Laughter in the Shadows (21 page)

The Shrimp Soldiers

This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partners and opponents both.

—MARK HALPERIN, A
Soldier of the Great War

Nguyen Van Buu was a Vietnamese businessman close to President Diem. He had the shrimp monopoly in Vung Tau on Vietnam’s southern coast and his own paramilitary force to secure the road between Saigon and Vung Tau. He supported his three hundred armed, mobile, and very effective “shrimp soldiers” out of his own pocket.

I had gotten to know Buu after turning over the Mountain Scout program and had begun working in the southern part of Vietnam. Buu had a training site near Vung Tau, which he offered to let me use for our political action trainees. At the graduation ceremony for our first fifty trainees, Buu introduced me to his friend, Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu, commander of the Fifth ARVN Division, and later president of South Vietnam.

Because of Buu’s close ties to President Diem, he was arrested after the coup against Diem. He would have been executed if his friend, Colonel Thieu, hadn’t intervened. When Buu was sent to prison on Con Son Island, Thieu took over his mistress, Anna, a former Air Vietnam hostess. I last saw Buu when I visited him on the prison island. President Thieu was still looking out for his old friend Buu and at Anna’s request arranged for me to go down and see him.

I was met at the airstrip by the governor of the island, who invited me to join him and “his friend,” Buu, for a picnic on the beach. It was a tranquil setting for a prison island. We had our picnic near “shark’s cove” with swarms of monkeys swinging through the trees. It was a perfect site for a future Treasure Island–style resort, with casinos and plush hotels designed to attract rich Chinese gamblers from the mainland, Vietnamese businessmen, and even some former case officers.

Buu was never pardoned. He died on Con San Island. Anna eventually emigrated to the United States.

Colonel Chau

Following the turnover of the Mountain Scouts, I was assigned to the rice-paddy delta of South Vietnam. Rufus Phillips, a former case officer in Cham and Vietnam and the new Agency for International Development (AID) director for rural development in South Vietnam, introduced me to Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau, the innovative province chief, whose model villages, census-grievance cadre, and provincial reconnaissance (or hunter-killer) teams were having some success in a rich rice-growing province that was also a prime target for the Viet Cong.

Chau’s cadre worked in outlying hamlets building schools, digging wells, setting up dispensaries, and training self-defense militia. His census-grievance cadre counted heads and solicited complaints and grievances, which they would then bring to Chau for action. The teams, working primarily at the hamlet and village level, were unique in a country where authority traditionally trickled down from the top.

Chau’s secret hunter-killer teams were trained to eliminate Viet Cong agents and political commissars in contested villages where the Viet Cong were active. These teams were unfairly associated with the interrogation teams of the controversial Phoenix program.

I worked with Chau for over a year, supporting and aiding him in augmenting his programs. I found traveling with Chau outside the provincial capital was risky, and the province chief barely escaped a number of ambushes set by the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese advisers. Among the latter, as I would learn later, was one of Chau’s blood relatives.

When I was staying with Chau, we had long talks about the war. Chau faulted the government in Saigon, which he believed was so obsessed with “search-and-destroy” operations and the “strategic hamlet” program that it had lost touch with the people at the rice-roots level. His views, which he expressed openly, did not endear him to government leaders in Saigon, including the president.

One night Chau told me he was in contact with a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) officer whom he didn’t identify. The NVA officer said he wanted to open a dialogue with the American embassy about ending the war.

Many South Vietnamese had Viet Cong and North Vietnamese relatives, but I was surprised to learn that Chau’s “contact” was an NVA officer. I encouraged Chau to maintain contact with the NVA officer, and when I returned to Saigon, I reported our conversation about Chau’s NVA contact.

The last time I stayed with Chau before returning to the United States, he confided to me that the NVA officer was a relative he hadn’t seen in more than fifteen years and was surprised when he had turned up at his office. I tried to press Chau on the identity of this relative, but he changed the subject. On returning to Saigon I again reported Chau mentioning his contact with an NVA officer whom he had identified as a close relative. I learned later that the relative was his brother.

After I returned to the United States, I learned that Colonel Chau had been arrested as a North Vietnamese spy. He was charged with passing information to his brother, NVA Colonel Trong Hien. The arrest of Chau, who had become a close friend of his American military adviser, Colonel Vann, and had been extolled in the American press, caused an outcry in Congress. My son, Kent, who was attending Lenox School in the Berkshires, wrote me, enclosing a New
York Times
article about the trial of Chau. According to the article, during the trial Colonel Chau continually maintained he was not a spy and had “kept the Americans informed of his contact with his NVA brother.” He named CIA officer Stuart Methven as one of the Americans.

My son added a tongue-in-cheek comment about having to learn from the
New York Times
that his father worked for the CIA.

Chau was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but in 1974 Thieu commuted his sentence and allowed him to return to Saigon. When Saigon fell, Chau was again arrested, this time by the North Vietnamese, who sent him to a reeducation camp, where he probably would have been executed if it hadn’t been for his brother. After over a year in a reeducation camp, Chau was again allowed to return to Saigon but was kept under house arrest. He and his family later escaped from Vietnam on a fishing boat that almost sank before reaching the coast of Malaya. Chau spent the next year in various refugee camps until immigrating to the United States, where he and his family now live. We still speak by phone from time to time.

The Sacred Mountain

The Holy See was at Tamyin. A pope and female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette. Saint Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East.

—GRAHAM GREENE,
The Quiet American

In the apse of the Cao Dai cathedral in Tay Ninh, sixty miles from Saigon, the “pope” pontificates from a cobra-sculpted dais. Founded in 1919 by mystic Ngo Van Chieu, the Cao Dai sect at one time had more than three hundred thousand adherents. Its panoply of saints included Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, George Washington, and Joan of Arc. To communicate with the spirits, Cao Dai elders sit around a long Ouija board, which would emit vibrating messages from their departed ancestors.

The terrain of Tay Ninh Province is flat, except for the for the cone-shaped “Black Virgin” mountain in the northeast corner. The mountain, with a golden pagoda on its summit, is sacred to the Cao Dai.

The Viet Cong in the early 1960s had occupied the Black Virgin Mountain, driven the Cao Dai priests from the pagoda, and raised the Viet Cong flag. The sight of the yellow-star flag flying on their sacred mountain was an irritant to the Cao Dai, particularly the Cao Dai province chief, General Tat. I had met General Tat several times, when he invariably asked for help in recapturing the sacred mountain. He made the same request to Major Johnson, the Tay Ninh military adviser. In the end we decided that recapturing the sacred mountain was justifiable. Recapturing sacred mountains was not an Agency priority, but an operation targeted against a Viet Cong base was.

Together with Major Johnson, we came up with a plan calling for arming and training two fifty-man platoons of Cao Dai commandos, the Station to provide arms, ammunition, logistics, and finances and Major Johnson’s team to train the teams in commando operations. General Tat would be in command.

As a covert operation, retaking the Black Virgin Mountain was to be a “one shot deal.” General Tat recruited the teams, and when Major Johnson said the commandos were combat ready, General Tat convened the Cao Dai elders, who consulted their “board” for the most auspicious day for the attack.

At dawn on the chosen day, the commandos moved out. They climbed up the mountain, skirmished briefly with surprised Viet Cong defenders, and by mid-afternoon the “cult soldiers” had retaken the Black Virgin Mountain.

General Tat made a speech invoking the Cao Dai spirits and extolling the brave deeds of the commandos. The victors then raised the ten-by-fifteen-foot flag of South Vietnam, which had been handwoven by Cao Dai widows. But the flag was so large it still touched the ground when raised to the top of the flagpole.
Finally, the wind caught the flag and unfurled it. It could be seen all over the plain and flew on top of the mountain until the fall of Saigon and the occupation of Tay Ninh by North Vietnamese troops.

The North Vietnamese recaptured the mountain and ran up a flag with a yellow star in the center. General Tat was captured and sent to a reeducation camp. His brother, who escaped and now lives in the United States, told me Tat would never be allowed to leave Vietnam.

The Cao Dai cathedral was gutted but is still standing.

Farewell to Arms

I had been in Vietnam for four years. Our counterinsurgency operations had given way to a full-time war. Census-grievance cadres had been disbanded, and counterterror teams had been sent back to their villages. Political action teams (PATs) had been incorporated into a National Pacification Program.

The Station had grown like topsy. Case officers reported to regional chiefs in a bureaucratic jumble that encouraged coordination and discouraged initiative. When I was told I had to get a ticket to fly an Air America heliocourier, I knew it was time to leave. Headquarters agreed and gave me a sabbatical.

Sabbatical

There was too much farce mixed up with the tragedy.

—ROBERT GRAVES

Boston in 1967 reverberated with echoes of the maelstrom I had just left. Flag burnings and antiwar demonstrations rocked the MIT campus, where I was enrolled as a graduate student at the Center for International Studies. I had persuaded my superiors to forgo sending me to one of the War Colleges, because “I didn’t want to study war no more.” Thanks to Henry Kissinger, whom I had escorted around the highlands and who put in a good word for me, I was one of first operations officers to be sent to attend a private university for his midcareer sabbatical.

The head of the Political Science Department at MIT’s School of International Studies and one other professor were the only faculty members aware of my Agency affiliation. A recent
Ramparts
magazine exposé of alleged CIA infiltration of college campuses had become a cause célèbre, and I was warned to keep my head down.

The clamor against the war made it hard to study. I found myself tagging along behind draft card burners and antiwar protestors to “get a feel” for the mood of the country I had been away from for the better part of twelve years. I audited “sit-ins” and “love-ins” on the Boston Common and let my hair grow long. I wrote my thesis on parapolitics and pacification and was invited to join Kissinger’s private “round table” on Vietnam. At one point we briefed presidential candidate George Romney, who later said he had been “brainwashed” on the war in Vietnam. Fortunately, his “brainwashing” did not occur at our round table in Cambridge, or I would have been called on the carpet in Langley.

A Thai graduate student and friend who knew I had been in Vietnam asked me to give a talk to his Harvard club about the war. I was reluctant to accept his invitation, because the week before violent student demonstrations at Harvard had prevented Defense Secretary Robert McNamara from speaking and forced him to leave. My Thai friend assured me I would be speaking only informally, and, besides, it was the students, not the administration, who had invited me.

I was having a glass of sherry when a group of demonstrators stormed into the club. I decided I had better leave, but my student hosts stepped in front of the demonstrators and talked to them, pointing out that I was their guest. They were welcome to stay and listen, or they could leave. Most of them stayed.

I didn’t waste time trying to justify the war. I told the students I had spent a lot of time in Vietnam attending funerals of schoolteachers, nurses, and hamlet officials assassinated by the Viet Cong. Contrary to popular belief, I said the Viet Cong were not the shining freedom fighters portrayed in the media. To the contrary, they had no compunction about beheading innocent villagers and sticking their heads in toilet bowls. The insurgency was not a “people’s revolution,” and brutal acts had been committed by both sides. The people of South Vietnam wanted only to live in peace and tend to their rice paddies, and even though they might have little use for their own government, they didn’t want to be dominated by the North Vietnamese.

When the talk was over, I was surprised both by the applause and by later comments that this was the first time they had heard about the atrocities committed by the other side. In the end, I learned more from them than they did from me. They told me their biggest problem with the war was that the government and the Pentagon kept lying about it with their constant barrage of propaganda saying that we were “winning hearts and minds,” that we were fighting for a just cause, and that there was a “light at the end of the tunnel.” One student told me something that kept coming back to me as the antiwar protests reached a crescendo. “Our government lies at its peril.”