The Americanization of Vietnam

" 'Sometimes the Viets have a better success with a megaphone than a bazooka,' " says the narrator of Graham Greene's novel about Vietnam, The Quiet American." 'You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested.'

" 'They don't want communism,'" Pyle, the American, answers.

" 'They want enough rice,' " the narrator says. " 'They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want.'

" 'If Indochina goes--'

" 'I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does go mean? If 1 believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred (continued on page 114)Americanization(continued from page 105) years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember--from a buffalo's point of view you are a European too.'

" 'They'll be forced to believe what they are told; they won't be allowed to think for themselves.'

" 'Thoughts are a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?'

" 'You talk as if the whole country were peasant. What about the educated? Are they going to be happy?'

" 'Oh no, we've brought them up in our ideas. We've taught them dangerous games. and that's why we are waiting here, hoping we don't get our throats cut. We deserve to have them cut. I wish your friend York was here too. I wonder how he'd relish it.' "

• • •

There were not many reporters there in the late summer of 1962, still just a handful of us (a few years later, there would be 500, in true battalion strength), we used to sit in the small French cafés and talk about Greene's book. It seemed at that time, and now more than ever, the best novel about Vietnam. There was little disagreement about his fine sense of the tropics, his knowledge of the war, his intuition of the Vietnamese toughness and resilience, particularly of the peasant and the enemy. Greene seemed then to possess a far greater sense than any French or American general. It was only his portrait of the sinister innocence of the American that caused some doubt, that made us a little uneasy. Greene inscribed his book with a quotation from Byron: "This is the patent age of new inventions / For killing bodies and saving souls / All propagated with the best intentions." Wasn't it too vulgar a stereotype? Wasn't he too harsh? The American Embassy public-affairs officer was particularly bitter about Greene's American: He called it an evil book, made worse, he said, because it was so effective, so slick. We were not like the French, he said. We were there to help the Vietnamese: we would talk to them, respect their decisions and their judgment.

That was not very long ago, but it seems like light-years. It was the early Sixties, and we had a handsome young President and a Peace Corps: we were proud of ourselves and our egalitarian tradition and we were ready to inflict that tradition on the entire world. Truly, the eagle held both the olive branch and the arrows: we were a great superpower turning our good intentions and our virtue toward the world. British power was slipping, French power already had been eroded by a decade of dishonorable colonial adventures. This was the American century. The old order, white master and colored servant, would be replaced by a new one, Americanized, a partnership led by a great power. at once sensitive to indigenous drives and anti-Communist. Some of us had worked in other areas of the underdeveloped world and we had not liked what we had seen. The Belgians had raped the Congo and then, after independence, had fled, leaving their dogs behind. (Later, when the Belgians had slowly begun to straggle back, one of us had said, '"This is the first time I remember the rats coming back to the sinking ship.") We knew the French had fought two senseless wars with their colonies, and we had seen Guinea, where in anger they had torn out all the telephones, let the prisoners out of the jails and destroyed all jail records. The British, of course, measured up better by our standards. They had behaved better, had not fled from any country, had left the natives better institutions, armies, police forces and telephone systems that almost worked. But they had left behind no love for the British or things British. We Americans were different; we were not colonialist, we came not to stay but to go. The Vietnamese would see this and recognize it, and, indeed, they did. They told us we were different from the French ("Never believe anything any Vietnamese tells you, including me." Nguyen Cao Ky, in one of his more candid moments, once told American reporters). There were only 15,000 American Servicemen in Vietnam in those days and we identified with them, admired their bravery and their idealism, their courage and dedication in the face of endless problems. We believed that they represented the best of American society: They were intelligent, tough, idealistic. Of course, we did not realize where it was all heading, how short a trip it would be from the jokes of those days--"Don't knock the war, it may not be much, but it's the only one we've got"--to, a few years later, a stunned American major looking at Bentre after the Tet offensive and saying, "We had to destroy the town to save it." The French were our particular target in those days. We mocked them constantly, saying they had managed to give the Vietnamese the worst of two cultures, laughing at how they had taught the Vietnamese corruption and bureaucracy, joking about the noon siesta, when everything stopped, the shops closed, the war came to a halt. Who had taught whom? we laughed. We were pleased when the Vietnamese whores began to learn English instead of French. We took the best girls in town, explaining that this was happening because American men were nicer than the French (and also had access to the PX and the hair sprays). No wonder we sensed in the local French a certain distaste for us; indeed, a certain unexpressed sympathy for the enemy. After all, the Frenchmen who remained had ties to the land; they had learned to respect the enemy and his right to the soil. But at the time, we mocked the French, demeaned their military mistakes, their outpost system, the Maginotline mentality, while every day repeating their mistakes ourselves. Several years later, it would come as no surprise when the American military commitment had bogged down and an American correspondent in Paris, asking a French foreign official the unofficial view of the war, received the reply, "It is very much like the divorced man who hears that his former wife and her second husband are about to get a divorce." Yet, if we knew all the political failings of Saigon, all the frustrations and official mendacity, if we admired the tenacity and the courage of the enemy, we still held out the hope, sometimes a slim one, that we had something to offer, that somehow a viable and decent non-Communist Vietnam could be built, that the Vietnamese in the South could be spared the gray uniforms and the rigidity of living in the totalitarian North. We held to a basic belief in American society, that the problems could be solved, that our good intentions could overcome Vietnamese duplicity, French failures.

• • •

Now we are both the initiator and the victim of a hopeless, bitter war that has ripped aside so many of our more comfortable illusions about ourselves. We are shorter of slogans now, less quick, I think, to mock the French or even the Belgians. Where once we had few doubts about American capacity, American intentions, American achievement, now we have more doubts about that capacity to deal with social problems, not just in Southeast Asia or Latin America but even at home. "Would you." asks one counterinsurgency expert who spent five years in Vietnam, "want to hire the United States as a consulting firm in counterinsurgency anywhere else?" Graham Greene's book, now almost 15 years old, no longer looks like a caricature of ourselves. We have become the caricature, not the book; rather, the book abounds with a prophetic sense. Who would guess that Pyle (the quiet American), in the book unable to eat Vietnamese food and preferring an American sandwich spread called Vit-Health (" 'the meat--you have to eat carefully in this heat' "). would be followed one day to (continued overleaf) Vietnam by an American general named Westmoreland, whose relationship with Vietnamese troops, according to his staff, would be somewhat limited in part because his stomach was weak and he had trouble eating their food? And who was Pyle, the bad American, with his dreams of decency? We all tried to guess his identity. Was he young Colonel Ed Lans-dale, the CIA man who had starred in The Ugly American by saving the Philippines? No, Lansdale was too minor a figure. How about Dean Rusk; no, Mc-George Bundy; no, Walt Whitman Ros-tow; not even close. But here we have it--Robert S. McNamara, symbolizing at once the decency, arrogance and naïveté of the Americans. What could be more arrogant, after all, than to commit thousands upon thousands of Americans to a country whose name you can't even pronounce? For McNamara is, above all, decent; what more natural job for him after the Pentagon than the World Bank? Greene wrote of Pyle: "He didn't even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined--I learned that very soon--to do good not to any individual person, but to a country, a continent, a world. Well he was in his element now, with the whole universe to improve."

That was a very long time ago. Now we have blanketed the country with our men, our ideas, our institutions and our failures. We have learned, I think, more about ourselves than about the Vietnamese; it has been a dark journey, indeed. Failing to offer viable political ideas and alternatives, we have continued to talk of political possibilities, pacification, nation building, winning hearts and minds. But we have responded in our political bankruptcy with the most awesome firepower in the history of war: not just the bombing of the North but, more horrible, the regular bombing of the South, the destruction of villages and hamlets, the chasing of Vietnamese peasants from their beloved land to detested urban relocation centers (an encouraging sign, noted one American political scientist, for perhaps we can handle the political problem; after all, we Americans are an urban society and we know something about cities). We have talked about nation building, but we have torn the fabric of this society apart, created a new class of the newly corrupt: "The moral degeneration caused by the GI culture that has mushroomed in the cities and the towns is another malady," wrote Neil Sheehan of The New York Times late in 1966. "Bars and bordellos, thousands of young Vietnamese women degrading themselves as bar girls and prostitutes, gangs of beggars and hoodlums and children selling their older sisters and picking pockets have become ubiquitous features of urban life. I have sometimes thought when a street urchin with sores covering his legs stopped me and begged for a few cents' worth of Vietnamese piasters, that he might be better off growing up as a political commissar. He would then, at least, have some self-respect." The few genuine patriots on our side watch the destruction of the city, the escalation of corruption, with horror; and, numbed by what is taking place before their eyes, they slowly withdraw from the country. "We are," in the words of Professor Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard, "creating desolation and calling it pacification." Now we have replaced the French, created a new Americanized Vietnam in our image. Who was the political figure we created and wanted to win the election, who had served as our head of state in Vietnam? Nguyen Cao Ky, whose wife went to Japan for an operation so she would look less Asian, who would meet with the elders of Vietnam and gain their distrust by wearing a Westerner's dark glasses--what, they wondered, was he hiding? And how did he come to power in Vietnam? Astride a water buffalo? By ties to the peasants? By some great mass base in the countryside? No: because he was the head of the air force and was jaunty, young and proud and spoke good English. We have remade Saigon in our image; it even has its own little Pentagon (with its own heliport so that embassy officials and military officials can get back and forth as quickly as possible, seeing as few of the Vietnamese as possible). We have our own currency, our own corruption, our own race problem, our own drug problem, even our own new technocratic scholarship, linked half to the Pentagon and half to the campuses (one of the new scholars, in a study made for the Air Force, found that, yes, the Vietnamese peasants liked being bombed, didn't blame us at all, blamed the Viet Cong for it). We escalated the prostitution in Vietnam, too. And what did the Vietnamese call the little roadside whorehouses? Car Washes. Come, wash your car, GI. A generation of Vietnamese airborne and marine officers bursting out of their tight uniforms, speaking good English, verily good American. "No sweat," they would say, "we kill Viet Cong bastards good." A friend of mine, a very tough-minded American who had been in Vietnam for five years and spoke fluent Vietnamese, caught the local district chief stealing thousands of dollars a month and had him transferred, much to the annoyance of the newer American brigade commander. The brigade commander complained. The conversation went like this:

"How could you do this; how could you criticize Captain Thung?"

"Because he's a crook and we proved it."

"But he spoke such good English…."

• • •

Over all these long years, we talked in our speeches not just of killing the enemy but of reclaiming the nation. But our massive infusion of goods and products clogging the ports did not create a new clan of patriots, not in Vietnamese terms, but created, instead, a generation of cynical Vietnamese who smelled where the money was--in the ports, in the construction business, in the selling of draft deferments. Nation building? In 1967, everything in Vietnam was for sale: a province chief's job, 3,000,000 piasters: a driver's license, 5000. It was not just small graft, small corruption; it was institutionalized, a system that worked from the top down, if not from the generals themselves, then from their wives for them. It was hopeless to punish the small offender; he was a very small operator, a petty product of the system. One did not punish the corps commanders; indeed, one honored them--corps commanders controlled the opium trade and collected from the bars in their area and sold the division commanders their jobs; division commanders shared the profits on tax collections with the landlords, trucked beer and supplies in and, of course, sold the province chiefs their jobs and the district chiefs their jobs, each of them taking a rake-off from the bars. The Americans talked about corruption but could do nothing. Their presence, after all, had created it; their goods, their incompetence, their presentation of false values had made it virtually mandatory for Vietnamese to steal. If the Americans either had so much money or were foolish enough to seem like they had so much, then why not oblige them and take it? It was, after all, preferable to be rich and alive than to be poor and dead. In late 1967, I asked one old friend how the war was going, particularly for the young Vietnamese. How are they, what are they like? This was basic to the American hopes--the old Vietnamese were French tainted, colonial tainted, tired and corrupt; but the new Vietnamese would be Americanized, more egalitarian, modern and talented. "The sons," he said, "are more corrupt than their fathers." And the Americans, in a different sense, were corrupt, too: It was a mutuality of corruption. For the Vietnamese, it was a simpler and cleaner kind of corruption, stealing a few goods here and there, lying to the Americans, abusing the countryman one notch farther down. For the Americans, it was a more subtle and insidious corruption. They sat around and watched and tolerated it; more often, they tried not to see it. as if what they did not see did not exist. They did not resign; that happened only at the very lowest levels. A few young people in the International Voluntary Services who knew too much and could bear no more would resign; but at the higher levels, the levels where they should have known more, where (continued on page 268)Americanization(continued from page 116) there was more responsibility for these actions, for the decision making, they went along with it. They signed their names to false and empty reports, went through the motions of trying to improve a bad situation and decided to win the war on paper, if not in the field, and they encouraged the men under them to do the same. The lack of high-level resignations, the lack of anger, the lack of anyone's admitting that he had made an honest mistake would be a mark of those years. Similarly, too, those who had failed, who had misled the Presidents of the United States the most, would be rewarded, promoted, given even more important and powerful jobs. Were an American general to spend an entire crucial year in Vietnam misleading the President about how well the war was going, why, he would subsequently be promoted and put in charge of the entire American military mission in Thailand. Would, as far back as 1962, General Maxwell Taylor express to reporters his reservations about the commitment, the belief that, perhaps, we had entered too late into too sick a society, why, he would become, as that commitment became worse and worse, the most outspoken defender of the policy and its imminent success. The charade would go on and on; the higher the official, the greater the loss of personal integrity. Relentlessly, it would continue even into early 1969, when General Andrew Goodpaster, Nixon's favorite general, perhaps the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would arrive in Vietnam for a personal report to the President. Goodpaster visited a tough area north of Saigon, getting pessimistic reports for most of the day; and when he finally met one major who said, why, yes, everything was fine and, yes, the war was going very well, and, yes, the Vietnamese were finally getting with the program, he turned to an aide and said, "This is the first time today I've learned anything." And as those who had averted their eyes from reality were promoted, similarly, those who had dissented from the policy or who had criticized it, albeit within the channels, were shunted aside, their careers damaged forever. There was much to be ashamed of. In the epitaphs of the South Vietnamese leaders of this generation, it might be said that no one ever believed in them or in their word or in their ability in the first place, that it was all an illusion and they were the first to recognize it. Of the American leaders of the same generation, the McNamaras, Bundys, Taylors, Bunkers, the epitaphs would be more severe: that they had, by their actions in Vietnam, made an entire country doubt not only what was happening there but what existed in America, that the commitment there would finally tell more about America than about Vietnam.

• • •

From the time the foreigner first arrived in Vietnam, his beholder's eye told him more about himself than about what he saw. American misjudgments followed French misjudgments as surely as night follows day--worse, perhaps, because Americans had the French experience to study and learn from. The Westerner saw the Vietnamese as inferior intellectually, culturally, physically and morally. We were larger; thus, we were superior. We were more modern in our technology; thus, we were superior. We had higher health standards; thus, we were superior. We looked down on their accomplishments, never thinking, of course, that they had set out to accomplish different things. (There was much contempt of them culturally. Centuries ago, they sent poets to foreign courts as their ambassadors, but that didn't impress us.) A Vietnamese lieutenant deep in the Mekong Delta once came across a very old and withered man; the lieutenant noticed the air of distaste of the American with him and he said, "You think this is just an old man, an illiterate old man, that he knows nothing. But he knows poetry, old and great poetry"; and he asked the old man to write some poems, which he did, then asked him to recite them. "We are older and we know more than you think," the lieutenant said. The Westerner looked down on the vague and permissive Buddhism of Vietnam; even a Westernized Vietnamese such as Ngo Dinh Diem thought of Buddhism as a religion that was not really serious, was barely civilized, almost pagan, in his view. The Americans never thought of Vietnam in terms of Vietnamese institutions and traditions. In 1969, Frances FitzGerald noted:

Like a patient in psychoanalysis, the United States seemed preoccupied with the significance of its own actions. But perhaps the debate was only symptomatic. As the Vietnamese had never really been the subject of American journalism, so they had never really been the subject of American policy. That officials of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations continued to issue victory statements for seven years suggests that, in spite of all their talk about the complexities of Vietnam, they had made a picture of the country so simple as to exclude not only their enemies but also their own allies. Though the contours of the picture were not at all clear, presumably the officials, too, had followed Jean-Luc Godard's advice to make a Vietnam inside their own heads--and left it at that.

It started very early. The Westerners had always seen and heard what they wanted to see and hear. Joseph Buttinger points out that the first French missionaries who went there in 1857 assured Paris that the Vietnamese would greet the French as "liberators and benefactors." So it was. For over 100 years, the Vietnamese were dominated by French arms and French colonialism; to the French, those Vietnamese who rebelled always seemed the minority. Most of the countryside was silent, for it had no leadership; and some of it, the upper class, acquiesced for its own material reasons. Thus, the French deluded themselves and saw love where there was only servility and well-guarded derision.

In 1946, the French Indochina War began, as the French tried to reassert by force the colonial authority that had relaxed during World War Two. In Paris, where Ho Chi Minh had gone for one last desperate attempt to gain some form of independence from the French, to avert a war, he was interviewed by David Schoenbrun: "If the French do not give you some sort of independence, President Ho, what will you do?"

"Why, we will fight, of course," he said.

"But, President Ho, the French are a powerful nation. They have airplanes and tanks and modern weapons. You have no modern weapons, no airplanes, not even uniforms. You are peasants. How can you fight them?"

"We will be like the elephant and the tiger. When the elephant is strong and rested and near his base, we will retreat. And if the tiger ever pauses, the elephant will impale him on his mighty tusks. But the tiger will not pause, and the elephant will die of exhaustion." A prophecy of what happened, of course. There was no shortage of tigers: indeed, if the French had been interested, they might have read what Marshal Trail Hung Dao had said earlier about other invaders: "The enemy must fight his battles far from his home base for a long time. We must further weaken him by drawing him into protracted campaigns. Once his initial dash is broken, it will be easier to destroy him." Trail Hung Dao had been writing about the Mongol hordes at the end of the 13th Century; the Vietnamese, of course, defeated the Mongols.

The French, the real French in Hanoi and Saigon, were shocked by the ingratitude of the Vietnamese, whom they had known so well and who were now trying to kill them.

There was an extraordinary sense of tragedy to the French Indochina War (an even greater one, if anyone could have sensed that it shortly would be repeated; but who would have dared think that?). The French, proud, brave, vain, jaunty, could only fight and die bravely, that and nothing more. The nha ques, les jaunes, lacking military superiority, had absolute political superiority; they appealed to the highest motivation of the best of a generation of Vietnamese, to rid the nation of the white colonialist, to end the vast inequities of the mandarin system. The Viet Minh had few illusions about themselves or their enemy; they calculated the price coldly and honestly and then paid it. They searched for the French vulnerabilities (as they would more than a decade later against the Americans, joining battle in 1965 for the first time in the Iadrang Valley. The Americans later estimated Iadrang a victory, but they read it incorrectly. It was simply the North Vietnamese deliberately testing the American military machine and how to fight it. The answer, they discovered, was to close to 30 yards and nearer, neutralizing American air support. Militarily, the war was stalemated almost before it began.). The French war dragged on, the tide inevitably turning against them. ("Anything that is not a total success in Indochina," Lucien Bodard, author of the excellent book The Quicksand War, once postulated, rather accurately, "is doomed to be a total failure.") Having fought the Viet Minh for eight years and having learned nothing--the painful lessons of a bad war are learned only at the lowest level by the people who fight--still contemptuous of the enemy and his subtlety, his capacity to adapt to a war against a better-armed adversary, the French military command decided to bait a trap for the Viet Minh. The Viet Minh would walk into the trap and, voilà, the best of Giap's forces would be destroyed. The name of the trap was Dien Bien Phu. The French set up their base in the valley. All around were high peaks. A friend of mine who visited it before the battle asked who controlled the high ground. The French officer shrugged his shoulders. And what if the Viet Minh were there and had artillery? my friend continued. They did not have artillery, the French officer replied; and even if they did. they would not know how to use it. But, of course, they did have artillery, carried in, piece by piece, up and down the Laotian and Vietnamese trails at night. They had artillery and could use it. The battle was over when it started; that night, the French artillery commander committed suicide. The war was over. Dien Bien Phu would enter the lexicon as a synonym for a trap and a failure. Indeed, the Americans would spend their war endlessly talking about Dien Bien Phus, how to avoid them, side-stepping them, only to find if you take the real definition of Dien Bien Phu--a vast miscalculation, a serious overestimation of your resources, capacity and effectiveness, a concurrent underestimation of the enemy's reserves, bravery, intention and will, something that is easy to get into and virtually impossible to get out of--that the entire American war was one total Dien Bien Phu. Only after Dien Bien Phu did the French realize what had happened. After the Geneva settlement, Bodard sat in a Hanoi bar with a French colonel who had been captured at Dien Bien Phu.

"It was all for nothing," he was saying, "I let my men die for nothing." His glare was as blind as a sleepwalker's. "In prison camp the Viets told us they had won because they were fighting for an ideal and we were not. I told them about my paras at Dien Bien Phu. I told them how they fought. And they said, 'Heroism is no answer.' In prison camp we faced the reality of the Viet Minh. And we saw that for eight years our generals had been struggling against a revolution without knowing what a revolution was. Dien Bien Phu. Dien Bien Phu was not an accident of fate. It was a judgment."

In the French cemetery at Tansonnhut airport in Saigon, where the crosses stand row on row, noting that Nguyen Xuan Chi and others are mort pour la france, there is one unmarked grave. Who is that for? a reporter once asked. ''The French always said that it is for the first American soldier who will die in Vietnam," the Vietnamese answered.

• • •

The American commitment to Vietnam was born of many things--arrogance, naïveté, blind faith in American power and American righteousness and an obsessive fear of the Communists. The commitment started in 1954, after the fall of China, immediately after the Korean War and the end of the McCarthy years. It was a time when the Communists were the enemy and, indeed, there seemed to be a Communist monolith that was evil and immoral and that acted in constant concert against us. In August 1954, Cardinal Spellman, one of the most powerful and influential sponsors of the American commitment, said, "If Geneva and what was agreed upon there means anything at all, it means … taps for the buried hopes of freedom in Southeast Asia! Taps for the newly betrayed millions of Indochinese who must learn the awful facts of slavery from their eager Communist masters! Now the devilish techniques of brainwashing, forced confessions and rigged trials have a new locale for their exercise." But one man does not make a policy nor, indeed, a viewpoint, and the American policy in Vietnam had the general concurrence of most American liberals. The liberals had been on the defensive in the American politics of the Fifties and they had evolved a philosophy that was at once liberal and anti-Communist, seeking to counter communism by political and economic means, opposing the Communists for intellectual reasons. (In The Quiet American, when Pyle talks about the Communists' destroying the freedom of the individual, the narrator answers, "But who cared about the individuality of the man in the paddy field? … The only man to treat him as a man is the political commissar. He'll sit in his hut and ask his name and listen to his complaints; he'll give up an hour a day to teaching him--it doesn't matter what, he's being treated like a man, like someone of value. Don't go on in the East with that patriot cry about a threat to the individual soul. Here you'd find yourself on the wrong side--it's they who stand for the individual and we just stand for Private 23987. unit in the global strategy.") In America, both groups--the hard-core anti-Communist right and the traditional liberals--found in Ngo Dinh Diem a man they could agree upon, and they invented and created his government. That his qualifications were clearly more American than Vietnamese was significant. To the Americans, Diem was a hard and dedicated anti-Communist, a traditional and deeply moral Catholic (more a Spanish priest than a Vietnamese one, a Vietnamese noted), yet he talked the kind of vague liberal reform that liberals believed in, regularly mentioned land reform. To the Vietnamese, he was a Catholic in a Buddhist country, a Central Vietnamese in the South, a man of mandarin psychology at the time of a revolution that was in large part anti-mandarin, a man whose base of power was rich Caucasians in a country that had just won a war to drive the white man out; he was surrounded by American advisors. Indeed, Graham Greene would write of him in 1955, "Diem is separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisors droning of global strategy, when he should be walking in the rice fields unprotected, learning the hard way how to be loved and obeyed--the two cannot be separated. One pictured him sitting there in the Norodom Palace, sitting with his blank brown gaze, incorruptible, obstinate, ill advised, going to his weekly confession, bolstered up by his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle. The name I would write under his portrait is the Patriot Ruined by the West." But a more typical and influential view of Diem, reflecting something of the American propaganda-generating mood of the time, was that written in 1959 by Wes Fishel. a young professor who had become Diem's personal intellectual aide and propagandist: "Is Ngo Dinh Diem a 'dictator' or a 'democrat'? As one examines the structure of the Republic of Vietnam and the behavior of President Ngo, he learns that (a) Ngo Dinh Diem has all the authority and all the power one needs to operate a dictatorship, but (b) he isn't operating one! Here is a leader who speaks the language of democracy, who holds the power of a dictator and who governs a republic in accordance with the terms of a constitution. The constitution was written at his request by a national assembly which he caused to be elected by the people of the republic." Diem had been installed in part by the CIA, and his skill in winning the first election was engineered with more help from the CIA. He was, from the beginning, an illusion to Americans; but the Vietnamese were not fooled. They understood what he was, who and what he represented, what his failings were; they judged the deeds and not the vague American-oriented speeches. Thus, the extraordinary deception--with the deceivers being the deceived. We made our case, it was a republic--we had it on paper, a constitution, an assembly, all documented, and we believed it. A vast array of somewhat embarrassed Vietnamese in their white suits would show up in the office of then ambassador Frederick Nolting, representing what was alleged to be the cabinet, knowing, of course, that they had no function or power, only to be amazed by their treatment from this foreigner. He quite clearly believed that the alleged foreign minister was, indeed, a foreign minister, that he deliberated long and hard on matters of state, that it was important to get him together with Rusk. Thus, the kind of illusion that subsequently justified so many mistakes, misjudgments and horrors. An army was created, and we who created it believed it was an army. It had generals and corporals; ipso facto, it was an army--and the Vietnamese must believe so, too, though, of course, they saw them as the same troops who had come through their villages alongside the French, pausing only to steal chickens and ducks and to help landowners collect their taxes. To this day, we think of the generals in Saigon as generals; the Vietnamese think of them as former French corporals. But the army was typical of the American role there. We created institutions and then believed they worked, and encouraged the Vietnamese to lie to us about them; we lashed out at those Americans and Vietnamese who did not lie, who broke through for quick, flashing moments of candor. But we believed all of our house of cards, that the Chamber of Deputies was a chamber, that the fact that Diem had arrested many political opponents had no effect on the political attitudes of the Vietnamese, since the Vietnamese were not interested in politics, anyway. We saw what we wanted and, of course, believed that the Vietnamese saw it that way, too. But the reverse was true: The Vietnamese saw everything created from 1954 on in the South as tarnished by white Western hands. Everyone who got ahead in those days and reached a position of power and influence, who received a decent education, usually did it through some Western-supported institution. It was one of the great attractions of the Buddhists when they rose up in 1963 that they were so Vietnamese. They had received no foreign aid, had not been trained at Fort Bragg, more often than not spoke only Vietnamese, practiced an ancient and powerful Vietnamese religion. The Buddhists provided one of the few social structures other than the Viet Cong where a Vietnamese could rise on talent alone.

"Monsieur Diem's position is quite difficult," the North Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong told author Bernard Fall in 1962. "He is unpopular, and the more unpopular he is the more American aid he will require to stay in power. And the more American aid he receives, the more he will look like a puppet of the Americans and the less likely he is to win popular support--"

"That sounds like a vicious circle," Fall interrupted.

"Not a vicious circle," said Dong, with a very small smile, "it is really more like a descending spiral."

The spiral went inevitably downward. The fine young Americans, brave, idealistic, went to Vietnam determined to help the Vietnamese. Whatever else they were, they were white, and they were not revolutionaries. The U. S. Army officer corps, whatever else it may be, is not noted as a training ground for the revolutionary spirit. They found themselves assigned as partners to pleasant young Vietnamese officers, captains and majors, and they dutifully went around trying to teach those captains and majors how to woo the peasants, little realizing that the good Vietnamese captains did not want to woo the population, to bridge the gap that separated them from the muck of peasant life, but, rather, to increase the gap. The base for the Vietnamese government was the Americans; the more the Americans gave, the less the government depended on its own population for support. Inevitably, the proxy war was over; the Viet Cong in 1964 had defeated the American proxies. The men who made the decision about whether to send American combat troops to Vietnam were not men besieged by self-doubt. (Bill Moyers has recalled being at a cocktail party in Washington when someone suggested that the war in Vietnam might take the Americans as long as the British in Malaya, 12 years. "We are not the British," a high member of the Administration archly answered.) They were representatives of the successful areas of American life; they knew nothing about American social failures. "They were," says someone who worked with them, "about as completely misinformed as people can be about the ability of American technology to satisfy human desires. They felt that no matter what it was that was needed, America's capacity to produce could do it and fill the job. Was there a revolution? Then we could meet the revolution with more economic goods. Our kind of rice, our big, juicy pigs." They also felt that no matter how well the Viet Cong had fought against the ARVN, and how well the Viet Minh had fought against the French, the enemy would collapse the first time an American combat soldier appeared, the first time American bombers flew over. We were simply too powerful for them and they would know this--some fighting, a test of wills, and then a trip to the negotiating table, America generous in victory once again.

• • •

The 51st state is an extraordinary place, reeking of the American touch (even the good touch: The construction business has given employment to thousands of Vietnamese and treated them as American workers are treated at home). We came, we fought, we died and very little happened. John Foster Dulles in 1954 had called Dien Bien Phu a blessing in disguise, because we entered Vietnam "without a taint of colonialism"; Bernard Fall, a far better observer, would write regretfully that the past is not that easy to escape, that the Americans were walking in the same footsteps as the French, although dreaming different dreams. We created in a nation that had been technologically (though not ideologically) just tottering on the edge of the 20th Century one of the most massive and modern communications networks in the world: and it was useless. Washington called Saigon as easily as it called McLean, Virginia, and it learned nothing. The preconceptions and the illusions passed back and forth; all this gear, all this equipment, and it was never able to teach the lessons of this war to our leaders. The enemy would lack this kind of equipment: his would be primitive--perhaps only a runner crossing through paddy fields, or a crude radio network--but he would know what we were doing. We would have the most extraordinary mobility of any army in the history of mankind. We could move divisions in moments, transplant giant artillery pieces, and yet, we would miss contact, we would punch the pillow, while they, using at best motorized sampans, would strike suddenly and quickly, and more often than not be gone by daylight. We would take a great professional Army and train it to a fine peak--in special uniforms to be lighter weight, with special weapons to fire more quickly and to weigh less in the tropics, with special anti-malaria pills, special meals, special boots, special courses on how to fight the enemy. But it would come down to the frustration depicted in Jonathan Schell's The Village of Ben Suc, when a giant American soldier looking for weapons in a thatched hut pointed to his own weapon and asked a young Vietnamese woman, "You have same-same?" That which could be built was built and built quickly, astounding and deluding those who had done the building. If Camranh Bay could spring up from nothing, an instant port, didn't that also mean that the war was going well, that the kill statistics were valid and accurate, that the Viet Cong must be suffering, that the pacification program was working, too? Roads sprang up, ports were built, barracks appeared overnight; throughout the country, what had been desolate terrain became instant bases for jet fighter bombers. The lesson seemed obvious, that the American experience and genius were valid here, too. The smallest barracks in the smallest hamlet sprouted hot showers and flush toilets. There was an Armed Forces television station and one could fight the war in the morning and then, dog tired, still in combat gear, watch Combat at night. When I went back in late 1967, I remember registering the first night at the Caravelle and looking over at a huge television screen in the lobby: There was George Plimpton being interviewed; he was followed by the local weather girl, who gave not just the Da Nang and the Camau temperatures (hot weather followed by hot weather followed by …) but the temperatures for Los Angeles and Indianapolis. It was a new world, modern, electronic and futile. Electronic gear was everywhere: A new generation of American kids did not write letters to their parents, they simply slipped a cartridge into a small tape recorder and began talking. "Dear Mom, it's not so bad here as they say…." Then they would go out for combat, slipping into a helicopter, flying over the land once distant and alien to them, now so close, yet still distant and alien, and they would fight and die. Occasionally, they would break for mail helicoptered in or hot pizza helicoptered in, and an American general would boast to a visitor how good the morale was; there was always a hot meal. Yet all of this was bewildering. And it did not work. An American brigade would move into a district and fight well; there would be much killing, heavy casualties on both sides; but finally, the enemy would move back and the pacification program would begin. The pacification program would be unusually successful, and soon the fine results would be mirrored on even finer charts, and Vietnamese colonels would proudly show to American generals the astounding results--one third of the district pacified a year ago, and now look: two thirds pacified. Then sadly, someone would need the poor brigade elsewhere and off it would go, and back would come the Viet Cong, and the fine charts would be useless. The Vietnamese colonel would not travel at night, and the pacification program would join all the other failures of the French and the Americans. The casualties were high for us, so we used air power, creating free strike areas--anything that moves, hit it--driving the population out of their villages. (To destroy the dense jungle cover that hid the enemy from our bombers, we saturated areas with an anti-crop spray so poisonous it produced fatal malformation in over 90 percent of laboratory animals who were given normal doses of it and has already caused deformities in Vietnamese babies.) Finally, the peasants did not sleep in the villages at night, because it was too dangerous. They slept out in the paddies and then, as it got worse, they left their villages to go to the new relocation centers. They were immigrants in their own land, cold-faced, even the hatred hidden, forced off the land where their ancestors' ashes lay, while American social scholars improvised their theories to justify our actions. Yes, this is good, this is the urbanization of Vietnam, and this is something we Americans can understand and finally deal with, for we are an urban society ourselves, and it bodes well for the future. The new generation of Vietnamese was, of course, in the cities: It learned to speak English and to operate on the periphery of legality, sensing where the money was and how to get it, in the ports, in the bars and bam-bam parlors, in the export-import business. The best young men from the best families wore their hair long in protest, bought draft deferments or Saigon staff jobs, bought Hondas on the black market and carried their young girls off to the coffee shops in the afternoon, where they would sit and mock the Americans. Occasionally, they would slip off to Paris, where, being of good families, they would join the Viet Cong student groups, preferring the Viet Cong who did not have to fight to the Viet Cong who did. There were more of them every day, more cynical, and all the time paying more for their deferments. And in the American Embassy, yet another American ambassador, once more with a fine reputation elsewhere, would drone on about the new vitality of the Vietnamese, the new training programs, sending the ARVN into Laos, quoting some American general about the improvement in the attitude of the Vietnamese, saying always that they were a young nation, but we Americans must be patient.

I have a friend in Vietnam who has been there a long time and speaks the language well. He is a wry and funny man and has a reputation for excellent scholarship on Vietnam; this, plus a secure knowledge that the rational has become irrational, and vice versa. His work is much admired both in Saigon and at home, and he regularly receives letters from ambitious young graduate students who want to work with him. Recently, one was not content just to write him but showed up in Saigon one day, healthy, intelligent, eager to make a contribution. He would, he said, stay as long as needed; he would contribute. What, he asked, could he do?

My friend looked at him for a very long time and then he said, his voice very soft: "You could go home."