stability upon South Vietnam now, we are unlikely to be able to do it for Vietnam and China in the aftermath of major war. We could conquer; but as conquerors what would we do? It is delusion to think that the masses of Vietnam (or China ) discriminate among their white invaders, or comprehend the benevolent rhetoric of American policyrnakers and press. And we have neither the political nor the moral ability to sustain indefinitely a conquest of a hostile population. I cannot conceive of a victory over the Viet Cong or the Chinese which would be preferable to the present situation, bad as it is; and I can think of many outcomes that would be worse.
2. An extension of the present policy of rather desperate support for the most likely figures in a shifting political situation, and of limited covert military intervention—perhaps to include major sabotage in North Vietnam and the use of Americans to interdict Viet Cong communications—together with unlimited overt support to the Vietnamese National Army. Such a policy quite possibly would fail, the Vietnamese army defeated as the French army was before it, or the government either disintegrating entirely or ending in a neutralist coup that would demand U.S. withdrawal and direct negotiations with the Viet Cong.
The principal thing to be said for such a course of action is that it might not fail. The war might be dragged on until something turned up—and things do turn up in war and politics; buying time is not necessarily a mistake. If a neutralist coup occurred, the result might save more of Vietnam from total Viet Cong control than any other solution. And in such a situation we may hope that the Viet Cong’s National Liberation Front has remained open to “non-Marxist influences” and that some other power had made “some provisions for the future.”
3. The United States might seek, or quietly encourage the French to seek, a neutralization of Southeast Asia. This is perhaps the most promising of alternatives, even though it could constitute a “defeat” for the United States. It need not be a defeat, and such an agreement need not be entirely to the Communists’ advantage. American sea and air power in Asia are potentially great incentives to a reasonable settlement, and influential deterrents to violation. A neutralization that took in more than South Vietnam alone ( Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia has proposed that Burma, Laos, and Cambodia be included, and there is no apparent reason why a proposal for such a neutral zone should not include North Vietnam and Communist-occupied Laos as well), that was underwritten by the threat of U.S. air and sea action against military and logistical targets in North Vietnam, and that was guaranteed by the great powers with an American right to intervention in the case of violations, might provide a workable temporary solution. It would not provide a permanent settlement of Southeast Asia’s crisis. It would not change Chinese policy or ambitions. It would not heal the wounds of Vietnam. But it would buy time and halt the killing. And the first seems an intelligent political goal for the United States; the second simply seems worthwhile.
