SECTION: 1:iv

AMERICANIZATION

Americanization is the saddest and most tragic chapter in all Vietnamese ethnohistory, the Vietnamese holocaust is a portent of things to come, an apocalyptic vision without parallel in all of human history. As both a veteran and a child of the 60’s, it is impossible to feign neutrality or pseudo-objectivity. It is the most difficult chapter to write when its living memory malingers in the lost heart, fractured spirits, fragmented minds, amputated limbs, incinerated bodies and missing souls of all its innocent victims. It cannot be genuinely written about or sincerely read without bringing tears to one’s eyes.

The disillusionment and disbelief, the malingering incredulity between official policy and front-line reporting, between lifers and conscripted rank and file, between leaders and protestors, if nothing else, the really real case of the way it really was with the Vietnam conflict will prove to be a timeless study in the pornographic power of modern propaganda machines. It was a demonstration the power to delude and deceive a mass audience of Joe and Jane Public Television, and the power to use the same media to persuade the American people against the war.

For the first time in human history Americans at war became a popular evening past-time. American friends and families together at home could watch their young sons and brothers and cousins and neighbors kill and be killed during the many continuing episodes of the unfolding docu-drama of the Vietnam conflict. From Alexander Haig to Ho Chi Minh, from John Wayne to Jane Fonda, from cluster-bombs to booby-traps, from B-52’s to ponji sticks, from My Lai to Haiphong, from children’s atrocity stories to official body counts, from Walter Cronkite to Con Son tiger cages. It is extremely difficult to separate fact from fancy while the question remains to be answered—"Where the Hell was Vietnam?"

On April the 19^th, at 14:02 (my Rolex froze at that moment), while shooting for Time, my ‘Nam blew to a standstill....The next year they installed a plastic lid and for the next twelve months my mind dwelt on the enormity of having being there. The focus was pushed and pulled until the light became pin sharp. The sufferings had dimmed; there had been no reality, only a shared sense of nostalgia. (Page 1983:98)

Witness the ecology of modern electronic warfare—the systematic ecocide of the Vietnamese experiment in modern devastation. Anti-communist ideology and the metaphysics of MAD (e.g., guaranteed nuclear holocaust, or "Mutually Assured Destruction") combined to form a convenient group-think, double speak strategic system of defensive rationalization (DOD, or Department of "Defense") for the bourgeoisie engineers of the most deadly arsenal of World Terrorization in World History, reconfirmed by an Official Mandate from Washington D.C. to establish a permanent Pax America for the children of the world. The United States operated on the Model of Devastation in Vietnam, a hybrid bastardization of the Model of Korea, the Philippine Model, and the Malaya Model, (it has been nicknamed the "Malaya-gone-amok-Model"), combining a program of "forced-draft" urbanization ("without commensurate industrialization"), of deliberate systematic ecocide, and blatant devastation of a paper tiger—a mysterious, magical and mythical enemy:

…Counter-insurgency is a pseudo-science which has limited its vision to such a degree that it has created paper creature lurking in a triple-canopy jargon jungle.…The very fracturing of worldview that makes possible the invention of bombers and electronic-sweat-sniffers has, to a great extent, directed America’s weaponry to tasks of mindless, repetitive destruction. In the Indochina war we see science gone mad, metaphorically acting out aggressions and unable to respond to the real world. (Lewallen 1971:16-17)

Americanization was an underhanded brand of neo-colonialism/capitalism suffering many of the same deceptions as "Frenchification." The first American presence was aid of weapons given to Ho Chin Minh’s Viet Minh forces in resistance to Japanese occupation. By 1950, however, the U.S. branded Uncle Ho as part of the "red menace" and switched allegiance to the besieged French forces, eventually underwriting the whole debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, footing more than half the French bill of fare for the first Indochina War. There prevailed officially at this time a paranoid fear of Communist aggression, especially the strange yellow brand of Chi-Commie-ism. Of course, the American neo-capitalists are part of a long progressive tradition of an enlightened mission to salvage their savage yellow brethren for the sake of Western Civilization, so the American presence in Vietnam was all very humanitarian.

"In order to defend peace, it may be necessary to use the Atomic Bomb." ("It became necessary to destroy the town to save it"—U.S. major in Vietnam) It would be almost certain that President Truman would have had "not the slightest (regrets) in the world" about having done so—after all he had done it twice before. In fact, use of the bomb to save the French at Dien Bien Phu was even contemplated by the Americans who had underwritten the French war. In 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon (of Watergate fame) stated unequivocally that he would make the unpopular decision of sending American boys into Cambodia. When President Nixon was courting communist Chinese Panda bears in Beijing, he was also bombing Northern Vietnam "back to the stone age." And now, after the poetic justice of his War Crimes, his fait accompli of Watergate, he resides sumptuously exonerated of his political misdeeds, while "American boys" he sent to hell in Vietnam are still propping up white marble grave-stones. Meanwhile, Red China has become a less menacing pink, thanks to Tricky Dicky’s opening of the bamboo curtain. President Eisenhower orchestrated the theme of the domino threat of communist expansion. Loss of Indochina would spell the "loss of valuable deposits of tin and prodigious supplies of rubber and rice…..And if Indochina fell, not only Thailand but Burma and Malaya would be threatened, with added risks to East Pakistan and South Asia as well as to all Indonesia" and so on.

As early as 1954 American psy-ops stimulated the southward exodus of 860,000 refugees from North Vietnam—assisted by the U.S. seventh fleet. (The same team was working at it again behind the scenes in 1975) From 1955Eik held CIA covert operations in Vietnam continuously until 1961. Until 1956 the CIA financed cadre programs to win support for Diem. After 1956 American policy shifted toward conventional combat forces. By 1961 Americans were experimenting with Defoliation—"leaf abscission"—by the end of that year Diem had fully implemented the anti-crop program. Kennedy sent his pet Green Berets via Georgia to Vietnam during that year and the first U.S. casualty was killed by sniper fire. By 1963 the U.S. had completely taken over the defoliation program. Diem’s assassination threw South Vietnam into turmoil, and the NFL made substantial gains razing "strategic hamlets" while "American advisors flocked to Vietnam and pacification programs blossomed."

The first major U.S. military action since Korea began with the bombing of Laos in May, 1964, with the dissent of only two congressmen. "No President had the right to send American boys to their death on a battlefield in the absence of a declaration of war. But one thing I do know, and that is we are going to be bogged down in Southeast Asia for years to come if we follow this course of action, and we’re going to kill thousands of American boys until finally, let me say, the American people are going to say what the French people finally said: "We’ve had enough!" (Sen. Wayne Morris 1964) By 1965 he NFL was about to win when U.S. Marines stormed the beaches to save the day at Da Nang (new Tourane) to a reception of flower bearing school girls in Ao Dai’s. Prior to this, the North Vietnamese had not sent regular troops across the DMZ but soon "dispatched divisions to fight in the South." Meanwhile, back at the White House, LBJ muttered this truly remarkable comment: "I do not believe it is pleasing in the sight of God for men to separate morality from their might. (June 6, 1965) Bernard Fall, killed two years later by a land mine, wrote of the meaning of American Operations in Vietnam in Dec. 1965 (Ramparts Feb.1966:69)

  Looking back at the Vietnam I left, I can see the means only too clearly, and so can everyone else who is not altogether blind. But I cannot say that I have found anyone who seems to have a clear idea of the end—of the "war aims"—and if the end is clearly not defined, are we justified to use any means to attain it?

By 1967 the Vietcong controlled an estimated 3978 strategic hamlets while Saigon controlled only 168. The rest were contested. At its peak in 1969, the U.S. fielded more than half a million men, with 700,000 allies, "with total command of the air (and) sea, backed by huge resources and the most modern weapons, are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is about 250,000." (Sen. Robert Kennedy, Feb 19, 1968) Since Nixon’s presidency until 1972 about 40,000 sweeps of battalion size and up occurred. "The total number of hamlets destroyed in South Vietnam was 3,000 out of which 1,600 were completely demolished." (Forman 1972:110) Between 1965 and 1972 there were more than half a million desertions from the U.S. forces. "In 1971 alone 79,000 men the equivalent of six divisions, deserted the army." (U.S. Office of Manpower and Reserve)

Secret Agents Orange, Blue, White and Purple: Vietnam, once a plastic proving ground of American military-industrial technocracy—systematically reduced to an other-wordly moonscape of eerie dimensionality, now a haunting "desecrated" specter at the edge of oblivion. If all experts could shut their mouths and open their eyes, if all parties to the crime of war against humanity could put aside their ideological rhetoric—then it would become quite obvious that one set of undeniable facts speak silently but all too eloquently for themselves. The Verdict of the Vietnam Conflict is the Verdict of War itself—nothing good ever came from war, but especially not from the Vietnam War. The Verdict of waging a War in Vietnam that wasn’t a "War" may be succinctly summarized in three words: ecocide, genocide, and ethnocide.

The Vietnam Conflict is a unique episode in the History of Human Civilization in that in involved for the first time a qualitatively different kind of militarism than anything experienced or known to humankind ever before. This is what made it at one and the same time so shocking, so protested, so bizarre, so murderous. It was the debut of the totality of modern warfare, a reflection of the nuclear threshold at the point of no return, beyond which we cannot proceed because there can be no end in war, no strategy, no victory, no justice, beyond which there is no war itself but only holocaust and extinction.

Twenty years of Americanization accomplished what two millennium of Sinization and Sinicization and 300 years of Westernization, and one hundred years of Francoization could not—the near total dissolution and destruction of traditional Vietnamese civilization. Modern warfare occurs as a result of administrative perversion. "The types and sources of such perversions are complex…."

There is no longer any need to declare War by an act of Congress or letters of marque in our push –button electronic Nuclear Space Age. "Strange indeed is this undeclared war! For how can an aggressor declare a war since he cannot admit to his own purposes." (Tran 1969) Vietnam was a war without front or rear, without specific targets, without final objectives. The enemy was faceless, clad in civilian clothes, women and children. He was everywhere and nowhere. And yet it was enclosed "in a circle of deception. Distorted perceptions, false interpretations, and misguided actions have been reinforcing one another in a self-defeating process." (Lifton, March 1968) The moral reality of modern warfare is the limit beyond which war becomes hell, self-evidently unjust, beyond the limit of mutual consent. "….not to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification—was already criminal….For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences—from the very beginning." (Albert Speer, Memories)

I have not written a history of Vietnam. Others have done so, and others before them have made that history a reality. I have written an ethnohistory about the histories that have been written of the past of Vietnam. A history of history is necessary if we are ever to step outside the ever-widening circles of historical rationality beyond the purview of claims to the "past" reality.

In conclusion I wish to reiterate several lessons to be learned from Vietnamese ethnohistory in general. It is mainly a history of culture-contact and culture-change. It has at least four successive phases of acculturation and Vietnamization, each phase qualitatively distinct and structurally different, yet each subsequent phase seemingly became more destructive in its consequence for indigenous Vietnamese culture, and yet each time elevating the Vietnamese civilization to a higher level of structural articulation. A hypothetical model can be used to interpret these phases within a framework of types of acculturation. The initial process of development of Southeast Asian civilization and Indianization in the prehistoric period was very gradual in influence, but also relatively peaceful and constructive, a symbol creating phase possibly termed assimilation with varieties of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism with a "live and let live" value orientation. The second phase of Sinization and Sinicization was both destructive and constructive, defined as "integration with varieties of melting pot and pressure cooker acculturation process. The third phase of Westernization with its brand of colonialism/capitalism was even more disruptive, but not necessarily destructive, involving process of rejection with varieties of withdrawal and segregation. The fourth and final phase of "Americanization" was clearly, totally, destructive, involving as it did deculturation in terms of enforced marginality and ethnocide.

In its theme of diversity is to be found it s unity, its strength for survival. Unity in diversity is the central theme of Vietnamese ethnohistory. To be seen in these acculturation experiences is a lesson of adaptation and survival in the face of changes. It is a lesson of survival from people who have become survival artists in the face of adversity. "….No theme is more consistent in Vietnamese history than the theme of resistance to foreign aggression." It is this spirit of resistance and survival that teaches us the errors of our own ways.

Vietnamese people, in spite of their culture contacts with many advanced civilizations, have always remained close to Nature. Those who live amidst the mythology and ideology of the developmental, progressive civilization of consumption, are unable to see clearly its own grand illusion. I suggest simply that an alternative possibility of human social development other than what our own contemporary human civilization may allow, must exist for human cultural survival.

….The birth of Vietnam was the birth of a spirit of resistance to the universal claims of Chinese power. It represented the collective decision of a society to risk danger for the sake of preserving its heritage. Vietnamese independence is the result of commitments made by successive generations. (Taylor 19983:302)