Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. John A. Wood
were allegedly so incompetent that Americans were forced to do all the fighting. The scorn heaped upon ARVN troops in veteran narratives cannot be exaggerated. They are called “pathetic” and “chickenshit sons-of-bitches,”103 “fucking cowards” and “babies,”104 and are shown either running away from danger, avoiding the enemy, or acting like happy-go-lucky clowns who would rather lounge around than fight. Puller saw an ARVN unit whose members smoked cigarettes, chatted, and listened to transistor radios while on patrol.105 Malevolent ARVNs laughed at Downs and his platoon one day as they marched off in search of Vietcong. The Vietnamese soldiers evidently thought it was funny that the Americans were risking their lives in “the bush” while they stayed behind and relaxed in hammocks.106
Veterans express the most anger towards Vietnamese who initially hid their greed or contempt by treating GIs with, as Broyles puts it, “exaggerated kindness.”107 Caputo writes of street children who praised Americans when they passed out money and treats, but hurled curses and insults at them when they did not.108 A formerly friendly beggar child threw rocks at Broyles when he did not offer up his usual handout.109 Puller was heartened when a village chief invited his platoon to sit down for a lavish meal, but was furious when the chief presented him with a bill after they finished eating.110 Tobias Wolff worked closely with ARVN troops, and they treated him to a farewell dinner shortly before his tour ended. When his Vietnamese hosts broke into hysterical laughter during the meal he realized that they were not honoring him. Wolff had instead been set up for a cruel practical joke; they had fed him his dog.111
Besides being portrayed as pitiless exploiters, most of the Vietnamese who appear in veteran narratives basically serve as scenery or props. These nameless figures are the “villagers,” “people,” or “gooks” with whom GIs briefly interact as they pass through rural hamlets or urban neighborhoods. The occasional Vietnamese who rise above this status invariably speak in snippets of broken English and GI slang. Caputo, for instance, records begging children saying “Gimme cig’rette gimme candy you buy one Coka. One Coka twenty P you buy,” and a teenager who says, “Hokay, hokay. Kill buku VC.”112 Readers are only rarely presented with Vietnamese who seem like real human beings with thoughts, feelings, and complex motivations for their actions.
The Vietnamese, of course, were real people, and many had good reasons for acting in ways that American soldiers found annoying or despicable. So many South Vietnamese seemed greedy because prying dollars away from comparatively wealthy American servicemen was their best option for survival.113 Before the war, the great majority of South Vietnamese lived in rural areas and relied on agriculture, principally rice production, for their livelihoods. But the countryside became increasingly dangerous as the war escalated, and US forces, as part of their “pacification” efforts, laid waste to farmland with bombs and chemical defoliants. These developments led to an exodus of people to cities,114 causing “the urban population of South Vietnam [to increase] from 15 to 40 percent of the total population” by 1968.115 The South was “normally a rice-exporting area,” but with much of its rice crop destroyed and farmers fleeing their paddies, it was forced to import rice by 1967.116
Deprived of their livelihoods, refugees who settled in slums or the shantytowns that surrounded US bases were forced by necessity to get what they could from the Americans. For some this meant working as laborers or maids for the Americans, but for others it meant pursuing more illicit occupations.117 An example of how this process played out for one South Vietnamese citizen is found in the memoir of Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Hayslip spent the first years of her life in a small village, but fled her home after local Vietcong cadre sentenced her to death because they mistakenly believed she was a government informant. She ended up in Saigon and became pregnant while still a young girl. Hayslip first made money peddling black market goods to US soldiers. She later lived with a series of American boyfriends who paid her expenses, a route taken by her sister and many other South Vietnamese women. On one occasion, after being offered what to her was a fabulous amount of cash, Hayslip reluctantly had sex with a GI for money.118
In addition to disruptions caused by the random destructiveness of war, the lives of millions of South Vietnamese were upset by their government’s “strategic hamlet” program. Initiated in 1962 by South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, this plan was designed to separate the Vietcong from civilians by forcibly removing peasants from their villages and relocating them to fortified government-run camps.119 Citizens conscripted into the program had to build their own new housing and were charged for building materials, including the barbed wire strung around the encampments. No matter that the construction supplies were “provided free by the United States” to the Saigon government.120 People were “motivated as never before to support the Viet Cong” after they suffered such indignities.121
The great economic and social upheavals caused by the war also gave many South Vietnamese good reasons to treat American troops with hostility. Prior to the American War, many South Vietnamese followed a way of life that had changed little in thousands of years. Existence for such people revolved around rice agriculture and family, and to move away from one’s home village and ancestors’ graves was anathema.122 It is no shock that people whose villages and crops may have been wiped out by American bombs and chemicals were unfriendly towards Americans. Vietnamese were even more likely to dislike GIs if family members or friends had been killed or maimed in the fighting, as was the case for millions of people. In the early 1990s, journalist Martha Hess traveled throughout Vietnam and interviewed people about their memories of American air raids and atrocities. One man posed a question to her that was echoed by other interviewees: “With all the American soldiers did to the Vietnamese people, how can we not hate them?”123
Besides their own alienating actions, American troops were tainted in the eyes of many Vietnamese because their stated mission was to protect a government that was inept, oppressive, and thoroughly undemocratic. The corrupt South Vietnamese officials propped up by American power really represented only a small class of urban elites. A majority of the population was Buddhist, but many high-level Saigon politicians and bureaucrats, including President Diem, were Roman Catholics. American troops were also a foreign army, and Vietnam had a long, proud history of resistance to invaders. Such a history led many Vietnamese, rightly or wrongly, to regard GIs as the successors to the French colonialists who were driven out of Southeast Asia in the 1950s.
All of these reasons for hating Americans also served as compelling motivations to join the Vietcong insurgency. Whereas the South Vietnamese government frequently acted imperiously, the Vietcong generally adhered to policies designed to win villagers to its side. The Vietcong also produced propaganda that successfully appealed to ordinary Vietnamese, whereas the Saigon officials were never willing or able to convince many people of their worthiness to rule.124 One prisoner told his American interrogators that he had joined the Vietcong because he was a poor farmer. The message of Vietcong “propaganda cadres,” that he had been exploited by the government and the rich landlords it represented, appealed to him.125 It is unlikely that many South Vietnamese fully comprehended or believed in the ideology of the Communists who predominated in the Vietcong.126 Large numbers of Vietnamese nevertheless joined the insurgency because they, like the prisoner, saw it as the only alternative to a distasteful government seemingly controlled by the “puppets” of foreign imperialists.127
Another significant reason why many rural South Vietnamese hated their national government was because it drafted thousands of their sons into the ARVN. Rice agriculture in South Vietnam was labor intensive, and when the young men who performed much of that labor marched off to war, peasants suffered greatly. Maintaining a force of rice workers was so important that village leaders frequently helped local men avoid military service. In 1964, farmers in the Mekong Delta blocked roads in protest against conscription policies that emptied their fields of workers. Ever eager to exploit antigovernment sentiment, the Vietcong provided peasants with workers who aided in planting and harvesting.128
The major unrest caused by the draft is an indication that there was more to ARVN troops than the scathing portrayals included in American narratives.