Fire in the Lake (24 page)

The National Liberation Front, after all, began in a world where men walked behind wooden plows and threshed the rice by beating it with wooden flails. The NLF recruits were largely illiterate or semiliterate, men who spent their life working on one hectare of paddy land, hoping only that one day they might afford a bullock. The NLF taught these men to operate radio sets, to manufacture explosives, to differentiate one type of American bomber from another. It taught them to build small factories, hospitals, and logistical systems that ran the length and breadth of the country without touching a road. With these men the Front cadres shot down helicopters, designed gas masks against American chemicals, and invented small-unit tactics that would add chapters to the history of the art. With them the NLF built a government and an army out of the disordered and intractable society of South Vietnam.

This change, that in most countries takes several generations to perform, the NLF telescoped into five years. The movement was founded in 1960. By the spring of 1965, when the American regular troops entered the war, the Liberation Front had seriously damaged the Saigon government’s armed forces and isolated its city outposts from the countryside. With an army of southerners and a supply of weapons largely obtained from their enemy, the NLF was on the point of defeating a state the United States had provided with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military assistance, artillery, bombers, and some seventeen thousand American advisers. Five years is a short period in which to make a revolution, but it is a long one in which to fight a major war. Over the next half-decade the NLF with the help of North Vietnamese forces stood up to an American army of over half a million men armed with the most sophisticated array of weaponry the world has ever seen. In 1971 the Liberation forces remained undefeated, and the Front was still the most important political force in the south.

Over the years of war American officials spoke of the NLF as if it were an illustration of some larger principle, some larger menace to the security of the United States. To Walt Rostow the National Liberation Front was but one instance of the “disease of Communism” that affected developing countries around the world. To Robert McNamara it was a test case for the “new” Communist strategy of promoting “wars of national liberation” around the world. To many American military men it was but an example of the threat that guerrillas in general provided to the established governments of the earth. By this attempt at generalization, duplicated in other terms by many Americans on the left, the officials reduced the NLF to the status of a symbol and, again, obscured its achievement.

For the Vietnamese revolution in the south was in many ways unique. If it belonged to a category, then that category was extremely small. Since the period of international turmoil following the Second World War there were only two successful Communist insurgency movements, one in Cuba, the other in Vietnam. In Bolivia Che Guevara brought all his theory and practical experience to bear on the miserable, exploited hinterlands, only to find the Bolivian peasants as unreceptive as stones. In Southeast Asia the Communist movements had an almost complete record of failure. In Burma, the Philippines, and Malaya, they did not succeed in gaining support from the majority of the population. In Indonesia the Party relied upon the magical figure of Sukarno and did not take the necessary steps to seize and hold power.
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Then, too, since the Second World War only two countries have won their independence after a protracted war with a European power: Algeria and Vietnam. In many respects the Vietnamese war of the 1960’s was unprecedented in the history of revolutionary and independence wars. The Chinese Communists and the Viet Minh had, after all, secure base areas within their own country and a relatively weak enemy on their soil. At their greatest strength, the French forces in Vietnam numbered only seventy thousand. The United States by contrast gave the best of its armed forces and two billion dollars a month to the Vietnam War. At one point General Vo Nguyen Giap himself admitted that until the war for the south he knew nothing about “people’s war.”

During the course of the war Americans wrote a great deal about the military strategy of the NLF and relatively little about its politics. The reason is simple. Most research on Vietnam was official research, and the official American line was that the guerrilla war involved no internal political issues, but that it was merely part of the attempt of the North Vietnamese to conquer the south. As
The Pentagon Papers
showed, many American officials did not believe this line themselves, but it provided them with a convenient method of avoiding crucial and potentially damaging questions, such as what the political problems of South Vietnam were, and how it was that from the same population base the NLF managed to create an organization so much superior to that of the GVN. The result was that even those Americans responsible for the conduct of the war knew relatively little about their enemy, for within the NLF politics was all: it was at the same time the foundation of military strategy and its goal. For the NLF military victories were not only less important than political victories, but strictly meaningless considered in isolation from them. Those few American officials who studied the NLF saw the political focus, but did not understand its significance. Had they understood it, they might have warned that it would be better to send the Saigon regime’s army to fight without weapons than to send it to fight without a political strategy, as was the case.

For a non-Vietnamese to write a full account of the NLF is finally an impossible undertaking. It is not that the evidence is lacking. On the contrary. By 1967 the U.S. government possessed more information on the NLF than on any other political phenomenon in Asia. The American mission in Vietnam collected not only “captured documents” — a vast array of reports, orders, laundry lists, tax receipts, soldiers’ journals, promotion forms, and propaganda leaflets — but thousands of interviews with defectors and prisoner interrogations that described everything from the movement of battalions to the sensibilities of the individual soldier. By 1970 the collection must have filled entire buildings and, like a section of Borges’s Library of Babylon, contained (buried and irretrievable) every written statement the NLF ever made about itself. From this information it is possible to reconstruct the entire scheme of NLF operations and even to some extent the lives of its cadres. The political strategies are clear enough — the NLF itself proclaimed them. But still the task of description remains difficult, for no American can follow the NLF cadres into the world in which they live to see the point where these strategies touch upon the life of the Vietnamese villager. Hypotheses can be made, theories abstracted, but the very essence of the revolution will remain foreign and intractable.

Politics of the Earth

The American soldiers in Vietnam discovered their own ignorance in an immediate way. The NLF guerrillas chose the night and the jungles to fight in, similarly, and they chose to work with that part of the population which was the most obscure to the Americans and to the Saigon government officials. For the Americans to discern the enemy within the world of the Vietnamese village was to attempt to make out figures within a landscape indefinite and vague — underwater, as it were. Landing from helicopters in a village controlled by the NLF, the soldiers would at first see nothing, having no criteria with which to judge what they saw. As they searched the village, they would find only old men, women, and children, a collection of wooden tools whose purpose they did not know, altars with scrolls in Chinese characters, paths that led nowhere: an economy, a geography, an architecture totally alien to them. Searching for booby traps and enemy supplies, they would find only the matting over a root cellar and the great stone jars of rice. Clumsy as astronauts, they would bend under the eaves of the huts, knock over the cooking pots, and poke about at the smooth earth floor with their bayonets. How should they know whether the great stone jars held a year’s supply of rice for the family or a week’s supply for a company of troops? With experience they would come to adopt a bearing quite foreign to them. They would dig in the root cellars, peer in the wells, and trace the faint paths out of the village — to search the village as the soldiers of the warlords had searched them centuries ago. Only then would they find the entrance to the tunnels, to the enemy’s first line of defense.

To the American commanders who listened each day to the statistics on “tunnels destroyed” and “caches of rice found,” it must have appeared that in Vietnam the whole surface of the earth rested like a thin crust over a vast system of tunnels and underground rooms. The villages of both the “government” and “Viet Cong” zones were pitted with holes, trenches, and bunkers where the people slept at night in fear of the bombing. In the “Viet Cong” zones the holes were simply deeper, the tunnels longer — some of them running for kilometers out of a village to debouch in another village or a secret place in the jungle. Carved just to the size of a Vietnamese body, they were too small for an American to enter and too long to follow and destroy in total. Only when directed by a prisoner or informer could the Americans dig down to discover the underground storerooms.

Within these storerooms lay the whole industry of the guerrilla: sacks of rice, bolts of black cloth, salt fish and fish sauce, small machines made of scrap metal and bound up in sacking. Brown as the earth itself, the cache would look as much like a part of the earth as if it had originated there — the bulbous root of which the palm-leaf huts of the village were the external stem and foliage. And yet, once they were unwrapped, named, and counted, the stores would turn out to be surprisingly sophisticated, including, perhaps, a land mine made with high explosives, a small printing press with leaflets and textbook materials, surgical instruments, Chinese herbal medicines, and the latest antibiotics from Saigon. The industry clearly came from a civilization far more technically advanced than that which had made the external world of thatched huts, straw mats, and wooden plows. And yet there was an intimate relation between the two, for the anonymous artisans of the storerooms had used the materials of the village not only as camouflage but as an integral part of their technology.

In raiding the NLF villages, the American soldiers had actually walked over the political and economic design of the Vietnamese revolution. They had looked at it, but they could not see it, for it was doubly invisible: invisible within the ground and then again invisible within their own perspective as Americans. The revolution could only be seen against the background of the traditional village and in the perspective of Vietnamese history.

In the old ideographic language of Vietnam, the word
xa
, which Westerners translate as “village” or “village community,” had as its roots the Chinese characters signifying “land,” “people,” and “sacred.” These three ideas were joined inseparably, for the Vietnamese religion rested at every point on the particular social and economic system of the village. Confucian philosophy taught that the sacred bond of the society lay with the mandarin-genie, the representative of the emperor. But the villagers knew that it lay with the spirits of the particular earth of their village. They believed that if a man moved off his land and out of the gates of the village, he left his soul behind him, buried in the earth with the bones of his ancestors. The belief was no mere superstition, but a reflection of the fact that the land formed a complete picture of the village: all of a man’s social and economic relationships appeared there in visual terms, as if inscribed on a map. If a man left his land, he left his own “face,” the social position on which his “personality” depended.

In the nineteenth century the French came, and with their abstraction of money they took away men’s souls — men’s “faces” — and put them in banks.
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They destituted the villages, and though they thought to develop the economy and to put the landless to work for wages in their factories and plantations, their efforts made no impression upon the villagers. What assets the French actually contributed to the country in the form of capital and industrial plants were quite as invisible to the villagers as the villagers’ souls were to the French. At a certain point, therefore, the villagers went into revolt.

Ngo Dinh Diem and his American advisers, however, did not, or could not, learn from the French example. Following the same centralized strategy for modernization, they continued to develop the cities, the army, and the bureaucracy, while leaving the villages to rot. As it merely permitted a few more rural people to come into the modern sector in search of their souls, this new national development constituted little more than a refugee program. For those peasants with enough money and initiative to leave their doomed villages it meant a final, traumatic break with their past. For the nation as a whole it meant the gradual division of the South Vietnamese into two distinct classes or cultures.

Of necessity, the guerrillas began their program of development from the opposite direction. Rather than build an elaborate superstructure of factories and banks (for which they did not have the capital), they built from the base of the country up, beginning among the ruins of the villages and with the dispossessed masses of people. Because the landlords and the soldiers with their foreign airplanes owned the surface of the earth, the guerrillas went underground in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. Settling down among people who lived, like an Orwellian proletariat, outside the sphere of modern technology, they dug tunnels beneath the villages, giving the people a new defensive distance from the powers which reigned outside the village. The earth itself became their protection — the Confucian “face” which the village had lost when, for the last time, its hedges had been torn down. From an economic point of view, their struggle against the Diem regime with its American finances was just as much of an anticolonial war as that fought by the Viet Minh against the French — the difference being that now other Vietnamese had taken up the colonial role.