In 1956 Saigon seemed a soft, plump, clean place of greens and yellows; for fourteen years I remembered it this way, insisting these were its colors. The greens were the tall and lush trees that darkened in the rains, held the water, cooled the air. The trees seemed to have a faint sweet smell; some had leaves which flashed silver underneath when the wind tickled or rubbed them. There were tamarind trees, flame trees, mango trees and, on some streets, rubber trees. On the Boulevard Gallieni, which linked Saigon to Cholon, the Chinese city, there were double rows of trees planted by the French, whose branches reached out to each other, touching arms high above the wide road. Behind their walls and gates, the villas were yellowy, with shuttered windows.
Saigon was a calm place then, not yelling and choking with traffic; a lame dog could stroll back and forth on rue Catinat without being troubled. It was not yet called Tu-Do Street. Some Vietnamese had bicycles, a few had motorscooters, the cars were often Citroën, Renault and Simca. The French called the tiny dented Vietnamese taxicabs “the matchboxes.” The four-door black Citroëns often had slipcovers made of white muslin to cut the heat, so their interiors looked precious and dainty. Vietnamese women seemed weightless, and had an astonishing and flat beauty in their long-sleeved ao dai with the tight high collars. These tunics, with their slit panels, worn over satiny wide pajamas, showed nothing of them, only sketched the smallness of their arms and breasts and waists. No Vietnamese woman wore western dress; any woman who did was Chinese. The women carried parasols in the pale colors of their ao dai—violet and blue, white and rose—so the sun would not darken their faces or confuse their eyes.
I took a photograph once of a man over eighty who always sat under a black umbrella. Many Vietnamese thought—as he did—the sun made you ill, and they were surprised, even then, how the foreigners adored lying in it, wanting their skins to turn a tight, shiny brown. I had freckles and was pitied for it by a Vietnamese woman. I had never seen a people with such skins. They did not have the pink or the chalkiness that we had, the circles, the pimples, the pouches, the stubble, the lines that complicate and sadden western faces. Their skins were very smooth, and if a color for them must be given, it would have something to do with the palest honey. Sometimes the conical hats women wore had beautiful blue embroidery inside them and velvety ribbons under the chin. When they put their heads back, the embroidery was suddenly startling to see.
“During the day the sun’s heat practically forbids walking on foot; on the other hand, it is easy to circulate by rickshaw or taxi, hired by the hour or day,” the Guide de Saigon said. It was a small book with paper covers from A. Portail, the bookstore on rue Catinat, that long pretty ribbon of a street with its shops and restaurants, running one thousand five hundred meters from the waterfront to the huge pink-brick cathedral with twin spires which was finished in 1883. “The climate is very damp especially during the rainy season (from May to November),” the Guide de Saigon said. The rickshaws were not pulled by men: the drivers rode high bicycles behind the two-wheeled shaded little carriages which could only seat two people. The faster way was to take a motorized one, which made a light roaring noise.
The little book was sadly outdated in 1956—with its advertisements for tailors named Wakim and Luong Nam who made military uniforms to measure for the French; the Air Vietnam flights to Hanoi and Haiphong, where no one could go; the big firms which listed their branches in the north. The nine-year war for independence against the French had been won, the colonials who were left huddled in Saigon or went to Phnom Penh, but the Guide de Saigon said nothing of all this. Nowhere in its pages was there a mention of the war or the peace.
Few places were air conditioned. But the Americans had come and were pickled by such heat, so they ordered machines which stuck out from the windows and made it ice-cold inside. It was better not to defy the climate, to take naps after lunch, to keep the rooms dim and use the ceiling fans with their big blades that could be set to vite or moins vite. At night beds turned into huge white cribs, for the folded mosquito netting was dropped and tucked under the mattress. The floors in the houses and apartments were tiled and made it a pity to wear shoes, to miss the pleasure of walking with bare feet on their coolness. There were many bats in Saigon who sometimes flew inside, but in 1956 this is all there was to fear. In the first months of that year there were still French soldiers in Saigon. The soldiers were short, with uniforms that showed most of their ropy legs and pale chests. They left their shirts unbuttoned and their pants were cut very high on their thighs. Their little caps were always tilted. At night they sat in the outdoor cafés, drinking LaRue beer or “33,” sometimes Pernod or calvados or pastis, laughing a lot. There was no curfew then, no reason why people should not sit at tables on the sidewalks.
The names of the streets in Saigon were still in French. The Guide de Saigon had a very good map showing all of them, for they had not yet been given new Vietnamese names. There were seven streets named for French generals, five for French admirals, two for French colonels, one for a captain and even one for a Lieutenant Ribot whose history no one knew. There was a street named for Rudyard Kipling, another named Champagne and one named Ypres. There was a boulevard named for Kitchener, the British field marshal, but it was misspelled in the Guide de Saigon, for the French do not take trouble with the names of others.
In Saigon, French was the language, as rooted as their trees, and even the cyclo drivers on their high bicycles spoke something, some words, which sounded like it. When Frenchwomen talked to each other, their voices seemed too urgent, too high and sharp. I remember: a beauty shop on rue Catinat owned by a fierce and small blond woman with short hair. She had stopped struggling to camouflage the black roots that in time looked like peculiar honorary stripes. She wore flowered dresses, sleeveless and low-cut, whose skirts were always wrinkled in the back. She complained to the customers that she could no longer get nail polish, peroxide, the hair dyes she needed from France. They knew it. Nor could she sell her business to a Vietnamese and convert all those piasters to francs and go away; no one could do that. Sometimes her face suggested she might cry, but she never did; she only lifted her shoulders in a shrug. The sight of the American men in Saigon irritated her—she did not count me as anything—and she would say to any of the customers: “They will never understand this country, they will never change the Viets, they will not be happy here.” We sat under the old dryers, which snored and trembled, our faces red and glistening from the hot air. The Frenchwomen spoke of the war in Algiers, sighing and shrugging, calling out to each other on the street “Madame, Madame.” I never knew any of their names; it was always just “Madame.” The Vietnamese women in the beauty shop did manicures very slowly, as if they were making tiny paintings on our hands and toes, but the emery boards were soft and bent and the nail polish streaked. They seemed to hear nothing.
The French boutiques which sold Christian Dior brassieres, and blouses from Nice, and Guerlain perfumes were closing, then closed. The wines were running out, the French cigarettes, the famous French butcher named Michaud no longer had his shop. Men liked to sit on the terrace of the Hotel Continental—the old French-built hotel with the potted palms on the sidewalk—but during the day many women went to La Pagode. It was a salon de thé, a place for tea or little cakes, or café au lait in the mornings, but there were very good milkshakes. There were no windows; it was an open and pleasant place where you could see so much. Years later, when windows with grilles had gone up to protect the customers from flying glass in case of rockets or explosives, there was no longer anything special about La Pagode. The younger middle-class Vietnamese took it over in their western clothes and long hairdos.
At night the Americans often went to sit in the deep rattan chairs and have drinks outside the Hotel Majestic, run by the stout and stern-looking Corsican, Monsieur Francini, who also owned the Continental and much else. It faced the port, the great port of Indochina, where the Saigon River flowed into the Donnai and then to the China Sea. One night we watched a parade of light armored cars, jeeps and heavy weapons being taken to the docks to be shipped to the war in Algeria. It was a busy port. The Guide de Saigon noted that it took eighteen to thirty days to sail from Saigon to Marseilles, with stops at Port Said, Suez, Djibouti, Aden, Colombo and Singapore.
There was nothing in Cochinchine—as the French called the south of Vietnam, which had been theirs for eighty years until that spring of 1954—that told me much of the nine-year war. There were cemeteries, and watchtowers where the French and their troops waited for the Viet Minh at night, there were barracks and hospitals, there were people who spoke of something that had happened at a place called Anh Khe, of something that had happened at a place called Cao Bang in the north, but the only war name I knew then was a name I never heard the French say: it was Dien Bien Phu. The countryside, with its shining rice fields crossed by canals and divided by dikes, was peaceful and lovely. I went everywhere: to the tea plantations at Blao, the beaches at Qui Nhon and at Nha Trang, down to the very tip of southern Vietnam called Camau, to Ban Me Thuot, to the port city called Tourane, with its long curving waterfront, which became Danang. You could drive at night or at dawn. I thought it the most beautiful country I had ever seen, and none of it looked the same.
In 1956, outside the Hotel Continental, there was a smiling Vietnamese in a clean shirt who sold books, which he carried in his arms and peddled to passers-by. Afterward the books could be bound in tiny shops which made covers of red or green leather quite cheaply, the titles tooled in gold. Once I bought a collection of letters by a soldier from the peddler, but it was not until years later that I could read French well enough to understand all of them. The letters were written by Sergeant Guy de Chaumont-Guitry. In the photograph he has a lean and assertive face and blond hair brushed straight back from his forehead, the way men did in the nineteen forties, often using water to keep it down. He arrived in Saigon in March 1947, at the age of twenty-four, and was a noncommissioned officer in intelligence. He did not work at a desk or in a base camp but, rather, moved constantly through the south, going on patrols, interrogating prisoners, training spies and agents who could identify the Viet Minh, those Vietnamese fighting the French. It was part of the “pacification” program, the word relentlessly used so much later by the Americans for their own military and civilian operations. “Pacification will be fully realized,” one Frenchman wrote, “not when we will have occupied each inch of earth but when we will have conquered all the hearts and won all the minds.” He was Commandant A. M. Savani, head of the Deuxième Bureau, the French intelligence apparatus; these words hung over the desk of a young New Yorker working on the American pacification of the Vietnamese.
The sergeant was in the Plain of Jars, in places called Thu Duc, Cai Lay, My Tho, Tan An, Nhi Binh, where long afterward there were Americans. He was critically wounded during a Viet Minh attack in a village named Cau Cong. He died on November 21, 1948, in a small hospital run by French nuns in Vinh Long, only a few hours after he was brought in. I have the book still; the red leather cover has protected it for twenty years. There are the typical snapshots that all soldiers take: one shows him wearing a black shirt and pajama bottoms—his garments as dark as the ones worn by peasants—standing in a rice paddy; another of him crouching in thick bushes as he might during an ambush, raising his weapon.
July 17, 1947
. . . There are times when we’re so discouraged that we wish we could abandon the whole thing. The outposts always being attacked, the roads always being cut, the convoys that have to be escorted everywhere, assaults on anyone who becomes isolated (gets caught by himself), shots in all directions each evening, and for encouragement, we have the indifference of France and the help some Frenchmen are actually giving to an enemy that is building up its armaments and its organization day by day.
August 8, 1947
. . . The Vietnamese are hard workers but slow—for them, the notion of time doesn’t have the same meaning it has for us. They never show any anger—that would mean losing face—and they never make extravagant gestures. You get the impression of a people laced into a strait jacket of absolute politeness.
So the merchants receive you with a great show of esteem, the “boys” serve you with alacrity, and are always hanging around to bring you whatever you want, to dust the furniture, or arrange some object. But that doesn’t stop them from going out each evening to tell the Viet Minh how many men there are in the camp, the number of weapons, the deployment of defenses, or even, if that’s what’s required, to set fire to the outpost once an attack has started and then grab a machine gun and start shooting you, after having served you so devotedly for so many months.
. . . Obviously all this involves a mentality that is beyond our comprehension.
October 5, 1947
. . . I’m afraid we’re on the way toward losing this war.
Almost everyone seems to sympathize with the Viet Minh, because for them they represent the independence they all want.
Little by little, certain elements in Vietnamese society, realizing that the Viet Minh are wrong, would gladly turn to France if they were given certain guarantees. But we make so many mistakes, that we alienate even those of the most patient good will—especially since we’re clearly so unable to protect those who join with us.
On top of all this, most of the French are insensitive to the Vietnamese and wound even our best friends by the words and actions.
July 26, 1948
. . . Day after day, we nibble at Executive Committees and Assassination Committees. This morning we succeeded in catching a Viet Minh security agent with a pistol. It’s the first time I’ve been able to capture a weapon with my agents, aside from grenades.
My financial difficulties will soon be resolved because the village is going to form a local autonomous self-defense group. I’ll enlist all of my agents, and that’ll make the village elders happy because they’d never be able to recruit any men and train them. And that way, I get the community to pay for my agents.
They owe us at least that, because before we arrived nobody was collecting any taxes anyway. Yesterday, in one day, we took in two thousand piasters.
So I won’t have to pay for anything from now on except my interpreter and an agent who supervises the spy network . . .
I just got an invitation to have dinner with the chief of the investigation unit, to celebrate the capture of the pistol. A great event!
October 8, 1948
. . . Only someone who’s been in the Army for a long time can understand the way we work here. As a pal of mine said, if we didn’t have the Americans to move us around, we’d still be somewhere in Tunisia computing transport capacities and tonnages.
Here in Indochina, we’re breaking all the records. We truck one part of the battalion off to fight and leave the other half a hundred kilometers behind to bring up supplies and the women. Then the first group gets sent off to fight someplace farther off, marching until they’re dead tired to some objective that won’t be reached until the next month. They tell us that in January we’re supposed to go back to Cambodia. In the meantime, the men are exasperated, and since their enlistments are almost up, there’s a good chance they won’t reenlist.
Anyway, with our system, only a half of the battalion gets resupplied and the other half becomes skeletal, and thus no good for fighting. And while one part waits to be relieved, the other part disappears somewhere and no one knows when it’ll show up.
A marvelous system, which evinces deep conceptions of strategy and politics! The result:
In pacification: within a radius of eight hundred meters, everyone flees in terror when we march out of the post.
Militarily: Our operations are like sword thrusts in water. And this is the only place we’ve learned to call that success.
. . . As for the population, what good does it do for us to propagandize—it’s just too fascistic. And they follow the Viet Minh anyway.
Besides, what can we expect from the people? They flee from our operations and only the Viet Minh administer them. The Viet Minh end up looking like protectors against French depravations.
Oh, it’s all very well to talk about pirates and barbarians. We failed to bring them along with material prosperity, some kind of social progress. Or, if we once did, at least it’s finished now . . .
In 1970 it was useful, and faster, to speak French with some of the Vietnamese generals, the older civil servants, lawyers and politicians. The higher their rank, the more comfortable they were in this language. Luong did not like the Vietnamese who were attached to France; once he pointed out that President Thieu, and some of the men in his cabinet, had fought on the side of the French in the war of independence. It repelled him, and many other Vietnamese as well.
The middle-aged Vietnamese still remembered the French rulers, and among themselves, compared them to the new ones, the Americans. In Hue an elderly official, who had served the Emperor Bao Dai during the reign of the French, said the happiest moment of his life came in March 1945 when the Japanese overthrew the French administration in the north and south of Vietnam. There was one splendid sight which the official said he had never dared hope to see: a field where Frenchmen had been forced by the Japanese to work like animals, pulling plows, as Vietnamese watched it, hardly able to believe what they saw.
It was a wonderful sight, the old man said. He wore a lady’s black wool coat of a dated style which he said protected him from chills. Such talk made Luong remember too. As a child in Hanoi he had been happy that spring to see the Japanese humiliate the French, who he had always thought were untouchable, immune to injury.
Some middle-class Vietnamese in Saigon, however, preferred the French for commerce; the Americans were puzzling, abrupt or unreliable although much richer. We heard this complaint most piercingly in the Thuy Chung shop, on a side street off Boulevard Le Loi in downtown Saigon, which made plaques for American soldiers and civilians and for their wives and mothers back home. The nicknames of American military units were so strange—Jungle Eaters or Ground Pounders or Delta Death Dealers—many of the Vietnamese in the shop who engraved the chrome or brass plates hardly understood what they said. Some of the plaques which bore the Latin mottos of Army units had comments on them: “Spooking the Cong” or “To hell with Ho Chi Minh.”
The owner, Mrs. Hoang Thi Dinh, said she made insignia for French soldiers during the fighting that began in 1945, and after that war her shop made nameplates for doctors and lawyers.
Occasionally, Mrs. Dinh said, she was distressed by a lack of seriousness in her American customers. “The French only ordered serious things,” she said. “They never wanted dogs and bones and skulls on plaques like the Americans do. The Americans so often order plaques with strange designs on them. Really, they are crazy.”
A bronze plaque in her shop, which she said many American officers choose, bore a slightly modified version of a poem by Rudyard Kipling called “Epitaph”:
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear:
A Fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East.
The poem made Luong laugh.
“I believe only educated Americans can understand it,” Mrs. Dinh told us. “I have seen so many Americans stand and read it over and over without seeming to understand it at all.”
WHAT I REMEMBER about them now is their purposefulness; it seemed to give off the steady, low hum of a generator. The American military wore long British shorts and knee socks. The civilians and the Foreign Service officers and various experts, who were there to fatten and shine up the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem, had very clear, terrible notions of duty which burdened them as much as iron-plated suitcases that could never be put down.
They were anxious to be pleasant, to be pals with the Vietnamese. There would be none of the French arrogance. Only one man among them was still there when I got back: an anthropologist and professor named Gerald Cannon Hickey, born in Chicago at the end of 1925, who lived in Vietnam for twelve years. In the beginning he was connected to the Michigan State University Advisory Group, but after 1962 he was a consultant to The Rand Corporation, a private research organization in Santa Monica, California, which did contract studies in Vietnam for the Department of Defense and other government agencies. Both groups—MSU and Rand—were considered despicable by elements of the antiwar movement, who said these researchers, advisors and scholars were instrumental in the imperialist policies of the United States in Indochina which caused the deaths or grievous losses of millions of Asians.
But there was no one like him. He was a gregarious and amusing man, appreciated for his wit, his scholarship and his biting, long criticisms of the policies of the board of directors of the war. He was at home in Vietnam, very fluent in the language, as few other foreigners were. The reporters, year after year, needed and wanted to know him. Most of the American journalists did a tour in Vietnam—eighteen months—had a big party to celebrate when they go out, and then were sometimes sent back again. They were not unlike a great flock of gulls skimming over the corpses and offal of the war, plunging into it, and coming up again. Dr. Hickey seemed always to be in Vietnam even when the official Americans kept changing. He outlasted everyone. He liked to tell stories; they were sardonic and chatty, long and nearly always full of names of people to whom he had said such and such: a general, a land-reform expert, a big gun in the pacification program, a CIA or a USAID man, and if you did not even know whom he meant, it hardly mattered, for that was not the point.
“You and I are ghosts,” Dr. Hickey said in Saigon. I said yes. Later, when both of us had left and knew there would be no going back, he sent me a gift. It was a bound volume of old French magazines from Indochina, a collection of the illustrated monthlies from 1954 called Indochine Sud-Est Asiatique.
“From me—A Ghost—to Gloria—Another Ghost—a Volume of Ghost Stories” he wrote on the flyleaf.
I had seen many of the issues before, with their pictures of the French generals, the peasants being moved back and forth, the crew-cut French reporters in the press camp at Hanoi, the wounded dark-haired Vietnamese soldiers whose faces even now sometimes trick me into thinking that yes, here is the Private Moc I knew, here is Sergeant Co, Squad Leader Binh. But they are not. In the last issue of the volume there is the final piece, the last thin trumpet, called “Death of a War” by Bruno Rajan. “This war, false in its origins, uncertain in its conduct and frustrated in its objectives, brought with it a fundamental truth: it is the form of war of which the westerner is the worse prepared but it is the form of war to which he must pay most attention.” In paying tribute to the French, to the Vietnamese who fought with them, to all those who chose their side, Dajan ended with these words: “. . . there is nothing else to say now but this: Forgive us for not having won this war.”
But among us, in Saigon, there was not much interest in the French; the Americans learned nothing from them. All that mattered was that the French had failed, not the reasons why. In 1956 the Americans did not want to be associated with the French, and tried to make it clear to the Vietnamese that they were not greedy people seeking privilege or power. Many of them believed it: overweight men, missing winter, writing reports, making money, trying to keep their tempers when it went wrong, not colonials but anti-Communists.
“I remember the first thing I learned to say in Vietnamese was ‘I am not French,’” Dr. Hickey said. “There was quite a fixation about that.”
In 1959 he came back to the United States to teach undergraduates at Monteith College at Wayne State University, then he moved to New Haven to teach a graduate course at Yale University on Ethnic Groups in Southeast Asia. Vietnam was not a place anyone ever heard of, so he learned to say that he had been in Indochina. “Then people would say ‘Oh, Gerry’s back, he’s been in India or in China,’” Dr. Hickey said, laughing.
In 1964 his book Village in Vietnam—the research, which he began in 1958, had been sponsored by the Michigan State group—was published by Yale University Press, the first study of a Vietnamese village to be published in English. It was called the finest piece of American scholarship that the large-scale United States commitment in Vietnam had thus far brought about. Dr. Hickey had used the village of Khanh Hau in Long An province in the Mekong Delta, southwest of Saigon, as a microcosm for the study of the rural physical setting, the beliefs and customs of the several religions that coexisted, the kinship and family pattern, the crops and agricultural methods, the economic, administrative and legal systems, and the socio-economic structure and mobility. It was an x-ray of Vietnamese culture and how it was changing as western influences grew stronger. Few reporters in Vietnam had read it, but the book made Dr. Hickey a figure of great respect and reliability.
In the early years he traveled by train, and on a March day in Washington, twenty years later, he still remembered the trip to Nha Trang.
“You’d leave at seven-thirty in the evening and the station was always sort of chaotic, everyone was loading all sorts of cargo in the boxcars. The beds were all made up in the couchette de luxe, it was very clean. They had the little overhead fans to keep the cars reasonably cool, and they had those marvelous sort of shuttered windows. And the funny little dining car where they did all the cooking on braziers, so that when they’d throw a steak on the brazier the smoke would just go billowing right through the car. Of course, the windows were all open.
“It was marvelous leaving Saigon because you’d go through these quarters where people had built their houses right up to the railroad. So you’d be looking right in at the little oil lamps and people sitting on a mat having dinner, and bare-bottomed kiddies running about the place and all that. And then you’d wind your way out and finally end up in this marvelous rain forest between Bien Hoa and Phan Thiet.
“That forest! You would be going through it and the fronds would be hitting the windows, the side of the train. And they’d stop to get wood and you’d begin to see this little funny settlement with little fires burning, because the trains were all wood-burning in those days. They were marvelous engines, all polished brass, and with a funny high smokestack like the old trains had. But they were always on time.”
In those days the Vietnamese did not dream of dressing as the Americans did. If the women put on western clothes, it was done for special effect. When a group of Vietnamese women, who all worked for the Michigan State group in Saigon and had studied in the United States, decided to appear on the same day in American dresses, they did it as a prank. “It was kind of a lark—they all came in giggling, wearing American clothes. They’d all been in the United States. Everybody was commenting, the coolies, the drivers, the other Vietnamese,” Dr. Hickey said.
He went to the Cercle Sportif, the name of the French swimming and tennis club in Saigon, although some of the young Americans working with MAAG—Military Advisory and Assistance Group—were advised not to go to the citadel of privilege, the symbol of the white masters. But each year, of course, more Americans joined, so that by 1970 eight hundred and fifty of them—military and civilians—were members and no one remembered that early opprobrium, or cared.
“The children of the big French colonial families used to call ‘Boy, boy!’ at the Vietnamese waiters, screaming at them in a very arrogant manner, treating them like dirt. And the French used to complain, they were always complaining, and some of the Vietnamese who were very Frenchified said it too: that the Americans were not as cultured as the French. There was the great complaint, too, that the Americans were too nice to their servants, too nice to their chauffeurs and drivers. You know, it was true that the Americans did treat the servants better; they gave them a day off, which the French never did or the Vietnamese. People started working for the Americans because they were getting better wages, and they did get Sunday off. They were by and large quite nice to the servants. They would buy some clothes and be decent with them.
“But everybody thought he had the solution,” Dr. Hickey said. “A lot of people represented a kind of missionary spirit, and there was that, it was very strong. But it was mixed with an incredible ethnocentrism that everything could be done. The solutions were American solutions. People didn’t go to learn from the Vietnamese, they went there to teach the Vietnamese or to tell the Vietnamese, in some cases. Even someone like Ed Lansdale when he talked about what was good for the people, you know, getting the people to rally behind the government, his ideas were American ideas. If they would have a constitution, everybody would love the constitution and respect it. But that’s a very American idea, a constitution. Well . . . I went out, not with a missionary spirit, because I was primarily interested in research on the Vietnamese. I didn’t really have this notion that I was going out and save South Vietnam, that we’ve got to save it from communism, that our ways are best. So I didn’t pay much attention to this attitude until we were doing a study for Michigan State on the Ministry of Education, the first study I got involved in right after I arrived.
“I had been working about six weeks and going around the Delta and interviewing. Because obviously, if you’re going to make revisions in the Ministry of Education, I thought, you had to find out how the Ministry was structured and how things worked.
“For example, one of the problems was that when new teachers were hired, they didn’t get paid for about four or five months. This was 1956. A couple of Vietnamese who were trained at the University of Chicago and I said ‘Let’s trace the movement of the dossiers when someone is hired and find out why it takes so long for them to receive their first pay.’ This seemed like a logical thing to do.
“Well, the Michigan State offices then were right off of Catinat, in a dreary set of offices, and they would take a coffee break down at La Pagode, you know. So I was down having coffee one afternoon with the head of Public Administration, an American from Minnesota. And he said ‘Well, I think enough work has been done, let’s get the final report written on the study of the Ministry of Education.’
“I said ‘We couldn’t possibly, we’ve just gotten into it and we’re beginning to find out what makes it tick, how it’s working.’ And he said ‘No, no, that’s not important, I already have the recommendations written. And I said ‘You couldn’t possibly have the recommendations written, we haven’t done the research.’
“He said ‘The principles of public administration as devised by the Americans are applicable anywhere in the world.’ And I said ‘Wally, that patently ain’t so. Obviously you take these principles and take the American ideas in public administration and they’ve got to be adapted to a particular culture. You may write these recommendations, but the Vietnamese may not understand what you’re talking about and it may be completely alien to them.’ But we did trace the dossiers and we stalled on writing the report, much to his chagrin. The dossiers went into a thing called Fonction Publique. This was a government bureau that had to process every dossier from every ministry when a new person was hired. And we found that this was the bottleneck; it was an empire, it was someone’s empire . . .
“The Americans always thought they discovered fire and they discovered the wheel in Vietnam,” Dr. Hickey said. “But in 1956 Diem was really impressed by American efficiency. There was a magic involved, it was as if we had this amulet around our neck. In 1956 Diem still believed that the Michigan State group was going to work wonders, so all doors were open for us. It was a honeymoon period. When they wanted to set up an administrative study, we could go in and interview anybody in any ministry. And those poor little civil servants with the dossiers piled up on their desks and their little glasses of tepid tea, usually with green plastic covers over the glasses to keep the flies out. And there they were. I’ll never forget the little dossiers that were piled all over the place with little strings to hold the pack of papers together. And the offices were invariably stuffy, warm, with those overhead fans sort of barely moving. I hated doing the interviews during the afternoon because you felt so groggy having had a siesta. And by that time the heat had accumulated, you know, it was just awful.”
IN 1956 HE began his research, too, on the Montagnards, the hill and mountain people of Vietnam of different racial origins. There were thirty or so different tribes—the Jarai being the largest—and their population was guessed to be eight hundred and fifty thousand. President Diem had started a land development program in the Central Highlands where the Montagnards lived: it was based on what Dr. Hickey calls “the old Bao Dai scheme to develop the Highlands and bring in the Vietnamese—in other words, to shunt the poor Montagnards aside so he could settle the poor people from the coast of central Vietnam, which were overpopulated areas, and refugees from the north.” It disturbed him that some official Americans approved of this, saying that after all, the Montagnards had no land tenure system. Dr. Hickey asked Wesley Fishel, who headed the Michigan State group, to let him go to the Highlands to do a preliminary survey on land tenure in 1957.
“Not only did we include material on the land tenure, we also quoted what the Montagnards were saying about the Vietnamese and how much they disliked them because they were being badly treated. There was discrimination against them and the Montagnard civil servants were getting less money; even the Vietnamese children were arrogant with Montagnard officials and behaved like mandarins. They were cheating them in the marketplaces, they were stealing things out of the baskets that they carried their produce in to the market. And there was general discontent. The French had romanized some of their languages and taught them in schools. These were suppressed by Diem. They could no longer talk. They had to take Vietnamese names if they were in the army or the civil service. They felt their culture was being wiped out. They had to wear trousers if they went into town; they couldn’t wear loincloths.
“There were certain lands that were inalienable, they belonged to the clans, and you couldn’t sell them. The Rhadé particularly had a very well-defined land system tied into matrilineal clans. The women owned all the land. It wasn’t all the land in the area, just certain plots. And they knew the boundaries.
“The French had to some extent honored this because in principle the plantations had only ninety-nine-year leases if they were on Montagnard claimed land. Well, Diem did away with that. So there were a lot of complaints and I wrote all of this up, putting in that the Montagnards would agree to form a commission with the Vietnamese officials to sit down and work out their claims to certain areas, and translated it into French and Diem got a copy of it.
“And he was livid, he was absolutely livid. Wolf Ladejinsky [a land-reform expert for Diem] was livid. Ladejinsky tried to get the report suppressed and he later came to the Michigan State office and said to me ‘This is the worst report Michigan State has ever done. How do you expect the government to deal with these children?’
“And I said ‘If you operate on the premise that they’re children, you’re not going to get very far.’ And he said ‘They look out the window and they say “I own all the land I see.”’ And I said ‘That just demonstrates that you haven’t read the report because that’s exactly what they don’t do.’ I tried to point that out in the report, that they have well-defined claims to certain limited lands. There was a threat that Michigan State would have to let me go because everybody was against this report. But Wesley Fishel backed me, Wesley was helpful. And he didn’t try to change anything in the report. I get along with Wesley. People make him out to be a dark plotter, but I don’t think he was a schemer. Poor Wesley was really a bit bumbling in many ways, and his sins were sins of omission more than anything else. He backed it. I was under a terrible cloud.”
But the fifties had been a fine time for him in Vietnam: his work absorbed him, and there were splashes of enormous gaiety. He always liked parties. The grandest ones were at the Cercle Sportif. He can remember the 1956 black-tie Christmas ball when the big swimming pool was partially covered over, and a mise en scène, a huge pagoda scene, was put over the high-dive. People came at eleven P.M., after going to dinner parties, the men in white jackets, the women in long dresses, their faces powdered and pleased, to drink champagne and dance. There was a spectacle, with Chinese dancers performing by the painted pagoda, then a ballet of little junks in the water, pushed by small French girls in bathing suits and flippers who had been trained by Maître Vatin, the swimming instructor. There was another ball, too, called the Carnival of Nice, where the guests tossed flowers at each other. Hundreds and hundreds of flowers, he said.
At the beginning of 1962 he went back to Vietnam for two months. That February he went to the opening of one of the first “strategic” hamlets, near the district capital of Cu Chi. It was an elaborate plan to contain and isolate Vietnamese communities to prevent infiltration, or contact, with the Viet Cong. Dr. Hickey was doing a report on the program, which was making the peasants in the area most unhappy. They were angry because men were being hauled off to work in Army trucks as laborers for the Saigon government, and there was no pay or even food. Furthermore, the farmers said their tobacco crops, their most important cash crop, were suffering.
That day in Cu Chi, tanks blocked Highway 1 for the elaborate, almost theatrical ceremony. There was a large reviewing stand for important Vietnamese—including President Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Ngu—and Americans coming from Saigon. Airborne Vietnamese troops were out in such large numbers, they made up the greater part of the audience. There were, of course, some women and young people who belonged to the organizations set up by the government. They had been rounded up, but there were no villagers on hand.
“It seemed to symbolize the whole situation in Vietnam,” Dr. Hickey said. “I kept saying ‘Where are the people, what happened to the people?’”
Dr. Hickey went in a small shop to change the film in his camera and the Vietnamese offered him some tea, a customary politeness. He asked the Vietnamese where everybody was, where were the villagers? The shopkeepers told him the people had all been told to stay in their houses, or to throw water on a dusty little road leading to the communal temple because Ngo Dinh Ngu was expected to go there. The American colonels seemed quite elated with the goings-on. When Dr. Hickey inquired of the American military why the villagers were not at the ceremony, one officer said it was because Mr. Ngu needed protection. Dr. Hickey, who knew his sarcasm was often wasted at such times, nevertheless pointed out that the strategic hamlets were supposed to provide protection. A dark look was his answer, nothing else.
“When we wrote up our report on strategic hamlets everybody was furious. They tried to get Rand to change it. The people in Saigon said we were completely incorrect. Some of the officials in Saigon tried to talk us into changing things, and we said no. That was the only time they really did try to make me change a report. Apparently it was due to pressure brought from Washington.
“I gave General Harkins a debriefing before I left Saigon. I said the strategic hamlets aren’t going to work if they impose an economic and social burden on the population. If they’re relocated, they’re going to have negative reactions and these haven’t been properly explained. I said you’ve got to realize you’re operating under the assumption that everybody wants protection, but the poor people in the hamlets don’t need protection because they’re not bothered. And if they’re the ones who pay the most, then it’s going to cause an adverse reaction on their part.
“Harkins said no, that can’t be true, I don’t agree with any of that. Well, the whole thing was hopeless. We went to Washington and gave debriefings; I had never done this before, it was an interesting experience. Over at the Pentagon, I had a real fight with General Krulak, the Marine general, that little creep. And Krulak said ‘We’re going to make the peasants do this, and we’re going to make them do that.’ I said you’re not going to make the peasants do anything. You better realize it right now. They’re very tough, independent people and they have ways of circumventing. You’re not going to make them do anything.
“So everyone said that this report was negative. I said you simply can’t build walls around every settlement, it doesn’t do any good. And then we were condemned, literally. After the coup d’état the new government said the strategic hamlets plan was a failure, that it was all faked, the figures and everything.”
After three years in New Haven, Dr. Hickey came back once more to Saigon in the beginning of 1964, saw that nothing was the same, would not be the same, and stayed for another nine years and three months.
“You began to see the marked changes in 1964,” Dr. Hickey said in Washington, D.C. “You couldn’t go out in the field and everything began to go down downhill. The next thing you knew, the trees were all dying from the defoliants—the wind carried them into the city. Also, the planes that were taking off from the airport all leaked. The first trees that went were the flame trees out at the airport, which were very sensitive, and the gorgeous flame trees all the way in from the airport. They cut down all the trees to widen the streets so the American jeeps and tanks could move; they cut down some of the best streets in Saigon to make truck routes. Those huge trucks with the klaxon horns—they were the loudest horns I’ve ever heard, they were air horns!”
But he did keep making trips, and that summer the war almost wiped him out. He was visiting a Special Forces camp in Quang Nam province when, on July 6, there was a fierce, prolonged attack by a reinforced Viet Cong battalion. Dr. Hickey thought the camp would be overrun. There were eighty stretcher cases, he said, two dead Americans, six others severely wounded, and a dead Australian, maybe the first of the war from that country. The Marines sent in helicopters, but they only circled the camp and then went away. It made him wild. Relief came the next day, when they were evacuated. He was not like most scholars who collect and analyze vast amounts of material on the war. What made him different was that he, too, had been caught inside it.
Because Dr. Hickey was asked to return in 1964 by both the Vietnamese and the Americans in Saigon, he thought he could make a difference, “I had an entrée and I knew I had to exploit it,” he said. “I had to really use politics.” He saw that it was not enough to do good reports with honest recommendations. The reports had to be as sharp and light as arrows and cleverly aimed. “So when I wrote one-page memos, which was the only thing they would read about relocation projects, I always had to couch the thing in terms of security. That’s the only thing that cuts any ice with the Americans. Your lead line had to be a shocker. You’d say ‘Security is going to tumble in Pleiku province unless . . .’ Then I’d say ‘Because of the following reasons . . .’ And then you’d show that you did your homework.
“‘These people are pro-VC, they’re turning pro-VC, they have pro-VC attitudes, they’re stirring up among the refugees,’ you’d write. Then you had to add a little short paragraph with some positive upbeat recommendations at the end. You double-spaced the whole thing. One-page memo. We sent them to the military and they hand-carried them, all ten copies, to give to Bunker and to the science advisor, who would get them directly to Westmoreland or Abrams and not through channels. That’s how I’d get things done, it was the only way to do it. And then you had to grab people at a cocktail party or somewhere and put the bee in their bonnet.”
HE WAS NEVER shy or cautious about speaking his mind. He was willing to testify before Congressional committees, or talk to any high-ranking visitors who came to Saigon. He felt sickened by what was happening to the Montagnards. An American in Saigon named Don Luce remembered Dr. Hickey giving him a very long, brilliant, deadly analysis of the war, point by point. When Mr. Luce asked the anthropologist why he did not join others who were working to stop the war, he thought Dr. Hickey looked quite startled.
“He said ‘I am a scholar, not an activist,’” Mr. Luce recalled.
In the spring of 1971, wanting to get out, Dr. Hickey tried to return to the anthropology department at the University of Chicago, where he had done his graduate work. It was his hope to use the research library at the university for his project on the Montagnards. The faculty members in the department refused to have him; they declined to discuss the decision. It was believed that Dr. Hickey’s association with The Rand Corporation—that link with the military—was the reason for the rejection. There was some concern in the United States that a new McCarthyism, as the headline in an article in The Wall Street Journal asked, was arising, and that the issue of academic freedom was at stake. In Saigon he seemed saddened and upset by the rejection but he did not want to talk about it. He kept on writing reports on the pitiful plight of the Montagnards, who were being made refugees or who could no longer farm because the land had been affected by herbicides and bombing.
The ending for him was more dreadful than he had suspected it would be.
“When I left the Highlands the war was over, it was lost. It was March 1973. Kontum was a dead city. It was unbelievably depressing, this lovely, lovely, lovely little town, half of it in ruins. The shops were closed. There were ARVN soldiers wandering about aimlessly at night, eating roasted corn, which was all they could afford. The one restaurant that was open had almost inedible food.
“Then I did the last of the herbicide interviews at the old Camp Enari outside of Pleiku. I saw them build that camp, it was the headquarters for the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. And it was now filled with Montagnard refugees. The GI signs were still on the walls but they were all blackened from smoke because everyone was cooking on braziers. They said things like ‘Movie at 2000,’ ‘Mail Call 0900.’
“And here are these poor Montagnards everywhere in what had been offices. It was filthy, filthy dirty. They were telling me such depressing stuff. They had been bombed.
“I said to an American there ‘Look at this, the 4th Infantry is going to come and save them from communism and look at them sitting in the 4th Infantry camp. The 4th Infantry is gone and the people have never been worse off in their lives! The worst had happened. The Americans up there were a bunch of bums. They were the worst.’ Oh, they were ghastly people. They thought of nothing but themselves, they were all shacked up with Vietnamese girls, with Montagnard girls. They were drunk. They were awful to the people. They were ex-military who had all become civilians. I think a lot of them were involved in corruption. I couldn’t even talk to them. I didn’t want anything to do with them. Oh, Pleiku was so dreary and dirty and the place was just so depressing. I said ‘The war is over, it’s lost. All the government controls are these little pinpoint towns.’
“I went down to Saigon, and Peter Glick said he was going to build a new hotel. I said ‘Are you out of your mind?’ And Nguyen Ngoc Lieng said he was going to start a university, and I said ‘Who for, the VC?’”
When, at last, after saying for so long he wanted to leave, it was by ship. Dr. Hickey booked a cabin on the States Line ship called Idaho. He had lunch with friends, then people came for drinks aboard ship, then a small group went to dinner on shore at the Tour d’Argent restaurant, which always had excellent crab. The next day, at nine A.M., he sailed.
“It was strange. I wasn’t sure how I’d react. I was up on deck and of course we were going through all the defoliated rung sat—the mangrove swamp—at the mouth of the river. It was like a desert. I just felt a sense of relief at leaving.”
That day in Washington there were many statues in his apartment which I remembered from Saigon; they gave the living room a gold shimmer. One of them was of a Thai Buddhist hand, fingers together, palm upright. There was nothing there to remind you of the armies. By his desk on the floor were the charts of Montagnard genealogy on which he had worked for so long writing an ethno-history on the Montagnards.
His Montagnard assistant, Touneh Hantho, often felt depressed looking at the pictures in the old magazines from Indochina in Dr. Hickey’s files. He felt so homesick for the Dan Him Valley, between Dalat and the coast.
“I tell him not to think about it too much, to think about the future,” Dr. Hickey said. “I say ‘Think of your family who are happy in Santa Barbara where your children are getting a nice education. The nuns out there are treating them beautifully.’”
He was occasionally irritated by the continuing work of a tiny group of the antiwar people in Washington, who he thought were acting as propagandists for North Vietnam. For years, he kept saying, a political settlement to the war and a coalition government were the only solution, but he had not much cared for any of the Vietnamese in power, in Saigon or in Hanoi. “I never thought of the North Vietnamese as God’s gift, you know!” he said. “But that gang we had there—well, we were running a school for corruption. Everybody was out for themselves. That gang!”
Sometimes he glimpsed some of the young Americans who had gone to Vietnam not as experts, not as soldiers, but to work as teachers with the organization called the International Voluntary Services. Many of them had denounced the war, had become important in the antiwar movement and had put their private lives aside.
“They got caught up in a formative time in their lives. They got very caught up, somehow it became terribly meaningful, their feelings about Vietnam and the war and they threw themselves into it,” he said. “The more extreme antiwar people got caught up in the revolution. But the revolution didn’t pan out, it was a kind of a ripple. There was a certain impact to the whole thing but I don’t think it was all that great.
“The war is over. There’s a kind of funny letdown. I think they’re at loose ends. It was such a high period for them in terms of commitment and meaningful behavior. Now there’s a kind of low. They don’t know if they can ever achieve that again or even come close to it, caring so much about anything.”
Then Dr. Hickey went off to a weekend in the country with old friends in Washington, D.C., whom he had known when they worked in Vietnam for the U.S. government and who had kept in touch all those years, the way people do when they have been posted overseas together, when the friendships are fattened by pleasant memories and a shared nostalgia.
In the infancy of the war he had never imagined how it would all turn out, never dreamed that only the early memories of Vietnam would be so cheerful and endearing. There had been such grand times, like the week when the opera star Eleanor Steber came to Saigon. It was the same year, 1956, that Joseph Mankiewicz was making the film The Quiet American with Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy. Dr. Hickey was hired as an extra, to play a journalist, and given a pad and a pencil for the scene. Miss Steber gave two concerts at the old Majestic Theatre, which had no air conditioning. There was a dinner for her at a fancy restaurant called Bodega, which years later became a dark, slick place with a California décor. It sold pizzas to GIs and other Americans who didn’t mind paying too much. Its name was the Pizzeria.
“The old Bodega was very elegant, it was marvelous. It had this little bar and a baby grand piano. That night the fellow playing it started ‘Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.’ Steber kept insisting that the song was stolen from Puccini. Then she said ‘I’ll show you!’ She started singing ‘Un Bel Di’ from Madame Butterfly. You could have heard it all the way down Catinat. Ah, she was marvelous.”
In the summer of 1976, when he was working on the contemporary history in his book on Montagnards, reviewing the years when he had been in Vietnam, Dr. Hickey had trouble. He used to say in Washington that he would not let himself brood about the war, he would not give himself over to thinking about it. It is a resolution quite commonly made by Americans who want to get on with their work and lives.
“I find it harder to block out now,” he said. “I can’t seem to do it any more. I’m homesick for Vietnam and Cambodia and the old days. It’s with me all the time.”
THERE IS THE scrapbook of that year in Vietnam, the first strange and exciting year abroad. There were always scrapbooks in my family, pushed far back on the shelves of the closet but never thrown out, and the scrapbooks of my friends, as if all of us insisted on a peculiar proof of our lives at their most deceiving. The pictures were counterfeit certificates of being alive: what they showed was almost never what counted and they were nearly always quite bad. There we were—setting forth and coming back, laughing, hugging, acting, on beaches, on boats, on the backs of camels, on foot, on rivers, in cars, up mountains and down church aisles.
The images of Vietnam in 1956 lie on the self-sticking black pages under the plastic sheets, just as I once so carefully placed them. Opening the book after so long, and dreading it, I see again the tiny children at the high raw desks in a school, the clean soldier smiling because he is being photographed for the first time in his life, the villagers washing in the river. They have not moved or disappeared.
I was in Vietnam by chance, wanting to imitate a grandmother who had once gone from Titusville, Pennsylvania, to China and because I knew a charming young man in New York named John Gates, Jr., who was being sent out there as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps although his work was for the CIA. In those days connections with the CIA were not openly spoken of but it was not considered degrading or even unhealthy work. Lots of men out of Harvard and Yale went to the agency, making little jokes when people asked them what they did.
The years before 1956 had been malignant and frightening. I can still hear the loud, crashing voice of Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin as he punched out accusation after accusation against people he claimed were Reds, traitors, dupes and saboteurs. I had a casual friend in Washington Irving High School whose parents had been Communists in the 1930s. For a while I was afraid Senator McCarthy would cite the parents, then the daughter, then her friends. There were other troubling memories: a roommate who had a friend named G. David Schine, who conducted investigations with the lawyer Roy Cohn of suspected Communist influence or infiltration for the Wisconsin senator.
All of this and the war in Korea and my own cowardice froze a crucial and questioning zone of intelligence in me that took years to thaw.
In Vietnam that first year I thought it splendid that the Americans were making a democracy in South Vietnam. It was part of our national tidying-up of the world. Eight years later I finally knew better. Fifteen years later the real punishment came when I went back to Vietnam and could not believe it was the country where I once had been.
Some of the pictures in the scrapbook are of faces I remember but do not know why. The tall, thin girl in the polo coat that was me, had my name, stands by a sign that reads: Ligne de Demarcation Militaire Provisoire. It was the 17th parallel. It was cold and damp, so I wore my New York coat. The 17th parallel looked like nothing. There was a wooden bridge of medium size crossing the Ben Hai River. It led to another half of the nation which I had been taught to fear. There was only a soldier standing at the other end—behind him a garrison—a flagpole and the wide plain bridge that you could run on, then turn, to pose for a photograph. The soldier did not point his gun or shout to get off. “We have decided to extirpate the Communists,” a notice on a wall in Quang Tri said. It was in English, a questionable benefit, for the peasants there spoke only their own language.
In some of the photographs there is a Vietnamese interpreter named Mr. Luoc who always held his head back and looked down on the camera. When I left Vietnam that year I gave him the man’s watch I wore, and years later, looking at such a huge number of soldiers, then wounded, then prisoners, I would always hope to find him again by spotting the expensive large watch. He was very keen on learning English; he said it was important for the future, but he said it in his strange, sad, astringent way. I always looked for him when I went back, everywhere. He had no address in 1956, so all I could do was keep glancing at the faces, looking at the watches. I do not know what side he chose, or if he chose at all, this complicated and angry man, or even if the watch from Switzerland kept working for him as I promised it would. There were years when I wondered what he had been trying to tell me, what kept me from hearing it.
He was an intense young man, my own age, who wanted to be in a university but had no money. Mathematics was a passion but I was of no help there, for he knew far more. He was unhappy with the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem because a male relative of his had been put in jail. Once, in Quang Tri, as we walked, he said that it would be better if President Diem was done away with. I remember my shock and how I pleaded with him not to talk like that because it was dangerous and stupid. Mr. Luoc was not convinced, said something I could not follow, and made it known that it was bad Diem came from Hue, strange people came from Hue, that he was not realistic, that he was a mystic, that what was needed was something else, that he was not admired but feared in Saigon, that Diem should be shot.
In the scrapbook there is a photograph of the President in a white suit, talking slowly, as he did for hours when I went that day to see him. It was clear even to him that his visitor could not follow the endless interlocking circles of what he was saying in French, so he wrote on a small white card, which I have kept, a précis of his remarks. It was in French. “Vietnam is conscious of representing the aspirations of non-Communist Asia. It is a grand responsibility and it is also a test for Southeast Asia . . .” He went on trips; the diplomatic corps, the American military and the experts followed him. Once we went to the Plain of Jars and to a place called Cai-San in Long Xuyen province where a huge refugee settlement for the Vietnamese from the north had been built. President Diem, wearing a hat, a dark tie and a suit, sat on a gunboat which went slowly down a canal. He was trying to smile, sitting very upright. The Americans were anxious for him to be seen by the villagers who had been lined up.
During one long stupefying ceremony that took more than two hours, a peasant in black pajamas stood before a dais, which had four microphones, and read a very long speech from a bunch of papers. He was admitting to being a Communist, regretting it, confessing his sins, saying that he had now seen the light, but the length of the speech, and its complexity, seemed to make it hard going. The self-confessions were part of a new effort called for by the Americans, which grew into the Chieu Hoi, or “Open Arms,” program, meant to encourage defections. In 1970 it was hard for young Americans to believe me when I said it was such an old, old idea.
In Saigon, I lived with a group of Filipino doctors, nurses and public-health workers who were called “Operation Brotherhood.” In principle, Operation Brotherhood was supported by the International Junior Chambers of Commerce; the idea was supposed to have come, like a white storm, from the Philippines, but it was actually the brainchild of Colonel Edward Lansdale, a counterinsurgency expert in the CIA who had been sent to the Philippines in 1951 to help the government crush the Hukbalahap rebellion. Later the colonel became advisor and close friend of Ramon Magsaysay, the Secretary of Defense, and helped him to become President of the Philippines in 1953.
There were more than a hundred Filipinos who lived together in a cheerful stew; the house was at 25 rue Chasseloup-Laubat, which later was renamed Hong Thap Tu. Vito, Magdalena, Buddy, Paul, Carola: They were cheerful, young, hard-working and nice. Most of them were women. They traveled in teams throughout the south, opened first-aid stations and taught some public health. The idea was that Filipinos would be more acceptable to the Vietnamese than whites, they would adjust better, it was good for an anti-Communist Catholic Asian country to be ostensibly taking the lead in helping Vietnam. But there seemed to be constant quarrels and difficulties between the Diem government and the leaders of O.B., as it was called. Some operations were done, a few clinics were set up, the nurses tried to nurse. I took notes for an article for The Reader’s Digest.
The head of O.B. was a talented Filipino named Oscar Arellano, a friend of Colonel Lansdale. He was an architect, a gifted and inexhaustible man who chose to be a teddy bear at times, a tyrant at others. He did not much believe in sleep and kept us worried about his health. I was told, and I believed it, that during the Japanese occupation in World War II he had been without fear and taken risks that later made him a man to be honored. I did not know until I saw him in Hong Kong in 1970 quite by accident, sat with him in a restaurant, and heard in astonishment the same mush I heard so eagerly in 1956 about the wonderfulness of American intentions and the importance of O.B., that I saw him as a pitiful man or one of immense self-deceit. He suddenly seemed to choose to know very little about the war, to think nothing too nasty had happened in Indochina, that we must not dwell on the tragedy, that the ending would make all of us proud. He was a fine actor, pouring his life into that odd, unnatural role the Americans had elected him to play. The Philippines did not become an important anti-Communist force in Vietnam; the Vietnamese did not at all trust other Asians manipulated by the Americans, so there were few of them when I came back, mostly in offices, quiet people who did not count for much.
JOHN GATES, JR., who is always called by his childhood nickname Demi, was an original and romantic man of a certain impeccable eastern background, which meant St. Paul’s School, Harvard, debutante parties and the New York Social Register. In the fifties I was always beguiled by men who could make me laugh—it seemed a special American talent—so his humor and bravado caught and held me for years. We were a dull generation, and a greedy one, so it was not unusual when Demi Gates said so many times how much he wanted to make money, be on the cover of Time. Line his pockets with the losses of lesser men, he would say, laughing. After college he had gone to Europe and settled in Spain, where he ran a small printing company in Madrid and had fun. I used to wonder if the migraine headaches, the uncertain memory and the peculiar passion for parties made him a very good man in intelligence or espionage, but it did not then matter. In 1955 and 1956 he worked for Colonel Lansdale in Vietnam, and hero-worshipped him. He had a nice way with people; the Filipinos found him charming and whimsical.
In the spring of 1975, after a fifteen-year lapse, I saw John Gates again; we met for lunch in a Brazilian restaurant near the bank on Park Avenue where he worked in investments. He married a very pretty woman from Oklahoma who rarely spoke and painted sweet murals. She was an interior decorator, they had no children but had a house in Southampton and a house in Palm Beach, which suited them both very well. That day in the Brazilian restaurant, over the black beans, he could still make me laugh, still make me see the charm, but there was nothing we could agree on.
“I love this country,” he said, above the beans. “When anything gets out of whack, there is a correcting force within both the government and our society which takes care of it—something’s wrong, a story comes out in Time, it begins to improve; things are normal again.”
I said others were not so sure, that, for example, the struggle of the blacks in the civil-rights movement had not ended because of a story in Time. He then said something about Nixon stepping out of line and being clobbered by Congress.
His wife, Letitia, had gone to Southampton; he was alone in the apartment in the East Seventies when I came for dinner, which he cooked. The very long yellow living room had a portrait over the fireplace of Letitia holding a dog. The two tiger-skin rugs on the floor, the animal’s horns coming out from the wall, all trophies of a hunting trip in East Africa, and the fancy yellow silk curtains gave the room a theatrical look, the feeling of a set waiting for the actors. It was a great room for giving parties, he said.
When the food was finished, nothing went as well. He would only say that during his two years in Vietnam he had trained the Vietnamese in a paramilitary operation. Its purpose was to make the soldiers understand how to have a good relationship with the villagers so they would be regarded as the friends of the peasants. Then, as a civilian, he worked for the Department of Defense, attached to the Military Assistance Advisory Group. He left the CIA years ago, he said not once but twice, then three times, and he had not kept up with the war. It was so long ago, he said.
“I was doing psychological warfare, civic action, political warfare,” he said. “I really can’t give you too much of that background.”
He did not understand why I began to laugh, to tell him it need no longer be a secret, I knew more secrets now than he dreamed of, and the Pentagon Papers had been in print for four years.
“Under the Geneva Agreement, MAAG was restricted to only a certain number of military. I came home, was demobilized and went back out as a civilian, doing basically the same thing,” he said.
He didn’t want to talk about the war, he wanted to watch the NFL game. He said it was Monday night, the football game was the reason he was staying home and had planned to do nothing.
“I’ve never told anyone I was in Vietnam. No, I wasn’t ashamed of it. I never mentioned it because it would always bring up an argument in which I was on one side and everybody else on the other,” he said. “But I’m ashamed we got beaten so badly. What the hell, you can’t really argue with people who don’t know what they’re talking about. And I didn’t even really know what I was talking about, in retrospect.”
He thought the war had been lost because of the terrain. It was too difficult for American troops, even with their air support, their superior weaponry and equipment. Jesus, that terrain, he said.
The Civic Action Program—copied from the Communists—recruited, trained and assigned cadres to live in villages and assist the villagers while persuading them of the merits of the Saigon government. It was not a success, he said. “We set it up, we pumped some money into it, we got the government to give them some help. Every time they ran out of medicine I had to run around and try to find some. We found a lot of French medicine. It was just a make-do operation; we started that thing with just nothing.
“No, I’m not ashamed of it, it’s just that I just don’t like to really be involved in anything that’s a failure, right?”
It was he who so many years before had told me what good fighters the Viet Minh had been, what an awesome and resourceful army they were, how some of the Communist programs could be adapted by the Americans to help the Vietnamese in the south.
“I don’t know . . . Look, to be perfectly frank, the Vietnamese war bores me,” he said. He remembered the name of one woman whose son had been killed there, but he thought most of his friends’ sons had evaded the draft, which was wrong.
He saw one antiwar demonstration, on Wall Street in 1970, when the peace marchers were attacked by construction workers. “We were all rooting for the hard hats. They weren’t rough enough, in my book. The peaceniks were very irrational and impractical. They were screaming and yelling about peace and love and they were all hopped up on pot. They were freaks; they were nothing we could ever relate to. They were screaming and yelling when they came down, shouting all those crazy things. Frankly, I was all for the hard hats and I think everybody else was who was looking at it. They were literally asking to be beaten up.
“You’ve got to understand that I’ve been brought up so that when my government says go out there and fight, you go out there and fight. When I’m told by my government to do something, I do it.”
But he had thought about the war, it turned out, then he had stopped paying attention around 1971. “I never talked about it. I avoided it. I used to see it on television as little as possible. When they always showed the other side of the story, I’d turn it off. They never did show anything but the other side, the antiwar side.”
I thought the interview might bring on a migraine, but it didn’t. He went to a couch and lay down. He felt tired.
“It was a military take-over that we were trying to fight by military means, and we lost. That’s all, it’s as simple as that.”
Yes, he had remembered the hopes he had for the Civic Action Program, for the cadres. “Obviously they were not as dedicated as the VC cadres. It was a helpful program but it didn’t work, that’s all, I guess. You got them from anywhere you could. They were paid, they weren’t paid enough. Remember, we only had about ten teams by the time I left.”
I asked him if we had paid the cadre more, would they have believed more, been better. But by then he wanted to see the football game more than anything. He clearly did not want to hear that the Civic Action Program had lived, taken huge shape under other names and not worked either.
“Basically I still look at it as a North Vietnamese military invasion. I mean, for Christ sake, I don’t really see that we’re the bad boy!”
He and Letitia had taken a trip around the world in 1973—he was on leave from the New York brokerage firm where he worked and had not yet joined the bank—and it was his idea to go back to Vietnam. At lunch in the Brazilian place with the beans, he said Saigon hadn’t changed much. Then he saw my face. “Well, we were only there for two days.”
It was too bad that the Vietnamese didn’t speak French as much in Saigon as they had when he was first there, that the Hotel Majestic wasn’t what it once used to be.
“There was a lot of anti-Americanism which I didn’t find distressing at all. I’ve always thought the minute the Koreans turned anti-American was when they wanted to fight the battle themselves. I was hoping that the South Vietnamese would say to themselves ‘We can do a better job than you guys.’
“We were flying from Phnom Penh, we must have flown around some Communist areas. We came in, really, from Camau—we really flew the length of South Vietnam between Saigon and Camau. And sure, every once in a while you’d see some evidence of war. But I mean it’s a hell of a big country and just how much real devastation was done, well, I question it.”
He was always a kind man, sometimes squeamish, who could not bear to see people in pain. There was the summer when a young Japanese woman came to New York for more corrective surgery on her face, which had been burned at Hiroshima. He drove the two of us somewhere but he could not look at her. Seeing him again that night, I wanted to tell him that the Japanese woman’s face, which had already borne so much surgery, was a pretty and functional thing compared to the faces in Vietnam without noses, eyelids, lips, chins and ears. She was only scarred, she could chew, swallow, speak, close her eyes. Napalm and white phosphorus did their work very well on human skin and bones, I said, but he turned away. What the hell, he had never listened to the voices coming at him in the sixties. He was not going to put up with the ranting now.
He spoke of the war as if it were a wild good-natured kind of poker game, as so many others have.
“They kept upping the ante until we didn’t have any more cards to play with,” he said. “I was hoping we’d have the same success in Vietnam we had in the Philippines. Obviously there wasn’t much hope for that. I didn’t think they had that kind of persistence; they showed a lot more tenacity than I thought. What am I going to believe? You think I’m going to listen to anything that the goddamned press is going to tell me about the war? It was so slanted that you didn’t believe anything they said. Most people didn’t believe what they said. ‘The ARVN is this or that’ or ‘Thieu is this or that,’ You no longer knew what to believe.”
I knew how to answer him: the press did not plan the war or fight or vote on it. Not that many reporters had even done a good job of reporting it. The daily briefings—the meaningless recitals of the military—had been a sham, but no one refused to write them.
“Why should I feel responsible? I was sent out to do a job and I did it,” he said. “It bores me, it’s ancient history, I would just like to turn my back on it, I don’t even like to talk about it. Well, I mean, gee whiz, Gloria, what do you want? Did you want to have the Communists walk down and just take over the whole area? I don’t care how you view the Viet Cong, I think they were totally Hanoi people. I hate aggression. I’m against it. It was a bald-faced military effort by the North Vietnamese to get the rice in the south because the rice deficit in the north—”
I didn’t let him finish his theory about the north wanting the rice of the south, which for years because of the war had to export large amounts of rice to feed its own people.
The quarrel began then. He went to look at the football game, muttering “I don’t want to remember.”
IN SAIGON, TWENTY years before, Demi Gates had been upset by a novel that was only two hundred and forty-seven pages and just being published in the United States. Its title was The Quiet American by Graham Greene.
In 1956 in that hot city of yellow and green, both of us read the American edition. It was a first warning for me, but I dismissed the book as brilliant but cynical, until it came back to haunt me more than I ever thought such a small, light book ever could. Demi Gates thought it was awful: a deliberate attempt to make the Americans look like meatheads and bad guys, as he put it. Actually, the novel did not make much difference then, least of all to the Vietnamese. Fowler, the narrator, is an aging British journalist covering the war between the French and the Viet Minh. The young American, Pyle, talks of democracy, quotes a book called The Advance of Red China, wants the Vietnamese girl Fowler has, and intends to build a third force in Vietnam which will improve the place and make it a democracy. Fowler thinks that the American, because of “his gangly legs and his crew cut and his wide campus gaze,” is incapable of harm. But the Englishman cannot trust Americans like Pyle, for he knows that such “innocence is a kind of insanity.”
When the two men are trapped in a watchtower at night, with two frightened Vietnamese soldiers, Fowler tells the American: “You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren’t interested.” Pyle says—as all of us once said—they don’t want communism. Fowler replies that they want enough rice, they don’t want to be shot at. He goes on: “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 Indo-China goes . . .” This is Pyle speaking.
“I know the record. Siam goes, Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean?”
All of us were not unlike Pyle: earnest, ignorant, friendly, hygienic, preachy. We talked the way he did. “If Vietnam goes . . .” became an obsession, a blue-eyed marching song.
The Quiet American was attacked in The New Yorker by A. J. Liebling, a writer and humorist who later became somewhat revered for his articles on American journalists, called “The Wayward Press.” The book, which Mr. Liebling read on a transatlantic flight, made him very angry. He feared it might confuse and upset the French. In April 1956 he wrote:
Mr. Greene’s irritation at being a minor American author does not justify the main incident of the book, which is a messy explosion in downtown Saigon, during the shopping hour, put on by earnest but unimaginative Pyle in collaboration with a bandit “general” in the hope of blowing up some French officers. (The French postpone their parade, and the explosion merely tears up women and children) . . .
The book begins with Pyle in the morgue. That is the big gag: A Quiet American. It then goes to the events that led up to his arrival there. . . . Near the three-eighths pole, it appears that Pyle, who is a cloak-and-dagger boy attached to the Economic side of the American Legation, is helping the bandit get plastic, which can be used in the manufacture of bombs. . . . I figured the bandit was fooling naïve young Pyle. Not at all. Pyle knew all about the bombs and the contemplated explosion. So did the whole American legation.
Mr. Liebling also referred to Mr. Greene’s preface, which was a letter to friends in Saigon. The writer explained that historical events in his novel had been rearranged and none of the characters were based on originals. He had only borrowed the name Phuong from the wife of his friend because it was “simple, beautiful and easy to pronounce, which is not true of all your countrywomen’s names.” Mr. Liebling was vexed by the preface:
Greene was, then, writing about a real explosion, a historical event, which had produced real casualties. And he was attributing the real explosion to a fictitious organization known as the United States State Department. . . .
But whether it had or hadn’t, anybody who read the book would wonder whether the State Department was engaged in the business of murdering French colonels and, in their default, friendly civilians. . . .
He called Mr. Greene’s book a “nasty little plastic bomb.” “There is a difference, after all, between calling your over-successful ally a silly ass and accusing him of murder,” Mr. Liebling said.
I lent the novel to a veteran who wants to write. He did not like it. His platoon had been around Dau Tieng, near the Michelin rubber plantation; like most American troops, he had never seen Saigon or any city in Vietnam. Besides, he said, all the people in the novel were old. He did not see what could still be learned from The Quiet American or the conversation in the watchtower between Fowler and Pyle. Almost everything, I said.
THERE WAS A “wanted” poster of Wesley Fishel. It said he was wanted for murder. He even kept one of the posters, but could not find it to show me in his office at James Madison College at Michigan State University in East Lansing. The room bulges with papers, files, bookshelves, periodicals. Dr. Fishel, a professor of political science who teaches a course to undergraduates on international politics, became a target for antiwar protests because he had for two years been a close advisor to President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and had headed the Michigan State University Advisory Group in Vietnam from 1955 to 1958. In 1969 he was Visiting University Research Professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and senior consultant to the vice-president of the university, where he had helped create a Center for Vietnamese Studies and was editor of its journal Southeast Asia.
His troubles in the United States started when Ramparts, a magazine now defunct, published an extraordinary article in the spring of 1966 on how Michigan State University had been a willing partner of the Central Intelligence Agency in South Vietnam, carrying out “counterinsurgency” tasks in support of a government denying civil liberties to its citizens.
The article was extraordinary because in 1966 there was not yet a record for the public of the secret commitments, the false official reports, the disguised escalation and what one reporter called “the contrived public relations arguments that victory was essential and turning back was unthinkable . . .”
It was the first connection made for American students on hundreds of campuses—who were not yet protesting the war or the draft in large numbers—to the link between the universities and the war machine, to the complicity between the universities and a detestable foreign policy. Furthermore, the article had an introduction by an economist named Stanley Sheinbaum who had been the campus coordinator for the Michigan State University Advisory Group in South Vietnam for three years and now deeply regretted it. Mr. Sheinbaum called the article “a specific, if shocking, documentation of the degree of corruption and abject immorality attending a university which puts its academic respectability on lend-lease to American foreign policy.” He wrote of two critical failures in American education and intellectual life:
The first and more obvious is the diversion of the university away from its functions (and duties) of scholarship and teaching. The second has to do with the failure of the academic intellectual to serve as critic, conscience, ombudsman. Especially in foreign policy, which henceforth will bear heavily on our very way of life at home, is this failure serious . . . We have only the capacity to be experts and technicians to serve that policy. This is the tragedy of Michigan State professors: we were all automatic cold warriors.
Dr. Fishel provided me with an autobiography which made mention of his Vietnam connections and showed that among other organizations he had been a consultant at various times to the U.S. Department of State, that his published works included The End of Extraterritoriality in China and Language Problems of the U.S. Army During Hostilities in Korea, that he had held a Guggenheim Fellowship 1961–1962 and several other grants for research.
In Ramparts, Mr. Sheinbaum wrote he knew that some of the CIA agents embedded in the MSU group in Vietnam attained faculty status—some as lecturers and some as assistant professors—because he remembered signing the papers that gave them faculty rank. The first MSU professors joined Mr. Fishel in Saigon in late May of 1955; the CIA agents were ostensibly assigned to the police administrative division of the Michigan State group and worked as a self-contained unit that was not transferred to the United States Mission until 1959. The article claimed that the East Lansing School of Police Administration not only trained security forces for Diem but provided revolvers, riot guns, police ammunition, jeeps, handcuffs and radios.
Dr. Fishel denied the existence of CIA agents in the Michigan State group, and the supplying of weapons. Eight years later, he complained once more about that Ramparts article. “We didn’t supply the police with weapons other than target pistols. What our people did was to advise the Vietnamese police services on what kinds of weapons they should be armed with, and when they got them, how to handle them. Which equipment was best and which was worst. We have here reputedly the best school of police administration in the United States. The police advisors that we sent out—only a small number of them actually came from the faculty, because the Vietnamese needs were so great that they were hired from state police forces around the country.”
He did not stop going to Vietnam even when he was no longer chief of the MSU group. He had gone back on the Guggenheim Fellowship, and to write articles. In 1971 I caught sight of him in Saigon.
“I came back virtually every year after I left in 1958 for various reasons,” Dr. Fishel said.
He regretted nothing he had done; it was clear, however, that he felt many other people should regret their actions. He said, for example, that Stanley Sheinbaum had been required to leave the university because he had not completed his doctorate. He added that Mr. Sheinbaum had then found a job with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, “which made all of us who were his friends very happy because it tripled his salary, got him a respectable position and when he left here he was going to complete his Ph.D.” Dr. Fishel said he had seen Stanley Sheinbaum’s name in the papers as chief fund raiser for Dan Ellsberg during his trial in Los Angeles, but even this did not seem to convince him—for nothing could—that Mr. Sheinbaum had very deep feelings about the war. Dr. Fishel said that Mr. Sheinbaum “simply burned to get even” with Michigan State for taking him “out of academic life.” Many of Mr. Sheinbaum’s acquaintance find this almost humorous in its inaccuracy.
“And I was simply—as he explained to somebody else—sort of accidentally his victim,” Dr. Fishel said. “He didn’t really mean it against me personally, but I was the happy symbol of everything that was evil.”
The Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University came to life in July 1969 with a one-million-dollar grant from the Agency for International Development for the purposes of “economic and social development of Vietnam and its postwar reconstructions.” There were protests among the SIU faculty and other academics who feared that the Center would be used to uphold American policy in Vietnam and that AID was corrupting Vietnamese studies in the United States. Twenty of twenty-two members of the SIU Department of History signed a protest in February 1970. In October a conference was held by scholars and academics—the theme was “Scholarly Integrity and University Complicity”—who announced an international boycott of the Center.
One of the participants was a Vietnamese, Huynh Kim Khanh, from Ontario, who said: “I’ve read that the cost of killing one ‘Viet Cong’ is something like three hundred fifty thousand dollars—a real Viet Cong, that is, not just a gook or any Vietnamese. In these terms the million dollars given to the Vietnam Center is very cheap . . . But as the Center here is set up, it is part of a scheme to continue the American presence in Vietnam. This is simply no good and it is very dangerous. It is dangerous because it is part of the pattern of the war itself. Much has been said about this war’s being a ‘mistake,’ as though it were correctable. It is not; it is part of a larger pattern.
“The Center for Vietnamese Studies is an instrument of American neo-colonialism in South Vietnam . . . After 1945 one type of colonialism, that of small European countries with limited resources, was replaced by a new form of domination maintained by large countries with extensive resources, territories and populations, operating through foreign military and economic aid programs.
“The term aid itself reflects the fiction at the heart of these new arrangements . . . It is only when control exercised by military and economic means fail that the neo-colonialist powers bring troops into their own states . . . I am looking at Czechoslovakia and at Vietnam . . . We have to watch these superpowers, because with them it is not a matter of ideology; it is a question of power politics.”
IN 1969 WESLEY FISHEL was senior consultant to the vice-president of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and a Visiting University Research Professor of Government. He, in effect, headed the Center for Vietnamese Studies. It made him intensely unpopular, and a symbol of the collusion between the universities and the war, the technology and the sicknesses in the American society. At Southern Illinois, where he stayed for two years, there were demonstrations. The impetus on many of the country’s campuses for reform, resistance, challenge came from chapters of Students for a Democratic Society.
“The SDS decided that I was villain number one, their most evil man,” Dr. Fishel said. He spoke of Molotov cocktails being thrown through the windows of his offices on three occasions and of a May evening in 1970 when great numbers of antiwar students were “roaming the campus in bands,” while the National Guard was on duty with fixed bayonets. He remembers barbed wire. Dr. Fishel worried about his extensive files on Vietnam, which included the records of the many conversations he had had with Ngo Dinh Diem from 1950 when they first met in Japan. Later the university assigned two campus police to protect him and the office.
“My phone had been bugged. We’re not sure whether it was the SDS or the university. It was a sloppy job. In any event, on this particular evening there had been a crowd of about four thousand around the president’s house screaming for his blood. Because of the war in Vietnam, the Center for Vietnamese Studies was a symbol of imperialism and warmongering and so on. They had banners and posters.”
Dr. Fishel, who is a short man with broad shoulders and a husky body, said he was not without combat experience, which he was sure helped that night.
“I was on Iwo Jima, attached to the 3d Marine Division. I was an Army officer, commanding a detachment of interrogators. I was a first lieutenant. It was 1945 and we had the job of trying to persuade Japanese soldiers to surrender. I was under fire a good deal of the time and, I think, sort of foolish about things of this sort, or maybe I’m just normal. You don’t think about the fact that you’re in danger until after it’s all over . . . I was trying to protect my files and my papers. I was there by myself and trying to protect the women who worked for me—four of them, three students and a full-time secretary. They were very brave, but only, I suppose, because I didn’t seem to be alarmed.”
He spoke about books on the war which had mentioned him unfavorably, as well as the attacks from the antiwar groups. “I feel pain, not because of the personal attacks on me. No, it’s not pleasant. I was attacked in 1950 by the Beverly Hills California Republican Women’s Club—for supporting Dean Acheson. There was a lot of criticism. I remember this one particular group because this was an audience of five hundred women who ended up in a screaming rage because I was defending our policy in Korea. One woman got to her feet, she said: ‘When are they going to do something about those insane traitors in Washington who are selling us down the River of Rubles to Red Ruin.’ I was trying to explain why the war in Korea was being fought and why the United States and the U.N. were involved.” The woman, he said, believed that the United States had sold out and was not fighting the Communists in Korea.
He spoke of himself as a man who had withstood many sieges, some of them even in Saigon, and never given way. In the spring of 1958 when he had been very ill with food poisoning, there was a crisis with General “Hanging Sam” Williams and his colonels, Dr. Fishel said. The general had been urging President Diem to place the civilian police training operation run by MSU under the American military. One of the general’s arguments, Dr. Fishel recalled, was that the Michigan State people were just police officers and knew nothing about fighting a war. Dr. Fishel said he rose from his sickbed, had one of his private breakfasts with President Diem in the palace, persuaded him not to turn over the police operation to the Military Advisory Assistance Group, and won. His victory made General Williams shake with rage. It pleased Dr. Fishel to remember this.
“I had a kind of rapport with Diem which they envied and which they could not duplicate,” he said to me. President Diem had asked him for more MSU people to enlarge the police operation, but the university felt it was “an inappropriate project.”
“It wanted really to close it out,” Dr. Fishel said. “It felt that this was not an appropriate activity for the university to be involved in, however appropriate it might have seemed at the outset. It had become inappropriate. I agreed with the university’s view . . .”
Dr. Fishel said, with a shrug, he had been attacked from the far left and the far right. “The ones from the far left have been more unpleasant because I consider myself a liberal. It’s painful to see people who are your intellectual peers go off on a tangent—or what you consider a tangent—to be misled and to translate their interpretation of what they see into violent emotional irrational emotional attacks. Not just on me, but on anyone who holds a view different from theirs.
“I happen to be a very trusting, credulous person in the sense that I will take a person at face value until he or she is proved to be something other than I expected. When I see scholars who are experts in their own fields and who wouldn’t stand for the slightest bit of irrationality or monkey business in their professional fields coming into my field and behaving like little children or like people who have just escaped from a mental institution, it shakes me. Because my image, my youthful image, of the intellectual was a kind of demigod image. Does that make sense to you? It has been with great pain over the years that I’ve discovered that intellectuals are even human. You don’t like to see this because, as a student, you have this idealized image of the intellectual, a professor, as the great man who isn’t going to be swayed by the crass kind of things.”
A young instructor of Asian philosophy at Southern Illinois University seemed to have particularly offended Dr. Fishel. He was Douglas Allen, who was so outspoken and constant in his criticism of the Center, the MSU role in the war and of Dr. Fishel that he was dismissed from his job in October 1970 by the Board of Trustees at SIU. One graduate student, however, wrote that Mr. Allen was an example of “courage and dedication to many students.”
“He seized on the war issue as one which he would, in effect, I guess, ride to some kind of power never clearly defined. He fancied himself a leader of the students. How deeply he believed the things he said, I’m not sure,” Dr. Fishel said.
He saw such people in terms of power, wishing it for themselves. He could not understand that what they were seeking was the struggle to take power from those in command, and that what they had come to believe was that vital issues could no longer be settled by universities, presidents, statutes, decrees, politicians, generals and scholars, but in spite of them.
“He attacked me before this whole SIU field house full of people as a complete bastard, that’s a quotation, and as a warmaker who must be driven from the campus. And in the recording you can hear the audience just surge with cheers and howls and applause. Okay, now, this irritated me. Didn’t frighten me, it frightened some of the local police . . .
“You have to keep in mind that to almost all of these people I was nothing but a name that they had read about in Ramparts, thousands of copies of which were distributed free all over.”
In 1967 Dr. Fishel invited Hubert Humphrey, the Vice-President, to speak about Vietnam during the last week of the term after Memorial Day. He said two thousand eight hundred students filled the auditorium. “Hubert gave a very strong, supportive speech, trying to explain what Vietnam was about. I thought it went off very well. He had a good audience and he did a beautiful job.”
In 1968 Vietnam: Anatomy of a Conflict was published. It was a collection of essays and articles on the Vietnam war which Dr. Fishel edited and for which he wrote a long preface. In addition, each of the eight chapters—which contained articles critical of the war as well as those defending the American role—had an introduction by him. The first article in the last chapter, titled “Only Choice in Asia: Stay and Fight,” was also written by him.
“I speak from a position which has been consistently misrepresented over the years. It has never been a popular position and it is a position which I suppose would be difficult for the public to understand,” Dr. Fishel said. “But it was a position very similar to that of Diem in some respects—and I differed with him violently on others. Diem, as you know, violently opposed large-scale American action in Vietnam.”
He agreed his career had been affected by the antiwar movement. “That doesn’t bother me. It’s hurt only in a salary sense. I am not one of the university’s highest-paid professors, even if I am one of its best-known and perhaps respected ones. This simply reflects the fact that for a period of years I was highly unpopular and I was busy in the public arena.”
Dr. Fishel said he had not given as many lectures on Vietnam in 1974 as he had previously. “Last year I probably gave a dozen, but for years I was giving anywhere from fifty to one hundred lectures a year.” He thought the Ramparts article was inaccurate and that it had “a circulation and notoriety that far exceeded any of the expectations of the authors.” In Wichita Falls, Texas, where he was giving a lecture, he was greeted by a Brigadier General Winn, whom he described as one of the highest-ranking POWs in North Vietnam.
“He told me in essence that my name was a household word in the POW camps in North Vietnam because the North Vietnamese insisted that every single POW read that article from Ramparts as an example of how the American establishment was imperialistic, how we had deliberately made war and so on and so forth. That sort of startled me. I had no idea I had been read about in the prison camps. And he pumped my hand and said ‘I’m glad to see you in the flesh.’”
AFTER HE WAS fired by Southern Illinois University, some people suspected Douglas Allen was on a blacklist, for he could not seem to find permanent work. For three years he had one-year appointments at three different universities, until the fall of 1974 when he joined the faculty of the University of Maine. Mr. Allen, who is thirty-five, now has tenure. He teaches courses in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.
Following his dismissal from SIU, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in Federal Court, the American Association of University Professors held an investigation and placed SIU on a national censure list, and the university’s application for a Phi Beta Kappa chapter was rejected, he says.
None of this was as important to him as the slow, steady decline of the Center for Vietnamese Studies, which at the end of the second year of operation was moved off campus to a floor of a former dormitory building. During 1973–74 one hundred and four faculty and staff members were let go.
“There it stood: ugly and offensive, a focus for our sense of outrage, a destination for our marches and demonstrations,” Mr. Allen said. “Professors housed in the same building with the Center began to sign petitions demanding its removal from campus. There was room in the struggle for the person who did scholarly research and the person who spray-painted buildings with OFF AID. The strategy was to keep constant pressure on SIU and the Center by organizing forces on many levels of opposition and by keeping the Center in a state of confusion . . .”
They did just that. The Southern Illinois Peace Committee knew exactly who were the speakers at the Vietnam Center, and leafleted them, so in time the Center stopped sponsoring public lectures. Mr. Allen, a member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, said the movement attempted to “make the life of anyone coming to Carbondale and accepting the Center’s Funds exceedingly uncomfortable.” The decline of the Center was noticeable in 1970, he said, when Washington began to have doubts about the wisdom of its investment in Carbondale, for the Center was in a state of siege from January to May 1970 and the university was forced to shut down for a month.
In April 1972 fifteen Vietnamese in the antiwar movement “invaded” Carbondale. Most of them had come to the United States on AID scholarships, and they were there to persuade the seventy Vietnamese at SIU—the largest number at any American university—to hear them out. The SIU students waved Saigon flags, held high their signs, made noise, jeered and argued. They were told by Ngo Vinh Long of the role AID played in building prisons and “tiger cages,” in the training and equipping of the Saigon police, in the persecution and torture of Vietnamese political prisoners. When Le Anh Tu, a Vietnamese woman married to an American medical student, spoke to the SIU Vietnamese, something surprising took place.
“She said she would not attack her Vietnamese brother. She was saddened to see that her SIU brothers and sisters had learned so well Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization,” Mr. Allen said. “It was an incredible sight. Most of the SIU Vietnamese, who moments before had been screaming and waving Saigon flags, were silent and shamed, their eyes cast downward. She then analyzed Nixon’s policy and the situation in Vietnam, and even received some applause from the SIU Vietnamese.”
It was a day he never forgot.
It was the Vietnamese themselves who finally doomed the Center by ending the war, Mr. Allen said. It now exists on a shrunken scale and a harmless one, teaching a few students Vietnamese.
“Of course, if SIU had hired one professor to teach a few students Vietnamese, there would have been little if any protest,” Mr. Allen said. “But this was not what AID and SIU had in mind in 1969 when the university received an initial one million dollars and talked about future, separately funded contracts in Indochina.”
He thought the crippling of those plans had been a victory for the antiwar movement, that they had played a small role in resisting Washington’s policy of Vietnamization. But there was no elation, no great surge of triumph in it for him or the others.
“We shall never know how many Vietnamese were tortured or silenced because of AID police and prison training programs at Southern Illinois University and other institutions. We shall never know how many Vietnamese became ‘Americanized,’ became tragic victims of cultural imperialism, identified themselves with Saigon and Washington and cut themselves off from the progressive Vietnamese forces, at least partially, because of the AID educational and training programs at SIU and other institutions. But we do know, we certainly know, that the costs paid by the Vietnamese people were tremendous.”
FEW OF US who were there can claim innocence. It is useless now to ask what has happened to the Vietnamese who worked for the Americans, for the reporters who required them to be what we needed for our own advancement and gain and comfort. It is not a question of their being punished now. The question is if all of us harmed them and how much. Sometimes it seemed that Luong was changing—yet not changing—and I worried about how he might be affected by working for Americans. Yet I never worried so much that I let him go. The reporting depended so much on him; he was more important than I was. If there was in this war an army which he loved, he did not reveal it. All I saw was his pity and kindness for the victims. Long ago I asked him what he thought would happen if the war ended and the other Vietnamese won.
“I would have to go to many meetings and volunteer to give up my Honda,” he said. But he often spoke of breaking from us and being a simple man again, working as a farmer or in a café as a waiter. “It can be good in life to go down,” he said.
On one of the rare days when he was drinking that wonderful, sharp Vietnamese beer called “33”—which made his face flush—he spoke of a small nightmare. The war was over, his family was okay, he was calm. He saw himself in a room facing a man seated at a table asking him questions. The man was his own age, thirty-five or thirty-six, a chien si in the National Liberation Front who had been fighting in the jungle for all the years of his youngness. Luong loses his voice before this man, he cannot answer the questions. The other man is patient and waits, only looking at him.
I think he is fine. But I wait for word and cannot send any. Some letters are getting through to the south; some are getting out. The trouble is that I have no address for him, only a map he made of his house in Gia Dinh. In the cities there were often no proper addresses for the little dwellings tucked behind the big streets or boulevards, no common names for the alleys or cul-de-sacs or roads. There is an Esso station on Luong’s map which must now be gone. I did not think I would ever need an address for him, since Luong received his mail at the Saigon office of The New York Times. The expert reporter thought that would always be enough.
A FEW MEN were made experts in Vietnam and could not tolerate it. One of them was John Isaacs, who grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and in White Plains, New York, the son of a lawyer, who always wanted to be in the Foreign Service. He was accepted by the State Department and began that career in 1969. He spent thirteen months in Vietnam, but resigned in October 1971 in an unusual manner. Mr. Isaacs returned his civilian medal to William P. Rogers, who was Secretary of State, with a letter of resignation. He did not personally notify his immediate superiors in Saigon; he just packed, left a letter for the ambassador, mailed copies of it to a few senators, and went to the airport. A copy of that letter was given to a friend to hand-deliver to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon. Mr. Isaacs left his little apartment in good order. It was his contention that if he resigned in the normal way, it would have meant “two weeks of hassling.” A very quiet and calm man, not given to arguments and futile confrontations, Mr. Isaacs is also very stubborn. “They don’t like anyone resigning and so I am leaving on my terms, not on theirs,” he said in Saigon. “They won’t listen to my reasons anyway.” He was right.
In Vietnam he was assigned to CORDS, the agency in charge of pacification, to work with refugees. He thought it was a paramilitary operation and that his work was “a perversion of the traditional duties” of a Foreign Service officer, who was expected to report what goes on in a foreign country. Instead, Mr. Isaacs felt he was actively working to support a local government, and it was so. He was first assigned to Binh Tuy province in the coastal lowlands as an advisor to a Vietnamese called a social welfare chief who was trying to resettle five thousand two hundred repatriates from Cambodia.
“I was sent into the province with no knowledge of refugees, never having seen, smelled, touched or talked to a refugee,” Mr. Isaacs said. “I was supposed to advise a Vietnamese who had worked with refugees for four years.” He lived in Ham Tan, the provincial capital, with a team of one hundred and twenty American men. They were mostly idle, he said, because they didn’t know how to advise the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese did not want to be advised. He often wrote reports that were critical of plans to relocate Vietnamese and questioned whether the relocations were voluntary.
He was transferred to Bien Hoa, near Saigon. During those six months he realized what he could do. He began to provide a few reporters with documents, available only to CORDS personnel and usually marked Classified, that gave very clear examples of how the war was going. They were little case histories of deceit, greed, foolishness, corruption, malice, misunderstanding and stupidity. Some of the other young men in CORDS shared his misgivings about the war but did not try to do anything. Few Americans wanted to risk getting into trouble.
“A lot of people objected on practical grounds but they had no moral or ethical objections,” Mr. Isaacs said.
He did not have many friends. He worked very hard and when he gave us documents he would sometimes summarize their contents, or underline passages, to make sure we got the point. Nothing seemed to surprise him. He thought that the pacification program, with all its long and numerous tentacles, was a fraud being perpetrated on the American people to cover up a war that had long been lost. He would write notes in a red, or sometimes a green, felt pen. He wanted to provide a record, a sort of history, of what the Americans were doing and of what was happening to the Vietnamese.
Once he gave me a very long report from an American officer who had served in III Corps and who just before he left had submitted six pages in an outburst of frustration and anger. The name of the American, the district where he worked, the names of Vietnamese and Americans mentioned in the report had all been deleted by officials in CORDS. The American was a deputy district senior advisor to a Vietnamese district chief. Each district in each of the provinces had an American advisor who often had a deputy.
The report, dated February 24, 1971, criticized the district chief for stealing from a U.S. base camp that had recently been closed down and turned over to the Vietnamese. The American officer saw materials—electrical wiring, lumber, artillery ammunition boxes, tin roofing—being carted away. “The materials being sold from this base camp represented hundreds of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars being taken away by one man for his personal profit,” he wrote. As proof of the stealing, the American tried to take pictures of the materials being put in civilian vehicles, but he was told to desist by an armed Vietnamese who admitted such orders came from the district chief.
Another complaint in the report was that the Vietnamese in the People’s Self-Defense Forces, the village militia who were required to take turns guarding their village at night and observing any suspicious behavior of other villagers at all times, were paying the district chief to be relieved of their duties. The rate was three thousand piasters for a month without duty at night.
In the report the district chief—always Vietnamese—was referred to as the DC. The man who was the district senior advisor—always an American—was called the DSA.
“The district chief and his staff had a marked tendency not to report enemy-initiated incidents or other incidents which might lower their HES rating or otherwise reflect unfavorably on the DC,” the report said. HES meant Hamlet Evaluation System, the American method for grading the security of all the hamlets; it was based on reports, sent in by American advisors, which were fed into a computer in Saigon. The results were often inaccurate and optimistic. The district chief, a major, knew as well as any clever Vietnamese how obsessive the Americans were about the HES ratings, how much simpler life was if the Americans got only good news. At a meeting with local officials and police the district chief became quite nasty, warning the others to be most selective in what they let the Americans know.
“He told them specifically that if they did not personally see an incident, then it did not occur,” the American officer wrote. “He then proceeded to blame the Americans for the low HES ratings in some of the villages.”
The American complained in his report that the district senior advisor, a major in the U.S. Army, was an easygoing fellow who catered to the district chief and overlooked his rudeness, disrespect and dishonesty.
The Vietnamese officers at district headquarters seemed to have little regard for the lives or welfare of troops or civilians. Whenever wounded or sick troops or civilians were brought to District the Vietnamese duty officer would inevitably ask the U.S. advisors for someone to drive the casualty to the dispensary or hospital . . .
At about 1100H a young civilian girl was brought to District by a couple of women who had carried her several kilometers. The girl had a piece of shrapnel in her hip from a booby trap in a rice paddy. The Vietnamese duty officer asked us to drive her to the dispensary. I said no, that they had their own vehicles and drivers to do that. I then told the district chief, commo officer and S2 about the girl and they said they would get a vehicle to move her. When I went back to check, I met the S3 again and I asked him if he’d had the girl driven to the dispensary. He laughed and said he’d told the women to carry her there.
The report complained that the district chief had sent out local soldiers to warn villagers that they had better vote or face possible harassment to their families; one Vietnamese said he had been jailed for not voting, on the grounds that he must certainly be a VC supporter.
The American, who spoke Vietnamese, ended the report by saying that the district chief controlled the district by the “same methods the VC use, i.e., military force.”
His report was upsetting to CORDS officials, who did not seem to appreciate such frankness. It was circulated in III Corps with an attached, stern reproach from Richard Funkhouser, deputy director of CORDS, who seemed most annoyed that the officer had not spoken up sooner. The deputy director did not seem to realize that the protesting American was outranked by the district senior advisor, that the Army does not like junior officers to dispute what their superiors say, and that the American had taken a rather large risk and possibly jeopardized his military career by writing the report at all. None of this impressed Ambassador Funkhouser, as he liked being called, having once served as United States ambassador in Gabon. He was not grateful to the American, only vexed that he had made it all known so crudely. The report was circulated with a stern memorandum from Ambassador Funkhouser, whose point was that the American had shown rather bad form:
What is especially disturbing to me is the lack of information provided to this headquarters on the conditions he alleges during the period described. During the cited period visits to the district concerned by me and members of my staff revealed little information with regard to the allegations made by the deputy district senior advisor. Indeed, he noted in conversations with me that there were no problems in the district and all was going well. His report, no matter its validity, should be a lesson to us all. All members of CORDS must be made aware of their responsibility to pass to higher headquarters all information which might affect CORDS adversely in carrying out its advisory role.
Nothing about John Isaacs aroused suspicion. He had a quiet and diligent manner. His hair was short, he looked clean and neat, he did not complain. He was quiet and kept to himself, a man who wasted nothing. When he handed over material to us, he did not seem nervous, but we took precautions. Before he quit, he was promoted in rank in the Foreign Service.
When he returned to the United States in November 1971 Mr. Isaacs went to work for Americans for Democratic Action in Washington, D.C., as a legislative representative who also worked on the ADA monthly newsletter, analyzing Congress, bills, the budget and the voting records of the legislators. He went to antiwar demonstrations “on a nonviolent basis,” as he says, and signed petitions. He did not put on blue jeans, let his hair grow, smoke marijuana, speak the language of the sixties, or dive into the music or amusements of the young. At ADA he worked hard. He never received an answer from the Secretary of State or any reference to the civilian medal he returned. A one-sentence acknowledgment from an administrative officer in the State Department said his resignation was received and accepted. He now works as a legislative aide to a New York congressman who is on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
On the night the war ended, the last night of April in 1975, just before his thirtieth birthday, Mr. Isaacs did an unusual thing. He made two long-distance telephone calls—one to Detroit, one to New York—to speak to two reporters who had shared some of the struggle, and the strain, in Vietnam. It was an unusual thing because he prefers to write little notes. Although it is said that many Americans of his generation, who grew up in the wild, rosy days of the counterculture and tested themselves in the little furnaces of the antiwar movement, became depressed on reaching the age of thirty, it did not happen to him. In October 1974 Mr. Isaacs married a woman in the ADA office who did national political work.
He is still not a man who attracts attention or wishes it. He shows neither despair nor great hopefulness. He does not often speak of the war. He always seems overworked, a man of unusual privacy, not much changed.
“Well, I didn’t go off to grow carrots in Vermont,” Mr. Isaacs said. “But I regret being part of that effort in Vietnam which so hurt the country and the people. I may have counteracted that effort as best as I could. I may have taken the best course of action. I can’t be sure.”
PEOPLE SAID: AH, it was unbearable, a disgrace, a shame, they should all be shot or put away. They were complaining about the violence of other Americans, especially the antiwar demonstrators who used dreadful words like fuck and attacked the police and defiled public property while pretending to be so moral. You could still hear this talk long after I came home, knowing so much about murder. The violence they condemned did not mean the violence of the war in Vietnam: the twenty-one million bomb craters in the south which glistened when the rains filled them, or the thirty-nine million acres of land in Indochina infected by fragments of bombs and shells. They did not mean the violence done to the ghostly grey trees that had been poisoned. That was normal, war-normal.
In Washington, D.C., that first winter back a California boy, who had been in fourteen antiwar demonstrations, raided a draft office, been jailed three times, said yes, they had gone forth ready for violence, prepared to provoke it, sometimes needing it.
“We had to show we were not cowards,” the boy said. “We had to show we weren’t against the war because we were afraid of it.” I said I thought I saw his point. We were sitting outside the White House, where he hung out that week, bearing a sign saying STOP ALL AID TO THIEU. He went on talking but his words made my mind wander.
The purpose of the National Commission, established by The White House in June 1968 shortly after the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, was to examine the causes of violence and means of prevention in the United States. One of their reports on an antiwar demonstration was a careful, dry, detached document which did not even allude to the most important factor: it was the fury and helplessness felt by people persuaded their government would not see or hear them, let alone represent them.
Nothing, except this perception, seems left out of the report called Rights in Concord, a special staff study submitted by the Commission’s Task Force on Law and Law Enforcement.
In 1969 there was a series of confrontations in Washington, D.C., on January 18, 19 and 20, in connection with the inauguration of President Richard Nixon. The demonstrations, composed of various antiwar groups, were called by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the same organizing force that had brought together demonstrators for the March on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967, and at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention. The protesters were from a loose coalition of antiwar groups, local and national, which depended on MOBE officials to obtain the permits and make arrangements for mass demonstrations. MOBE’s leaders called once again for a show of strength to protest “another four years of war, political repression, poverty and racism.”
So people came back again. A vast tent went up behind the Washington Monument grounds, signs appeared—BILLIONAIRES PROFIT FROM GI BLOOD, VICTORY for the VIET CONG, REFUSE TO SERVE IN THE ARMED SERVICES, ABOLISH THE DRAFT, NIXON’S THE ONE: #1 WAR CRIMINAL. Marches formed and moved; men carried coffins with symbolic figures of Vietnamese war dead. Tiny bonfires were made of little American flags handed out by the Boy Scouts. Undercover agents from the FBI, the United States Attorney Office, the D.C. police force and the Department of Justice circulated through the crowds which gathered at the tent site. It was estimated that between five to seven thousand persons arrived for the counter-inaugural. FBI intelligence sources reported that some radicals in the tent site had bear traps and tire chains, but they were never seen. All of this is noted in Rights in Concord.
It was the first planned large-scale demonstration in American history to protest the inauguration of a President. Permission was granted for a counter-inaugural parade, which, symbolically, moved in the direction opposite to the inaugural parade. Men in black wore huge white sickly masks that were the faces of Richard Nixon. The morning of the huge march it rained and the grounds around the tent turned to mud, at least six inches deep in some places.
One crowd of demonstrators, which had marched from Franklin Park, stood along the inauguration parade route, held back from the street by a steel cable at the widest spot along Pennsylvania Avenue. Police from the Civil Disturbance Unit—especially trained in crowd psychology, tactical formations, use of special weapons, identification of explosive devices—stood directly in front of the demonstrators. They had thirty-inch riot batons. Units of the 82d Airborne Brigade from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, formed a line behind the police. They wore soft caps and long overcoats. The soldiers linked arms. They had no rifles. Nearly two hundred National Guardsmen, wearing battle gear and carrying rifles, lined up shoulder to shoulder next to the troops of the 82d. The effect was familiar, not startling. The street once more became a theater of war.
The report said:
When the President’s car reached the center of the crowd, a bottle and empty beer can were thrown into the street. Two cans with smoke coming from them were also hurled . . . Altogether, twelve hard objects and many wads of paper and tin foil were thrown. The President avoided embarrassment by waving at the bystanders on the other side of the street.
At no time did anyone attempt to break through the police lines. No oven cleaner was used. Other than verbal abuse and the few missiles that were thrown, no commotion engulfed the crowd.
After the inaugural parade, as the demonstrators dispersed, police chased and clubbed several of them at Madison and H Streets, fearing they were on their way to the White House. At least this is what the report says they feared. There is no suggestion that the police wanted to hit, liked the hitting.
On the corner of Vermont and H Streets a young woman, clearly marked with a white armband as a medic, went to assist a youth who appeared to have been injured during a scuffle with a policeman. The policeman turned and hit her with his baton. She began bleeding at the ear.
As demonstrators moved toward 16th Street, police continued the chase, swinging and striking.
At one point a city official intercepted a policeman chasing an eleven-year-old boy. The official escorted the frightened youth to a church. An eighteen-year-old girl was chased twenty-five feet by a policeman who kept hitting her across the back with his baton.
Helicopters attempted to locate groups of demonstrators running in the streets. Multiple sightings of one group by several policemen magnified their numbers in the minds of the police. It was later believed that no more than five dozen demonstrators continued to roam the streets; many began making their way back to their homes and to bus and train stations.
The Deputy Chief of Police in charge of the CDU was notified by his Command Post that ninety arrests had been made at that time. He replied, “Not enough. Not near enough.” Off the radio, the officer who had supplied the information said apologetically, “I’m sorry.”
At 5 P.M. on January 20, 1969, the counter-inaugural was considered to be over.
The report said that the city’s tolerant but firm approach to the demonstrators was responsible for avoiding large-scale violence. The report congratulated the Washington police and authorities on their handling of the counter-inaugural protest, and special credit was given to the assistant chief of the D.C. Police Department and to a MOBE attorney. There were one hundred and nineteen arrests, eighty-seven of them on that Monday, mostly during street skirmishes. Many of the arrests were for pedestrian violations. Ninety-nine males, ten females and ten juveniles were picked up. There was, of course, no praise for the demonstrators. There never was. Even now it is commonplace for men like Senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey—who once said Vietnam was our Asian adventure—to still point out how brutal and vulgar the demonstration were. He remains one of those men who did not find the draft as upsetting as people yelling “Fuck the draft.”
Four years later it happened all over again. Thousands of people, some in disbelief but moved by habit and disgust, once more went to Washington for a counter-inaugural as the same man was sworn in to the same office and the same war went on. We were kept apart from the inaugural parade, apart from the happy people, the women with corsages, the bands, the floats. The policemen looked less nervous. The 82d Airborne troops were once again lined up. When a Vietnam veteran in a field jacket, who had been a medic in the infantry, reached their line and whispered “Don’t do it, brothers, they’ll fuck you over as they fucked us over,” the soldiers did not see or hear him. They knew better. Then the veteran said it was useless being in Washington that day, we were only inconveniencing ourselves. But we already knew. It was a fiercely cold day. Our sadness and a sense of shame rose like a swamp gas that stayed fixed just above our heads, so only we could smell it.
AS A CHILD in Paris, David Sulzberger collected stamps, and this is how he first learned the names of countries in Indochina. Long afterward he could still remember their colored romantic faces. Vietnam was in three parts: the south, called Cochin-China, was a colony of the French. North Vietnam was Tonkin, a French protectorate. Central Vietnam, called Annam, was an indirect protectorate, which meant the Vietnamese Emperor and his royal court were allowed to exist, a cherished and handsome screen which did not always conceal power exerted by the colonialist. He had stamps from Cambodia, too, showing the babyish-looking prince named Sihanouk. David’s mother used to play a game with her small son: they listened to classical music on the radio and tried to guess who had composed it. When the boy was eight, in early May of 1954, a concert was interrupted to announce the fall of Dien Bien Phu. His mother cried as if she had suddenly been struck.
He is the only son of Cyrus and Marina Sulzberger, a famous couple who have lived in France since the years after World War II, famous for name and family, contacts and a newspaper. Cyrus L. Sulzberger, a columnist on foreign affairs for The New York Times, joined the newspaper in 1939, and after World War II was for several years chief of foreign correspondents, before he began the column. His father, Leo, was the brother of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times from 1935 to 1961, when he was succeeded by his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. When I was a reporter in the Paris bureau of The New York Times, Mr. Sulzberger was an awesome and aloof figure, not given to small talk or amusing comments. He had nothing to do with the foreign staff or the running of the newspaper.
It was a surprise when young Sulzberger left Harvard to go to Vietnam: the sons of famous men did not have to. There were always draft deferments for the privileged or for those in college.
Long after he had been in Vietnam, not as a soldier but as one of the bright young men working in the pacification program, David Sulzberger was not sorry he had gone and he knew why he had. “I was twenty years old then, with a certain amount of competitive desire to blow my father’s mind,” he said. “At that stage particularly, it was a way of throwing myself into a situation which couldn’t be anything but interesting, which would open wide, new waves of spectra to look at. I wanted very much to get there.”
WHEN I WAS a reporter in the Paris bureau Cyrus Sulzberger had two rooms in our office all his own, which none of us entered unless summoned. The walls were covered with the framed photographs of kings, heads of state, generals, sultans, prime ministers, archbishops and dictators whom he had interviewed and who had, at his request, autographed their photographs. He hung them all and took no man down even when he was deposed, dishonored or dead.
It was startling scenery. Sometimes the hundreds of solemn male faces—covering every inch of the walls in their thin black frames—had a squashing, silencing effect. There was no one of great influence or ambition whom Cyrus Sulzberger did not seem to know. It awed me that he had lunch with Malraux, could get to de Gaulle, had been damned by Mussolini. He was an indefatigable traveler, a tireless interviewer who kept meticulous notes and iron diaries of almost every conversation, every trip, every opinion, including his own, which were typed and filed and indexed by a succession of pretty girls in his office. In 1942 he married Marina Tatiana Lada, a well-born Greek woman whom he had met in Athens. During the early stages of the German occupation of Greece she was a lieutenant in the Greek Army Nursing Corps, but was able to leave to join Cyrus Sulzberger. They were married in Beirut, Lebanon. It was her husband who wrote in his memoirs about Marina Sulzberger’s work in the military hospital in Athens, of how she was given the job of carrying out buckets of amputated hands and feet of wounded or frostbitten soldiers.
“My parents had interesting experiences in World War Two; there was a much more clearly defined right side and wrong side to be on. They were on the right side. They could recount all sorts of good and bad things that had happened, but basically the war for them had been a period of intense work, fascinating experience, romance, heightened consciousness and youth,” David Sulzberger said.
“I was perfectly prepared to accept some of the exhilaration when the experience came along. You know, if people say to me ‘Did you have a good time in Vietnam?’ I’ll answer ‘Yes.’ If people ask me what was the best thing about Vietnam, and I say the food, people will think I’m putting them on. If I close my eyes and go into a trance and think about Vietnam, it conjures up flavor, smell, light, those types of feelings. It doesn’t conjure up emotion in the sense of feelings that can be practically translated into policies or books or ideas.
“Don’t hold this against me. But the thing which I think I will remember about Vietnam when I am a hundred years old and will talk about it to my children is the countryside, how beautiful the women looked, and the food.”
In that spring of 1975 when the provinces of Vietnam, one by one, were being taken as easily as shutters are slammed on windows, David Sulzberger remembered the impact on him of the World War II experiences of his parents, the snatches of stories he had heard, the reminiscences, the references to it, going back like fly lines. It is his small and dark mother whom he resembles, it is her slightness and dark eyes that he has, the same exuberant charm. He is an American who was born in Athens, raised in Paris, sent to an English public school named Winchester—a more intellectual school than Harrow or Eton, not as relentlessly social—then to Harvard. He worried about being drafted and thought he would rather enjoy being in the Special Forces, but people warned him there was some chance he might not make the grade or that he would have to suffer a year in the Army before going overseas.
“This would have been the summer of 1967, and for a year before that the situation in Vietnam was becoming extremely interesting without in the least bit becoming particularly clear,” he said. “Do you see what I mean? It was, from the sociologist’s or politician’s point of view, an interesting situation without yet being particularly controversial.”
Everything pointed to a career in the State Department: it seemed the most suitable and elegant channel.
His father seemed quite pleased, his mother more so, when he set his sights on working in Vietnam. He wanted to leave, to have an Asian adventure because of a girl who had pulled away from him. In Washington, D.C., a friend steered him to AID just as CORDS was being formed. The language training program was nine months; he started in July and quit at Christmas. He did not enjoy the program. He played a hunch: if you learned good Vietnamese, you were bound to end up in the boondocks.
“On the other hand, I did speak fluent French. All the Vietnamese who were going to be interesting in terms of what I was interested in—which was finding out what the hell was going on—would probably speak French,” he said. “The one thing I was least prepared for when I enrolled for Vietnam was the Americans I was going to be doing the program with.
“It sounds awfully snotty and snobbish, but it’s not a question of being snotty and snobbish really so much as the fact I simply hadn’t had all that much exposure. There were a lot of intelligent people in CORDS, but at the same time there was a lot of middle-mindnesses right at the beginning. There were a lot of people, for example, who were perfectly competent agrarian specialists who were learning the language with me, but I felt very isolated in terms of the group I was with.”
He mentioned meeting a man named Oggie Williams at a party in Washington—a tall, pleasant man who had been in Saigon in 1956 with the CIA, I thought—who offered him the right job. It meant living in Saigon and traveling a lot all over Vietnam. For the first year and a half he found working on the Chieu Hoi program to be interesting. The Chieu Hoi ministry was small, and unimportant in some ways, he said.
“The one thing that I could pass for was anything other than an American,” David Sulzberger said. “Because of that, and because I was younger than a lot of Americans in Saigon—there were a lot of my contemporaries out in the field, but there weren’t all that many wheeling and dealing in Saigon—I had access to not so much information as confidences that I think were directly related to the fact that I had no influence, or was not perceived to have influence.
“I did a thesis when I was at college on the origins of American involvement in Vietnam—on that and Franco-American relations on the subject of Vietnam from 1950–1960. I interviewed a lot of people like Jean Sainteny and General Ely, I interviewed Bernard Fall, who gave me a lot of information. I didn’t know anything about it, so I had no prejudices. I also read all the French documentation. And Lacouture—he was at Harvard on a Nieman, so that was incredibly useful for me.”
At Harvard there were two readers for a student’s thesis. The two readers on the Sulzberger thesis were Henry Kissinger, whose history course he took, and Stanley Hoffman in the government department. “One of them gave me a magna plus and the other gave me a summa; I just can’t remember which order it was in. Kissinger—I’ll say one thing for him, in the few times that I’ve run into him since then he has had the good manners to say ‘Oh, I remember you from then’ sort of thing. He’s usually particularly unpleasant toward former students. I think he regards himself as ill-treated by former students. I think that’s it.”
At first he had felt exhilarated and important and alive in Saigon. The job intrigued him. “I had never had access to an environment in which I could find out or not whether I was successful at, if you want, using my skills by being devious. By which I mean not going through regular channels. I think, instinctively, the regular channels meant the American system, and I’d never been much of a participant in that. At school I always managed to get around doing things the normal way. It didn’t take me long to realize that not only was I not particularly good at going through normal channels, but that normal channels were not particularly good at providing you with any results. Here was the perfect opportunity to avoid them, and demonstrate to the people who you might be eventually responsible to that by avoiding them you could come up with useful results.”
There had been two Vietnamese he was attached to and did not forget. One was a street child whom he nicknamed Public Enemy Number One, a child who sold newspapers most persistently and in a loud voice, a frowning boy who leaped at you outside the Hotel Continental. The other was a Buddhist from North Vietnam who had come south, a man who was his “counterpart” in the ministry, the word the Americans use in a futile but cheerful attempt to be tactful, since they had so much power and the Vietnamese so much less. He said this friend was a man in his fifties, a poet, who worked in the Chieu Hoi ministry, who drove an old Hillman.
In Saigon he lived in the Hotel Continental—sharing suite 19 with Kevin Buckley, a young, witty, wildly good-looking raconteur and correspondent for Newsweek—then he moved into a villa, a famous villa, at 47 Phan Thanh Gian, which was leased by the embassy and inhabited since the American ascendancy in 1965 by a succession of young men, out of Harvard, Yale or Princeton, who worked for CORDS. It was one way of avoiding the draft if they passed the civil service examination, for the State Department issued them an occupational deferment. They spoke Vietnamese, they wrote miles of reports, they entertained each other, they moved around the war, rarely through it, like greyhounds circling a garbage dump.
The huge villa at 47 Phan Thanh Gian was the scene of the most famous of Saigon’s parties. It was given on New Year’s Eve for four years; the last one, in 1970, was no less amusing and spirited than the others. The invitation to it said: “The Flower People of Saigon invite you to see ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel’ Act Four.” It was assumed, correctly, that the guests knew party French, so at the bottom of the invitation it read “Cette carte sera exigée a l’entrée” and “pour memoire.” The invitation had something to it of the London of Evelyn Waugh in the 1930s. The names of some of the Flower People, fourth generation, listed inside the invitation included: “Angus Davidson and Ancestors,” “El Gleeko,” “Sir Cloudesley Shovel,” “Baron de Tourane” and “The Ghost of Christmas Past J. W. Fulbright.” But sometimes the real names of people—Gage McAfee, W. Stowell Doyle, M. L. Pressey, Charlie Salmon—sounded made up as well. The party had started as a huge joke, first given by people with links to the U.S. Mission, and became so famous that even more imposing people in the Mission dropped in. There was nothing else quite like that villa. Someone always made sure there were good wineglasses and tablecloths. The Cambodian silver animals looked polished. The male servant wore a white coat. There were flowers, pillows, good towels, wine. The villa had a fluffed-up feeling. Once when I went there, an American told me he had just flown to the United States for his sister’s wedding, the weather for it had been fine. It seemed an astonishing thing to be able to say in Saigon. The second, and last, time I went, there was a dinner party, and a young man who worked for the head of USAID, had a stunning Vietnamese wife, spoke the language flawlessly himself, leaned across the white tablecloth and said: “We’re going to stop corruption in this country.” That is the way they often spoke.
David Sulzberger was much admired in Saigon for his charm, his wit, a European silkiness of speech, and the 1937 rumble-seat Citroën he bought. It was painted cream and black and caused a sensation in the streets. When he speaks of the villa, he calls it Forty-seven. “One was a whole lot less isolated there than anywhere else because, you know, the one thing about Forty-seven which people picked up on was that it was the most social and most amusing with its va-et-vien—the coming and the going. What made it so interesting was the fact that it was a crash pad for everybody who came to Saigon unexpectedly from the field. So that you could pick up information. Vietnamese and foreign diplomats, people who would ask questions and had no ax to grind, whose promotions did not depend on whether their report sounded well or not.”
He worked from February 1967 to 1970 as a reports officer for the Chieu Hoi program in CORDS.
“Within the space of three or four months, in no time at all, I was on very, very close terms with all the journalists,” David Sulzberger said. “They were enormously fun to know. I had a much more adventurous time in CORDS than other people but a much less adventurous time than a lot of journalists. So I lived to some extent vicariously off the stories and adventures of somebody else.”
He traveled to forty of the forty-four provinces; he kept a map showing where he had been. His reports were largely concerned with statistics and some analysis of the trends that the statistics were supposed to indicate. He talked to Vietnamese who had “defected,” but this wasn’t part of his job. “The great majority were peasants from the south and really had no political—Well, as I said before, it was a population shift. Since there were so few North Vietnamese defectors, there was no set pattern as to who or what they were. There were as many officers as soldiers. Some of them had just become isolated, you know.”
There were enormous masses of defectors in 1969 under the Chieu Hoi program, he said, but he had no illusions about these hoi chanh. It was the safest thing for a Vietnamese to do, even if you were not on one side or the other. “There was enormous abuse of the system, but I think there probably was a fairly rational and fairly acceptable reason for large numbers of people coming over at that time. It made sense. At that particular time there really was some sort of notion that maybe there would be a cease-fire and some sort of peace. And you know, defections obviously meant that you were in what was somewhat arbitrarily conceived as being on the other side. It was one way of clearing yourself, if you came from a VC-controlled area, through a fairly benign government agency and picking up some money along the way.”
The program became bureaucratized, he said. In the beginning there were six Americans and six Vietnamese. By 1970 there were at least thirty people, which displeased him; it made things a little less exciting. He felt blunted.
As a propaganda device, he thought the program was certainly successful in 1969. “Nobody gave much thought to the political aspect of it, it was really a processing of the population shift,” Mr. Sulzberger added. “It was one way of not being told you belonged to the other side and penalized for it. So you got a whole lot of people who, I think, would never belong to the other side coming in on it.”
He did not think it would be an embarrassment to him to have worked for the Americans in Vietnam, that it would ever boomerang. “To be embarrassing to me, I have to be embarrassed by it, and I am not embarrassed by it. The one thing which embarrassed me, when I was there, was my detachment. I felt a bit parasitical because I felt here am I, and here I am, observing, and I really do have a front-row seat and it is fascinating. But I am not in any sense going to involve myself more deeply than that because on the one hand I see how it’s unworkable and on the other side I wouldn’t put myself in the hawk or dove variety. I had access to experience and information. People showed me that it was also too easy to simply say ‘Let’s get right out’ or ‘To hell with the Vietnamese.’
“I always felt particularly irked at people who loathed the Vietnamese because they weren’t, let’s say, as left-wing as they ought to be or as anti-Thieu as they ought to be. I mean, it’s so much easier to be left-wing in somebody else’s country. It seemed to me obvious that it was wrong because the elections were obviously rigged to assume that there was no political backing, no political constituency and that every single Vietnamese if given a free choice would opt for the other side.
“Certainly, going to Vietnam was good for me. It was an annealing process. It was as if you were making caramels. You drop them in cold water to have them shaped. I went to Vietnam qua Asia, rather than Vietnam qua our political problem.”
AN AMERICAN BACKGROUND paper said: “The Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), an element of the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, is part and parcel of the total American effort to assist the government of Vietnam in resisting and ending Communist aggression and providing a better life for its seventeen million, two hundred and twenty-three thousand people.” It made high-ranking CORDS officials very snappish when reporters wrote of the American pacification programs. No, no, they said, CORDS only advises and supports the government of Vietnam on pacification or nation-building programs that span a broad spectrum, from establishing security to initiating economic development projects. It was not true.
By May 1969 the CORDS team consisted of six thousand American advisors and technicians, twenty-five percent of them civilians like David Sulzberger. The military in CORDS were Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines. The Chieu Hoi program—in Vietnamese the words meant “open arms”—encouraged enemy soldiers, political agents and any Vietnamese supporter who gave support to VC or NVA forces to defect to the side of the Saigon government. A Vietnamese who did so was called a hoi chanh. If a hoi chanh brought in weapons or was willing to lead allied forces to an enemy arms, food or medical cache, he was rewarded with cash, the amount depending on the number and type of the weapons or the size of the cache. The numbers who did were always disappointing. The inflated figures of Vietnamese who had defected and become hoi chanh were held up as proof at last that the wicked had seen the error of their ways. The U.S. Mission was very keen on the Chieu Hoi program. “In terms of numbers,” one document said, “one hundred thousand hoi chanh are the equivalent of ten enemy military divisions, or to put it another way, assuming a kill ratio of five enemy soldiers to one allied trooper would mean that for every five returnees, the life of one allied soldier would be saved.”
But it did not mean that at all; often the hoi chanh were Vietnamese who were afraid of being punished for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, who were not combatants, who gave up for the money or the papers or the false identification the giving-up provided.
But the words chieu hoi, chieu hoi became famous among American soldiers who knew only three or four Vietnamese expressions. Once, in Albany, New York, after leaving an interview in a housing project too late at night, with the yelling and cries of a party or a slaughter coming from the eighteenth floor, a drunken man in a field jacket lurched into the elevator, a bottle in one hand, what looked like a knife or ice pick in the other. “Chieu hoi,” I said, raising my arms. It made him laugh. He said that I should Di di mau, which meant get out of there, leave the building.
HE FINISHED HIS studies at Harvard, then went to the Harvard Business School and then to his own business, buying and selling works of Islamic art, including carpets from the Middle East. There were times when David Sulzberger missed Vietnam. “I had a tremendously good time. I’m not embarrassed to say I had a good time. A lot of people I know had a good time. A lot of people had a terribly bad time, obviously. I would have had an appallingly bad time regardless of whether I’d been fighting and killed or not if I’d been locked up all the time in a series of A-frame green drab buildings which could have as easily been in Virginia as in Nha Trang.
“When I left Vietnam, I had an enormous awareness of the right and wrong in terms of myself, of what I liked, what I disliked, what I felt, what I didn’t feel. I mean, you know, even things like food. I knew I liked carrots, and eating them in Vietnam just confirmed that. It left me very much confirmed in my western-ness. But in no sense did I come out feeling that philosophically or morally I was changed. I came back feeling very much confirmed. It’s like a movie you see for the second time, several years later, and though it may seem a little dated, you remember what you liked about it and it’s still good.
“. . . I mean, one of the things which obviously made an impact on me was this was really my first paid job. I went to an office and after X many months I got rated and I got promoted . . .
“. . . what we were trying to do was not a question of being morally right or wrong. After all, unfortunately, things that are right are things that work, very often. Things that don’t work are wrong. However much there may be a moral justification—or a colonial justification or a power justification—anything that doesn’t work, as soon as you are in a position to know that it isn’t working, you know that it’s wrong. In that sense I got a very clear picture that American policy in Vietnam was wrong. Because it didn’t work and because it couldn’t work and because whatever there was to gain or to lose, it was perfectly clear the longer you prolonged it the more was lost.
“America, not ever having a real colonial experience, has a superficial approach. It’s not so much we have a superficial approach, but we have an innocence in all our dealings with foreign countries that allows us to think we’re right and never allows us to really get in and try and understand what’s going on there. We never really have a commitment that is our own. There’s always this ‘We’re-doing-it-for-their-sake-and-if-they-can’t-take-it . . .’
“It’s a rather sinister thing to say right now, but I would much rather we were in there for the rubber and the manganese, because then at least we would care about whether it worked or not.”
Each hour he sat in my living room that April in 1975 the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, the army trained and equipped and supervised and pushed and paid for by the Americans, was disappearing, as if the soldiers were frenzied actors dropping through a trap door on a stage.
“I think they’re doing us a great favor, really. I mean, imagine, if there were Iwo Jima flag-raising scenes, and dying to the last man, and Horatio on the burning deck right now!”
It did not astonish him in the least that so many provinces had fallen in that year and that the very last day of the war was so close. “We should have learned by now that nothing about Vietnam should surprise us. I hope to go back some day. But at the same time I know right now I’d be crucially embarrassed to go back. I mean, I’ve talked to you earlier about my ability to be embarrassed for other people. I used to be embarrassed for all the Germans I see going to Greece, you know, in the summer as tourists. I’m also embarrassed for the Greeks who receive them with open arms. Except the Deutsche mark is worth something.
“I would be the German in Greece. I thought last night about this. This is a sinister thing to say. I thought of how a lot of Germans must feel as innocent of that whole experience as a lot of Americans feel, will continue to feel, forever.”
MARINA SULZBERGER WAS easier than her tall, stern husband, who did not give the impression that he wrote a column for a newspaper so much as the feeling that he, too, held high office and had no time to waste. He always knew her worth, for she went with him on many of his long, important trips, an asset, a calming and sweet presence. When they came back to Vietnam in February 1971—on their way to China for the first time—he was sick with the flu and some of their luggage had been lost in Calcutta, which made him furious. The brilliant young bureau chief in Saigon, Craig Whitney, stopped working to send urgent and stern messages, trying to trace the suitcase. He made telephone calls, notified other bureaus of the loss, reported daily on the progress or no progress of the search. Mr. Sulzberger, who wanted to see General Creighton Abrams and President Nguyen Van Thieu, took to his bed the first day. The bureau chief, who was bracing himself and the reporters for a Vietnamese offensive because of the collective predictions of the military, asked me to arrange an excursion for Mrs. Sulzberger. She was charming and attentive to everyone.
I HAD BEEN in Vietnam more than two years that month, had come back from the last trip in the field. It was Ben Het in the Central Highlands, where the North Vietnamese attack was supposed to start any minute. Ben Het was seven miles from where the borders of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia rubbed. It had been a Special Forces camp that had come under heavy siege in 1969. There was still a sign in the Americans’ quarters, a sign that had hung over the Green Berets’ bar, which no one wanted to remove. “Ben Het and Loving It” the sign said. A reporter, describing the siege in 1969, had written of the Green Beret who said: “I’ve been hit and I ain’t loving it.” There were always the jokes; it was the easiest, safest language to use, sometimes the soldiers and the reporters could only speak by using jokes.
That year there were only two American advisors there. Most of the soldiers were the Montagnard tribesmen, recruited and trained by the Special Forces in earlier years; some lived there in huts with wives and children. On the main hill of Ben Het, a sprawling and lumpy base, were the South Vietnamese Rangers. The dust veiled all of it, so even the barbed wire was pale grey. The children played with nothing. They did not seem to ever speak. The covers of the sandbags, which felt like stone, had rotted and torn. Over everything was a blackness that came from the sun; the sun seemed black.
In the bunker where the Americans slept, a man had written more than once, in chalk, on the wall: “I trust in God.” It was most neatly printed. He was the third advisor who was no longer there. He just went back to go to the dentist, the other Americans said, and nothing else. But in Saigon, a reporter had told me that this man had been very nervous during an interview, quite certain that Ben Het could not hold, it was a mess. The Newsweek man had written it all down, and thought the American was cracking up.
Luong slept with the Vietnamese at their command post; he always needed to be among his own. The second night he came to find me, saying we must get ready to E and E. He was very good with the American expressions that all the soldiers used, that curious, fast, deadly baby talk they had. E and E meant “evade and escape.” An attack was expected, Luong whispered, we could not expect choppers, get water and let’s go. He had heard it on the radio at the Vietnamese CP.
But the American captain—a spare man, clearly West Point, who had been seriously wounded on his first tour in 1969—said no, that couldn’t be, there was a full moon, so forget it. I believed him. It was always like that: in danger, we huddled with the men whose profession I hated, expecting them to know best, to give the right orders, to defend us all. They had no choice. They had to feed and brief reporters, too, and find beds or a place where we could lie down. It was not that they always wanted the company.
I lay on the cot of the man who had written “I trust in God,” who knew that Ben Het could not hold. It was too close to a North Vietnamese base camp that had been half jokingly described as about the size of New York City. The Vietnamese Rangers did not care; they were nearly anesthetized. A lieutenant told Luong that the boredom was worse than anything else.
“Think of having to stay in this base all the time,” the lieutenant said. “What can you do to fill such emptiness?” The lieutenant drank, he played cards, he listened to cassettes on a little Sony player.
There was nothing to do after the nine or ten interviews, after the morning inspecting the perimeter, so long and wiggly, with the older American advisor who intended to be a store detective in Pennsylvania once he got out. The sergeant looked displeased with the trenches on the perimeter. They were paths lined with artillery casings filled with mud and water. He denied he was worried. At Ben Het each smell was a hundred years old.
MRS. SULZBERGER AND I went to the Air Force base at Bien Hoa near Saigon. She wore a pretty print dress because she hated wearing pants and refused to do it. So I wore a skirt too. An information officer led us to some pilots—their unit was nicknamed Blue Max—who flew gunships. We stood around in an office while she made marvelous small talk that had always worked so well, but the men had no gift for it and did not know what was expected of them. Mrs. Sulzberger spoke about her son, David, who had been in Vietnam. Then one of the gunship pilots—a man with a deceivingly simple face—asked her what her son had done, meaning infantry or artillery or engineers or what. David was in CORDS, Mrs. Sulzberger said, but the pilot never heard of CORDS and it took a while for him to find that out. Mrs. Sulzberger, who did not like people to be ill-at-ease, skipped over it and plunged on. Some of her friends had been concerned about David’s going to Vietnam but she had not listened to any of that kind of talk.
“Every man should have his war,” Mrs. Sulzberger said.
The pilot stared. He had never heard it put that way.
We were taken on a helicopter ride. A black sergeant stood by with a little ladder so that in our skirts we could gracefully climb into the aircraft. Afterward we went to Long Binh Army base and toured the offices of the chief information officer.
They had handled nice ladies before. It was the easiest thing of all. Someone arranged to have the usual out-with-the-troops photograph taken. There were two soldiers, in the fatigues and boots that everyone wore, who stood on either side of her, smiling as people cannot help doing when they see a camera. I think Mrs. Sulzberger was given a yearbook of an Army unit, and she asked the soldiers to sign their names in it. They didn’t mind any of it. The clerks were always bored in those Long Binh offices and she had pretty, winning ways.
THEN CAME A demonstration so different from all the others that it surprised even those people in Washington, D.C., who had seen it all. The veterans of Vietnam massed in Washington, D.C.—only men who were veterans and could prove it—and threw back everything at the white marble Capitol, the building where Congress said yes to the war. They threw back medals for valor; they threw back stripes torn from sleeves, their campaign ribbons and sometimes parts of dress uniforms. Some Vietnamese in Saigon were a little shocked. Their own newspapers and magazines and radio made no mention of such a thing, but a few of them heard of it. An ARVN lieutenant, in from the field, was bewildered, for he had known American infantrymen for seven years and he could not imagine any of them doing this. At first the lieutenant thought the Americans wanted more money for having fought so far from home. It took some doing to persuade him this was not the reason.
“Who do they want to win the war?” the lieutenant asked me. His English was good.
“They think the war is a crime,” I said. “They are ashamed of the war.”
The lieutenant looked snarled: he was so sure that the Americans, above all, wanted to win the war.
Luong, who was made uneasy by such discussions, said the lieutenant had not noticed all the peace symbols the Americans wore or heard the words of their music. Although Luong could not always explain the words, he knew the music had a terrible meaning.
The five-day demonstration, organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was the first time that Americans who had fought in a foreign war demanded an end to it, were not proud of being a part of it, did not think it best that their country win, and hurled back the rewards they had been given for doing their duty, for being the men their fathers and the nation wanted.
They called that five days in April 1971 Dewey Canyon III. Operation Dewey Canyon I, in February 1969, sent elements of the 3d Marine Division into Laos. Operation Dewey Canyon II was the American name given to the first seven days of the allied drive into Laos in 1971, which was then known, and for its duration, as Lam Son 719.
Dewey Canyon III took place in Washington, D.C., April 19 through April 23 in 1971. The VVAW called it “a limited incursion into the country of Congress.” They started to come on a Friday, an eccentric, a strange-looking army, wearing fatigues and field jackets, helmets and their old boonie hats, the same boots they had worn in Vietnam. Some brought bedrolls and all slept outdoors on a camping site on a small quadrangle on the Mall between 3rd and 4th Streets. All came with their discharge papers so their bitterest critics could not accuse them of being imposters, although some did anyway. There were a few men who did not have two legs, a few who could not rise from wheelchairs, but they were in good spirits and among their own. Many of the people in the city who saw them were startled and saddened, for the veterans looked like men straggling back from a wilderness. It did not matter that they were long-haired or bearded, that their manner was not military, their uniforms muddled, or that they came with young women. It was impossible not to know what they had been: troops. No one laughed at them or called out that they were cowards and draft dodgers.
On one day they marched from the Lincoln Memorial Bridge to Arlington Cemetery to hold a brief ceremony honoring the war dead, which was conducted by a man who had just resigned his military chaplaincy. But they were refused entrance, which made them very angry. They also marched to the Capitol to present sixteen demands to Congress, and nearly two hundred veterans sat through hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on proposals to end the war. Groups of them spent hours talking to congressmen. Fifty veterans wanted to be arrested as war criminals, but no one would oblige them. Two hundred men and several Gold Star mothers went back to Arlington National Cemetery, where they were at last let in to lay two wreaths on a grassy knoll, apart from the graves, kneel down, pray.
There were times when they talked and sang and acted as if they knew what it was to be young, but it was not a reunion they came for. One hundred and ten of them were arrested for disturbing the peace after they marched to the steps of the Supreme Court, and sat down there, to ask why the Court had not ruled on the constitutionality of the war. None of them resisted the police: they folded their hands on their heads, as the prisoners in Vietnam used to do, and were led off. There was a candlelight march around the White House. The nicest thing that happened was the planting of a tree the veterans donated to the Mall: it was a small triumph. They cooked for themselves, they kept order, they cleaned up, and they even asked the park police for more trashcans. But the sight of the men worried some passers-by, even though the veterans did nothing that was cruel or messy or menacing.
“Son, I don’t think what you’re doing is good for the troops,” one elderly woman said to a man handing out leaflets.
“Lady, we are the troops,” he said.
A middle-aged man from Russell, Pennsylvania, wearing the fatigue jacket of his dead son, blew taps before the medals went back. Sometimes, after a man hurled a bit of a ribbon or a Bronze Star or a Purple Heart over a high wire fence the police put in front of the steps of the Capitol, he would break down and be hugged by other men. They were free at last to do it. No one was ashamed of crying or holding on to each other. Some threw in fury, others in sorrow, but nearly all made faces as they did it.
Afterward, there were men who had wept, stopped, then felt a curious, unreasonable elation. One of them, named Rusty, had been a captain with a helicopter squadron in the 1st Marine Division. He and some friends—a whole bunch, he called it—cried really hard for two hours. Then Rusty said they felt wonderful; they felt so intensely hopeful, they wouldn’t have been surprised if somebody came to say that Nixon had just announced the troops were leaving Vietnam and would be back home by suppertime. They almost expected to hear it.
“We thought we’d finally done it and we’d reached everywhere,” the former captain said. It was the top of the mountain, he kept saying.
Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, one of the VVAW coordinators, put the case strongly, and with an eloquence that made the older men in the room, the men in their dark suits and good shirts, pay attention. Kerry was not a mumbling, disheveled boy who used words they could not grasp.
“We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Johnson and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned?” Mr. Kerry, a former naval officer, said the men he named had deserted them; that the administration had done the veterans the ultimate dishonor by “attempting to disown us.”
His address, which was quite short, ended this way:
“We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our last own determination to undertake one last mission—to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say ‘Vietnam’ and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped in the turning.”
A study was conducted of the veterans encamped on the Mall. Most of the men were between twenty-one and twenty-five; few had finished college, unable to capitalize on college draft deferments. A majority had enlisted. Nearly half their fathers were blue-collar workers. Most of the veterans began to change their mind about U.S. involvement in Vietnam during their first three months there.
On Friday, April 23, they broke camp. It was estimated that more than two thousand men had come from all over the country; half had camped on the Mall. There is no plaque there to show which tree is the one they planted, or how it is doing. The last American troops did not leave Vietnam for another twenty-three months; the war went on for another four years. Most of the veterans did not try again in the same way to stop the war, or to redeem themselves. They saw it was no use. One by one, they fell away.
IT TOOK A while for VVAW to die, and before it did, there was a last muster in Washington on the Fourth of July weekend in 1974, when less than a dozen men who had taken part in Dewey Canyon III came back for the protests called by Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization. The name had been lengthened so that women and nonveterans could be included; “Winter Soldier” was derived from Thomas Paine, who in 1776 had written: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”
That summer there was hardly an organization at all. Many local chapters had disappeared; veterans had to find jobs and get on with their lives. The early VVAW leaders had been pushed out, then there were no leaders at all; funds were nonexistent, organization chaotic, informers frequent, records poor, and most important, the passion and the hope nearly spent. The few men and women who worked full time for VVAW/WSO were radicals, who did not believe, as Kerry had put it, that Vietnam would be the place where America finally turned. They did not believe there would be any turning at all, not yet, not so easily.
But, still, some came back. William C. Henschel III was there, for one, pleased to see the buttons, the banners, the campsite on the Mall. During Dewey Canyon III he had worn his dress Marine jacket with three medals pinned on his chest, the ones he tossed back. That July, Henschel was twenty-eight years old and did not seem to know many of the other men sitting on the ground. This time he was out of the wheelchair, walking on an artificial leg or using crutches. When it became too hot, or when he tired, Henschel took off the leg. It was surprisingly heavy, a shiny pink left leg which he used as a bulletin board. There were at least seven stickers on it, above the black sock and the black buckled shoe which never creases across the toes. One sticker said: The Marines Are Looking for a Few Good Men. During one march another veteran hoisted Henschel’s leg and walked a long way with it over his shoulder.
It was a terrible Fourth of July; no one was there. The protesters marched everywhere: to the Veterans Administration, the Court of Military Appeals, the Justice Department, the Capitol and past the White House. Up and down the huge blank white avenues of Washington, in a long, lumpy parade, shouting their fierce slogans so that the words would pierce those miles of deadly white marble. “Fight back,” shouted Henschel. “Fight back,” shouted the others. The only people interested in us were police units, who ringed the campsite; some had videotape cameras and used them. There were police who looked young enough to have known Vietnam. Officer Roger Merkle, guarding the perimeter, said he had been a Marine, had been in the Ashau Valley. It was the worst thing that ever happened to him, Officer Merkle said, the worst. But he was not interested in talking about the war, or why he had to go to the Ashau; he did not care about the roots of the war, the reasons, the results. It was over for him.
“Wars have always been fought,” Officer Merkle said. “It’s always been that way.” He saw no reason to speak to any of the men, their shirts off, sitting in the sun, who had been Marines too. He did not want to talk to Henschel, an ex-lance corporal in the 2d Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. There were only a few hundred yards between them. He was not about to cross them.
Henschel was not surprised. He took such things calmly; he was used to it. He is a tall, thin man with large eyes, dark hair and a soft thin beard. His sense of humor is nice; Henschel likes the small, dry joke. He can tell his history in a few words: he was shot in the head inside the Citadel in Hue during the 1968 Tet battle. Casualties were heaped on top of tanks to be taken out. The tank that he lay on hit a mine. He was thrown off and the tank ran over him, crushing the leg and ripping off part of his buttocks. This is what he was told. He was in eleven different military hospitals, including those in Vietnam and Japan. The V.A. sends him five hundred and eighty-four dollars a month because of the head wound, which caused traumatic epilepsy leading to “seizure disorder,” as the military doctors put it. He receives an additional one hundred and twenty-two dollars for the cut-off left leg. Henschel thought that his benefits were okay; he lived on the checks. That day he had run out of money but would not go off with me to eat, for he wanted to stay with the others.
“I don’t have the knife in my back, like a lot of vets,” he said. “I’m here more for other people than myself.” His mother died before she knew how critically he was wounded, and Henschel said he was glad. His father was for the war; the two men did not see each other and Henschel said he was glad. He was living in a room in Washington, D.C., and hanging out at a YWCA that had summer programs for ghetto children. They let him help but, he said, no more than that. Maybe he would go to college, maybe. Nothing was certain.
Long after that day in the Citadel, when Henschel was home and driving a car, he picked up a hitchhiker, a young and friendly fellow, who saw something wrong about the leg. He asked about it. Henschel told. The hitchhiker was furious to be with a man who had killed in Vietnam.
“He said to me ‘I wish you had died in Vietnam, fascist pig killer,’” Henschel said. “I told him I didn’t want to go there, I didn’t. He got out of the car. The guy even took my lighter. There was no way I could stop him either.”
Each day that July weekend seemed to bring a whiter, meaner heat. On one of them, there were spasms of pushing, shoving, kicking and cracking and hollering when the police became vexed because the demonstrators did not stay on the sidewalks during a march. No one really knew how it happened; it hardly mattered. When the police came, hurling us backward, I thought of Henschel on his crutches, but he was not to be seen. Danny Friedman, who had been seriously wounded as a rifleman in Vietnam, was a massive fellow, the bravest, who ran interference for others when the police got nasty. He was cracked on the skull and had to sit down, the blood going in streamers down his hair. There were women, too, on the police line; the sight of them made me want to turn away. Their make-up was going mushy in the sun. They did not look as composed as the men. There was that instant—all of us were standing still—when a veteran said: “Jesus, I don’t know, how can I hit a woman?” Someone laughed and said, “Hard.”
At one point, in that baking and still city, we were gathered at the foot of the steps of the Capitol where the police were massed, booted, armed, holding their batons in front of them. It was ordinary scenery. I asked one officer—a middle-aged man with a huge, creased face who reminded me of Rod Steiger—if he was afraid of such a small crowd. His answer seemed to be one I had heard so many times before.
“No.” he said. “I’ve been in the war.”
Alfonso Riate, a former Marine and prisoner of war who had never regretted or retracted the antiwar statements he made in North Vietnam, sang for us. He had a sweet, high, haunting voice which he flung over us like a net. He sang in Vietnamese, a song called “American People Fight on with Your Music and Songs.” The police nearest us looked disgusted. When Riate sang in Vietnamese, he sounded Vietnamese. Everyone felt better hearing Riate sing, listening to that song, and it did not matter at all that none of us could understand a word. It was all we had.
THEY HAD WANTED Nixon kicked out. He has long been out. The war is over. But they also wanted other things. They wanted universal, unconditional amnesty, a single-type discharge for all veterans, so that three hundred and fifty thousand men of the Vietnam era who had been given less than honorable discharges would be helped. They wanted decent veterans benefits, for the G.I. Bill was not the promising, generous program it had been after World War II. A single Vietnam veteran could not pay the average annual tuition fee at a public college on the two hundred and twenty dollars he received a month, let alone the normal costs of a private college. There is no living allowance.
Henschel thought it was all wrong. Henschel thought it was a shame. I never saw him after that weekend, but we all remember each other, and it was Henschel, after all, who said how odd it was that the only people being punished for the war were the wrong ones.
EVEN WHEN YOU are not looking for them, sometimes, but not often, you meet men who went to Vietnam and who were in Dewey Canyon III. In Durham, North Carolina, a former Marine sniper works at night behind the desk at a Ramada Inn. Chuck James said he had flung back his medals in Washington, D.C., and been glad of it. I did not quite believe him at first—he said it in such a throwaway manner—until I found a photograph. Mr. James pointed out himself in the crowd of veterans sitting on the ground, laughing, raising their fists. He was easy to spot.
“I was the only guy wearing a suit,” Mr. James said. “I didn’t quite know what to expect.” There were four trips to Durham in 1976; I used to stay up late talking to Mr. James in the lobby when he was not busy on the adding machine or signing in other guests. There had been a few veterans in Greensboro, North Carolina, who protested the war, he said. They would do it again if anyone pulled another Vietnam on them. The day that Jimmy Carter came to Durham to campaign in the primary, and little bags of peanuts were given out, Mr. James was not impressed. He was for Mo Udall, and he knew who the southerners were who had supported the war and wanted it won, even if later they sang a different song.
There were no war stories he wanted to tell, none that I wanted to hear. Yet he was willing to show me a very long white pencil-thin scar high on his left arm, to confide that there was another scar on his back and a knee that looked so terrible he would not let his wife look at it. The young black night porter, Robby, said he regretted not joining the service, maybe he still would. There were no jobs in North Carolina, Robby said, he had been to college and was going nowhere, making nothing.
“Look at that scar,” I said, wanting to change his mind. But it did not tell him anything fearful; it was only a scar and a neat one at that. Sometimes it does no good at all to show the injuries, to keep reciting the horror and the pain and the waste of the war. It makes some men more interested, even willing to prove that they are ready for risks like that.