
LINH: Culture clash and communication
failure
The view from inside the South Vietnamese
government
By Nguyen Ngoc Linh
Since the fall of Saigon, I
have had 35 years to think about what went wrong. Even before that fateful
April 1975, I had had 10 years of government service to witness the mistakes of
American and Vietnamese leaders responsible for managing the war.
From the very beginning of America's commitment in Vietnam, there
was a huge gap of understanding between Americans and Vietnamese that led from
one misunderstanding to another about each other's intentions, good will,
expectations and much else.
Indeed, Americans, with their gung-ho, can-do, task-oriented
attitude, had the tendency to take control in their partnership with the
Vietnamese, even at the risk of stepping on our toes. The Vietnamese, proud of
their Confucian traditions and steeped in a millennial historical
consciousness, resisted and even ignored advice from pushy American advisers
and condescending commanding generals.
The understanding gap led to fateful decisions on the
American side, such as encouraging the Vietnamese generals to stage a coup
against President Ngo Dinh Diem and his
brother-adviser, which ended tragically in their deaths. This marked the
beginning of the end of South
Vietnam in its fight against the invaders
from the North.
Once President Johnson decided to send combat troops to help
South Vietnam,
the American generals quickly took charge of the war. They fought a
conventional war against communist insurgents who at first fought the only way
Vietnamese knew how against a superior enemy, as guerrillas - disappearing only
to reappear when the superior force moves on. The fact that the war often was
directed from the White House only added another layer of intervention, which
tied the hands of generals in the field.
While the communist invaders and the local Viet Cong
insurgents could roam all over the South, the American and South Vietnamese
sides were not allowed to go north to bring the war to where it would hurt. For
a long time, they were not even allowed to go into Cambodia, where the North
Vietnamese withdrew whenever they needed rest and recuperation.
Even after President Nixon went to China and met
with Mao Zedong, the Americans were still leery of Chinese intervention should
our side take the fight to North
Vietnam. Thanks to documents recently
declassified, the Associated Press' Calvin Woodward reported in 2006 that Henry
Kissinger, then national security adviser, told Prime Minister Chou En-lai something to the effect that "in my view, after
peace is restored, the political orientation of what comes afterward is of no
concern to the U.S." and that "if we can live with a communist
government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina." This
practically amounted to giving assurance that the United States would not engage in Vietnam after a
communist victory.
At the height of its engagement, the U.S. had a
half-million troops in Vietnam.
It had been suggested that had the Americans deployed those men on our side of
the 17th parallel from the Ben Hai River all the way
into Laos and then mined the port of Hai Phong, interdicting war supplies to the communists, they
could have choked off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, leaving it to the South Vietnamese
armed forces to take care of the guerrilla insurgents in the South - something
we could have handled without much difficulty. In fact, the Ho Chi Minh Trail
could have been cut off with far fewer troops. One study done at the time even
suggested 60,000 could have done the job.
With such a strategy, the U.S. would not have lost more than
58,000 killed in action and untold numbers of wounded, and the antiwar movement
never would have had enough wind in its sail to pressure Congress to cut off
all assistance to the South, leaving it defenseless.
The greatest irony of the Vietnam War was that when tired of
the conflict, President Nixon thought of Vietnamization
as a way to put the whole burden on the South Vietnamese army. The word Vietnamization implies that during the entire 10 years of
massive American intervention, the only ones fighting were the Americans, while
the million or so Vietnamese troops and militia were sitting on their behinds
watching the show.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While American
bravery in places such as Khe Sanh,
essentially a diversionary battle, was glorified in the American press, untold
battles fought and won in places like An Loc, Quang
Tri and many other locations by the South Vietnamese armed forces were ignored
by American journalists, some of whom even had the temerity to call our heroic
fighters "rabbits." They predicted as early as 1968 that the end was
near despite the fact that the communists suffered 40,000 casualties, or half
of the attacking force in their Tet offensive of
1968.
Those Vietnamese troops suffered nearly a half-million
casualties while fighting to defend South Vietnam and, by some
calculation, killed four times as many communists.
America's
Vietnamization takeover stripped us of our just cause
as we fought against the aggressors while reinforcing the communists' claim
that they were patriots defending the motherland against imperialists and their
puppets.
As far as the Vietnamese side was concerned, we also made
monumental mistakes. With the encouragement and even the blessing of the
highest-ranking American officials, our politically immature top-ranking
generals staged a coup against a democratically elected president and murdered
both him and his brothers, Nhu and Can.
Yet, after seizing power, the generals were incapable of
governing the country and tried coups and countercoups against one another,
thus sapping whatever energy remained in the country to fight the Viet Cong.
When the communists started their final push against President
Nguyen Van Thieu, who managed the war from Independence Palace, he ordered the army to pull out
of the 1st and 2nd Army Corps area of operations without planning, leading to
panicked highways of death, clogged with refugees and evacuating troops under
constant communist attack. This tragic mistake accelerated the takeover of South Vietnam.
Our diplomatic representatives in the United States
were too busy trying to read the intentions of the American government and
Congress instead of spending enough time cultivating meaningful public
relations efforts aimed at the American public.
Truth wasn't important. Even U.S. government officials could not
debate because they were too civilized when facing crowds that paraded in the
streets of America's
capital under the flag of the enemy.
Inside South
Vietnam, our information agencies were not
effective in countering the communist propaganda machine, which was quite
persuasive when combined with long daggers at night and death threats against
the defenseless South Vietnamese population in the countryside.
From 1965 to 1972, I played an increasingly prominent role
in the South Vietnamese government's communications efforts, eventually as a
member of the Cabinet. I bear a share of responsibility for not having done my
best to persuade Thieu to send our best to the United States
to confront the antiwar movement. Eventually, we did launch overseas
information offices in Paris,
London, Tokyo and Washington, but they
came too late to make a difference.
I hope others can learn from all these mistakes.
Nguyen Ngoc Linh was head of South Vietnam's National Broadcasting
System, spokesman for the Prime Minister and, later, Director-General of Information
and Propaganda, then Press Officer for the South Vietnam Delegation to the
Paris Peace Talks.
Courtesy: The Washington Times

 |