Vietnam. Max Hastings
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which much of life and labour was shared: at new year people worked together to make rice cakes that were cooked overnight, then threaded on fine strands of bamboo. They gathered to wish parents long life, health and wealth: the Vietnamese, like most Asians, believed that each year conferred upon the old an additional accession of wisdom. After a pig had been slaughtered, children might beg its bladder as a plaything. They played hide-and-seek, shot ‘jute guns’ made from bamboo pipes – like Western pea-shooters – or competed at another game, ‘hitting stick’. At festivals they might taste jam, sweets, peanuts, birds’ eggs and squashes coated in sugar. For the most part, however, they knew only rice and vegetables – and were thankful to get them.
Some Vietnamese later idealised the simplicity of peasant life before war descended. One said: ‘Everybody knew each other and never closed doors.’ She waxed lyrical about ‘the beauty of togetherness’, shared tasks and pleasures. Yet such nostalgia was rare among the vastly greater number who recalled only hardship, persecution and near-starvation. Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh was born east of Hanoi in 1948, daughter of a poor peasant who cultivated four hundred square yards of rice. Her parents and their six children occupied a thatched hut in a hamlet of some thirty families, none of which owned a radio set or bicycle. Few inhabitants could read: when an occasional newspaper reached them, people gathered under a tree, while a literate villager with a good voice perched on a branch to read aloud to them interesting items.
Such people grew up without photographs of parents or children, because none owned a camera. Pyjamas, ba ba dress, brown in the north and black in the south, was the clothing of peasants which only incidentally became the uniform of guerrillas. Infant mortality rates were appalling, partly because it was customary to sever umbilical cords with fragments of broken glass. Villages frequently had to be abandoned because of flood or famine. Binh had no memories of childhood happinesses: life was merely an unremitting struggle for existence, in which children gathered snails to supplement the family diet. At twenty she became a lifelong member of the Communist Party, regarding Ho Chi Minh with quasi-religious fervour as ‘the indispensable, incomparable leader’.
Although Ho’s armed supporters in the south-west never matched the spectacular military successes achieved by Giap’s formations in the north, his movement won widespread support on the single issue of land redistribution. Even prosperous tenant-farmers craved ownership: many were hopelessly in thrall to creditors who appropriated up to half their production. Debtors could become body-slaves, enlisted to rock a landlord’s hammock. They eagerly supported the secret land-redistribution plan of the Vietminh, one of whose cadres told Norman Lewis in 1950: ‘Our enemies are slowly converting us to communism. If it is only by becoming communists that we shall achieve our liberty, then we shall become communists.’
A historian has described Giap’s soldiers as ‘simple men whose world view was formed entirely by their own and their families’ immediate experience … coloured by oppression and hardship over generations’. The foremost strengths of Vietminh fighters were discipline, patience, ingenuity; a genius for fieldcraft and especially camouflage; tolerance of hardship and sacrifice. Above all there was motivation: they yearned to share the fruits of a political, economic and social revolution. Itinerant communist cadres launched political-education programmes and composed folk songs to help villagers learn their alphabets. There was a ‘learn through play’ programme for children. Virtuous as that may sound, it was reinforced by compulsion: cadres caused villagers to display banners decorated with flowers, proclaiming ‘Long live the fighters against illiteracy’. In some places non-readers were wantonly humiliated, forced to crawl through mud to go to market. As ever when communist doctrine was imposed, victims were reminded that this was cruelty with a purpose, for the ultimate good of The People.
As for more drastic penalties, even an official Party history admitted later that ‘not a few innocent people were killed’. Simple country folk serving the Vietminh assumed that any man who affected blue trousers and a white shirt with a tailor’s label must be a French spy. Whereas the Mafia employed the euphemism of sending an enemy to ‘sleep with the fishes’, in the equally watery words of Vietnam’s communists he was dispatched ‘to search for shrimps’. Killings were conducted with maximum brutality and publicity: Vietminh death squads favoured burying victims alive or eviscerating them in front of assembled neighbours. ‘Better that a possible innocent dies than that a guilty man escapes,’ ran a Party catchphrase. In the ‘liberated zones’ the Vietminh established notorious punishment camps. When Nguyen Cong Luan’s father died in one of them, a cigarette lighter was the only possession his jailers grudgingly returned to the widow.
In 1947 the Vietminh conducted an ideological ‘cleansing’ campaign, in which a large though never quantified number of ‘class enemies’ were murdered. Any landlord or government office-holder lived under threat of a death sentence which extended to his family. The Catholic religion bore the taint of foreign ownership, and thus its adherents were vulnerable. Local denunciation sessions – dau to – held in the courtyard of a pagoda or landlord’s house, inspired the dread their organisers intended. Farmers or peasants, often impelled by grudges, rehearsed landlords’ alleged crimes before people’s courts run by Vietminh cadres. If death sentences were pronounced, a victim might there and then be shot, stoned to death, hanged, or face a crueller death. At My Thanh in the Mekong delta a Cao Dai functionary, about to be buried alive, pleaded for a merciful bullet. His killers observed contemptuously that ammunition was being conserved for ‘the pirates’ – the French.
As a peasant child, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh remembered landowners hiding from their accusers by immersing themselves in the nearby pond and covering their heads with reeds, while others adopted crude disguises. Some failed, and she stood among her fellow-villagers watching their trials. Even as a loyal Party cadre, she later admitted that ‘a lot of those people were wrongly accused’. In the north a ‘people’s court’ was often staged as a theatrical event, held at night in an area the size of a football pitch, ringed by bamboo torches. A presidium of seven judges, poor peasants, was attended by a Land Reform cadre and sometimes also Chinese advisers. Behind the stage hung portraits of Ho, Mao and Stalin, together with painted slogans such as ‘Down with the Treacherous Reactionary Landlords’.
As for summary executions, one peasant retained an indelible childhood memory of the Vietminh visiting his northern village in 1952, seizing two unarmed soldiers in French service who had called to wish friends a happy new year, and beheading them behind his family’s house. This twelve-year-old said later: ‘I can still hear the sound of their necks being cut through.’ Then the guerrillas left, and French troops arrived. They accused neighbours of responsibility for the men’s death – and burnt every surrounding house. In 1953 the Vietminh sentenced the child to spend two weeks in re-education camp, conducting self-criticism: ‘Everything that I did wrong, or my parents or grandparents did wrong, had to be written down. Everybody had to think hard what to write.’ When Stalin died, all prisoners were obliged to assume black mourning bands. Soon after, a French offensive forced the guerrillas to flee, liberating the boy. He and his family briefly returned to their house, then fled to Hanoi.
The struggle’s seesaw fortunes imposed continual strain. A poor peasant in the Mekong delta expressed his delight during a period of Vietminh reverses, when their economic blockade was lifted and he was for a time free to sell his produce: ‘The people were very happy … I myself said many times, “I hope that just one side will control us – no matter which one. Living under the control of both is too much.”’ Anh, a daughter of landowning parents, joined the Vietminh because she sought the expulsion of the French, married a fellow-fighter, gave birth to a son, and shared the hardships of life as a guerrilla in the Mekong delta. In 1952, however, she quit: ‘I saw too many frightening things. The communists were grabbing all the power and killing off the nationalists.’ She attributed her own survival merely to the fact that she was too young to pose a threat.
In the ‘liberated zones’ of the north, rather as some British people in old age became nostalgic for the legendary ‘blitz spirit’ of 1940, Vietminh later looked back on wartime as a halcyon era. Guitarist Van Ky, who became a guerrilla strolling minstrel, enthused, ‘The spirit was marvellous! We imagined that we were all part of one big family.’ Volunteer canteens were formed, known as ‘soldiers’ mothers’