The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam
Sahlins, Marshall
Villages in the Delta are laid out mainly along the canals and rivers. "Village" may be the wrong term. The houses stand side by side, strung out for hundreds of yards along a road or path...
...So you cut up his stomach a little bit and his insides fell out...
...There are no Chinese there...
...It seemed to me quite clear from conversations with the Hoa Hao commander that it was the Americans with whom they were now allied, not the Government to whom they were loyal...
...it is sealed by big robbery in the city...
...The Vietnamese eat rice and prefer it—with corn only on occasion...
...One or two said that conditions were improving because the present Government included dynamic young leaders who took the people's well-being to heart...
...Not recognizing it, we succeed in destroying it...
...The detente is taken in evidence that when a Communist revolution generates an economic stake in the world, and when the revolutionary generation with its heady ideas of world uprising dies off, a Communist power ceases to be aggressive and instead evolves an interest in the status quo...
...a single traitor wrecks the organization of a whole village, perhaps a district...
...sAHLINS: Then the attempt to discourage Vietnamese water torture...
...Should we share our "compatriot's" understanding of the moral...
...MR...
...A heavy "dot" in the transcript indicates that a portion of the interview is skipped over...
...So all peripheral rationales fade into the background...
...Somewhere in the middle were two American advisers...
...toward the rear was another...
...But these slim measures of good intention have to be put in the balance against the huge, unplanned subsidization of decadence in the cities to determine a final reading on the American presence...
...I encountered it among men of fighting ranks and among their officers, among staff members of U.S...
...Today they accept the Realpolitik—and the weapons and good payoff—of the American presence, decisive in this province where there are no Arvin (Army of Viet Nam) regulars...
...It was rather a model-village tour: an area of Hoa Hao, a Buddhist reform group now solidly (for the time being) with the South Vietnamese Government...
...It is a Cold War epilogue of nineteenth-century colonialism...
...And so inevitably they fall into a hopeless contradiction...
...X had mentioned that one of the rules imparted to the cadres in training was "be kind to prisoners...
...I asked one of the Vietnamese who interviews refugees for Voice of America—principally, however, on agricultural matters—why, in his opinion, the peasants come over to the Government...
...X" makes a curious slip: he speaks of an "emotional interdependence" between the prisoner and the interrogator, where he means to discuss the dependence of the prisoner upon the interrogator...
...so it becomes a prefabricated barrier erected wherever and whenever the ugliness intrudes into consciousness, a denial that one is implicated by what may be going on...
...The effect at every order of organization from hamlet to nation is to interpose obstacles to American direction of Vietnamese affairs, and so give free play to indigenous forces and interests—especially self-interests...
...These families had been selected by the hamlet chief and a local committee...
...He believed this, he explained, because he has a high regard for human life, American and Vietnamese...
...In a remote provincial outpost I found two Americans who had appropriated as their own draconic Chinese methods of interrogation and indoctrination ("motivation" is the American newspeak...
...bulgar wheat, 5 lbs...
...The indifference of the people mocks their "brave struggle against subversion...
...We stood back on a rise above: it was not an American function...
...Refugees axe streaming en masse into Government camps—where they live, newspapers say, in unspeakable conditions...
...These are common wants of everyone, aren't they...
...For one thing, the key decision-makers are not there...
...Now, I'm asking you, do you believe you have the right to impose your will on somebody...
...Even so, what appears to us as a choice of sides may present itself to the peasant as a tactical choice of masters—with a meaning culturally incomparable to the American who is "for" America, or even the Republican party...
...Instead of torture the guerrilla finds himself in the company of an "enemy" who nevertheless treats him with respect, even befriends him, feeds him, makes him comfortable—which is to say, profoundly uncomfortable...
...Tremendous," he says, "just tremendous...
...We had to "stop the Communists from taking over here," or else "they'd go on to Hawaii...
...or perhaps they did not go through the experience of being a P.O.W...
...Vietnamese nationalism is a dead issue, buried and covered over by Communist aggression...
...It is a moral anesthetic...
...death becomes an advertisement— and "we mean what we say...
...Each family received 100 lbs...
...We say we are "helping the Vietnamese to help themselves," and that's exactly what they're doing—helping themselves...
...Ten heaps of food lay in two rows on the ground...
...establishments the same architectural motif is repeated—with variations as minor in social meaning as the differences between the Mercedes and the Mercuries that jostle aside pedicabs in the crowded streets...
...He made no objection...
...The incident must be repeated often, as a circumstance of the American presence in Viet Nam...
...Can your ends be so God-given as to give you this right among humanity to do this...
...America, medicine man to the world, is impelled to Viet Nam to exorcise the evil spirits...
...Your whole series of assumptions has got to be reexamined here, and we're here to help you reexamine them...
...The bare courtesy of the reception I had just had inside did not trouble to conceal it...
...MR...
...War is the continuation of Madison Avenue by new means...
...MR...
...they maintain a hinterland conspiracy of silence...
...And, Jesus, there's some guys here have got some more basic ideas of how they'd like to examine you, but we're just holding these guys off . . . and we'll take good care of you...
...I thought it a good mot as far as it went, but incomplete...
...x: No, what it is, is breaking him down...
...Information Service (now part of the Joint U.S...
...dollars out of the country, for safe deposit in foreign banks and the import of prohibited luxury goods...
...A guy like that who will examine his previously arrived conclusions and change his mind, I admire thatSAHLINS: That's very admirable, but it doesn't describe the process you went through, which was to leave him in a situation where either he takes this set of alternatives which you give him, or he is a mental wreck...
...Every war and every army has its complaints...
...I asked...
...In that two to five days, we've got to get the information we need...
...Around here—in this "loyal" area—it's not a civil war, I thought...
...If they are then outraged at the My Canh, it is a cynical lie...
...I had a glimpse of this earlier phase among American combat troops at Bien Hoa, most of whom were comparatively new arrivals and had seen comparatively limited action...
...All disagreed—except one...
...MR...
...Their attitudes toward Viet Nam are indeed more scholarly than demonic...
...But once a guy begins to join this little society of alcoholics CAPTAIN Y: These cadres we have [as instructors]—these ex-VC, exNLF, ex Viet Minh—they all in some way or another gave up something in their own mind when they turned, came to the Government...
...He was terrified by the North Vietnamese land reform of 1955-56, when middle peasants were axed...
...The motivation and dedication of American AID people is beyond question and not at issue...
...him...
...a farmer who fled from Long An Province because he saw his relative, a rich farmer, killed by the VC for refusing to pay taxes...
...All the compromises and the self deceptions of Americans, and all the brutalization, originate in this contradiction...
...It is a moment of extreme anguish—"the lowest point in his life in terms of human meaning and existence" (the American civilian said...
...An alcoholic can attend the meetings and he can see everybody else get embarrassed...
...It becomes opposite-communism, and "opposites" are things alike in every respect save one...
...The involvement of the peasant must always have been uncertain and incomplete, particularly on the Government side...
...It is, I repeat, an important point...
...I asked, "How do you offset the damage to yourself...
...They were eight Army enlisted men—at least some were draftees— with whom their commanding officer (knowing I was "a professor against the war") had generously given me ninety minutes' privacy...
...SAHLINS: No, that isn't so...
...The compradors of Saigon express nothing of the Delta and the Mountains and feel nothing of them...
...It's a slow process...
...Still the American military adviser who turns his back on the torture of Viet Cong prisoners by South Vietnamese soldiers is the khaki counterpart of the VOA civilian who closes his mind to compromising information...
...According to the Sergeant in charge of it, this food program had begun about nine months ago...
...Joining battle with the evil spirits by ritual techniques of blood-letting, we get covered all over with blood ourselves and become ourselves dark forces in the land...
...We are losing the hearts and minds of Americans in Viet Nam...
...Everyone was waiting around when I arrived—it turned out they were waiting for me...
...MR...
...CAPTAIN Y: It's relatively ineffective...
...what we're trying to show these guys when we're interrogating them, through this tortuous process, is that you're not better [off] under the NLF...
...Then he tells you the names of the two people in his cell...
...First—and it is a thing seriously to consider—these two Americans are not strangers, not people who have been metamorphosed by some satanic forces to a point beyond our understanding or recognition...
...units in battle, in order to make the situation look worse and encourage a greater U.S...
...x: It's just like an alcoholic...
...The prisoner, therefore, expects to be tortured for information and ultimately killed if he remains steadfast...
...And again, it's a simple-minded approach...
...He spoke from notes he had just made, and I repeat his points here...
...Again, it's a technique that's been used most effectively by the Chinese, in which you've pulled the man out of his familiar environment: he's dependent...
...SAHLINS: No, your ends...
...Didn't tell us a thing...
...The last is anyhow ruled out by the "advisory" role of American personnel (civilian as well as military) in Viet Nam...
...MR...
...We give them the advice to do good and the power to do as they please...
...It is allegiance to oneself as a human being, to what one knows as the right human condition...
...or at least when it is comfortable, when it's comfortable for me to be an island unto myself, then I am...
...x: I don't know...
...But I misunderstood...
...Unless one is so disposed in advance, it may take a certain initial disillusionment with Viet Nam to reach this point, a disillusionment that undermines local meanings of the war, leaving one either with the Cold War conviction that it is necessary to stop this Chinese-inspired aggression, Viet Nam notwithstanding, or else without any conviction at all...
...His father was a businessman and a landowner who left an estate of some 60 hectares in Long Xuyen Province...
...The men left and I remained with the young officer who wanted me to get matters straight...
...B. was educated in a French college and then embarked on a life-long career of collaboration with foreigners...
...power, he said, is the only thing the Chinese can understand...
...we're only advisers here...
...They were down in the hollow with a portable loud-speaker system shouting to the assembled 40 people who were standing several feet from them...
...Fortunately, before he could react the thin voice of an old village-woman penetrated his senses...
...In fact, his is a holy work: to exorcise the communist devils possessing Viet Cong...
...He made it clear to the people what the food meant: as one of the recipients told me later, now they would turn in any Viet Cong they saw...
...Then off again on the all clear...
...I spent six days in Viet Nam: mostly in Saigon, one day in Chau Doc Province (An Phu District) and half a day at III Corps Headquarters, Bien Hoa...
...B. works for the Voice of America as a researcher and occasional broadcaster...
...For the most part, the family went about its domestic business: an old man working over some tools, a grandmother fussing with crying grandchildren, younger men and boys talking and laughing softly, a woman singing...
...The prisoner's disclosures are at the same time a betrayal of his cause and a confession of his errors, a renunciation of belief...
...He said too that the contracting business was the going swindle...
...Villages in the Delta are laid out mainly along the canals and rivers...
...Well, you can imply that you knew that already, what you're really after are better things and this might rather (uncalm...
...For even as he binds the prisoner's wounds, he systematically invokes the threat of "the others"—that there are these others (Arvin regulars) around who want at the prisoner and have "more basic ideas" of how to interrogate him...
...Then you indicate that this nice treatment that he's had so far [has] not been disinterested good treatment, that we expect his cooperation...
...The betrayal is the first phase of a "cure" of Communism— the American civilian kept likening the process to the rehabilitation of alcoholics...
...So Vietnamese die by way of demonstration...
...So as a matter of fact by this process you either transform him from that belief into one of a range of acceptable beliefs, or you will leave him a mental wreck— MR...
...He didn't see "the people here" getting with the war...
...The interrogator is now the only one in the world with whom the prisoner has anything in common...
...With a curious politeness he handed me a newspaper, saying that "a compatriot" of his (but not of mine...
...The soldier outraged at this deception of Vietnamese misery has been prepared to commit it...
...a captain in the army, graduate of a French secondary school...
...We are not imposing will...
...A settlement of 2,000 people could expect to be visited with food packages about every two-three months, although this hamlet had been given food only once before, if that...
...But they blanked out, every one of them...
...I had a number of experiences of this kind, times when I heard a Vietnamese or an American in the presence of another American of official position report something compromising to American ideals, policy or the Washington line on Viet Nam...
...If not exactly a moment of truth, the American's response gives subtle intelligence of the critical battle of this war: of how much of America, of what America has meant to us, can be consumed in Viet Nam...
...MR...
...MR...
...And I venture to say that the necessity for moral anesthesia is one reason there are so many versions of truth, why it is so difficult to determine just what is going on in Viet Nam...
...It confronts you as you drive into Saigon...
...MR...
...He apparently is joint heir with his brothers, and maintains a home in the provincial seat...
...Or does it just stay in MAC-V [Military Assistance Command, Viet Nam...
...A little hollow near the school made do as a ceremonial ground...
...I sense these men are identified with the prisoner, that they have themselves under the knife, that the prisoner's conversion will validate their own integrity...
...x: But we don't leave him this way...
...The American soldiers who see the Observer have already seen certain other pictures...
...and many people are being needlessly killed because of the ideological views of a few Americans, the President and those around him...
...4. I had talked with the others about civilian casualties...
...wanted to present it to me, and I should especially consider the inside spread of pictures on pages 4 and 5. The paper was the Observer, a weekly published for U.S...
...Last night the platoon had gone through a similar performance...
...the meaning is external, a judgment of those who inflict not those who suffer...
...It concerns me that many military men are critical of the critics and want to deny them the constitutional right to dissent...
...We've got to get it by an emotional and mental torture...
...But under what constraints does the Government of Viet Nam operate...
...But by a carefully calculated approach, the interrogator can from the beginning disappoint the prisoner's expectations, disarm and confuse him...
...Perhaps it is the higher wisdom...
...that, despite the circumstances, a government could be established on some basis other than the prevailing distribution of wealth and power, apart from its constraints, and become more the executive committee of the people than of the comprador...
...still, it gives Viet Nam a certain air of insanity...
...The New York Times reported what seems to be an analogous incident on September 15, 1965: the U.S...
...Recalcitrant under pressure, life insists on manifesting itself in all manner of ways —refugees in the cities, revolts in the mountains, desertions in the army, or perhaps just as studied indifference at An Phu...
...To think that you can just absolve yourself...
...Large Chinese merchants have a major influence on the Government, a senior USOM (U.S...
...Now, for the Americans...
...The horrifying quality is that the evil spirit is a construction of the medicine man, and though his operation prove a brilliant success the patient may die from it...
...it listed "The Four Principles and Eight Rules" of cadre behavior, apparently an amendation of "The Three Rules and the Eight Remarks" that Mao developed for partisan warfare against the Japanese...
...It's the latest thing in warfare—a medieval war...
...But it's only a beginning...
...But you have to really believe, as we do—although we get discouraged sometimes by our [Vietnamese] counterparts—you have to really believe that you're helping this guy to something better...
...Then he went on to relate that provincial officials who have accompanied him in talks with peasants have several times "asked" him to erase complaints about "bombing" from the tapes...
...He warned me that there are Viet Cong everywhere in Saigon...
...MR...
...Notwithstanding he had just described a specific prisoner who would not yield, he denies he was ever involved in such an interrogation: "because we're advisers—in every sense...
...The nutritionist spoke briefly—too briefly, I thought, considering the exotic character of the foods...
...And that's discouraging...
...MR...
...And shall we admit our responsibility for the misery of Viet Nam...
...But these seem advanced stages of moral decay, people now dangerously close to a final plunge into brutalization...
...The texts were classic Communist handbooks on revolutionary warfare, books these Americans studied and clearly admired...
...But there is a reason for the madness...
...The VIS officer spoke first...
...Public Affairs Office...
...He was seriously concerned...
...Historically, peasants have their own side: their family, their fields, their village...
...three dots, that a portion of an answer is elided...
...The evil is the "International Communist Conspiracy," known also in its emanation of "Aggressive Communism" and appearing in Viet Nam as "Chinese Expansionism...
...Marshall Ky says the land speculators who drive up prices around the American development at Cam Ranh Bay will be punished...
...We have brought him to a point where he realizes that the faith he placed in his previous system was essentially not powerful...
...The officer ("Captain Y") says that if you don't try to break the prisoner, you're admitting he's right...
...Vietnamese collaborators, I found, are apt to put it most directly, almost as if the NLF was Chinese...
...These six days did not make me an expert—and I hope not a fool or a victim...
...To some extent this has been done: the Chinese People's Liberation Army...
...the larger share is simply corrupted and a Vietnamese elite becomes the latest beneficiary of American affluence...
...Do we mean to indicate by these deaths that the Chinese must stop threatening us...
...Perhaps it is better said of An Phu district that the day belongs to the Neolithic, the night to the Cold War of the mid-twentieth century...
...That's saying that every man is an island...
...As a Viet Minh he had lied to the authorities about his background, saying he was of poor peasant origin...
...The revolutionary is likely to break completely...
...I always thought it a weak retort, if only because the critics were as a rule better informed than the tropisimatic adherents of official policy...
...But it was not a simple process of divination that led to this move...
...It becomes in general a question of what type of society we offer as an alternative...
...He undertakes the prisoner's "conversion" for the prisoner's own good: he is "helping" the man, saving him...
...and a word in parenthesis followed by a question mark indicates an imperfect rendering on the tape and my guess of the word involved...
...Officials at this level and above are appointed from Saigon...
...The career officers fear criticism because they are put in jeopardy by it...
...But it is a definite streak in an interesting number of officers—"and," he added, "just what the VC would want...
...acquired" 30 square miles near Ankhe from the Vietnamese Government for the newly arrived First Cavalry Division...
...But they are unequivocal truth of another kind—they are an American experience of Viet Nam: 1. The officer had it from "an informed source in a position to know" that Arvin desertion rates jump from 25 to 40 per cent whenever American troops came into an area...
...I had got to this district, An Phu, by courtesy of the U.S...
...In parting he remarked that if Viet Nam wants peace, and if peace means VC control, he for one is willing to accept it...
...The final stages of American dissolution in Viet Nam will be marked by imitation of the enemy's techniques...
...It is of a discussion I had with the Americans about torture and the transformation of VC prisoners to anti-communism...
...civilian agencies and among their senior officials...
...SAHLINS: Conversion from Communism is involved in the torture...
...MR...
...therefore, a critical tactic...
...This is war...
...The relation the interrogator seeks to effect is one between them as against the world...
...But at night, in this war, the two historic epochs join in a ballet which, when it is not a dance of death, is a moment of high comedy...
...Human agony has no meaning...
...People who couldn't keep up the pace in some cases were helped and in some other cases—just according to the individual guard—were bashed and thrown aside...
...The people stayed just so, arranged around their hurricane lamps in peasant set piece: a sequence of lighted dioramas in a darkened museum, before which passed beings of such abier-nidche purpose and expression as to raise the question of who was the imitation of humanity...
...The poor," said Mr...
...x: We are not imposing our will...
...He is "upset" by the career officers who speak only of "beatniks," and whose response is "those guys ought to be brought out here and sent on patrol to get shot...
...But...
...history, he said, will prove us right...
...He wondered, in this regard, to what extent the situation in Viet Nam is accurately reported insofar as the facts are purveyed through the military...
...The main protagonist—identified here as "Mr...
...there are a number of alternatives...
...At some point the latter feels he might press for reciprocity...
...There was something of a moon: one could make out the man several yards ahead and perhaps the man ahead of him, and then one or two others in the parallel line on the opposite side of the road...
...Then we are involved in killing people to show other people that they should stop threatening us...
...Although it is popular among Washington officials to say that the refugees are fleeing from Vietcong terrorism, some officials on the scene are quite willing to concede or even to volunteer that the majority are fleeing from the insecurity of the countryside and that air strikes are the largest single cause of that insecurity...
...We were carrying guns in the midst of life, where the people live: house by house, family by family, casually going on with it, all along the road we took so seriously...
...Among military personnel, of course, such translations of big structural events into terms of ordinary existence will take other forms...
...But that general point is not important...
...The guerrilla thus understands that secrecy is a first principle of the revolution...
...Then you're through with him, in practical terms...
...the solid fishing boats drawn up on the shore...
...I recorded most of that discussion and will excerpt parts of it verbatim...
...You could never tell...
...that, neither brave nor determined, they "would rather have us do the work for them...
...SAHLINS: But that isn't the issue here...
...But you can soon get this guy so flustered and so shaken up that before he knows it, he's agreeing with you—because his assumptions to begin with were rather vulnerable...
...Conscience must be destroyed: it has to end at the barrel of the gun...
...The feudal barons with their kept knights ravage through the countryside to engage in mortal combat for forty days...
...Saigon surely offers little alternative to this allegiance...
...powdered milk and I gallon of cooking oil...
...Then we are killing people to show other people that they should stop threatening the people we are killing...
...Everyone was so conscious of us on the hill, especially the shy women being given food...
...SAHLINS: What kind of control do you have over Arvin types of interrogation [i.e., physical torture...
...Through the good offices of the local U.S...
...SAHLINS: You don't accept that [i.e., that there is only one way of doing things and nobody can dispute it], but you accept the other premise that there are many ways...
...The Chinese can do that because they have P.O.W.'s for months and months and months...
...It is the expert opinion of those we employ as political experts...
...Charles Mohr writes in the New York Times of September 5: "Already more than 5 per cent of the population has fled into refugee camps...
...And not our alternative...
...It is difficult to become an expert anyhow on things that aren't what they seem...
...But Viet Nam could foster a new type of American military dissenter, an anti-ideologist, a man whose life has been interrupted when it did not seem threatened and yet, come upon the distant scene of emergency, sees there a people not so much involved in a fight for their lives against Communist expansion as a flight from their deaths—perhaps at American hands...
...I understood then that whoever controls "the hearts and minds" of the dogs will win the war...
...Such seems to be the hard-headed surrealism...
...So I understand the procedure...
...Certainly not from the incongruent setting...
...The death of Vietnamese is un related to their lives...
...MR...
...the people, he said, want security for their lives and peace for their work...
...here and there a woman placidly tending kids or a man mending nets— hardly anything to suggest a civil war, an invasion and least of all a social revolution other than the neolithic one that brought man from the mobile hunting condition and allowed him to settle down and accumulate a modicum of simple wherewithal...
...Nobody's got the right to succeed—guaranteed...
...x: Listen, I've met guys...
...They just moved them, and they moved them as fast as they could...
...At this point he's got to find a new way...
...The military dictatorship mocks our "defense of democracy...
...Its function is to explain the American action, and as the only reasonable explanation of that fact it becomes immune to contradiction by any other fact of life in Southeast Asia...
...The fixation has its own internal, Vietnamese dialectic...
...Saigon, one cynical American said to me, is full of Kennedy idealists who have discovered the facts of life...
...He got the last laugh on you, because he didn't talk a bit...
...The guerrilla yields some minor information...
...But by the same token, intelligence becomes a first principle of the counterrevolution...
...they were training Popular Forces as revolutionary cadres...
...A great many have the urge and the mentality...
...x: Not impose will—if he fails to accept . . . an alternative...
...But against this one might consider the bloodbath without forseeable end going on now, and the ruling class of South Viet Nam to whose tender mercies we would confine the peasant...
...But at this point, if you really belieye in anything yourself, what you've got to do is give him something to hope for before you send him back for further processing...
...the big clay pots in the yard and mats spread out for sunning...
...Many, I understand, work tirelessly under dangerous conditions to bring a modicum of betterment to the countryside...
...x: What ideas...
...I don't really believe anybody's hands are God-given...
...The contradictions of Viet Nam may thus reflect themselves in the everyday behavior of Americans...
...Mainland style—and what you're trying to do is change the course of warfare in Asia...
...Note that the officer did mention a particular area, but I am Tunable to pin-point his transliteration of the Vietnamese...
...it cannot extend to the bullet...
...He did not understand my motives, that I wanted to know what the Observer seeks to teach those who read it...
...upon you for his continual well-being...
...You've got what you needed to continue operating...
...Everyone knows that Communist China is expansionist...
...I want to know," he said, "if this is reported to the American people, and if it is reported to the President, and if not, why not...
...Because we don't concern ourselves here with American sensibilities...
...The dominant of the two Americans was a field representative of a civilian agency...
...He meets his interrogators prepared to resist the worse: it is a test of his revolutionary soul...
...he must have further "processing" at a rehabilitation center...
...Go 'way," he said, "we're waiting for someone...
...X"—describes himself as an "agnostic atheist," but clearly he believes in the devil if not in God...
...And lighting up a cigarette when they bring a prisoner in for questioning is, well, that's an immoral— CAPTAIN Y: It's just like saying, "It doesn't happen...
...SAHLINS: You will impose your ideas by this technique— MR...
...But it aims not merely at eliciting military information...
...0 A serious argument against American withdrawal is the bloodbath that would ensue in South Viet Nam when the NLF gains control...
...snxttrrs: It's in effect brainwashing—is that the point of this...
...The lack of freedom mocks our "defense of freedom...
...He said he decided then to get out as soon as he could...
...and you're really doing something else...
...What's going to happen to him now...
...She was kibitzing the war...
...Even after you've broken him and gotten the information, he's still a free agent...
...one sees only partial intimations of the grand design among the few who can seriously reflect on it, and among Americans in general only a vulgar idee fixe about the Red Menace...
...Thus even as America generates powerful economic and political force in Viet Nam, it turns around to deny itself the Ieverage...
...so that the line of settlement extends sometimes for miles, punctuated periodically by a short stretch of forest, a pagoda, or a focal market-place town...
...involvement...
...But An Phu may have been a perfect model, complete with all the flaws of its political virtues...
...Life went on, and why not...
...Born in Saigon, his father was a clerk in a French company...
...The fate of the people, therefore, is not mitigated by small aid in the countryside...
...A mandarin, proclaimed by the long nail of his little finger...
...Well it turned out in post-World War II analysis that the Bataan Death March was something that they handled to the best of their ability, given the available transport and the way that they would have handled their own prisoners...
...But we think that we're looking into it a little more deeply, and we see that the mental and spiritual torture that we bring a man through to the point where he voluntarily gives you the information is pretty rough stuff to get involved in too...
...The provincial officials indicated that the "bombing" need not be broadcast...
...But was it any more irrelevant than the things other Americans were doing in Viet Nam...
...But to kill irrelevantly is a contradiction in terms...
...also a former enemy: The district chief at An Phu was established, with servants, in a well guarded headquarters...
...I don't know anything about that kind of warfare...
...that the accumulation of wealth is a mere question of "graft" and "corruption" rather than an economic formation of society, a matter of excess rather than a constituted relation to the national economy and the underlying population...
...They put it in different ways, but everyone expressed concern that the Americans might lose patience and withdraw...
...He was a soldier in a Light Brigade: "The people here have been fighting guerrilla war for 20 years...
...The escalation of war may be narrowing the alternatives for the people to an end with misery or a misery without end...
...We've said that basically he's right...
...Our Popular Force, platoon strength in black peasant clothes, took stealthily to the road for an ambush position at a river crossing several kilometers from camp...
...The Ameri cans I have seen in this predicament were good men and intelligent...
...Those guys [NLF] they told me something else...
...x: Your belief...
...Some said nothing...
...The interrogator has at most four or five days before he must send the prisoner on...
...x: The individual advisor giving guidance on the spot...
...SAHLINS: What practical is being done to discourage this kind of thing...
...I was given a pledge card that the Americans issued to Vietnamese trainees...
...I met a few of our lesser collaborators...
...I had always thought this was put out for international and home consumption, to make the American intervention palatable for whoever might be inclined to swallow it...
...Hijacked American dollars in the cities capitalize a whole social system, and one in which just this unequal distribution of wealth is proper, a constituted condition...
...A Negro private brought it up—by his own compulsion, for the discussion was open just then—and others seemed to agree...
...Somewhere ahead was a scout with a walkie-talkie...
...x: Tremendous—tremendous...
...x: We don't do anything because we're advisors—in every sense...
...X's admiration of the prisoner who will not be broken...
...x...
...Clearly it proceeds from an injunction of sacred ancestral ideology, the Dulles demonology, which defined the struggle against the forces of evil...
...The rich men's big houses are protected by great iron gates and barbed wire deployed along the tops of thick walls...
...corn meal, 5 lbs...
...The Americans insisted, however, on one departure from Communist attitudes: alongside self-criticism they encourage the troops to question their instructors and formulate their own views...
...At the American Embassy and other U.S...
...And you can do that because that's what they're least adequately prepared for...
...once you've broken him down, it comes to the point where he wakes up in a sweat one morning and tells you, "All right...
...x: Well, guidance on the spot— CAPTAIN D. (SAHLIN'S ESCORT) It's up to the individual advisors— MR...
...The 10 families had been selected from a community of 2,000 people...
...He's got to have a way out of his dilemma, and the people at the training centers should be skillful enough to point out to him a number of alternatives...
...We have a moral responsibility, it seems to me, once we've stepped into this country to involve ourselves in the complete fabric of the country, and to understand it, and then try and help the Vietnamese to look at some different alternatives...
...Your belief: you have to sincerely believe that in the long run you're helping this man...
...In his opinion such actions as these would have the effect, desired by Vietnamese, of relieving their military participation and increasing direct aid to the local economy through military and other assistance—aid that would find its way to local vested interests...
...Some glossed over the reported incident as exceptional, as not happening most of the time...
...x: Well, if the final result of it is—it's a cruel process—but the result of bringing him closer to you, of conversion—it's a tortuous process of conversion—but the result is a kind one...
...He is sure we didn't pay rent to the French in World War II for the privilege of fighting for French freedom...
...It may sound hard-boiled to say that we don't concern ourselves with American sensibilities—but we don't...
...I was reproached for my naivete: "every Eastern country is full of graft and corruption...
...At the same time, several had experienced the recalcitrance of Viet Nam, its disengagement from what was supposed to be its own life and death struggle, and they were disturbed by it...
...For all our anti-colonial protestations we perpetuate a colonial condition in the country...
...Yet emotionally it is not slight: it is a fundamental betrayal of himself, his comrades and his cause...
...They're doing that because that's just been the bent of warfare in Mainland Asia for a thousand years, and what we have got to try to do is sophisticate it, and tell them, "Look, that's just not the way...
...The important point is a specific one, dictated by the man who anonymously gave me a present: the inside two pages of the July 3 edition...
...3. When we were preparing to build up a landing base in [a certain coastal] area, why did we have to negotiate with private land owners for space at so many piastres per acre...
...He has volunteered the information...
...Without it one could go insane...
...Both were highly qualified, competent in Vietnamese language and custom, and dedicated to Viet Nam and their vision of its future...
...The interrogator is protecting the prisoner, shielding him against the "big, ugly outside world...
...Together with a large number of Saigon friends who are doing well while we are thus doing good, we are under seige...
...x: Well again, that's an advisory function...
...Still, he is told the information is nothing, not enough, that he will have to do better or the others will move in on him...
...CAPTAIN Y: If we do not break this guy, if we do not attempt to change his ideas then in essence what have we done...
...If you're just breaking the guy down for the sake of getting a poor helpless alcoholic who's hipped on NLF propaganda to admit that he was wrong and give you the information, then you're going to send him out in the street a crushed derelict, then there's something wrong with you...
...5. He seemed to know my own position, and since I had talked with the other men about the criticism of the war in the States, he wanted to insist that, "The criticism of the war is extremely healthy...
...An outsider can attempt only a superficial and partial analysis of the Washington line and very little on its fundamental causes...
...At the institutional level, which is perhaps the critical level, the function of the "advisory" role must be judged from its effects...
...it's just like that and always has been" [and therefore always will be...
...Vietnamese to our eyes seem rather cruel sometimes to prisoners, but they're not doing this with any ideological vengeance...
...He would pull out—"because I'm selfish—I don't think the Communist control of Viet Nam will concern me in my lifetime...
...x: To most of the Americans, to most of the simple-minded Americans who get involved in Viet Nam—that's all the boobus Americanus that H. L. Mencken spoke about—undoubtedly they think that the mental and emotional torture we're talking about is the least objectionable, because they've never really paused to seriously reflect about it themselves...
...Why do these Americans so intensely need to crack down the prisoner, to convince him he is wrong, they right...
...we'll have to give you some penicillin...
...SAHLINS: How do you offset the damage to yourself...
...That's the kind of a dirty trick— [but] when you've only got four days . . . SAHLINS: Have you done this with Viet Cong...
...He was not new to the war but almost through with it, twenty-nine days to go, and now there were several things he had to say about it...
...Then he lies when I ask if he admires this man...
...A special type of "mental torture" (their term) is instead inflicted...
...The policy for Viet Nam seems to have developed from the intersection of the demonology with at least two important events, the Cuban missile crisis and the detente with Russia, which have impressed themselves firmly and in certain ways on political consciousness...
...It was not until they saw me sit cross-legged on the floor of a Vietnamese house, and with them eat Vietnamese food with Vietnamese people, that they, these two Americans, accepted me...
...it's only a beginning...
...Opposing it, we drive it into self-defeating dependence upon major Communist powers—and thus in the end obtain the confrontation we sought from the beginning...
...An American VOA employee present at the interview insisted I get the meaning of "bombing" straight...
...They settled carefully into an ambush position at the river...
...Many Americans I met in Viet Nam are convinced the Viet Cong have been lately violating their own principles, stepping up economic pressure and terror in the countryside, for their very success has bred control and logistic problems...
...The peace will certainly affect them, but is it their war— as war...
...Or do we mean to show the Chinese they must stop threatening the Vietnamese...
...What I'm asking is, do you believe you have the right to impose by this method:— MR...
...You boys want some tea...
...Critics of the war point to the contradiction between our announced defense of "freedom" and the character of the South Vietnamese Government...
...The two-page banner read: "'A New Glorious Exploit,' Broadcasts Communist Radio...
...Subject for years to opposition and oppression, the Hoa Hao have fought everybody: the Viet Minh, the Diem regime, the Viet Cong...
...It's what Americans are least adequately prepared for when they find themselves in the other side's hands...
...MR...
...He was from a Central Vietnamese middle peasant family...
...of the NLF, not the derogatory term of Viet Cong...
...I later discussed this conversation with an American employee of USIS...
...Sometimes an old woman would peer out and say something to us...
...He waxed Lippmannesque: "If we start here, we'll soon be all over the world doing the same thing...
...Our antics seemed to make a difference only to the dogs, and then the racket they raised made even our silence ridiculous...
...And some shrugged, referred to the feudal-oriental character of the country, then asked what one could do since "we're only advisers here...
...for another thing because the record compiled by Americans who had been in Viet Nam making and implementing mistakes suggested they had no understanding of Viet Nam or of their own existence there...
...Operations Mission, the AID program) officer told me, an influence that increases in direct proportion to their wealth...
...MR...
...Technically, however, we are just "advisers...
...We should be acting as a catalyst, as a thinking catalyst in Viet Nam...
...Then you might say, "Jeez, that scrape you got on your shoulder...
...The issue here is whether you will impose your will by this technique, which is— MR...
...And now consider this interview, what they said and what they revealed of themselves...
...As for the South Vietnamese soldiers (and this is I think a very common complaint), they aren't worth a damn: poorly trained and undisciplined, they talk and smoke on patrol and cannot work as a unit...
...The American commanding officer and some non-corns were there, and the commanding officer of the Vietnamese Regional Forces with his bodyguards...
...It's not worth it to America...
...We went quietly, watchfully, a little afraid, hunched forward with carbines at the ready...
...Driving that day to the South Vietnamese Popular Force outpost at Khanh An, I was in Samoa or New Guinea again: the thatch roof houses on stilts in endless procession along the road...
...It is difficult to see how the peasant can be "on" the side—"for" the cause—of a world from which he has been structurally excluded...
...Meanwhile, back at the village The scene that day at An Phu was reminiscent of the colonial payday described by Aubrey Menon in The Prevalence of Witches, with overtones as degrading and cynical...
...The objective conditions make it impossible to sustain any other image of the American presence...
...He enters into symbiosis with the Cold War...
...Politically aware Americans find it possible to believe it the higher wisdom even though they are unable to trace the chain of NLF command beyond Hanoi...
...I lived in with them for a night and a good part of a day...
...These people, I thought, are historically out of it...
...let them have it...
...I'd rather get—not get involved in it, not in the actual physical torture myself—but I'd rather be right there and see it done, and then laugh like a horse when it doesn't work and they don't get the information...
...is just because the other type [mental torture] doesn't offend American sensibilities as much...
...The masters of ceremony were a VIS (Vietnamese Information Service) officer, a Vietnamese nutritionist and the hamlet chief...
...And then in the long run you're affecting the situation when you just laugh at this guy and say: "Look, you think he's gonna break...
...we're attempting a reformation of a whole society...
...I am obliged to insist that I do not present his views as facts of war, as necessarily true in specific content...
...See, we don't have time to get any brainwashing...
...In my experience, nationalism is simply not discussed by Americans in Saigon...
...Your belief," he answers...
...They distinguish between "good" and "bad" innocent victims...
...In the end the medicine man is indistinguishable from an evil spirit...
...Thus the bond between prisoner and interrogator is forged, the captive caught in a deepening dependence upon his captor...
...SAHLINS: So you admire more a person who will not acquiesce to the thing that you say is right than one who does...
...But until the end of World War II, we always thought of the Japanese Army as a real cruel, vindictive, bunch of cutthroats...
...the exterior decor was barbed wire again, and a guard detachment of Regional Forces...
...But it works...
...L.—the captain was angry because "intellectuals" were not treated well...
...Special Forces Detachment, 10 selected families of a hamlet several kilometers from the base were ceremoniously to receive food doles, and the children of the hamlet school to get new school kits (though there weren't enough of these to go around...
...Much of the time I passed with U.S...
...But it begins from external conditions, from the Washington Cold War policy and its confrontations with world events...
...Waiting tensely, one of the American advisers was startled by an arm softly placed over his shoulder...
...in the Korean conflict themselves...
...Likewise the small Special Forces Detachment I saw at An Phu was committed to a program of medical and economic aid for the people—the Peace Corps of the War Corps...
...I'm not asking you for religious beliefs...
...MR...
...while the black gang with carbines and recoilless rifles and walkie-talkies and Americans seemed as meaningful to this existence as the court ceremony of the Inca emperor...
...and Americans have a complementary need to believe and practice it...
...It meant to him that Arvin has no inclination to fight...
...Transferred to China, these understandings dictate a policy of buying time for the revolution—that economic development and generational replacement might exhaust its fervor—and, in the meantime, during all that period in which it is dangerous, cordoning the revolution by a strong military stand and preventing its export...
...MR...
...They have looked upon the slaughter of villages, contemplated the civilian victims of American bombs and shells—perhaps not just in photographs...
...x: No . . . That's why we would not take a guy who's been broken directly into our unit at this time .. . SAHLINS: Either you will rehabilitate him by converting him to your belief or you're going to leave him a mental wreck...
...I didn't say that at all...
...Behind are the people he has sold out, ahead those who would kill him—and only the interrogator can help him...
...Still their howls brought no response from the houses...
...As we walked slowly together toward the commanding officer's tent, he said I could draw my own conclusions from all this...
...That we are fighting China follows with the force of a categorical syllogism...
...Physical torture is precluded...
...The still uncontrolled black market is testimony to a large flow of U.S...
...We just can't process you right into our unit now...
...They briefed me and allowed me to see the work for myself...
...SAHLINS: This is better for him...
...The colonial comprador outlives colonialism...
...And you said you're doing the guy a service...
...They did not give the impression of evil...
...But first allow me to develop the context...
...maple syrup, 6-7 lbs...
...He wondered angrily why they did nothing while we fought "their war," fought to make them "free from Communism...
...x: Remember, this was an act of affirmation on his part, where he yields the information voluntarily...
...At one level, it is a concession to Vietnamese national feeling...
...The prisoner's successful resistance is the interrogators' greatest satisfaction: his strength proves their strength, his will their will, his conviction their conviction...
...For if their own righteousness is at test in the prisoner's response, then they need too to fail...
...And while you're giving him the penicillin, you're telling him that, "You know, there are these other types of people who just...
...The revolutionary "techniques" were copied in fine detail...
...x: Oh wait, this is [where] we begin . . . I've had some tremendous conversations with these guys, and we begin by agreeing to disagree...
...If the technique really is effective, and the Americans claim it is, I think it must be because of some rather special qualities of revolutionary warfare and warriors...
...Their program was anti-Communist revolution...
...MR...
...Outsiders must appear as only more or less damaging—or beneficial—to this condition...
...We had a guy in Phu Yen Province in the summer of '63 who was the Propaganda Director for the NLF in that province...
...MR...
...It has to be understood that a VC prisoner comes in with certain comprehensions and expectations that are deeply entwined with his revolutionary ("Communist") corn mitment...
...I admire a guy who will tortuously admit—if he really believes—that, "Oh Jesus, I never thought about that before...
...I wanted to know how they related, morally at least, to the Saigon cats growing fat on American aid whose interests rather contrast with the dying people...
...We cannot know who he is, or what he wants...
...I, myself, interviewed only one VC defector, an instructor of antiCommunist revolutionary cadres at Khanh An (Chau Doc Province...
...And there was also a ninth: an officer of junior rank who came up to the jeep around which we stood, listened to what we said, and asked then if he could have a word with me because there were a few things I ought to "get straight...
...Paranoids are after us...
...Underneath were seven bloodsoaked pictures of the My Canh restaurant bombing in Saigon of June 25...
...SAHLINS...
...Morally, they passed...
...x: Hell, not I don't make any distinction in morality at all: torture is torture, and when you fuck around with a guy's mind and his whole basic raison d'être, you're really hurting him—especially when he's prepared mentally, spiritually, for the physical torture...
...The body becomes immaterial, something merely that each attempts to possess and manipulate to defeat the other...
...The free floating resources are appropriated instead by local collaborators for construction of their own version of Vietnamese society...
...Thus we moved, armed black phantoms...
...mental torture...
...He worked before the war and through 1944 as a clerk for a French lawyer...
...Intellectually they refused to come to terms with it...
...It was enough exposure: Viet Nam was incubating in them...
...A few hundred cautious steps, then you stop at a signal from the man ahead, crouch down, look for something, go down on one knee...
...Americans in Viet Nam hold it as a basic expression of purpose that there we oppose Chinese Communist expansion...
...They say we are here to defend South Viet Nam against Communist aggression, which is a threat to ourselves, but for himself he does not believe it...
...x: They take a drink from their canteen and light up a cigarette...
...she asked, with plaintive ingratiation...
...And if it is, what are we going to do about it...
...A guerrilla movement depends decisively on secrecy...
...The two Americans allowed they had some experience with it, and some ideas of how it is properly done...
...It meant something Eritical to him, and he wanted me to be convinced by it...
...SAHLINS: From what you say about mental torture, you wouldn't make any distinction in the morality of either kind [i.e., physical vs...
...It has to be discussed in more primitive terms...
...It is often said of South Viet Nam that the day belongs to the Government, the night to the "Viet Cong...
...MR...
...And what was the benefit of years of American expenditure in Viet Nam...
...L., "'The Communists only served one class!'" "What class was that...
...x: Conversion from anything to anything involves a certain degree of self-torture...
...The Chinese in Korea invoked the North Koreans in the same way when dealing with American P.O.W.'s...
...We're concerning ourselves with Vietnamese sensibilities...
...And he added then: "If they want peace at any price, not be shot at, the freedom to raise a few crops...
...The goods had come down through USOM...
...He might have added that crossing Kennedy idealism with the facts of life produces a curious political hybrid: a hard-headed surrealist...
...x: No, not true...
...economically and ideologically they are counterposed to the people and the resources of the country...
...It is a classic mythical denouement...
...The team included four Vietnamese instructor-cadres, two of these ex-Viet Cong...
...I asked all these people at the end of the interview if they would like to question me...
...They want to involve themselves in the country...
...Nevertheless, as an anthropologist if not as a critic I had to accept the argument: one should go into the field...
...I'm an agnostic atheist...
...SAHLINS: What about the sensibilities of the Americans who are involved...
...The single most important and general condition of the American war in Viet Nam is its irrelevance...
...The trap has been closed...
...I spoke with several of the tribe, middle to senior officers mainly, in their air-conditioned sanctuaries at the Embassy, USOM, USIS...
...He might indulge himself in the hate of evil killers at the expense of indifference to human pain and death...
...But no judgment of these pictures should be made in the absence of memory...
...nor a revolution, nor an invasion from the North...
...We concern ourselves with what will work...
...x: I think I've got the right to try...
...Nor was this compensation for hardships caused to civilians...
...But the most obvious incongruity is that we are defending the "freedom" of South Viet Nam...
...It's like an AA cure...
...Advanced anti-communism trades places with the enemy...
...Probably they have had little conception of it for centuries, and that mainly in the form of a more or less alien landlord or tax collector, a monk, and the few goods from elsewhere they got at market...
...forces in Viet Nam...
...MR...
...and boy, we just worked ourselves literally ragged in four days trying to bring that guy to the point where he'd tell us a few things, and he was tremendous—just tremendous...
...Viet Nam is the Asian analogue of the missile crisis...
...I asked him which he would choose if it came to a question of American involvement or NLF control...
...Yet again, in a disorganized and probably unintentional parody of Chinese techniques, the prisoner learns his confession is still not good enough: he cannot unite with his captors...
...After all, we are fighting Chinese there...
...In the decisive sense it is an American War: it is Viet Nam's tragedy to have been chosen the battleground for America's stand against the forces of evil...
...Besides, one community virtually runs into the next...
...A massive amount of American money is poured into Viet Nam...
...CAPTAIN D: Sometimes it's successful, sometimes not— CAPTAIN Y: In most cases, it's not...
...Seven of the men did not at all question their purpose in Viet Nam...
...Most of the photographs, such as the one captioned "Evacuating Innocent Child," showed Americans coming to the aid of shocked and bleeding victims, many of them Vietnamese...
...And they can probably tell you, "Oh, Jesus, I'd try and stop that physical torture, because I know it's just wrong,"—you know...
...The commitment to Viet Nam is all out of proportion to the importance of Viet Nam...
...so the state is an historic medley of incongruent and opposed nations: the one urban, wealthy, sophisticated and latterly comprador, the other seeking to perpetuate against exaction "the idiocy of rural life...
...L. interviews VC defectors and refugees from VC areas for broadcast materials...
...it's happened probably in the Japanese Army, the Japanese Self-Defense and Home Defense Armies...
...To have been in Viet Nam does not make one an expert but perhaps something of a fool or a victim...
...x: No, it's not because of that...
...The estate, he said, is occupied by 60 tenant farmers...
...and if he doesn't want to join them he can just back out again...
...The end justifies the means...
...Then the hamlet chief proceeded to dole out the food heaps, calling each family by name and insisting the family representative— many were widows—come over and stand next to his or her food pile...
...in one house a transistor radio blaring Vietnamese music at a spellbound family—and all their neighbors hundreds of yards around...
...The Hoa Hao allegiance is probably more practical than principled and based fundamentally on "to thine own self be true...
...Is it because they need to convince themselves...
...But we will not get the information we need by physical torture...
...Even if "the threat of Chinese expansion" did not exist in Washington it would be necessary to invent it in Viet Nam...
...Because in essence that's what we're trying to show him...
...The most general sentiment was that if the Government could somehow be stabilized, the problem of "corruption" would somehow be solved...
...Information Service people, to whom I had offered the proposition that they try to convince me they were right...
...The late intensification of this war between Good and Evil seems to bring no decision between them so much as it throws into relief a submerged third term of incommensurate value: life...
...CAPTAIN Y: If you ask you'll get probably 80 per cent of the people [U.S...
...As a denial of any colonial status or intentions, it provides for Americans an acceptable meaning of their existence in the country...
...Last night the platoon had been ambushed just near here...
...For the first several hours of my visit, we had only sparred in a rather formal way...
...Well, he might tell you a couple of things, beginning with rather innocuous things...
...But it is not of this guerrilla program that I write...
...If the VC are elected in a free election, he said in response to my question, he must go along with it—"for God's sake, it's the only honorable thing to do...
...On the occasions I could observe it, I was interested in the reaction of the American who was thus suddenly confronted with damning information on which he would have to make some reckoning—like the American VOA employee confronted with censorship...
...Now a young officer came out of the building...
...To that moment silent, he spoke now unabashedly: "All the people and all the ground in Viet Nam are not worth a single American life...
...I responded with the obvious: "You mean to say that the war is being escalated because of the South Vietnamese desire to be relieved and make a fast buck, complemented by the mentality of the American military...
...Its members are visible daily to the enemy but must be unknown to him...
...If you believe in your program, this is what you do .. SAHLINS: Do you believe in breaking people down so they agree with your program...
...Actually, I am an anthropologist and an academic critic of the war...
...And even though the prisoner may (resist...
...Infiltrated South in 1963, he immediately defected...
...MR...
...Neither is a qualification, in the view of Administration supporters, to speak on Viet Nam: one ought to have been there...
...x: He's alive, and you can still help him .. . MR...
...MR...
...he was assisted by a Special Forces officer...
...It is not simply that much more goes to bad causes than to good...
...If we are whored by our commitment, if we must lose ourselves in Viet Nam, we lose the war—whatever the military outcome...
...The officer was a little surprised when I asked if he could spare any other issues...
...Mr...
...it made the most propaganda of a limited supply...
...The interrogation methods the Americans described are copied from those used most effectively by the Chinese, as they themselves explained...
...On August 5, 1965, it was an irrelevant purpose...
...Toward what...
...The Neolithic is here joined as a tributary to the Bronze and Colonial Age, yet preserves its charac ter...
...The "domino theory," moreover, becomes unsuppressible...
...At the Saigon airport I handed over the immigration form to the Vietnamese officer...
...The criticism does not go deep enough...
...The outrage at suffering is indifference to suffering...
...And as they struggle for supremacy over the inert body, only shaman and spirit can seem real to each other...
...The defense of freedom in a lately colonial country takes on elements of a class war...
...But for you, what you've just told us is the beginning of a positive affirmation...
...We just accelerated the process because we need that fucking information...
...The peasants go back and forth between the lines, unconcerned except to see that they don't get ravaged, or to sell a few things to either or both sides...
...x: Most Americans, unfortunately, don't bother to think deeply about the stuff they get involved in and they make superficial judgments: "Well, it's wrong to torture this guy physically because we're all part of the same (background...
...Something must be said as well of those who described it to me...
...And maybe it'll make the guy think, you know, and ten times later, after ten more people have faded out because he physically tortured them, maybe he'll say: "Okay, wise American adviser, what would you do...
...During the French-Indochina War he had deserted from the Viet Minh and gone over to the French Army, where he served as an interpreter...
...Yet, one or two resisted the infection...
...The refugees are supposed to say they have fled from VG terror to a happy life under the Government, he said...
...Mr...
...SAHLINS: You admire this guy...
...His prompt answer was the "bombing...
...On my request for elucidation the Vietnamese said "bombing and fighting," the fire from both sides...
...To be an adviser is to be involved yet free of the place, to indulge a sense of duty yet disdain responsibility...
...And what you're trying to do is—this is just a traditional, feudal Asian society...
...The houses stand side by side, strung out for hundreds of yards along a road or path paralleling the water course...
...In Viet Nam, however, the strategy does not present even so rational an appearance...
...He related some interesting cases: a VC regular who defected because he saw a comrade killed for reading a Government leaflet...
...L., a radio broadcaster for VOA for the past eight years, was born in Haiphong and came south after the peace of 1954 because he, "could not live with the Communists...
...Foreign warriors in the land may open a new, complicated calculus of alternatives...
...I don't doubt they were deserving—the man I talked to was a landless peasant, unrelated (he said) to the hamlet chief—it's just that they deserved better...
...One agrees to disagree as a matter of principle in a democratic system...
...Because you have just brought this individual to the lowest point in his life in terms of human meaning and existence...
...The forced destruction of people's beliefs is no longer properly described as something "they" do...
...Between the medicine man and the spirit of disease there is a close relation to begin with: a set of shared assumptions about the nature of illness, its infliction and its cure...
...I asked if that wasn't a rule he disobeyed.] MR...
...and the bell's tolling for that poor fucker under the knife, not me, That's real bad...
...Leasing land, he said, is distiaguishable from compensations...
...On the contrary, they presented the appearance of good...
...Every day I saw something or learned something that made the country appear irrelevant to what was happening to it...
...and put me in touch with others, civilian and military (though not with the gung-ho types I asked to see), and with the war (such as it was) in An Phu...
...The "advisory" capacity is a new chapter in the relations between the West and the underdeveloped world...
...Part of this money corrupts, breeding prostitutes and vendors of "feelthy pictures...
...the shaded front verandahs overlooking decorative tropical shrubs...
...it obviously needs attention...
...Besides, the strategy here is refracted through the ugly circumstances of Viet Nam, which reshape it into something of an obsession: stopping the Chinese threat is the kind of end that will sanction adoption of any means— even, as I shall tell, Chinese means...
...Everyone knows too that we are faced in Viet Nam with Communist subversion, which if not contained here will have to be faced again, closer to home...
...MR...
...The "advisory" capacity is taken very seriously by Americans within the country, especially by civilian officials, and it has internal functions much more meaningful than the international propaganda effect...
...They have been more subjects than participants in the cultural evolution of the archaic civilizations of Southeast Asia, of the state but not in it, a petty agricultural existence which civilization has rested upon but not incorporated...
...The confrontation with China has the character of an unquestionable premise of our involvement...
...SAnLINS: We come back to the question: whether you have the right —by these techniques, which are external to him—to deny him [the] belief that he came in with in his hand and only accept a set of alternatives which you propose...
...Mr...
...we are defending them...
...it's kind of an emotional interdependence that's created, and what you try and do is (use...
...military] will say, "Well, I didn't get involved in it...
...x: We don't know what our will is yet...
...Here are excerpts from the tape...
...it does not go too far to say they were disciples, or at least revisionist disciples, of Mao Tsetung, Ho Chi-minh and Che Guevara...
...We're cooperating with him in a sense...
...He had "so many times heard it said, 'let's drop the load on that village.' " He has not seen it yet, however, and thinks it probably never will happen because the brigade commander wouldn't have it...
...MR...
...Beyond that, it serves as a convenient institutional means of personal dissociation from the sufferings of Viet Nam, sufferings largely inflicted by the American presence—which is one's own presence...
...The counterpart on the political level is the total failure of American policy to support, or even to recognize, nationalism and its human aspirations...
...The thought that these people have been suffering war for 25 years must be repressed...
...There is no question of Mr...
...In that connection, he said, "a lot of officers if given the opportunity would bomb the shit out of all the villages around here...
...x: It's ineffective...
...or, he gives you the location of the camp that he just recently came from...
...So we destroy in advance the possibility of deciding if he is really our enemy...
...I asked these men what they thought of the statement of Lt...
...It becomes a war of transcendent purpose, and in such a war all efforts on the side of Good are virtuous, and all deaths unfortunate necessity...
...But everybody's got the right to promote and proselytize what they believe...
...x: That's just about the height of immorality, I think...
...In the space next to "Purpose of your visit" I had written "tourist...
...this emotional interdependence in such a way that he comes to the point where he must tell you what he knows...
...and it's not fair to leave him at the point where he's just made the beginning...
...The two Americans were leaders of a "motivation" team working among Vietnamese Popular Forces...
...It was Mother Courage...
...These are now part of our own arsenal, weapons of our own struggle...
...They accepted—"only in America...
...I stood one morning outside the Psychological Warfare office at III Corps Headquarters, Bien Hoa...
...To speak of the Government disguises the issue of the class of "brave and determined people" we are involved with, of who are our natural allies, who our enemies...
...The missile crisis is understood to have spiked Russia's guns for the forseeable future...
...This again reintroduces the whole issue of the big ugly outside world...
...Washington officials have said that VC terror is the simple explanation...
...2. He has heard on good authority—"though it is not confirmed and must be"—that on occasion Arvin units fire upon U.S...
...But you cannot be a catalyst unless you know the entire fabric of the thing...
...x: At this time [the prisoner] kind of feels an emotional dependence upon you because for two days you've been protecting him from the big outside ugly world that he doesn't understand: feeding him good chow, talking with him, calling him a (can-bo...
...And "Mr...
...And breaking them down justifies the end...
...They hold bicycle races in the village while he is on a field problem...
...The black marketeers and other profiteers will be punished...
...China" is indispensable to the existence of Americans in Viet Nam...
...we expect cooperation from him...
...And at the end he lies the ultimate lie of Americans in Viet Nam...
...impose what you believe— MR...
...I asked the question, how do you justify the effect upon yourself of acting in this way...
...If we were less militant, they would lose their jobs and have to return to civilian life, where they are not fit for anything...
...because you don't know what we stand for and what we're fighting for, but we hope that some day you will be joining us...
...The absurdity of the statement is not fully manifest by the existing Government...
...Some spoke of Viet Cong crimes, as if to justify our own or our South Vietnamese agents...
...The indoctrination team moves from outpost to outpost, living in with the troops while "motivating" them...
...Of course, there are precedents—for example, the Inquisition...
...Met on a college campus or in a business office, they would not attract unusual attention...
...x: Actually again, this is the technique that Captain [Y] . . . and myself have been trying to promote in an advisory relationship...
...It is not a question of what Government, but what ruling class, what power we are supporting— and creating—against "Communist aggression...
...I had come up against standard American innocence of society: "who is the matter"—as if it were just personalities and not a political structure of economic interest...
...The Neolithic (transistorized) was the human occupation...
...Clearly I was an alien: a civilian and an academic dissenter...
...the person who's torturing...
...The "Chinese Threat" obscures in advance the nature of the enemy...
...Torturously exacted confession and conversion are no longer things we fight against...
...How shall we face the innocent victims of our weapons...
...During the French Indochina War he worked for local newspapers and a French periodical...
...I have heard it foreshadowed in the talk of Saigon officialdom: discipline, a senior American civilian officier told me, is what the South Vietnamese Government needs...
...In 1945 he was employed by Mitsui (Japanese...
...If we get a guy, we've got him for two to five days, and then he's out of our hands...
...who had refused assignment to a Special Forces outpost and expressed the sentiment that the war "wasn't worth a single American life...
...When they capture them, when they capture the Vietnamese Communists, I just turn my back and go and have a cigarette...
...They profess with sincerity their respect for the people—so much that they actively wish them a better fate...
...a VC captain, "an intellectual," who defected because, as he told Mr...
...The treatment seems a compressed and abbreviated version of the procedures used on American P.O.W.'s during the Korean War...
...So at that point, that's when you've got to stress that, "Well now we're releasing you for further processing...
Vol. 13 • January 1966 • No. 1
