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Russ
L. Kleinbach Presented at the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies, Nov. 1, 1992. The
meaning of human experience is to a large extent determined by our paradigms or
world views. When Americans and
Vietnamese met in Viet Nam in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, their experiences
frequently had very different meanings for them. The following observations are based primarily on two years
(1968-1970) working as a civilian in urban and rural areas of Viet Nam during
the war, and literature from the same period. The paper will present contrasting
Vietnamese and American world-views and perceptions of self, family, nation,
death and the war. The Vietnamese paradigm is characterized by the family, a
sense of obligation to extended family, an attitude of being, a relative
tolerance of diversity and neutrality, a unity of means and ends, and death and
the dead as part of the process of reality. The American paradigm is characterized by individualism, a
defense of self and national rights, a belief in an ideology, relative
intolerance of diversity and neutrality a separation of means and ends, and
death as the end. This paper
will address how people with these diverse paradigms may experience similar
events differently and how their actions reflect their paradigms.
It
is important to say in the beginning that the statements I am going to make and
the conclusions I will reach are generalizations
which are meant to be helpful in understanding the general character of
American and Vietnamese experiences, and are in no way meant to be inclusive of
all Americans and Vietnamese.
Vietnamese
reality is centered in the family with
an extension of the family being the
village community and fatherland. The
family includes all relatives and ancestors.
The family is based in the
home (of generations), in the graves of ancestors, and in the many relics and
mementos, including family altars.1
This is a world of an ethic of obligation to the family, authority, and
to “correct behavior.”2
It is not a world of individual or human rights.
In this sense it is a world akin to the family/tribal reality of Judaism
where the way was defined by the Ten Commandments. But for the Vietnamese there is no correct set of beliefs or
commandments. What is desired is an attitude or a method for arriving at
knowledge and action. When one
attains this attitude or satori (insight)
his/her attitude will conform by itself to reality.3
While there is only one reality and “way,” the Vietnamese paradigm is
relatively open to diversity of interpretations, accommodation and neutrality.
There is no orthodoxy. More
importantly, there is no sense of the “individual self” and his/her rights
as we perceive these in America. The
self is a person and member of the historic family, but the self is not an
individual part of the family. Rather
the person is made up of the familial relationships and roles.4
It is important to understand that this reality can extend outward to
include patriotism and the fatherland. The National Liberation Front (NLF)
effectively made this connection for many of its followers and soldiers.5
We will see later how this is different from what we Americans mean by
nation and nationalism.
The
material foundation of the Vietnamese sense of reality is centuries of stable
family/village agricultural life.6
The cultural
foundation is Buddhism which has it strength not in organization or doctrine,
but in the psychological attitudes and values held by people. Buddhism
is pervasive but formless. . . . It has its organizations that are simple to
shatter, but Buddhism itself remains. It
is like a drop of mercury you can
strike the mercury and it will disintegrate into many smaller parts, but as soon
as you remove your fist they will run together again.7 This analogy to
mercury and the droplets which run back together is also a good image of the
family and family members. The
focus of reality is the family not the individual members. It can probably be said that this paradigm of reality is or
was generally true for Vietnamese whether they were Buddhist, Catholic or
Communist. This is a “relational” as opposed to a “particle” or
“atomistic” sense of reality.
The
absence of a doctrinal view of religion is illustrated in the following
experience. While I was working in a Vietnamese Protestant hospital, a woman
offered to follow my religion if I would take her into the U.S. military
hospital to visit her wounded husband. For
her, family was clearly more important than doctrine.
Somewhere she acquired the idea that for Western Christians beliefs were
very important. She may have gotten
it from the fact that for some time the Christian mission had required people
who came to the clinic, to listen to a sermon before they were seen by the
Western doctor.
The
Vietnamese tolerance of diversity and neutrality allowed for the peasants and
revolutionaries to say, “If you are not against us, your are with us,” and
“if we do not lose the war, we win.” From
the perspective of most Vietnamese, neutrality, accommodation and flexibility
were tolerated so long as they allowed for the survival of the family and the
community. In one village which I
visited there were two village councils. One
was a Government of the Republic of Viet Nam (GVN) council, and one was a NLF
council. The first was elected
during the day, the second at night. There
were six seats on each council, with four of the seats on each council being
filled by the same men. “The
essence of small people is that of grass,” wrote Confucius.
“And when a wind passes over the grass, it cannot choose but bend.” 8
I
learned this lesson of flexibility from a young Mennonite friend who had worked
in Viet Nam for three years. When I
was getting very frustrated with the Vietnamese community in which we were
rebuilding homes because they would not do things the way I thought they should
be done, this young man said to me, “Look Raul, just take it easy, there at
least six different ways to do almost anything.
So if they want to do it their way it’s OK, just as long as it gets
done.”
The Vietnamese
paradigm has a unity of means and ends. Life
and reality are “way” or
“process,” not a selection of
means chosen to reach unrelated ends in the future.
This was illustrated in the self-immolation by Buddhists as a way of
pushing the world to understand the suffering of the Vietnamese,9 and, as we will see, by
the organizing methods used by the revolutionaries in the villages.
As the Vietnamese say, In a river current, it is not the
water in front that pulls the river along, but the water in the rear that acts
as the driving force, pushing the water in front forward.10 American
reality, on the other hand, is centered in the individual with a civil and
ideological extension to the nation which is a geographic area with shared
economic interests and belief system. We
experience reality from the perspective of the big “I.”
As the Vietnamese have an ethic/value attitude of obligation to
family, we have an ethic/value ideology based on our individual rights,
exemplified in the first ten amendments to the constitution.
As the Vietnamese attitude of obligation extends beyond the family to the
fatherland, our belief in our individual rights (e.g., freedom, property,
democracy) extends to the rights of our nation, i.e., “national security.” Our paradigm is defined by beliefs (e.g., free enterprise
capitalism) which take on the character of revealed doctrine or “scientific”
truth.11
Since we have the truth, we are relatively closed to diversity or neutrality in
belief and structure. Reality for
us is known. There is truth and
there is falsehood. Truth is
America, Christianity, political democracy and capitalism.
We have the truth, and error has no rights.
Reality for us is not made up of many diverse families, tribes and
fatherlands. Reality is our nation
of individuals, with truth and our rights against the dark side, called until
recently, communism. Nixon said it
so well for the Readers Digest in
1964 On
the fate of South Vietnam depends the fate of all of Asia.
For South Vietnam is the dam in the river.
A Communist victory there would mean, inevitable and soon, that the flood
would begin; next would come the
loss of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, which is only
forty-five miles from the Philippines and next door to Australia. . . . And what
of Japan? . . . Encouraged by our retreat the Communists . . . will increase
their aggressive action, not only in Asia, but in Africa, Latin America and the
Near East. 12 This perspective is
illustrated by an American ideologist, Francis Fukuyama, who recently declared
(after the Communist Party lost power in the USSR) the triumph of capitalism and
the end of history.13
Well, almost, I guess, since
Cuba and Vietnam are still officially “enemy,” there is still history being
made there.
In
the context of the war, this American intolerance to diversity and neutrality
led the Americans to say, “If you are not with us, you are against us,” and
“if we do not win the war, we lose.” We
Americans are the world’s leaders, judges, and police establishing truth and
saving Viet Nam and the world from Communism.14
Anyone who does not help us is as bad as a Communist.
If we don’t control the country, we lose it.
Neutrality is evil. Although
our American individualism allows for individual neutrality (for Americans only)
within very narrow guidelines, i.e., the status of conscientious objector.
The
American paradigm has a separation between means and ends.
Life and reality are a journey through time.
This journey is make up of goals or ends to be accomplished.
It is a repetition of the selection of means chosen to reach unrelated
ends in the future. This was
illustrated in U.S. governments systematic lying to the world about the
“unjust” means used in Viet Nam,15
and, as we will see, by the methods used to save the villages in Viet
Nam.
People
with these diverse paradigms experienced similar events differently and their
actions reflected their paradigms. One
of the common and frequently misunderstood experiences in Viet Nam was the
physical touching of American men by Vietnamese men.
This often took the form of Vietnamese men stroking a hairy American arm.
Vietnamese men would also commonly put their hands on the shoulder or
knee of an American man while drinking tea or beer at a table.
Such contact was common, and often produced a physical withdrawal, if not
a violent aggressive response from American males particularly if they were
military and/or if it was the first time. In
Viet Nam men touch other men and even hold hands with male (not female) friends
in public without there being any homosexual implications.
Beyond the American overtone of homosexuality, there was a sense of a
violation of the American’s individual person
and space by someone with a more
relational sense of reality. It may
just have been that as we all like to pet hairy dogs, perhaps the Vietnamese
were just petting interesting hairy beasts.
Hoang Son, age 14 of Saigon wrote this poem AMERICANS
ARE NOT BEAUTIFUL They
are called MY Another
kind of family (non-individual) experience happened frequently to my wife (also
American) and I when we were eating in shops or restaurants anywhere outside of
the major cities. As we would order
our meal and speak to the waiter or waitress in
Vietnamese, the people around us would become aware that we spoke their
language. Not infrequently they
would, (without invitation) join us at our table and begin to quiz us on all
sorts of personal things. Sometimes
people from the kitchen would come out and join in the conversation.
Once when the owner of the restaurant found out that my wife was a
doctor, she (the owner) sent home for a sick daughter to have her seen by the
doctor right there at the table. It
was as though when we spoke the language of the people we were no longer
foreigners but family. Interestingly,
when people would first meet us and hear us speaking Vietnamese they assumed we
were from a country in Europe, then when they found we were Americans it was
assumed we were military intelligence (for U.S. national security) or
missionaries (to spread the American ideology) as they were the only Americans
who would learn the language.
Any
sense of individual space disappeared when we would combine speaking Vietnamese
with having one or both of our Vietnamese-American adopted babies with us.
Even in the cities, when we took a
baby out in public with only diapers and no shirt because of the heat, women
would frequently walk up to us, touch the baby’s chest and shoulders and tell
us to put a shirt on the kid so he/she would not catch cold.
Once a woman even came up to us and checked inside the diaper to see if
we had a boy or a girl. Vietnamese babies normally wore shirts but no diapers.
When
we would be in a crowd such as standing in line for a bus, the people around us
(assuming that we could not understand them) would talk about us.
The commonly held debate was about where we got the children, whether or
not we would take them back to the United States, how much we paid for them,
etc. Sometimes we just listened to hear what they thought.
Other times we would turn and tell them that we understood that they were
talking about us, thinking they would be embarrassed and stop.
It never worked. As soon as they knew we understood their questions they would
direct them to us. So we learned
that if we were not up to a detailed conversation about our family, we should
not let on that we spoke Vietnamese.
While
we often felt as though we had no individual or personal space in this
environment, and that we could easily move into almost family intimacy with
people, there was an interesting reaction which we got from several of our
Vietnamese friends. They advised us not to adopt the children because, they said,
since the children were not family they would not be loyal to us and when they
grew up they would perhaps steal our money and run away.
Thus it seemed that ultimate trust was only to be had within one’s
“real” extended family.
The
extended family paradigm had its positive and its negative sides.
On the positive side, before the French occupation of Viet Nam there were
few if any orphanages because there were few if any children without some, if
not many, relatives in their communities. The
downside to this paradigm, however, was that people did not feel an obligation
to care for children or adults who were not perceived as their kin.
This was evident in the orphanages which were established during the
French and American Indochina wars (often by foreign missionaries) where the
children were fed and housed, but not given familial attention and love.
In 1969 we picked our son out (age three months/ weight 7 pounds) in a
room with forty cribs and two attendants. Some
of the children were as old as two years and didn’t sit up, smile or cry any
more. We were told that about half
of them died by the age of two.
Another example of
the human feeling and obligation being limited to family membership was
experienced by Western colleagues who ran a nursing school.
They found that one of the things which needed to be consciously taught
to Vietnamese nurses (at least from an American perspective) was to care for
people with whom they were not related. By
tradition, hospitals in Viet Nam allowed family members to live/stay in the
hospital rooms or in nearby buildings and to feed, bathe, etc. patients in the
hospital. An American doctor
colleague who taught in the medical school in the mid 1960’s said that as late
as the 1950’s some doctors believed that a good doctor could diagnose without
touching the patients, i.e., non-relatives.
We
Americans experienced both an invasion of our individual identity and space, and
on the other hand surprise that trust and caring were not extended beyond the
family. We experienced ourselves as individuals in a society
(gesellschaft) of individuals. The
Vietnamese experience was as personal, but more as member of a family community
(gemeinschaft). Fitzgerald makes
this clear when she says that “Traditionally, the Vietnamese notion of society
was not that of an aggregate, a collection of people, but that of a complete
organism. The whole of society was
much greater than the sum of its parts because it reflected and duplicated the
overall design of the universe”17
Sometimes this had curious manifestations.
I found, for example, in the refugee area in Saigon where few small
family units had any of their extended family in the immediate community, that
individuals would trust me more than their Vietnamese neighbors because the
neighbors were not relatives. As someone who was not a member of any Vietnamese family and
not a government person, I was perhaps perceived as a neutral and safe person.
Even as a person living in a foreign country away from family and friends
it was difficult for me to really understand with feeling how alone many of the
displaced families and individuals felt, having been disconnected from their
family community. In the 20 years
following 1954, this forced displacement effected probably one-third to one-half
of the Vietnamese population.
So
the Buddha is not in the mountain. He
is considered to be in everyone, so that the peace and well-being of the whole
people require that every Buddhist should fulfill his responsibility to the
community while not neglecting his inner life. 18
This
way of being requires no particular ideology or political-economic structure but
it does require a community of caring people who are able to use their
community’s resources to care for themselves.19
For the majority of Vietnamese, this meant the absence of war. For a
minority of Vietnamese this came to mean the absence of foreign invaders, i.e.,
historically the Chinese, then the French and the Americans.
For the majority of Vietnamese the war was never about capitalism vs.
communism, or ideological issues of freedom, democracy or nationalism.
In their paradigm Viet Nam was a country populated primarily by a large
number of families who shared a common language, culture and way of life,
something like a tribe in which some small number of families often dominated
other families but the way of life continued.
Occasionally a foreign tribe, usually the Chinese, attempted to rule all
the families through one or more of the old ruling families.
“For more than three thousand years the Vietnamese have resisted those
who have tried to conquer them, and done so successfully, including even the
troops of the terrible Genghis Khan.”20 In 1076, General Ly
Truong Kiet wrote,
The southern mountains and rivers belong to the Viet people, Paradoxically,
the Vietnamese community paradigm did not include the tribes of people who were
native to the region before the Vietnamese moved south out of China. The historic Vietnamese relationship with the
“Montagnards,” as the French called them, is somewhat like that between the
Europeans and the Native Americans. The
conflict between ideological truth and the Vietnamese way of life reached
a crisis with the Vietnamese (Diem) whom the Americans selected to rule the
southern part of the country and to save it from Communism.
He was a Catholic, and a
member of one of the old mandarin ruling families.22 He imposed a doctrine and
a restrictive economic and political structure.
He arrested, tortured, exiled or “liquidated” those who were neutral
or not anti-Communist.23
Law 10/59, for example, gave Diem the right to cut off the heads of
persons suspected of being Communist sympathizers.24
In the early 1960’s, Vietnamese
Buddhists, students, progressives, and Communists organized against the
government. The repression
continued even after Diem was dead (1963), Robert Kennedy observed in 1967,
“The Saigon junta has ruled out ‘neutralists,’ has ruled out
‘Communists,’ has ruled out others of whom the generals disapproved, and now
they will not even let those who are left participate freely and openly.”25
In 1970 the exposure of the Con Son Island “Tiger Cages” revealed
that repression had increased with U.S. advice and financing.26
After the escalation of the mid-sixties the majority of Vietnamese were
confronted with a massively destructive war which from their perspective was not
about freedom and democracy which they never had, nor capitalism or communism,
but about the mandarins and their generals on the one hand, and the Communists
on the other, fighting for control of the country.
The problem was the Americans brought in B-52’s, defoliants, half a
million troops, etc., to help the mandarins and began destroying the families,
their villages and their way of life. The
Catholics and the Communists were both ideological in a “western”
sense, but the Communists, while advocating a modification in the traditional
way of life, were not advocating anything fundamentally non-Vietnamese27 and were not a front for, or a representative of, a foreign power.
The Americans were foreigners and seemed to be determined to destroy the
Vietnamese world and impose a new paradigm.
Thus when the majority of Vietnamese were forced to choose, and they were
forced to choose, they chose the more Vietnamese
way and supported the side led by the Communists.
Communism increasingly became identified by the peasants with village and
patriotism.28
To
illustrate the different world views and their implications we can contrast
General Vo Nguyen Giap with General
Curtis LeMay . In mid 1966 the
increased B-52 bombing of North Viet Nam led to the expectation in the north of
a land invasion. Kahin and Lewis
write, With this prospect in view, Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap stated “We must make sure that each citizen is a soldier, each village is a fortress, each party echelon or each party chapter committee is a combat staff.” The North Vietnamese have stressed the importance of “self-defense” and the mobilization of a large militia, and their statements contain constant reminders that men, not weapons, determine the outcome of any war.29 In
the South this kind of organizing activity, where the means supported the end of
modernizing and maintaining the community at the same time, was well
established. Fitzgerald writes, As
an archaeologist might conclude from examination of the NLF’s goods and tools,
the guerrillas were attempting not to restore the old village but rather to make
some connection between the world of the village and that of the cities.
The land mine was in itself the synthesis.
Made of high explosives and scrap metal--the waste of foreign cities--it
could be manufactured by an artisan with the simplest of skills.
A technically comprehensible object, it could be used for the absolutely
comprehensible purpose of blowing the enemy soldiers off the face of the village
earth. Having themselves
manufactured a land mine, the villagers had a new source of power--an inner life
to their community. In burying it --a machine--into the earth, they infused a new
meaning into the old image of their society. 30 On
April 1, 1967 Curtis LeMay, a former General in the U.S. Air Force said, “We
must be willing to continue our bombing until we have destroyed every work of
man in North Viet Nam if this what it takes to win the war.”31
The policy of “destroying in order to save,”
was a standard American operational policy for much of the rest of the
war.32
It was carried out with defoliation, saturation bombing, and ground
operations such as the 1967 operation Ceder Falls which began with the surprise
assault on the village of Ben Suc (population 3,500).
The village was surrounded, the people removed to a “relocation
hamlet,” (read concentration camp) and the village then burned, bulldozed and
bombed to remove any possible use by the revolutionaries. Jonathan Schell describes what was to follow the destruction
of Ben Suc; “After the jungle had
been heavily shelled and bombed, the 1st Division troops were . . .
simultaneously to destroy the villages of Rach Bap, Bung Cong, and Rach Kien,
evacuate the villagers, and start cutting broad avenues in the jungle with
special sixty-ton bulldozers nicknamed hogjaws.”33 To the Americans
the villages were just so many houses, gardens and trees which could be
reconstructed anew somewhere else. They
had no conception or feeling for what they were doing to these Vietnamese people
or what they were experiencing. In
the old ideographic language of Viet Nam, the word za,
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. . . [T]he villagers
knew that it [the sacred bond of the society] 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.34 What
the Americans systematically did without experiencing the meaning or magnitude
of the tragic offense they were committing, was to bomb and burn the religious,
social, economic, and interpersonal fabric of hundreds of thousands of people.
It is as close as one can get to cultural genocide.
In many cases, as in My Lai 4, the people and the physical village were
destroyed.35 Usually this was
done with bombs not bullets. The
North Vietnamese General expressed a non-dogmatic way to fulfill an obligation
to the family community and the fatherland.
Here the means is consonant with and exemplifies the goal or “end.”
Ho Chi Minh said in 1969, “Our rivers, our mountains, our people will
always be; The American aggressors
defeated, we will build a country ten times more beautiful. . . . Our Fatherland
shall be reunified. Our compatriots
in the North and South shall be reunited under the same roof.”36 The American General
represented his nation’s right to use whatever means necessary to destroy evil
and establish the ideological and structural truth. For him the means were independent of the desired end. Richard
Nixon said in 1962, “It is essential that the United States commit all the
resources of which it is capable to avoid a Communist take-over in South Viet
Nam and the rest of Southeast Asia.”37 The
material and symbolic differences between what the Americans and the NLF did in
the villages are very important. The
Communists saved the villages for the community by empowering the people.
The Americans saved the villages for “truth” and the West by
destroying them. If “light” is
symbolic of “truth,” and “warmth” is symbolic of “relationships,”
than we can understand the American expression, “Better dead than
Red,” and the Vietnamese world view as represented in the expression, “We do
not die from the darkness but from the cold.”38 When
I was working in Saigon helping people build low-cost permanent housing amidst
the ruble of their old homes destroyed by American bombs, many of my Vietnamese
workers were draft dodgers or military deserters who would miraculously
disappear for a short period of time whenever an ARVN patrol would come through
the community looking for men for the military.
My crew foreman had paid off an “uncle” to get himself discharged
with “legal” papers. These men
were not pro or anti-Communist. They believed that after the war when the American military
was gone, Viet Nam would be reunited. This
was not their war, it was the war being carried on by the Saigon and the United
States governments. The
relationship of government and citizens is another area where Vietnamese and
American paradigms differ. In the
Vietnamese family community paradigm, governments represent ruling families and
not common citizens. Citizens are
not responsible for what a government does, nor is a government representative
of its citizens. On the other hand,
I felt guilty and responsible for the destruction being caused by the American
military because in my paradigm the American government is of the people, by the
people, and for the people. American
soldiers often told us the war was about defending America, Viet Nam and the
world from Communism (an ideology) and from Communists (evil people). It is
interesting that an aspect of the ideology
is that from an American perspective, when a person is a Communist,
he/she loses any national or cultural identity, and becomes just a messenger of
universal evil. Lyndon Johnson said
in 1965, “Our purpose in Viet Nam is to join in the defense and protection of
freedom of a brave people who are under attack that is controlled and that is
directed from outside their country.”40
From a Vietnamese perspective the only outside direction was coming from
the U.S., and being a Communist or a Catholic didn’t mean one was less
Vietnamese. To the Vietnamese my wife and I were “Americans,” until we began
to eat, drink tea, and talk in Vietnamese with them, then we became people who
did not carry the label of American aggressor.
We trusted this to the extent that when we lived outside of Pleiku, we
assumed that the local NLF knew who we were, even if we didn’t know who they
were. We had no protection against
any attack at night, and sometimes we even drove late at night with the dome
light on in the VW micro-bus so that the guerrilla soldiers would recognize us
and not shoot. When American
civilians were attacked there was usually an explanation beyond their just being
Americans. Since
we were American civilians we had most of the privileges and few of
the restrictions of the military personal.
This meant that we frequently traveled with government issue travel
orders on Air American or military transport.
While we lived and worked in the Vietnamese civilian community we had
frequent contact with American military personal. I remember talking to a young soldier waiting for a plane,
who said that he had worked in Indonesia for a year as a missionary.
He also said he did not mind killing Vietnamese because they were not
Christians. This was an example of
the war, for Americans, being about ideology, truth and “the American way of
life.” I do not believe this was
just an isolated solder rationalizing his actions.
I later heard a young mother in a church basement in Boston say essentially
the same thing, i.e., even if America is the aggressor and the Vietnamese are
being killed and the country destroyed , “if this is what we have to do to
preserve our way of life, then we should do it.”
Such positions reveal that the meaning of the war for many Americans was
about our ideology and national
self-interest, and not freedom and democracy as universal principles. Thich Nhat
Hanh wrote in 1967, It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.41 There were, however, examples where the Vietnamese and the Americans in
Viet Nam did find a more shared understanding of the war, and occasionally even
accommodation. This became possible
as the American soldiers came to realize that the vast majority of the
Vietnamese did not support the war, were not anti-Communist, and did not want
the American military in their villages. The American soldiers began to see that
the Vietnamese were no threat to America, and to ask why they should die for
freedom, democracy, capitalism and Christianity in Viet Nam, if the people there
did not seem to care enough to support or even appreciate American efforts.
Fitzgerald in the beginning of Fire In The
Lake makes a similar
observation. She writes, American
officials in supporting the Saigon government insisted that they were defending
“freedom and democracy” in Asia. They
left the GIs to discover that the Vietnamese did not fit into their experience
of either “Communists” or “democrats.”42
In
one of the rest rooms in the Pleiku U.S. military evacuation hospital there was
graffiti which said, “Why are we here?”
“For the lifers.”43
At least some military personnel
did view the war as an opportunity
to get combat experience necessary to move up in rank, as well as to test new
technology and tactics. When we
were studying Vietnamese in Arlington, Virginia before going to Viet Nam, most
of the other students were U.S. military. One
of their common statements was, “It’s not much of a war, but its the only
war we’ve got.” What
happened when soldiers on both sides began to say, “none of us want this
war?” More and
more the American soldiers refused to search and destroy, and when officers
forced them to, sometimes the officers died.
An illustration of this was another airport story told by a young soldier
who had served in the delta where he said the local VC (Viet Cong) and the
American forces would alternate searching different sections of the region so
that they wouldn’t meet and shoot each other.
He said the only problem was when a new officer would arrive and see that
the body count was really low. He
would see how predictable their patrols were and say, “this has got to
change.” The young soldier
said they explained to the officer that to do so was dangerous, and that “you
could get killed doing that.” If
the officer heard the warning, fine, if not his tent might be hit by a
fragmentation grenade. The Americans in this case were not sharing the
Vietnamese paradigm, but they were saying that if the Vietnamese, who the
Americans thought they were there to help, did not share the American paradigm,
well then we certainly are not going to get killed
“for the lifers.” American
soldiers often wore jackets with a large map of Viet Nam on the back.
Above the map the letters read, “ When I die I will go to Heaven” and
below the map they read, “Because I spent my time in Hell.”
Pilots might be willing to bomb and
defoliate the country back to the stone age, but soldiers on the ground
increasingly became unwilling to die for the Vietnamese who did not want them
there, or for the American bankers, generals, and politicians who did want them
there.44
Ultimately, I suppose, it was when the American people said the same
thing and the American soldiers gradually stopped fighting that we decided to
come home and give Viet Nam back to the Vietnamese. Ultimately the convergence
of the Vietnamese obligation to family, and the American individual
self-interest ended the war. War is always about
death. I am not sure if
Vietnamese and Americans understood the others’ meaning of death. I believe that for the Vietnamese, death and the dead are in,
and part of, the process of reality.
Whereas for Americans death is the end, and the dead are gone.
Americans
became preoccupied with body counts. The
two years we were in Viet Nam the war score on the news was predictable.
The U.S. success was always in how many of the other side we had killed
and the reports were always close to the U.S. having killed ten VC (Viet Cong)
to one American. Many Americans did
not really care about the lives or deaths of the Vietnamese except as a way to
keep score in categories meaningful to Americans.
If an American was killed it was a loss of a different kind than if a
ARVN soldier or a civilian was killed. It
often seemed that a dead American had a higher status than a wounded ARVN
soldier. As a country we kept
precise statistics on our dead and only vague numbers, if any, on the number of
our Vietnamese allies and civilians killed.
In 1968, shortly before he was killed, an American soldier recorded in
his diary what most people in Viet Nam knew was happening
“April
4. It seems that the latest fad is
to build up a kill record. Since
our platoon got in that battle, we killed 45 V.C.
The other platoons are jealous so now they kill any body--just to match
our record. . . . I can say I’ve seen brutality to the utmost.
Grossness, ridiculous and senseless killing. And no conscience whatsoever.
It the usual statement handed down since from the cavalry and Indians.
“The only good gook is a dead gook.” . . .
One guy walked up to this old man, asked him for an I.D. card.
The old man didn’t pull it out fast enough for him.
so he blew him away. Then to
add to it, he lit a cigarette and put it in the bullet hole in his head.
People out in the fields running, so they mowed them down.
When they went to check, it was an old woman and children. . . . Record
it as a kill. 45 There
seems little doubt that there was a policy of protecting U.S. military personnel
even at the cost of many civilian lives.46
In the first three weeks after the 1968 Tet offensive the Allied command
estimated the toll of civilian dead at around 165,000, mostly from U.S. bombing
of cities and hamlets occupied by NLF and NVA (North Vietnamese Army).
Five hundred Americans were killed in the same time period. The villages
were saturation bombed because ground assaults caused American casualties even
though fewer civilians were killed. Americans,
with ideological truth on our side, are worth more than any non-Americans.
The individual is the locus of value and meaning in the universe and
history. The individual and my rights are the center of reality.
In one sense this is all there is, an aggregate of individual
“I’s.” We
can justifiably kill “others” in mass to save one or a few of “us,” and
we may die heroically in the cause of defending our self, other Americans, or
our ideology. Two
stories illustrate the American individualist paradigm as applied to our view of
death. In the spring of 1969,
shortly after the beginning of the mini-offensive of that year, I visited what
the Colonel in charge called the “largest mortuary in the world.” It was the
U.S. military mortuary for the lower one-fourth of southern Viet Nam.
It was a building with one large room approximately 40x80 feet, and
adjoining refrigerated rooms. In
the large room there were probably a dozen embalming tables where, at this time,
morticians were working 8 hour shifts. The
tables were used 24 hours a day. Between
the tables there were carts with five shelves to a cart and an American body in
a clear plastic bag on each shelf. I
didn’t count but my impression was that there were over a hundred bodies in
the room at the time. Some of them
had a single bullet wound, while others were burned or blown up beyond
recognizing them even as human bodies. My
ideological response was, “what a waste,” as this is such a wrong war.
As a personal experience, however, this was an existential turning point
in my life. Standing among the
dead, I said to myself, “Kleinbach, death is real.
You are going to die. So you
had better do the things you want to get done before you die.”
I experienced those deaths ideologically and as a finite individual.
I concluded that I needed to set about accomplishing the objectives of my
life. I am an American. Fitzgerald recounts
an event from the same region, a year earlier, that suggests how some Vietnamese
might have been feeling about their own much more imminent deaths. Just
days before the Tet offensive of 1968, the NLF cadres from the battalions that
were to assault Saigon took their men--or so it was reported--to a certain place
in the forest to give them their last instructions and words of encouragement.
There, where the underbrush had been cleared away for acres, they showed
them the hundreds of coffins they had built for the soldiers who would be killed
in battle. When they had seen the
coffins, the soldiers, it seemed, felt happier and less afraid to die. .
. . the Vietnamese know a great deal better than we do that society is largely
made up of its dead. For the
Vietnamese, life is but a moment of transition in the unbroken skein of other
lives stretching from the past into the future.
Death in the absolute sense comes only when there is a break in the
society that carries life on through the generations.47 The second experience of an
American response to death and the war came in Indiana, in 1971, in the home of
a family whose son had been killed in Kontum, a small town I had visited, not
far from Pleiku where I lived for a year. He
had, in fact, been killed during the period of time I was in Pleiku.
In the spring of 1971 I was giving a series of slide shows and lectures
on and against the U.S. war in Viet Nam in the Muncie, Indiana area.
One evening I spoke in a church and spent that night in this family’s
home. It happened that a roll of
slide film had come back with the son’s body.
The family asked me to tell them about the slides since I had been there
and knew the area. We did this and
talked about the war. I had, in my
lecture, been very critical of the U.S. role in the War.
“So,” the father said finally at about 1230 AM after cocoa and a
discussion of his son’s pictures, “ I guess our son died for nothing.”
Feeling their anguish I said, “Yes and no.
I believe the U.S. war actions are wrong, but your son did what he
believed was right and what he believed he ought to do.
To that end he gave his life for what he believed was right.
That is all anyone can be expected to do.” In the American paradigm,
individual integrity has priority over almost everything, and individual motives
and actions can be separated out and have meaning independently of the family
community or national action. The
emotional loss of a son, I believe is similar across cultures, but for Americans
I believe the symbolic meaning of a death is uniquely couched in the individual
and his/her beliefs (i.e., ideology) and motives.
This individualization is probably less likely to happen in Viet Nam. The
Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D. C., with all 58,000 individual names cut
in cold stone most powerfully symbolizes the American individualism and of our
sense of death as the end. In the two years I
was in Viet Nam I drove past the body of a handless sapper whose bomb had gone
off before he delivered it. I woke
up to a missile blowing up a home and the family of 12 living in it across the
street from our house. I held the
hands of an eight or nine year old orphan while he died, probably of starvation.
I returned the bodies of a mother, a father, and a daughter to different
Vietnamese and Tribal families. I
helped a Vietnamese woman check the teeth and
scars of the bodies in the American “cooler”
until we found her husband. I
watched the med-evac choppers unload dead and wounded American soldiers. Two
American relief worker friends were killed while I was there.
One, probably by NVA who didn’t know who he was, and the other by
“friendly” civil defense forces when she and her American soldier
friend did not stop their motor bike for a road check.
I did witness the death experience with Americans, Vietnamese and Tribal
people while in Viet Nam. My sense
is that the symbolic and cultural explanations and meanings of these deaths is
quite different between cultures and religions.
But at the same time, the feelings of fear and the anticipation of death,
and the human emotion caused by the death
of family and friends has the same range for individuals across cultures.
Perhaps
a good way to gain a sense of how individuals experienced the war and death is
to read diaries and poetry written during the war. A
South Vietnamese (ARVN) army doctor
THE MOTHER’S CHANT
by Do Nghe Sleep
well, sleep well, my son. Frank
Elkins, an American Pilot, married
[killed October 13, 1966] An American pilot
illustrates the “objectivity” with which Viet Nam was destroyed, while at
the same time showing personal fear, and concern for his and other pilots’
individual futures. June
14, 1966,
. . . . It’s not really
like killing, somehow. You just
roll in and drop bombs and see material things destroyed, but you don’t hear
the screams or see the splattering blood and brains on walls and foliage or
smoking metal. I imagine I’ll
have more to write and dream about that subject after I’ve actually seen some
action. Yet I think it’s
something that I’ve always worried about. August
24, 1966.
One thing that’s really difficult about being married to Marilyn is
that my attitude is now not as good as it was when I felt that I had nothing
really to lose. I enjoy living more
than some, . . . . It’s those who
have too much to live for, they’re always the ones who get it. October
11, 1966,
Sign on the ready room chalkboard “Only
30 more Bombing Days till Christmas, get yours done early!
It
seems that we never go into A1 in the morning anymore but what there’s another
report of a Navy pilot downed. Just
every day. Just count them off.49 A
newly married North Vietnamese (NLF) soldier
[killed February, 1968]
A
North Vietnamese soldier shows the same love for his wife, but shows some
willingness to die for his family and community.
Upon hearing of his induction, he wrote in his diary
A kind of joy and excitement, I admit.
But, at the same time, something like terror and pain.
Because I shall have to leave my wife, Can, this love that is so sacred
to me. We were married only four months ago and have been together so little.
In accepting this separation, I am making a great sacrifice and denial.
Dying does not frighten me if my death helps my people, then I am ready
to die. But to be parted from Can
makes me suffer so much. Too much.
. . .
I am sad, too, that I will never see my parents, brothers and sisters
again.50 An American soldier opposed to the war Rick
Springman was a young American who went to Viet Nam and after several months
decided not to fight anymore. After he returned he wrote about his experience.
The following paragraph records his thoughts when he had a short leave in
which he considered his options. Notice
how individualist his orientation is, and how often he uses the first person
pronoun “I.” A
friend of Bob’s was involved in draft resistance and getting soldiers to
Canada and I talked to him. He was
telling me I should forget it, not go back, go to Canada, be free. But
I couldn’t do that because it would’ve been a copout. I mean, I got myself
into the Army and it seemed like I had to go back over there and settle this in
my own head. It was something between the Army and me and between me and me. . .
. I realized I had to stop and look at my own morality and say--Now, really,
where’s it at, man? And what’s the best thing you can do in this situation?
And I figured out what I’d do.
I wouldn’t carry a gun. I’d never carry a gun again. I would
eliminate myself from the conflict.51 Mr. Springman did
just that, shortly after which he was captured and spent 33 months as a prisoner
of war. Even in the prison camp with other American POWs the individualism came
through. He writes, “There was no command among us, no military discipline.
Nothing. Even though we had a major there, he never bothered with trying to be
in charge. . . . When I told them about laying my weapon down, there wasn’t
much reaction. Not even from the major. I was doing my thing--that was that.”52
An
eighteen-year-old woman In
the year 1967, my village built small shelters in the forest and we had holes in
the bamboo thicket on top of the hill. It was a place to which we could flee.
But there were two brothers who went out to cut wood in the forest. The
airplanes shot them and both brothers died. Their mother and father had just
these two sons and were both in the same hole with me. I think with much pity
about this old father and mother who were like crazy people because their
children had died.53 William Calley, an American soldier who supported the war Maybe if I were President, I could change things. Till then, I’m like anyone else I’ll carry America’s orders out. For that’s what the Army is a chisel, it has to keep sharp and let the American people use it. If the people say, “Go wipe out South America,” the Army will do it. Majority rules, and if a majority tells me, “Go to South Vietnam,” I will go. If it tells me, “Lieutenant Calley,” or “Rusty Calley,” or “Whatever, go massacre one thousand communists,” I will massacre one thousand communists. But--I won’t advocate it. I’m against massacre, and I won’t preach it I won’t be a hypocrite for it. Or maybe that is a hypocrite, but I’ll do as I’m told to. I won’t revolt. I’ll put the American people above my own conscience, always. I’m an American citizen.54 CONCLUSION I
have also tried to illustrate how and why people with diverse paradigms
experienced events and acted differently. Most
Vietnamese approached Americans and issues surrounding the war from the
perspective of family relations. They
were neutral and flexible until their families and communities were threatened
and then they refused to give in at any cost.
Although they would not give that kind of effort for a Saigon Mandarin or
the Americans, even if drafted. Their
means were usually consistent with their goals.
The revolution empowered and armed the people.
Most Americans approached Vietnamese and the war as individuals or as
American citizens protecting “our” ideology and national security.
Most often the American means were separate and antithetical to the
goals. The Americans pacified with
B-52’s. Some Americans, for individual reasons, refused to fight, and a few
Vietnamese burned themselves for the people of Viet Nam.
Many Americans bombed, burned and hunted for America, and many Vietnamese
fought halfheartedly for the Americans and the Saigon regime.
Most Vietnamese (men, women and children) opposed the war when they
could, and opposed the Americans and the American ideology when they had to
choose. Many people died and more
suffered physically, emotionally, socially and economically. Depending on your paradigm, on April 30, 1975 “The
Communists conquer Saigon,”55
or “Saigon is liberated and Viet Nam reunited by the Vietnamese National
Liberation Front.” William
Calley’s paradigm of the military as America’s chisel has since been
actualized in Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, and Iraq.
The American paradigm has not changed and America’s aggression against
the Vietnamese has not yet ended. This
is evidenced in excerpts from a letter written by a long time American friend of
mine and of the Vietnamese people, Don Luce. With vengeance the
U.S. government continues its hostility toward Viet Nam.
How else can one describe the unrelenting U.S. policy to impoverish and
punish Viet Nam with a “trade embargo” nearly 20 years after U.S. soldiers
left that country. President
Bush’s refusal to remove Viet Nam from the “trading with the enemy” list
hurts both U.S. citizens and the Vietnamese . . . In
Viet Nam we also see human suffering exacerbated by this economic war.
Children suffer from malnutrition. Doctors
and teachers only work a few hours a day on their $5-10 a month salaries.
Rising unemployment fuels social problems like prostitution. . . .
The prostitution exacerbates the AIDS epidemic hitting Asia wiping out
gains made in economic development and health care. . . . 56 It has been said that the millstone of history turns slowly but grinds
exceedingly fine. Hopefully the
following words of a Vietnamese poet are true. FINE WEATHER
by Ho
Chi Minh The wheel of the
law turns NOTES 1
Thich Nhat Hanh, Viet Nam Lotus In
A Sea Of Fire, (New
York), Hill and Wang, 1967, p. 72. Frances
Fitzgerald, Fire
In The Lake, (New York
Vintage), 1972, pp. 12f. & 146-148. Jacqui
Chagnon, and Don Luce,
Of Quiet Courage
Poems From Viet Nam, (Washington, D.C.),
Indochina Mobile Education Project, 1974, pp. 49-50. |
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