Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.”
~T.S.Eliot
The concluding story in this blog, Three Days with the Vietcong, tells of a trip Max Watts and I made with the Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese were our partners in our struggle against the U.S. Army. In fact, the opposite is more exact. We were supporting the Vietnamese in their war against the United States. And our small group in Paris, along with anti-war people all over France, and the anti-Vietnam Americans back in the States, were all doing what we could to get the American military out of Vietnam. I assume the use of anti-Vietnam to signify “against the Vietnam War” is familiar by now.
Wars are all too familiar in the twenty- first century, American wars in particular, although these are not the only wars going. But due to America’s technological superiority to the rest of the world, particularly in the military field, our wars, speaking as an American, are the most notorious and the most devastating. We are engaged in two at present: one in Iraq where we have contracted private companies like Torres, DynCorp, Sabre and other so-called "enterprises of conflict," to create special armies, including many Third World Citizens, under U.S. military command, to stand in for us. They take over all the duties of the regular army, beginning with keeping the base clean. The other war is in Afghanistan where we also have our own American troops on the ground, along with the privately contracted armies. To most of the world, this is the significance of America in the 21st century: Invasion and occupation, on the pretext of training the local army to defend itself without the U.S.
Parenthetically and for convenience sake, I will use America to signify the United States; my apologies to Canada, South America, and many of the Caribbean islands.
The Vietnam War began, and ended fortunately, in the 20th century. Here comes some background: Vietnam, in fact the whole Indochinese peninsula, had been a colony of France before World War II. From the end of that war in 1945, Vietnam had actively resisted French occupation. After a long anti-colonial war, the Vietnamese defeated France militarily at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and from then until the American invasion in 1965, Vietnam was a sovereign state. But all the years France had been an occupying power had left a lasting cultural influence on Vietnam. For example, French was the principal European language spoken there; the educational system was based on the French system, and France was the country of predilection for foreign universities. The French, for their part, had always been against the American invasion of Vietnam (the government, however, was officially on the side of the Americans.). After France's humiliating defeat by the Vietnamese Army, they had no desire to see another country succeed where they had failed; that Eisenhower, the U.S. general-turned-President, had refused to help the French in their Vietnam War by lending them his Air Force might have been one more grudge against the Americans.
The American government had already sent “advisors” to Vietnam in the fifties. The United States was afraid Vietnam would be the first Communist domino in a chain reaction that would establish communism in the rest of the Indochinese peninsula and points east. Ho Chi Minh, the ruler of the country was certainly a communist, although “establishing communism” is a long term process that has never been done successfully. The United States was fast becoming the hegemonic power in the world and wanted capitalism, a system quite different from communism, to take over the world. The only way they could figure out to get rid of Vietnam, or probably even considered, was by physically destroying it.
For today’s readers: now that capitalism has taken over, and is in the process of taking over most of the world, the old method of total war—“bombing Vietnam back into the stone age,” as Curtis Lemay, a particularly blood thirsty American general put it—was as useless as it was cruel. That was how the Vietnam War protestors felt back in the 60’s and 70’s when my stories took place.
Back to Paris, 1971, when this Vietcong story takes place, we were now in the middle, approaching the end of the U.S./Vietnam War. As Vietnam had resisted the French, it went right on resisting the Americans. At the Geneva conference of 1954, the U.S. had pushed through an artificial division of Vietnam into a North and South. After invading the country in 1965 and occupying its capital city, Saigon, the Americans, under Lyndon Baines Johnson as President, set up two countries, one on each side of a convenient river to justify the division along the 17th parallel line that crosses the country a little more than halfway up. That part of Vietnam the U.S. had been able to conquer and hold they established as South Vietnam, with Saigon as its capital. The rest of the country was North Vietnam, with Hanoi under Ho Chi Minh as its capital. The point of the whole operation was to divide the people against itself, a division that the resistance saw through and successfully rejected.
Therefore, when the Vietnamese continued fighting the Americans, despite the heavy loss of part of their country, the United States said the North was invading the South. They had created a southern army called the ARVN, commanded in fact by a massive deployment of U.S.troops, with a puppet government complete with puppet ruler as local government. Puppets cannot defeat the will of a people for independence and liberty. In April 1975, the army of North Vietnam, along with the National Liberation Army of South Vietnam, (FLN or les Forces de Liberation Nationale), the Vietcong in U.S. slang, drove the Americans out of the country. The last U.S. helicopter loosened the fingers of the last puppet Vietnamese as they tried to climb abroad, desperate to escape the revenge of the people they had betrayed.
While the war lasted, the advantage for the Vietnamese of having a part of the country still under its own control was immeasurable; certainly for the obvious military reasons, among which a haven for refugees from the South, and a base to continue the war are but two examples. On the propaganda front, there was a North Vietnamese Legation in every country of the world, establishing contact with the local government, and a source of information for all the anti-Vietnam forces in that particular country.
Our parent group, the Paris-American Committee to Stopwar (PACS) had long been in contact with the Vietnamese. Both the FLN and the so-called North Vietnamese (I repeat, the Vietnamese always considered themselves one people) were present at the weekly press conferences at the North Vietnamese Legation, open to anyone, journalist or information-seeking individual, who wanted to hear the Vietnamese side of the story, as opposed to the American propaganda, feeding the establishment press throughout the world.
Despite the average PACS member’s fear of getting involved with the American deserters, he or she had no qualms about fraternizing with the Vietnamese. These mainly middle-class Americans said they were worried about getting sent away for seven years, the penalty for aiding and abetting desertion. By the same logic, they could have gotten thirty years for fraternizing with an open enemy of the United States, theoretically even execution. The two countries were at war, after all. Perhaps the Vietnamese were simply more charming and more reassuring than our support group. Maria Jolas, the over seventy years old doyenne of PACS, certainly found them so. Eventually, Maria Jolas did participate in supporting the American deserters, but with a French group. She was always a great favorite with the Vietnamese, and on her birthday they sent a delegation to her with presents. She was very touched: “It was not on the exact day,” she said. “But I have changed that in their honor.”
Max and I were able to drive four Vietnamese down to Cannes for the January Documentary Film Festival: a young man and woman from the FNL, one middle-aged man who had been a commander in the Northern Army, and their press attaché. How this happened, why it happened, and what the trip was like all demand a certain amount of precise reporting, which is why I have made a story out of it: Three Days with the Vietcong.
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