When the War Was Over (69 page)

The sense of bitter betrayal was best expressed by Truong Nhu Tang, a non-communist, a founder of the NLF, and a minister of justice for the PRG. “At the simple farewell dinner we held to formally disband the NLF in 1976 neither the Party nor the government sent a representative. It was a gesture of scorn toward the nationalistic and democratic principles for which the Viet Cong had bled so copiously and which the international liberal community had sustained so faithfully.”

The northern martial-law rulers treated Saigon as a cross between a gold mine and a brothel. Saigon had received and squandered billions of dollars in American aid, its people had grown accustomed to a Western standard of living, and the wartime society of the south had given a new meaning to the word corruption. The martial-law rulers politely blamed the United States for all southern evils. On May Day the military management committee running the south signed its first directive ordering the closing of “bars, brothels, dance halls, opium dens, massage parlors and all places for American-type activities.” The martial-law rulers also prohibited the printing of newspapers, periodicals, or books without official permission; such activities were deemed American. All of this was done in the name of the Vietnamese people—from the south and the north.

Hanoi wanted to order the end of centuries of distinction between the cultures of the Mekong and Red Rivers. “At the end of this very long struggle there are neither victors nor vanquished,” declared General Tran Van Tra, who took the official surrender of the thoroughly defeated southern regime. “The Vietnamese people are the only ones in all history to have defeated the Mongols. In 1945 we defeated the Japanese. In 1954 France at Dien Bien Phu, and now we have beaten the United States, which thought itself the strongest country in the world. It is to the Vietnamese people that the glory for all this goes.”

These claims of glorious victories, as exaggerated as they were, did not belong to the Vietnamese people but to Ho Chi Minh's army, which did defeat the French and the Americans. Few modern armies are as disciplined as Hanoi's. There were no lootings, no vengeful murders, no rampages by the soldiers or
bo doi
of the North Vietnamese army. The North Vietnamese soldiers modestly set up camp in the municipal parks and gardens around Saigon, tying their hammocks to tamarind trees and building small fires in the open. They seemed more like Boy Scouts than an occupying force. Their leaders, however, were just as efficiently confiscating the large sunbleached stucco villas of the city for their homes, the modern government buildings for the new rulers, the luxury American sedans for their own use, and other accouterments of Western living which they condemned in dispatches against the corrupt southern style.

This policy to take over the south and force it to become part of a northern-style system led directly to the boat people and the Third Indochina War. Hanoi could not pretend that northern, central, and southern Vietnam could join together magically in a communist state run by Hanoi. In its entire history Vietnam had been unified for no more than sixty-two years. Despite overriding Chinese influences and underlying similarities, the north and south had been separate and distinct administrations and cultures. The Vietnamese who finally settled in the south had become influenced by the indigenous Mekong River culture, and no amount of rhetoric could alter that fact. But Hanoi was in no mood to undergo a period of reexamination or reflection, to accommodate the southerners, particularly not the noncommunists.

They preferred to ignore history, and as a result a troubled and complicated dichotomy emerged: communist versus non-communist; southern farmers and businessmen versus northern bureaucrats and cadre; civilian versus military. Finally, however, these differences were translated by the people into a north versus south question. And the south refused to cooperate.
Each time the north imposed a new policy the south found new paths to circumvent it. When the north cracked down hard on the south, the southerners began to flee—to take to those rickety boats.

On the surface, the new order was in keeping with the socialist vision Hanoi had attempted in the north. The leadership said it wanted to concentrate on reconstruction of the nation, to resolve the question of war crimes and fraternization with the enemy—the Thieu regime and the Americans—through a “reeducation” program Hanoi described as humane, to alleviate urban ills caused by the war through “New Economic Zones” in the countryside for urban pioneers. In order to avoid a serious unemployment problem the rulers decided against demobilization of its armed forces, which grew after the war to one million fighters.

In practice, these policies led to further alienation of the south from the north and failure throughout the country, especially in reconstruction. Hanoi adopted the slogan “Economics in Command” and then asked its friends around the world to contribute billions of dollars to rebuild one of the most devastated countries in the world. Sadly, the communist world did not undertake a Marshall Plan for Vietnam. The Soviet-bloc nations gave some $3 billion in the first two years but with stringent requirements, including demands that much of the money be repaid in kind. China cut back its level of aid established during the war. Eventually the Vietnamese had some $6 billion in aid pledges—a handsome sum but half as much as they wanted.

Then they squandered that aid on an impossible reconstruction program. Nearly all the money was slotted for aid projects in the north. The south was expected to survive on the stockpiles left by the old order and on its bountiful harvests. The northern projects were more appropriate for nearby Hong Kong than Vietnam. Instead of asking for money to rebuild roads and repair basic electrical, water, and sanitation facilities, Vietnam asked for and received aid to build an expensive, modern paper mill in the north, a modern hospital in Hanoi that the Vietnamese could not maintain, and modern surgical equipment for provincial clinics so primitive they lacked thermometers and electricity. Hanoi's leadership refused to acknowledge that theirs was one of the poorest third world powers and that it needed very basic aid before it could build an industrial infrastructure. The leaders believed they could build a modern, industrialized socialist society in their own lifetime. In this sense the Vietnamese shared the impatience of their Cambodian communist neighbors: They wanted economic miracles immediately after the war. And they brooked no advice from foreign, largely Soviet, advisors who told them they were slitting their own throats.

Vietnam's self-image would not allow Hanoi to do otherwise. It would be difficult to overestimate the pride of the North Vietnamese after 1975. They were the third world's David that had defeated the giant Goliath of the United States. They had won on their own, without a foreign army fighting their battles, without a foreign government calling the shots. They were legends, near supermen. And they believed their country was among the most important in the world—how else could they explain the suicidal drive of the French and the Americans to deny their country independence under the Vietnamese communist flag?

One of Vietnam's spokesmen said years later: “At first we dreamed of doing very big things—big factories, big projects, everything at once. But nothing came of it. We were spread thin. . . . We did not know what we were doing. . . . In time of war we lived mainly off foreign aid. The state didn't manage the economy, it just distributed goods from the outside—rice, clothes, whatever. Our needs for the battlefield were put above all else, no matter the cost.”

These northern economic innocents were sent south to begin instituting a socialist system there and to send back north the profits from southern industry and agriculture the north planned to use for the north's reconstruction. However, if there is one thing southerners know it is how to make money A French official, whose countrymen witnessed this first phase of the southern conquest, said the northerners “made a mess of the south in less than one year.” While the north did not nationalize private firms, they took effective control over them. Northern comptrollers were dispatched to all private firms where they dictated how the productive capacities would be used. At one automotive plant, the French manager was ordered to switch production from jeeps to small tools. He had to design and pay for the changes and keep all personnel on the payroll—unemployment was too high to do otherwise. “There was no warning, no gradual shift from one line of production to another,” the French official explained.

Within one year over 70 percent of the south's light industries were nationalized. And overall production in the south fell to below 30 percent of its wartime level. Some of the blame belongs to the United States, which immediately imposed a complete embargo on Vietnam and forbade American companies to supply Vietnam with spare parts necessary to maintain the American-built factories in the south.

Hanoi refused to admit their plans were failing. One year after victory, in June 1976, Vietnamese Communist Party head Le Duan addressed the first assembly of the reunified country. The country had voted for delegates to
this assembly in pro forma elections, and in many parts the people used their rice ration cards to vote. If the card was not marked by a voting official, it was not valid for collecting rice. Le Duan told this new national assembly that the “most decisive task is to strive to build a network of key heavy industries such as steel, chemicals, machinery and metallurgy in the north.”

He unveiled a five-year plan to accomplish that. He said he expected the south to grow enough food to feed all of Vietnam and earn hard currency to support the industrialization of the north. He expected communist nations to increase their aid. That aid never materialized. One Eastern European diplomat in Hanoi explained why: “They continue to ask for aid because they don't know how to structure a planned economy and they don't seem to care. It is worse for socialist countries to trade with Vietnam than for a capitalist country because the Vietnamese keep asking us for aid, more aid, more favorable conditions.”

In fact, the Eastern European countries were among the first to understand the fatal flaw in the Vietnamese mystique: that they respond brilliantly to a catastrophe but are incapable of performing the vainglorious task of rebuilding a society, at least the militaristic Vietnamese of the north.

Matters worsened in 1976, after Le Duan submitted the five-year plan. China eliminated its free rice shipments that had averaged half a million tons each year. The Chinese also cut back or halted their other aid programs that had provided the Vietnamese with implements for their daily life—thermos jars, chopsticks, kerosene lamps, fans, clothing, and even toys. Southern consumer industries built by America during the war could not make up for these peacetime shortages, largely because of northern mismanagement.

Soon food was at a shortage, again for political more than economic reasons. In 1976 the farmers of the rice-rich Mekong Delta region refused to sell over 600,000 tons of rice to the government at the official prices set far below prevailing market value. Many farmers simply refused to grow crops at all. By the end of 1976 the country faced a shortage of over 1.5 million tons of rice. Inflation rose to over 100 percent.

Unemployment continued to be a problem. Nearly one million Saigonese were without jobs after the war. The north instituted the New Economic Zones program for the southern unemployed to homestead. These zones were in distant wilderness areas near the Cambodian border. The army was to clear the land, build roads, prepare primitive housing, and build a community center to act as a school and clinic.

The program was a disaster. The army did not fulfill the government's promises. The jungle remained a jungle and the people sent to these zones
gave up and went straight back to Saigon. Later, those who were sent back to the New Economic Zones chose to flee the country as boat people rather than return.

The demise of the New Economic Zones also killed an even more ambitious plan. Hanoi had hoped that the southerners could pioneer the frontier areas near the Cambodian border and make room for northerners to move south. Hanoi created an elaborate blueprint for moving ten million people from the more densely populated north to the south by the year 2000. The mentality of the Red River Vietnamese had not changed. They wanted to push farther south and west—which they did, finally, not through New Economic Zones but by invading and occupying Cambodia two years later.

True disillusionment set in when southerners realized what the north's reeducation program entailed. Reeducation, or
hoc tap,
was first described as little more than civics courses or political indoctrination sessions. Hanoi announced no plans for a Nuremberg trial for war crimes. Instead, the north would attempt to alter the improper political attitudes of its former opponents. Reeducation sounded tame, and for the first month it was.
Hoc tap
classes were held in factories, in homes, even on street corners of Saigon.

But on June 11, 1975, the martial-law authorities ordered all “puppet soldiers” of the defeated Saigon army to attend three-day
hoc tap
courses. These officers along with high government officials and important politicians were ordered to assemble that same day and to bring with them enough food, clothing, mosquito nets, and personal effects for one month. The announcement for these higher officials was deliberately ambiguous.

They were not sent off for one month, as they presumed, but indefinitely. They were sent to rural prisons or labor camps, where there were few indoctrination courses, increasingly meager food rations, and little medical care. Back in Saigon their families became impatient, and several hundred staged a demonstration asking to be told, at the least, when these reeducation prisoners would return home. The answer was vague, again: The “puppets” would not be released for some time.