Violent Politics by William R. Polk

Author:William R. Polk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER 9

THE VIETNAMESE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE FRENCH

NO COUNTRY HAS EVER BEEN MORE STUDIED THAN VIETNAM. IT HAS been the subject of countless investigations, reports, and analyses, as well as hundreds of books and articles. However, the sheer volume of information has tended to overwhelm the meaning of what was being discovered. As I have mentioned in the introduction, when I was a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, I found that, despite the mass of material crossing my desk on Vietnam, no coherent analysis of the nature of its struggle in guerrilla warfare emerged. Nor did any consistent treatment of Vietnamese history. What American officials were trying to appreciate was not a country with a people who lived in a cultural tradition and had widely shared aims but a disembodied conflict between opposing military forces. At least in retrospect, it is clear that they were missing the “forest” by concentrating on the “trees.” Here, of course, I cannot give a detailed history, but I will try to bring out what is essential to understand the nature of the guerrilla war that began against the French and carried on against the Americans. I begin with the land and its inhabitants.

As it exists today, Vietnam is a long sliver of territory, stretching roughly 1,000 miles south from the Chinese frontier to the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. It varies in width from 300 miles near the Chinese frontier to less than 50 miles in the waist and fans out again in the south to about 180 miles. More important than the length is that the coast is broken by coves and inlets that give the country roughly 1,500 miles of seafront, so the Vietnamese have always been a maritime people. During the French occupation the majority of the people lived within a day’s walk from the sea. Inland, the country is watered by two great rivers, the Red (Sông Hong), flowing south from China through Hanoi to the Gulf of Tonkin, and the Mekong, forming the border between Laos and Thailand and cutting through Cambodia to exit Vietnam in a delta west of Saigon. Between these river systems and the coast are mountain ranges, jungle, highlands, and low-lying rice fields astonishing in their variety for an area roughly the size of New Mexico.

Just as the land varies, so do its peoples. The Vietnamese describe their internal divisions in terms of climate and history: they joke that southerners, around Saigon, are lazy and slow-witted; those in the central area around Hué are hidebound and traditional; and northerners, around Hanoi, are aggressive and sharp-witted. As Douglas Pike found, “The Vietnamese are as conscious of region as an Indian is of caste…” In part, the sense of regionalism probably results from the way the Viet people arrived in their land. The earliest records placed them in southeastern China. From there, by fits and starts, they moved south, overwhelming the Champa kingdom, then centered in the area around the modern city

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