"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

Chapter Two

Fictional History & Historical Fiction: The Fall of Diem

South Vietnam was an American invention, conceived

by Dwight Eisenhower but delivered by John Kennedy

(Loren Baritz, Backfire).

South Vietnam was essentially the creation of the United States

(The Pentagon Papers).

i. President Ngo Dinh Diem

The major sign of the failure of the US project of nation-building in South Vietnam was the fall of its American-chosen leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. In this chapter, four early novels that deal with Diem’s dramatic final days will be examined. They share roughly the same time frame: the seven-month period from the outbreak of the Buddhist crisis in May 1963, which both exposed and brought to a head public dissatisfaction with Diem’s regime, to his US-assisted assassination in November 1963. In this first section, an overall chronological review of Diem’s career will be given to suggest why Diem was assassinated; more specifically, the events leading up to his death will clarify how the assassination came about. The American involvement in the coup d’état that led to the assassination of Diem and his brother Nhu is, according to Anthony Short, “probably the most painful and controversial episode of the Vietnam War,” but was also “arguably, something that was inherent in the logic of US intervention.”1

In all fairness, Diem’s obstacles to governing were formidable: war lords and competing religious sects, a powerful bandit organization (Binh Xuyen), the influx of nearly a million refugees to southern Vietnam from the north, coup factions within his own army, and northern Viet Minh cadres left behind in the south after the division of the country that were bent on inspiring insurrection. Diem took steps to deal with these problems and solidify his position in accordance with the following time-table. On June 18, 1954, he became Prime Minister of South Vietnam. The exodus of people from the north, mainly Catholics, with the aid of the US Navy, to South Vietnam began the same year, and numbered nearly a million people, furnishing Diem with a ready-made anti-Communist constituency in the south.2 US policymakers affirmed support for his regime while encouraging him to seek a broader basis of political support and to establish more democratic institutions.3 Diem gained control of the military by suppressing the rebellion of his Chief of Staff, General Hinh,4 and began to consolidate his political power by appointing members of his family to the cabinet. He agreed to the needed reforms stipulated in a letter from President Eisenhower (October 24, 1954) as a pre-condition to American aid,5 all of which went directly to Saigon. Diem launched the first of a series of agricultural reform measures (February 1955), but they resulted in more inequalities than before and created unrest among the peasants, which the Communist opposition exploited to its advantage.6

Diem’s forces did battle with the Binh Xuyen and the sects (March-May 1955)—action that is portrayed in two of the novels examined in Chapter One.7 Although Secretary of State Dulles and General Collins discussed replacing Diem, his champion Edward Landsdale urged the embassy to continue supporting him. The French, British, and Americans held talks in Paris (May 7-13, 1955), agreeing to support Diem’s government but expressing the wish to see it more representative. The following day, Diem declared that he was not bound by decisions made at conferences in which he had not participated.8 He launched, however, a successful offensive against the Hoa Hao sect (June 1955) and broke its resistance. Pham Van Dong, the foreign minister of North Vietnam, proposed consultations with the south to prepare for the nationwide elections stipulated by the Geneva Accords for July 1956. Diem replied in a broadcast (July 6, 1955) that since the accords were not signed, South Vietnam was not bound by them.9

The US leadership, including President Eisenhower, did not believe that if Ngo Dinh Diem ran he could defeat Ho Chi Minh, who was popularly perceived as the national liberator from foreign rule, both Japanese and French. For his part, Senator John F. Kennedy declared that free elections could not be held, for the results would inevitably be stacked against the South.10 Life magazine, published by the staunchly anti-Communist Catholics Henry and Claire Booth Luce, gave credence to the American lack of confidence in Diem when (in Life’s issue of May 13, 1957) it considered Diem’s refusal to hold elections as one of his greatest achievements, because the refusal would prevent his country from committing “national suicide.”11 In a rigged referendum abetted by Landsdale (October 1955), in which Diem received one-third more votes in Saigon than there were registered voters, he deposed Bao Dai and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as President, Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The new regime was immediately recognized by the US, five European and three Asian nations.12

By January 1956, Diem’s ruthlessness in purging what remained of Viet Minh cells in the south did not enhance his popularity in his own country and lost many potential allies.13 In Diem’s visit to the United States (May 5-19, 1957), Eisenhower called him the “miracle man” of Asia.14 Guerrillas immediately began a campaign of assassination of South Vietnamese officials (over 400 by the year’s end) that was meant to disrupt his government. He reacted by appointing more military men to administrative positions, which indirectly helped the guerrillas through the neglect of the population’s social and economic problems.15 With the resettlement of the northern refugees, Diem enjoyed perhaps the only popular support for his regime during the years 1955-57, but thereafter his policies only generated discontent.16 At a certain point, the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) took up the training of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN),17 and South Vietnam became, in effect, a client state of the US. Millions of dollars in aid, most of which went to the military, poured into South Vietnam annually, and were mostly spent on maintaining Diem and his family in power.18

Popular resistance to Diem gradually began to materialize. A peasant uprising in the Mekong Delta attacked and overthrew village administrations (January 17, 1960), which was a reaction to the oppressive measures of the regime in building and maintaining the hated “agrovilles.” In August of the same year, US intelligence produced an estimate that the South Vietnamese government had to win the support of the peasants or discontent would increase.19 Diem also encountered resistance by his own troops in Saigon. In the paratroop revolt (November 11-12, 1960) led by two colonels, which initiated the cycle of plotting against his regime, Diem was declared incapable of saving the country from Communism, and American intelligence confirmed the dissatisfaction with his inability to inspire resistance to it.20 As if to confirm this perception, there was a dramatic increase in revolutionary activity on the part of Diem’s adversaries. North Vietnamese leaders, who had already authorized limited armed resistance and selected assassinations of officials in South Vietnam, hoped that an indigenous southern movement would lead the insurrection there. They were concerned with consolidating their gains in the north, but their southern strategy received unsolicited help from Diem himself as his unpopularity grew. The southern revolutionary forces united in December 1960 to form the National Liberation Front (NLF)—an organization originally intended to “rally all those disaffected with Diem,” including non-Communists, to push toward independence.21

The US government remained committed to prevent a Communist takeover by means of financial and military support of Diem’s regime. President Kennedy sent one fact-finding mission after another to Vietnam, most of which were optimistic about the possibility of victory. In one report, Defense Secretary McNamara and General Taylor, for example, thought that a military program of anti-guerrilla war might reduce insurgency to “organized banditry” by 1965.22 Diem did not make the American effort easy, although he promised Kennedy in a letter (December 14, 1961) that he would be content to “liberalize” his regime in return for a large increase in aid.23 In January 1962, the US Air Force began flying defoliating missions in Vietnam, and in the following month the organization that would take over responsibility for conducting the war, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), under General Paul Harkins, was installed in Saigon (February 8, 1962).24 Two weeks later (February 27), two Vietnamese pilots flying American planes, in protest against Diem’s prosecution of the war, bombed and strafed the presidential palace, but Diem and his family escaped harm.25

This attack confirmed Diem in his belief that his true enemies were domestic. His “strategic hamlet” program, essentially a renewal of the agrovilles, also proved ineffective and was used mainly by Diem and his brother Nhu to increase their control in the countryside.26 As government repression continued, social ferment increased, culminating in the so-called Buddhist crisis. In a country where Buddhists constituted 70% of the population, twenty thousand Buddhists celebrating the traditional birthday of the Buddha were fired on, resulting in nine dead and twenty wounded. Diem, whose government was dominated by Catholics (10% of the population) because he thought that they were more politically reliable, blamed the shooting on the Vietcong.27 The crisis reached its climax in June, when the monk Thich Quand Doc set himself on fire at a Saigon intersection as a political and moral protest. The widely circulated news photo of this gruesome spectacle brought the regime’s repression of Buddhists to international attention. Diem resisted American requests to defuse the crisis and lost US support.

At home, President Kennedy began to express doubts about Diem, even proclaiming on television that the South Vietnamese leader had become out of touch with his own people. When the rumors emerged that Diem’s brother Nhu had cut a pragmatic deal with the Communists to deal out the Americans and stop fighting the war, the US government began to exert pressure on Diem to discard Nhu, and when that failed, began to consider supporting a military coup.28 Kennedy appointed Henry Cabot Lodge, his former Republican opponent, as Ambassador to Vietnam to reduce criticism of his Vietnam policy before the 1964 election.29 Before Lodge arrived in Saigon (August 22, 1963) to replace Diem’s friend, the current US Ambassador Frederick Nolting, anti-government plotting was already taking place: General Tran Van Don had informed CIA operative Lucien Conein on July 4 that a coup was being planned.30 The Ngo brothers, who controlled an extensive network of spies, suspected that Lodge was sympathetic to a plot against them. The conspirators, led by General Duong Van Minh (nicknamed “Big Minh”), were cautious about committing themselves, because earlier attempts had been aborted for fear they would not be firmly backed by the US. Lodge encouraged the conspirators with promises that the US would not interfere, while the US government insisted on maintaining “plausible denial” of Lodge’s participation.31

Tran Van Don proposed to Diem that he declare martial law to prosecute the war more effectively, but the real motive of the conspirators was to consolidate forces for the coup, while Diem and his brother hoped to implicate the army in cracking down on the Buddhists. Accusing the Buddhists of being Communist inspired, Nhu used members of an organization loyal to him, who were disguised as regular army soldiers, to attack Buddhist temples on August 22, 1963, beating, killing, and arresting hundreds of monks, students, and activists. Spontaneous demonstrations took place in various cities as a reaction, and President Kennedy himself emitted a protest.32 Ambassador Lodge met with Diem, who refused to dismiss his brother Nhu. At the same time, Lodge assured the generals of support if Diem did not agree to this demand as well as other necessary reforms. On October 5, General Minh met with Conein for assurances that the Americans would not hinder the coup and continue with aid afterward. On the same day, Lodge dismissed Saigon CIA chief John Richardson, who had his doubts, and reported to Kennedy that the coup was on. Although Generals Harkins and Taylor also expressed misgivings, Lodge did not deliver this message to the conspirators. Kennedy had left the decision up to him.33

The coup finally took place on November 1, 1963, only three weeks before Kennedy’s own assassination. The South Vietnamese generals laid siege to the presidential palace. The Ngo brothers first thought that the attack signaled a “counter-coup” that had been planned by Nhu and General Dinh, who controlled most of the forces around Saigon, but Dinh had in fact joined the rebellious generals. Diem was unable to get any support to suppress the attack and finally agreed to surrender. Lodge denied knowledge of the coup to Diem and offered him asylum in the embassy to save his life, but Diem and his brother Nhu fled to St. Francis Xavier Church in Cholon, the Chinese district of Saigon, where they were arrested and assassinated (November 2, 1963) under orders by Minh.34 As an immediate reaction, political prisoners were released from Saigon jails and the strategic hamlets in the countryside were destroyed by the peasants. The assassination, with American compliance, may be seen as symptomatic of the insistence of installing undemocratic leaders in other countries for the convenience of ideological or material self-interest.

ii. Stuart Hempstone, A Tract of Time (1966)

Hempstone’s novel views the events surrounding the fall of Diem from the perspective of the Vietnamese Central Highlands.35 It is the most complex and skillfully wrought of the works discussed in this chapter. The prose often evokes Hemingway:

Harry watched them come, trying to engrave on his mind the pattern of their coming, with the pale sun and green of the forest behind them, the abandoned long-house toppled on its side. It was something he wanted to take with him, to remember, to keep when it was all over. There was always, he found, something you wanted that way, something that summed it up for you and that nobody could take away (15).

There is an implicit contrast in the novel between this semi-wild region, inhabited by the indigenous peoples whom the French collectively called montagnards, or mountain-folk, and the urban space of Saigon, whose leaders will determine the fate of these tribal peoples. Divided into several language groups, the montagnards had had a distinct culture for thousands of years within the country. First enlisted by the French to fight against the Viet Minh, they were recruited by both sides during the American war (their casualties were exceptionally high, estimated at one-third of a total of one million people).36 Among Diem’s political blunders was his refusal to accommodate the ethnic minorities like the montagnards and the Chinese, or to conciliate the large religious sects like the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao. The montagnards were doomed by geography; they lived and hunted in an area that controlled strategic supply routes from north to south. Instead of courting them, Diem sought to reduce their influence by means of a Land Development Program that forcibly resettled them and put ethnic Vietnamese on their lands. By 1963, this policy had divided them into tribes that either supported the NLF or claimed independence from all outside authorities.37

To prevent the montagnards from assisting the Vietcong, the CIA developed a village defense program that was to be implemented by the US Special Forces, which armed and supplied them.38 Special Forces teams had begun training montagnards since 1961, creating the basis for the so-called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG). The village defense project was designed to combine military defense with socio-economic improvement programs. The montagnards evidently saw military service as an opportunity to protect themselves and their mountain highlands against the encroachment of ethnic Vietnamese,39 and the US in turn saw this attitude as an opportunity to control the highland supply route. Diem’s disregard for ethnic minorities and his incompetent ARVN commanders, however, often resulted in the unwillingness of the CIDGs to fight for the government, a situation that is reflected in Hempstone’s novel.40

Politically, the author is skeptical about any successful outcome for the war at the same time that he seems to uphold his protagonist’s anti-Communist ideals. When a correspondent asks an American captain in the field, an advisor to an ARVN artillery battery, if the war is being won, the man replies, “Wouldn’t say that. But we sure aren’t winning” (141). Diem’s betrayal of the montagnards, one of the reasons why he is portrayed in the novel as a leader who does not deserve to survive, is shown in two narratives that run parallel to the public narrative of the Saigon coup outlined above. These three narrative strands are alternated in small clusters of chapters.

In the Diem narrative, the Ngo brothers reveal themselves through their private dialogues, in which they are mainly concerned with staying in power by dealing with the multiplying crises in an ad hoc manner. For example, they install General Trang, a man entirely moved by greed, into the lucrative Saigon command in order to control the local situation more easily: corruption is thus institutionalized for the continuance of political survival. Their conversations also make it clear that any requests from the montagnards and other ethnic groups will have to wait until the current crisis is resolved. “The main thing is the Buddhist plot” (81), they conclude. The cynical pragmatism of the government is reflected in similar attitudes expressed by the leader of the CIA operation intended to support the regime.

In the novel, it is Diem who suggests raiding the Xa Loi pagoda and arresting the dissidents and Nhu who worries about the political repercussions of the wholesale arrests: “The army, if it could not defeat the Vietcong, at least could handle street mobs. But the riots forced him to make arrests and he knew that this antagonized the army. Each of the arrested demonstrators, bonze or student or coolie, had relatives in the army” (173). Nhu’s plan is to uncover the ringleaders through torture applied by a Chinese sadist named Mong Le. Nhu regards torture as a distasteful but necessary method of extracting information, with a fastidiousness that makes him doubly repugnant. He also resents “his role of eminence gris to the regime” (180) because he considers himself the stronger of the two brothers.

The various motives of the plotters against the regime are plausibly summed up by General Trang: Nhu’s secret police, the regime’s unwise persecution of the Buddhists, Diem’s lack of leadership, the military’s resentment of counselor Nhu, and the constant change of military commands. Trang shares these sentiments but has survived so far by being shrewd and cautious: “He had won his general’s stars not by achieving great victories but by avoiding terrible defeats” (191), an admission that reveals the impossibility of waging a successful war. Victory or defeat is not uppermost in the minds of the generals, who have more to gain by maintaining “a permanent stalemate”:

As long as the war lasted, the power and the prestige of the generals would remain high, more American money and U.S. equipment would continue to flow into the country, there would be countless opportunities for a clever officer to make himself a wealthy one (191-192).

The main narrative concerns the protagonist Harry Coltart and his efforts to maintain the montagnards as a strong partisan group in the fight against the Vietcong. A CIA operative, his political and military mission becomes complicated by his personal involvement with the Koho tribe. He forms a blood-brother relationship with the Koho chief, Yé, who gives him his teenage daughter, Ilouha, as a wife. Coltart constantly tries to convince Yé that the Vietcong are his people’s enemies. When Yé demands to know why this is so, Coltart replies: “Because they are Communists. Because they will enslave you. Because they will steal your land and make cattle of you” (21). Yé is understandably more concerned with his people’s welfare than questions of ideology, and he also knows that his people’s traditional enemies have been the Annamese (Vietnamese) of the plains. To the Annamese, “the montagnards were moi, savages, animals to be shot on sight” (24).

For this tribal people, stories are often the best argument. Coltart tells about the T’ai people from the north, who have felt the negative Communist influence on their lives. “You know they are taxed, that their young hunters are taken for the militia, that their chiefs are voiceless and cast aside like broken gourds?” (32). The patjao, or priest, points out, however, that such a situation may prevail in the north, but in these lands the Vietcong pay for food, news, and scouts, and they leave the montagnard women alone, in blatant contrast to the Annamese, who (the chief adds), “take our food, even when our granaries are almost empty. They break our laws. They use our women. They take our young men for the army, when they can catch them’” (33). These cogent arguments cannot be refuted by Coltart, a circumstance that would seem to be a critical objection to his presence, but he is liked personally by the chief and the tribe, and personal acceptance counts for much in their culture. He has, for example, mastered the local customs as well as the language, as he demonstrates in a ceremony of tribal chiefs by slaying a water buffalo with a single blow, which is considered a good omen, but despite his pleading Coltart cannot change the historical reality of hostility to the Vietnamese. He decides he can only get the allegiance of the tribe by means of a promise from Diem himself to respect the montagnard lands, which would in turn be respected as law by the tribe. As it is nearly a foregone conclusion that Coltart will fail, the attempt makes him the tribe’s doomed champion, a man who becomes disillusioned by his experience with the CIA and the American policy of backing Diem in any situation.

Coltart even suspects that an American victory in Vietnam is an elusive, probably unrealistic goal, but from a sense of duty he persists in trying to keep the montagnards in the fight. Yé demands of him the formal promise that “the Annamese soldiers will stay out of these hills, that no roads will be cut, that we shall be left to rule ourselves according to our own” (36). Coltart goes to Saigon in the hope of extracting this promise through his CIA boss, Englehardt, a man he trusts. He knows that Englehardt has always protected his operatives in difficult circumstances, but the CIA has its own political priorities. Diem is under pressure from reporters and the US embassy, the strategic hamlet program is not working, the Buddhist crisis is approaching, and a troublesome reporter named McWhorter is calling for the end of the Diem regime. As Englehardt tells Coltart, it is not the right time to rock the boat with ethnic minority questions. As for American strategy, Diem is their only hope: “He’s tough, intelligent, and has the will to fight. Finally, I know, if John McWhorter doesn’t, that there’s no alternative to Diem” (55). As a clincher, he invokes the domino theory. “We could lose this war…And if we lose it, we’ve lost all Southeast Asia, from Cambodia to Indonesia” (56). Eventually, Englehardt lies to Coltart about Diem’s assurances to keep him and the montagnards holding the line until troops can be sent into the mountains.

Although the correspondent McWhorter is portrayed unsympathetically (he finds it exciting to go on missions where men will kill, about which he can write “a very nice little story”), he is independent of the American mission and more perceptive about the war than is Coltart, who should have taken him more seriously. On Diem, who would cancel the troublesome correspondent’s visa if it were not a public admission to the Americans of his repression of the press, McWhorter’s remarks are perceptive: “We can’t win with this Catholic mandarin, Harry. He’s nothing but a yellow Frenchman…We need Asian leadership here” (89). It is through McWhorter’s eager eyes that the reader sees the shelling and looting of the presidential place, the failure of Nhu’s false coup, and the end of the regime, although to McWhorter’s great disappointment, Diem and Nhu have already fled. He has failed to get his scoop, the final interview with the toppled president, but he will still be rewarded with an editorship for his reporting.

While McWhorter serves as a political guide, a Frenchman named Michaud, who was born and lived much of his life in Vietnam, serves as his (a)moral guide. Frenchmen often serve in novels about the war as cynical but truthful observers of the situation, in contrast to disillusioned American idealists (cf. Greene’s The Quiet American and Just’s A Dangerous Friend). Michaud functions in just this way as a kind of foil to Coltart, his scarred face a sign of the price of knowledge and experience. He tries to convince Coltart that his guilt is out of place in the present situation. “Don’t wish, Harry, unless you can wish for a clean conscience. What a trade we apprenticed ourselves to! Clausewitz and Jomini say nothing about what it is like to betray a simple people” (112). He asks Coltart why the Americans think they can succeed with sixteen thousand men when the French failed with a quarter of a million, and Coltart thinks the difference is that the Vietnamese are fighting for their “freedom,” an answer that Michaud scorns as the vision of a “schoolboy” who does not take into consideration political complexities. He himself, for example, can operate as a rubber planter without being attacked by the Vietcong only because he pays taxes to both sides.

The third narrative functions as a counter-narrative to the second, with which it eventually converges, setting up an ideological antagonist to Coltart a Communist from the Rhadé tribe named Loye. Michaud is the link between Loye and Coltart, as a former comrade-in-arms of both men (Coltart in Korea and as Loye’s commanding officer in the French war against the Viet Minh). It is to the author’s credit that Loye is no caricature, as so often happens with characters who represent the Vietcong: he is given a complete past, from hunter of the hills and son of a tribal chief, to colonial soldier fighting for the French, to laborer and informant for the NLF. He has aspirations toward military command in this new war against foreigners, and his thoughts show him to be perceptive about the situation: “During the day, part of the country was Diem’s. But after dark the country shrunk to the tips of the bayonets of Diem’s soldiers cowering in their sandbagged forts. In the end, because of this, Loye thought, we will win” (102).

From the lectures he attends in Cholon, Loye has also learned his political lessons: “Did not the Vietcong stand for that which every Vietnamese wanted; rights for ethnic and religious minorities, an end to corruption and venality, the crushing of the landlords, the lowering of taxes?” (59). To become a member of the Party, which he wants badly, he works as a laborer at an AID mission, picking up information that he can pass on about the destination of rice shipments, and he also studies at the tactical school, waiting for a chance to carry out a mission that will impress his superiors. The chance arrives with the summons to a pagoda, where a Buddhist bonze, who is in reality a Party man, offers him a command in the Koho hills of his youth. He must stop the montagnard cooperation with Diem and the Americans by protecting the coolie caravans. The Koho sector is particularly important because of the American agent known as Erohé, the Elephant (Coltart’s tribal name). Loye is to win the Koho chief, Yé, away from this alliance and either discredit or kill the white man Erohé. Besides Loye’s desire to carry out the mission successfully and gain the confidence of the party cadres, he has an additional, personal motivation: Coltart’s wife, Ilouha, was originally promised to him.

Loye shows his military skills at careful planning and swift execution while leading a raid on the montagnard mission and hospital, Notre Dame du Bois. At the same time, he is ruthless and cruel in action, murdering the kindly French priest, Father Dupleix, who once patched up his wounds, and even decapitating him, impaling his head on a stake, and stuffing his genitals in his mouth. This ghastly atrocity is justified as a means of luring Coltart out of the hills. “He was a little sorry about the business of having to kill the priest, but he was a Boc [white man] and undoubtedly an enemy of the people” (150), a formulation that sacrifices personal feelings to political necessity and is probably intended to reveal the presumed Communist tendency to substitute slogans for analysis. The two antagonists are both expert in the practice of war, but Coltart is contrasted favorably with Loye precisely because of his commitment to people—the montagnards, Yé, Ilouha, even his mendacious boss, Englehardt—over political slogans.