Kitabı oxu: «"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War», səhifə 5

Part I Partisans

Chapter One

Early Adventurers

In such dangerous things as wars the errors which

proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst

(Karl von Clausewitz)

i. Lieutenant-Colonel Landsdale

It will be recalled from the Introduction that in the mid-1940s, at the end of World War II, the French colonial army was allowed by the Allies to regain control of Hanoi, at which point the Communist Viet Minh forces faded back into their bases in the countryside to fight an eight-year-long guerrilla war of resistance to the restoration of French control. Meanwhile, as part of its effort to halt Communist advances in Southeast Asia, the US recognized the French puppet emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai (February 1950), thereby declaring itself to be an adversary of the Viet Minh leader, Ho Chi Minh. For their part, the Viet Minh built a political organization strong enough to sustain the guerrillas and field a regular army that was eventually successful at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954).

The imbalance of power in Vietnam was therefore evident by 1954, when the Viet Minh had military and political control of most of Vietnam. During the chaotic situation following the defeat of the French and the migration southward of Catholics and non-Communists after the division of the country into north and south, the southern leader Ngo Dinh Diem, who would be the future President of South Vietnam, barely controlled the capital city of Saigon, much less the rest of the country.1 American leaders reasoned that an expert in dealing with Asian Communist revolutionaries might therefore be useful to the beleaguered Diem. This expert turned out to be the most important of the early American adventurers: Edward G(eary) Landsdale, an Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel on loan to the CIA. Landsdale was both instrumental in convincing President Eisenhower that the US should support South Vietnam against an imminent Communist take-over and indispensable in maintaining Diem, or, to give him his full name, Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem, in power. With American support, Premier and Defense Minister Diem eventually deposed Bao Dai and adopted his imperial flag.

Landsdale arrived in Vietnam on June 1, 1954, the day the Viet Minh celebrated their victory over the French by blowing up an ammunition dump, and (as he noted himself) “rocking Saigon throughout the night.”2 Landsdale came to Saigon to command the top-secret Saigon Military Mission (SMM), to install resistance teams in the north to delay the consolidation of that part of the country while he supported the non-Communist government in the south. By the time of the Geneva deadline prohibiting the introduction of additional military personnel into either side of the country, Landsdale’s teams were already active in paramilitary operations and psychological warfare, perpetrating acts of sabotage and spreading misinformation in both north and south. They were unsuccessful in the areas held by the Viet Minh, however, and many of Landsdale’s Vietnamese agents in the north actually defected to that side.

The sabotage activities included destroying government printing-presses and pouring contaminants into bus motors to undermine the transportation system. Misinformation included the distribution of leaflets about harsh government measures in the north, and a successful rumor campaign that the US would support a new war against the north employing atomic weapons, a rumor that greatly added to the flow of refugees to the south, many of whom, already encouraged by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and organized by Landsdale’s teams, were transported in US Navy ships to the south.3 Thus began the exodus of one million Catholics, which is fictionalized in M.J. Bosse’s novel, The Journey of Tao Kim Nam, discussed in section iv, below.

Landsdale was one of those men of action, usually described as “legendary” or “flamboyant,” who seem as fantastic as any fictional character, an example of the type that novelist Philip Roth once complained about: a real person that would be the envy of any novelist. Roth’s question “Can anybody have imagined him if he did not really exist?” referred to Richard Nixon, but it is, if anything, more pertinent to Landsdale, who inspired more than one fictional character in the early literature of the war (cf. sections ii, iv and v, below) and was far more influential in supporting the American effort in Vietnam than any of his fictional counterparts. After retiring from the Air Force in 1963, with the rank of Major General, he returned to Saigon in 1965 as “special assistant for pacification under [Ambassador Henry Cabot] Lodge.”4

Landsdale was born in 1908 and educated at UCLA. He served in the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II and later went to the Philippines as counsel to the Philippine Defense Secretary, Ramon Magsaysay, whom he aided in the successful counter-revolutionary repression of the Communist Hukbalahap insurgency, and later helped to become president. Landsdale is said to have developed “the basic concept that Communist revolution [was] best opposed by democratic revolution,” and, with his success in the Philippines he was accordingly sent to South Vietnam as a CIA operative in 1954, where he urged the development of a counterinsurgency force instead of a conventional army (he also “reportedly helped develop the US Special Forces,” which arose as a counter-insurgency force within the US Army).5 He is described in The Pentagon Papers as “well-known but mysterious” and “reticent about his role.”6

Besides his skills in unconventional warfare, Landsdale was evidently a man who could gain the friendship and confidence of Asian leaders. It was his intention to make Diem a progressive, non-Communist national hero on the model of Magsaysay and turn the Vietnam of the Sixties into a Philippines of the Fifties, and he was sent to Vietnam by John Foster Dulles explicitly with that mission.7 The difficulty with this plan was that the two Asian countries were very different. It was unrealistic to think that Landsdale would be as successful in Vietnam as he had been in the Philippines, a former American colony that had granted long leases to US military bases in exchange for independence in 1946. As Neil Sheehan points out, the Philippines was a 95% Christian country that had already been westernized and Americanized for almost half a century:

Landsdale’s Filipinos were Brown Americans...their Independence Day was the Fourth of July. They spoke English with a slightly out-of-date American slang. They liked jazz and much else in American popular culture...They staged operations against the Huks with names like Four Roses, for their favourite whiskey, and Omaha, after the D-Day beachhead at Normandy. The CIA was notorious for hiring Filipinos to staff its Asian operations because they were so Americanized.8

As for the Vietnamese people, on the other hand, “[i]t was not patriotic in Vietnam to collaborate with the Americans. To many Vietnamese, the Americans stood for colonialism, oppression, and social injustice.”9 And the leaders of the two countries could not have been more different: the deeply suspicious, autocratic, and unpopular Diem was nothing like the honest, charismatic Magsaysay.10

Landsdale, nevertheless, was a tireless defender of what he hoped would be a popular “Third Force” government in South Vietnam, neither colonialist nor Communist. Although he was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading the arrogant Diem to personify the Third Force ideal, he did become Diem’s best American friend (he actually lived in the presidential palace), mentor, and champion, indispensable for keeping the Diem regime in power. In November 1954, for example, Landsdale “single-handedly” prevented a coup d’état of Bao Dai’s officers.11 He contradicted Eisenhower’s new Ambassador to South Vietnam, General Lawton Collins, who advised the president that Diem should compromise with the powerful Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects that Diem had grossly mishandled. Landsdale urged Diem rather to use bribery and trickery, and only in the last resort, violence (the two sects had private armies), and he promised the aid of an auxiliary military force to do so. In 1955, he “masterminded” the campaign that subdued the military arms of the sects.12

General Collins distrusted Landsdale, whom he called a “romantic visionary” (and informally “that crazy bastard”) and regarded his protégé, Diem, as a “crank,” and he urged Dulles to get rid of them both and resume cooperation with the French.13 By April 1955, Dulles was ready to dump Diem, as the French also desired, but Landsdale lied to Diem about Dulles’s intention to replace him, believing that Diem could do the job. The French, who still had 75,000 troops in South Vietnam, did not intervene for fear of upsetting the US, but they supported the sects clandestinely in order to oppose Diem, a situation that is fictionalized in Jean Latérguy’s novel Yellow Fever (1962), discussed in section v, below.

To make his protégé appear a more convincing leader, Landsdale persuaded Diem to counter-attack the Binh Xuyen, a powerful criminal organization that also had a private army. With Landsdale’s auxiliary force to help him, Diem’s troops crushed the Binh Xuyen on the streets of Saigon. Dulles thereupon countermanded his earlier order and the cable urging Diem’s removal was burned.14 Thanks to Landsdale, the US was now solidly behind Diem. Landsdale “sealed the commitment” by rigging the plebiscite that deposed Bao Dai and established Diem as President of the newly declared Republic of Vietnam.15 Had Dulles followed General Collins’s advice to get rid of Diem, the subsequent history of Vietnam, and that of the United States, might have been very different. It is generally agreed that the French would have sooner or later given up Vietnam to the Communists.16

In an attempt to counter Communist influence in the countryside and the villages, where the “hearts and minds” of the people had to be won, Landsdale persuaded Diem to initiate a Civic Action program, which eventually failed because of Diem’s complete lack of interest in popular reforms. The land reform that Landsdale urged him to make for the same reasons actually ended up reversing the pattern of land ownership in the Mekong Delta (after the Viet Minh had made improvements in the direction of greater equality) toward the prewar levels of concentration of land in the hands of a very few. Half of the farmers remained landless.17

Lansdale was also adept at courting American leaders. He was a favorite of President Kennedy, who received him at the White House only a few days after the inauguration. Advisor Walt W. Rostow gave the president Landsdale’s report on the current situation in Vietnam, which he read “with horrified fascination.” The report predicted an enemy offensive before the end of the year that could, in Landsdale’s view, be checked by American effort. Kennedy urged McGeorge Bundy of the National Security Council to get the story of Landsdale’s anti-Communist exploits in the Philippines published in the popular magazine The Saturday Evening Post, presumably to publicize him as a heroic figure in the struggle against Communist tyranny.18 As FitzGerald puts it, Landsdale had “faith in his own good motives…a man who believed that Communism in Asia would crumble before men of goodwill with some concern for ‘the little guy’ and the proper counterinsurgency skills.”19

In a crucial mission in October 1961, Kennedy sent Landsdale, along with arch cold-warrior Rostow, on General Maxwell Taylor’s mission to Vietnam to evaluate what could be accomplished by US forces there. According to David Halberstam, The Taylor-Rostow Report revealed “a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the war.”20 It was contemptuous of an enemy that had for centuries successfully resisted foreign invasion; it assumed that the people and the government of South Vietnam were identical; and it was endorsed by a general who himself had seen the danger of ground war and the limits of air-power in Korea and who ignored the warnings of his great predecessor, General Matthew Ridgeway. Nevertheless, with reservations by Robert McNamara, the report would eventually be adopted as policy. It advised an increase in the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) and the introduction of an American military task force.21 It may be concluded then that Landsdale was directly influential in bringing about the American War in Vietnam, both in his advisory capacity to the American leadership and through his influence on Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. As Neil Sheehan has succinctly put it, South Vietnam was in no small measure the creation of Edward G. Landsdale.22

ii. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

When the first important novel in English about Vietnam was written, Greene’s The Quiet American, the United States had not yet arrived there in force. The novel’s setting is Saigon in the final years of French colonial rule in Indochina before Dien Bien Phu. Internal evidence suggests that the events of the novel take place in 1951-1952, since at one point the narrator, Thomas Fowler, a British newspaper correspondent, observes that any news he might report will go unnoticed because everyone now wants to read about the Korean War.23 There is also a reference in the text to “de Lattre” (114), that is, Commanding General Jean de Lattre Tassigny, who died of cancer in January 1952, after a trip to the US to plead for an increase of American aid.24

At this point in time, the Americans were not yet militarily involved but were giving the French material aid, including arms, to prosecute the colonial war. Fowler at one point watches American bombers being unloaded on the docks (the US began subsidizing the French military effort in 1950).25 Characters in the novel are constantly aware that large areas of the country, even the other side of the river in Saigon, are controlled by the Vietminh, whose clandestine organization seems to have ubiquitous eyes and ears, as well as closed mouths. With reference to the Viet Minh agent whom Fowler meets, for example, “everybody here knew all about Mr Muoi, but the police had no key which would unlock their confidence” (142).

It has been assumed by most commentators that Landsdale was the model for Greene’s title character, the operative Alden Pyle—notably, Charles Currey, in his biography: Edward Landsdale: The Unquiet American (1988).26 Charles J. Gaspar’s entry on the novel in the Vietnam Encyclopedia, on the other hand, argues that Pyle is a composite figure, blending Landsdale with Leo Hochstetter, a member of the American legation in Saigon.27 Judith Adamson, in her critical study of Greene, argues that the real-life model for Pyle was an American attached to an economic aid mission (perhaps Hochstetter, although he is not named), who once shared a room with Greene and lectured him on the necessity of creating a “third force” in Vietnam that he thought might be led by the self-styled General Thé, as actually occurs in the novel.28 Greene himself comments on this encounter in his memoir Ways of Escape (1980). He assumed that the man in question worked for the CIA but noted that his “companion bore no resemblance at all to Pyle, the quiet American of my story—he was a man of more intelligence and less innocence.”29

The long-running, back-and-forth controversy over a positive identification of Landsdale as Pyle is perhaps best illustrated by John Clark Pratt, who, in an early commentary on Vietnam War fiction, wrote that Pyle was “unmistakably modelled on Landsdale,” who was also the model for “a major character” in at least two other novels.30 In a footnote, Pratt added that “Landsdale believes he was the model,” because in 1983, he told Pratt (who was, like Landsdale, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the US Air-Force) that he thought he was the model, noting that both he and Pyle owned dogs. In the Introduction (1996) to his critical edition of Greene’s novel, however, Pratt evidently changed his mind, pointing out that the historical context of the novel, the years 1951-1952, predates Landsdale’s actual arrival in Vietnam: one month (incognito) in June 1953, and then the two years that he headed the SMM in 1954-56.31

Greene, for his part, always denied that he knew Landsdale personally, commenting in an interview for the British Sunday Telegraph (in 1975) that he had “never had the misfortune to meet” him.32 Of course, Greene would not have to have actually met Landsdale in order to use him as a fictional model, only to have heard of him, but it is not altogether certain that the two men—despite Greene’s denial—did not meet. Pratt cites a letter apparently addressed to himself in which Landsdale mentions that the French hated the Cao Daist General Thé (who goes by his real name in the novel), for having had the popular French General Chanson killed: “I was his [Thé’s] American friend and the French used to mock me about him in the presence of Greene.”33 In an interview with his biographer, Charles Currey, Landsdale mentions at least one episode when such a thing happened, recalling that a group of French officers, with Greene among them, booed him at the Continental Hotel. And yet, as Pratt observes, even this evidence is suspect, because Landsdale did not actually meet Thé until 1954, by which time Greene had left Vietnam and was already at work on the novel.34

If the Landsdale-Pyle mystery will never be completely solved, it is likely that its origins have arisen, as Pratt suggests, from the legendary character of Landsdale’s “exploits in the Philippines and Vietnam after World War II [which] have provided not only historians but also journalists, novelists and filmmakers with material for their countless stories and myths.”35 That is to say, Landsdale’s exploits, not the man himself, may have served as any number of fictional models. Pratt, finally, neatly sums up both the inconclusiveness of the factual evidence and its ultimate insignificance when he comments that “given the outcome of the American presence in Vietnam, perhaps Landsdale should have been the model after all,”36 a recognition of Landsdale’s mythical, even metonymical presence in Vietnam for the Americans who came later. Decades after its publication, The Quiet American has continued to astonish readers with its prophetic vision of the disruptive American presence in Vietnam, which would only gradually be recorded in fiction and non-fiction by American writers. The “prescience” of the novel, as much as its artistry, has accordingly been celebrated by critics.37

The principal narrative voice and the moral conscience of the novel is Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged English correspondent, who is rather burned out from personal disappointments in his past. Fowler has left his ex-wife, his lover, and England for the east, where he finds contentment in Saigon with his beautiful young Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, and the nightly opium pipes that she prepares for him. Disenchanted rather than cynical, Fowler is a basically decent man who feels at home in the country (he frequently explains the “situation” there to foreign visitors), but he chooses to think of himself as an uninvolved, apolitical observer of the war, a mere “reporter.” He has no desire for an imminent promotion to an editorship in England, where he might have to produce “opinion,” and to leave Vietnam. ‘“I’m not involved. Not involved,’ I repeated. It had been an article of my creed” (27). His eventual involvement becomes the moral and political crux of the novel.

Fowler befriends the newcomer Alden Pyle, an earnest son of a professor from strait-laced Boston, apparently eager, naïve, and idealistic, a young man of good intentions but little understanding. “With his gangly legs and crew-cut and wide campus gaze, he seemed incapable of harm” (16), Fowler observes. Pyle’s All-American boyishness seems out of place in the Euro-Asiatic culture of Saigon, once known as the “Paris of the Orient.” Rather, he “belonged to the skyscraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch and the chicken sandwiches on the Merchant limited” (19). Although Pyle insists in his polite, well-meaning manner that he has learned a lot from Fowler, Fowler perceives that Pyle has his own priorities, moral and political, which no contrary knowledge may be allowed to disturb: “I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East,” Fowler complains, “which he had known for as many months as I had years” (10). Nor is Pyle, who seems to think in grand abstractions, much of a listener. “He didn’t even hear what I said: he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West: he was determined…to do good, not to any individual person, but to a country, a continent, a world” (17). Even after some harrowing experiences in the country, Pyle remains “impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance” (162).

Pyle’s manner and appearance, however, are deceptive. He pretends to work for a medical mission but is actually a CIA operative in charge of covert operations, and therefore far less innocent than Fowler imagines. The title of the novel, in one sense, refers to Pyle’s need for secrecy. Phuong is the first one to call him a “quiet American,” although evidently in a literal sense. With Pyle’s lack of French and her lack of English, he is unable to talk to her, but this quietness takes on a more sinister aspect when the reader later discovers that Pyle speaks fluent Vietnamese. Fowler personally likes Pyle for his quiet, respectful manner, so different from his loud and boorish compatriots, like the correspondent Granger, who gets stumbling drunk in public and sees any Vietnamese woman as “a piece of tail.” A more sympathetic character, Vigot, the French policeman who reads Pascal, says of Pyle after his death that he was “a very quiet American,” with the implication that his reserve was tactical rather than personal. With Fowler, however, Pyle is tediously loquacious, especially when expounding his political theories. He will become “quiet” only when terminally silenced by the Viet Minh, with the collaboration of Fowler himself.

Commentators have noted that Pyle and Fowler thematically represent the classic dichotomy of innocence and experience. The two men immediately find themselves in competition for the affection of the lovely Phuong, who is guided (“managed” is perhaps a more appropriate word) by her older sister, who, in the face of an uncertain future, wants her to have the financial security of a stable relationship with a foreigner. Before she met Fowler, Phuong worked as a hostess in a respectable dance-hall, and the threat of eventually slipping down into the desperate prostitution of the House of Five-Hundred Women, which survives on the trade of French soldiers, is a possibility that Pyle recognizes, and he claims that he wants to protect her. Angry at Pyle’s presumption, Fowler tells him that Phuong needs no protection because he is aware that her serene behavior does not quite disguise a hard-headed approach to her future prospects, including leaving him for Pyle. Her name, which means “Phoenix,” suggests that she will survive.

The problem for Fowler is that he can offer Phuong real affection and conversation (they speak French together) but only temporary security. Because his English wife will not grant him a divorce and because he may be recalled to England by his newspaper, a future with Phuong is doubly uncertain. Pyle, who falls in love with Phuong at first sight and is championed by the scheming older sister, thinks he can provide what Fowler lacks: youth, marriage, children, and a safe and stable future in the US. Because of the supposed language difficulty, however, his courtship of the lady comically depends on his rival. In his boy-scout-like ethical code, he feels that he must make his suit in a thoroughly above-board fashion, doing nothing behind Fowler’s back, which even includes asking Fowler to translate when he asks Phuong to leave Fowler for himself. Pyle’s first name, Alden, may be an allusion to—but a reversal of—the go-between role of John Alden, the favorite of the lady to whom he must plead the case for Miles Standish, in Longfellow’s narrative poem The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858).

Beyond the love triangle, the three main characters may also be read as representations of their respective cultures.38 Phuong, an oriental sexual fantasy for western white men (she is beautiful, quiet, and unobtrusive—“One always spoke of her like that in the third person as if she were not there” (44)—as well as sensual and pliant), I would suggest that she also represents the Vietnamese prize for competing western political projects. Fowler, in this reading, would be European colonialism, which wants to maintain possession. In one of their many arguments over the correct behavior of foreign powers in Vietnam, Fowler defends the French on the basis that they are “dying every day” in their colonial war, which at least removes empty abstractions from their policy: “I’d rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it” (94), Fowler says, sounding like the French characters in Lartéguy’s Yellow Fever. He tells Pyle about the harm that the British did to their allies in Burma with “phony liberalism” and the concern for maintaining a good conscience. In a dialogue that suggests Phuong’s symbolic role, Pyle says he has Phuong’s own “best interests” at heart, which irritates Fowler with its egotism and naiveté: “I don’t care about her interests…I’d rather ruin her and sleep with her than…look after her damned interests…If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone” (58). The Old World colonialist only wishes to use Phuong—the country and its resources—for his own benefit. The New World moralist wants to save her from herself.

Pyle would then represent the United States, newest player in the Indochina game for control over a small, obscure country, which will be blown out of proportion in the following quarter of a century into a major center of world conflict. He is inspired and guided by the writings of one York Harding, the author of several earnest works of political analysis, with titles like The Advance of Red China, The Challenge to Democracy, and The Role of the West. Pyle believes fervently in the “Third Force” that Harding champions: a national party or popular group that is neither colonialist nor Communist and that will be willing to fight the Viet Minh to ensure an American-style democracy in a united Vietnam. Harding’s character may be based on a professor of political science at Michigan State, Wesley Fischel, a friend of Diem and Landsdale, who proposed in books and articles political and economic strategies for the “modernization” (i.e. Americanization) of Vietnam in order to combat Communist influence there. One of his widely read articles, with an oxymoronic title, “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule,” was seriously discussed in academic journals.39

The intellectual Harding and his young disciple Pyle, now in the field in Southeast Asia to implement the master’s theories, base their plans of action on the Domino Theory, the belief that the fall of Indochina to Communism would bring about the immediate collapse of other neighboring nations. The theory is alluded to in a reference that shows that the argument was hardly new in the Fifties and that there were already skeptics about its relevance. In an argument with Pyle about what the Vietnamese people really want, Fowler claims that they only want food, peace, and no white men around telling them what to do. Pyle, the idealist, insists that what they do not want is Communism:

“If Indo-China goes…”

“I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean?” (93).

After the “loss” of China to Mao’s Communists in 1949, US policymakers were determined to prevent any further such losses in the global competition for dominance. Dulles, it will be recalled from the Introduction, was convinced that Ho was “an instrument of international Communism,” even though the Vietnamese revolution, contrary to continued American belief, was a genuine nationalist movement not controlled by either Moscow or Beijing.40 Where Pyle, and by implication the Americans, go wrong is in the assumption that while the French in Vietnam had failed by trying to perpetuate colonialism, Americans would succeed in providing a Third Force, “a viable, non-Communist alternative to the Vietminh.”41 What Fowler comes to believe may be summed up by Frances FitzGerald:

What was not so well appreciated by the Americans as by the French who had fought the war was that the new Vietnamese government [of Ho Chi Minh] had a stronger claim to legitimacy than did most governments in Southeast Asia, for it was the government that had mobilized the entire population, both urban elites and rural peasantry, to fight the war of national liberation.42

In the novel, the unlikely local candidate for implementing this alternative Third Force is the renegade General Thé, former Chief of Staff for the Cao Dai sect, which has taken to the hills. As Fowler tells Pyle, General Thé is “only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy” (156). Thé is what is now called a terrorist: his men bomb a café during the daytime in the center of Saigon. The bomb kills over fifty people, including a number of women and children, who are always present in town at that particular time of day. This act of terrorist provocation was actually planned by Pyle, who, as agent provocateur, intends to put the blame on the Communists in order to discredit them. Fowler has by now become sickened by all the violence he has witnessed in the war: “I know myself and I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually” (113). The three final adverbs are to the point, for it is Fowler’s antipathy to senseless killing and his pity for the victims of acts that he has personally witnessed that make him morally different from Pyle, who is indifferent to his victims because they are simply abstractions that have got in the way of his master plan. When he sees their blood on his shoes, he cannot even recognize it for what it is: