Dusklands Read online

  My third picture is a still from a film of the tiger cages on Hon Tre Island (I have screened the entire Vietnam repertoire at Kennedy). Watching this film I applaud myself for having kept away from the physical Vietnam: the insolence of the people, the filth and flies and no doubt stench, the eyes of prisoners, whom I would no doubt have had to face, watching the camera with naive curiosity, too unconscious to see it as ruler of their destiny—these things belong to an irredeemable Vietnam in the world which only embarrasses and alienates me. But when in this film the camera passes through the gate of the walled prison courtyard and I see the rows of concrete pits with their mesh grates, it bursts upon me anew that the world still takes the trouble to expose itself to me in images, and I shake with fresh excitement.

  An officer, the camp commander, walks into the field. With a cane he prods into the first cage. We come closer and peer in. “Bad man”, he says in English, and the microphone picks it up, “Communist”.

  The man in the cage turns languid eyes on us.

  The commander jabs the man lightly with his cane. He shakes his head and smiles. “Bad man”, he says in this eccentric film, a 1965 production of the Ministry of National Information.

  I have a 12” X 12” blowup of the prisoner. He has raised himself on one elbow, lifting his face toward the blurred grid of the wire. Dazzled by the sky, he sees as yet only the looming outlines of his spectators. His face is thin. From one eye glints a point of light; the other is in the dark of the cage.

  I have also a second print, of the face alone in greater magnification. The glint in the right eye has become a diffuse white patch; shades of dark gray mark the temple, the right eyebrow, the hollow of the cheek.

  I close my eyes and pass my fingertips over the cool, odorless surface of the print. Evenings are quiet here in the suburbs. I concentrate myself. Everywhere its surface is the same. The glint in the eye, which in a moment luckily never to arrive will through the camera look into my eyes, is bland and opaque under my fingers, yielding no passage into the interior of this obscure but indubitable man. I keep exploring. Under the persistent pressure of my imagination, acute and morbid in the night, it may yet yield.

  The brothers of men who stood out against proven tortures and died holding their silence are now broken down with drugs and a little clever confusion. They talk freely, holding their interrogators’ hands and opening their hearts like children. After they have talked they go to hospital, and then to rehabilitation. They are easily picked out in the camps. They are the ones who hide in corners or walk up and down the fences all day pattering to themselves. Their eyes are closed to the world by a wall of what may be tears. They are ghosts or absences of themselves: where they had once been is now only a black hole through which they have been sucked. They wash themselves and feel dirty. Something is floating up from their bowels and voiding itself endlessly in the gray space in their head. Their memory is numb. They know only that there was a rupture, in time, in space, I use my words, that they are here, now, in the after, that from somewhere they are being waved to.

  These poisoned bodies, mad floating people of the camps, who had been—let me say it—the finest of their generation, courageous, fraternal—it is they who are the occasion of all my woe! Why could they not accept us? We could have loved them: our hatred for them grew only out of broken hopes. We brought them our pitiable selves, trembling on the edge of inexistence, and asked only that they acknowledge us. We brought with us weapons, the gun and its metaphors, the only copulas we knew of between ourselves and our objects. From this tragic ignorance we sought deliverance. Our nightmare was that since whatever we reached for slipped like smoke through our fingers, we did not exist; that since whatever we embraced wilted, we were all that existed. We landed on the shores of Vietnam clutching our arms and pleading for someone to stand up without flinching to these probes of reality: if you will prove yourself, we shouted, you will prove us too, and we will love you endlessly and shower you with gifts.

  But like everything else they withered before us. We bathed them in seas of fire, praying for the miracle. In the heart of the flame their bodies glowed with heavenly light; in our ears their voices rang; but when the fire died they were only ash. We lined them up in ditches. If they had walked toward us singing through the bullets we would have knelt and worshipped; but the bullets knocked them over and they died as we had feared. We cut their flesh open, we reached into their dying bodies, tearing out their livers, hoping to be washed in their blood; but they screamed and gushed like our most negligible phantoms. We forced ourselves deeper than we had ever gone before into their women; but when we came back we were still alone, and the women like stones.

  From tears we grew exasperated. Having proved to our sad selves that these were not the dark-eyed gods who walk our dreams, we wished only that they would retire and leave us in peace. They would not. For a while we were prepared to pity them, though we pitied more our tragic reach for transcendence. Then we ran out of pity.

  Two

  With the completion of this Introduction I close my contribution to Coetzee’s project New Life for Vietnam.

  Introduction

  1.1 Aims of the report. This report concerns the potential of broadcast programming in Phases IV–VI of the conflict in Indo-China. It evaluates the achievements of this branch of psychological warfare during Phases I–III (1961–65, 1965–69, 1969–72) and recommends certain changes in the future form and content of propaganda. Its recommendations apply both to broadcasting services operated directly by U.S. agencies (including services in Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, Muong, and other vernaculars but excluding V.O.A. Pacific services) and to those operated by the Republic of Vietnam with U.S. technical advice (principally Radio Free Vietnam and V.A.F., the Armed Forces radio).

  The strategy of the psychological war must be determined by overall war strategy. This report is being drawn up in early 1973 as we enter upon Phase IV of the war, a phase during which the propaganda arm will play a complex and crucially important role. It is projected that, depending upon domestic political factors, Phase IV will last until either mid-1974 or early 1977. Thereafter there will be a sharp remilitarization of the conflict (Phase V), followed by a police/civilian reconstruction effort (Phase VI). This scenario is broad. I have accordingly had no qualms about projecting my recommendations beyond the end of Phase IV into the final phases of the conflict.

  1.2 Aims and achievements of propaganda services. In waging psychological warfare we aim to destroy the morale of the enemy. Psychological warfare is the negative function of propaganda: its positive function is to create confidence that our political authority is strong and durable. Waged effectively, propaganda war wears down the enemy by shrinking his civilian base and recruitment pool and rendering his soldiers uncertain in battle and likely to defect afterwards, while at the same time fortifying the loyalty of the population. Its military/political potential cannot therefore be overstressed.

  However, the record of the propaganda services in Vietnam, U.S. and U.S.-aided, remains disappointing. This is the common conclusion of the Joint Commission of Inquiry, 1971; of the internal studies made available to the Kennedy Institute; and of my own analysis of interviews with contended civilians, defectors, and prisoners. It is confirmed by content analysis of programs broadcast between 1965 and 1972. Our gross inference must be that the effective psychological pressure we bring to bear on the guerrillas and their supporters is within their limits of tolerance; a further inference may be that some of our programming is counterproductive. The correct starting-point for our investigation should therefore be this: is there a factor in the psychic and psychosocial constitution of the insurgent population that makes it resistant to penetration by our programs? Having answered this question we can go on to ask: how can we make our programs more penetrant?

  1.3 Control. Our propaganda services have yet to apply the first article of the anthropology of Franz Boas: that if w
e wish to take over the direction of a society we must either guide it from within its cultural framework or else eradicate its culture and impose new structures. We cannot expect to guide the thinking of rural Vietnam until we recognize that rural Vietnam is non-literate, that its family structure is patrilineal, its social order hierarchical, and its political order authoritarian though locally autonomous. (This last fact explains why in settled times the ARVN command structure degenerates into local satrapies.) It is a mistake to think of the Vietnamese as individuals, for their culture prepares them to subordinate individual interest to the interest of family or band or hamlet. The rational promptings of self-interest matter less than the counsel of father and brothers.

  1.31 Western theory and Vietnamese practice. But the voice which our broadcasting projects into Vietnamese homes is the voice of neither father nor brother. It is the voice of the doubting self, the voice of René Descartes driving his wedge between the self in the world and the self who contemplates that self. The voices of our Chieu Hoi (surrender/reconciliation) programming are wholly Cartesian. Their record is not a happy one. Whether disguised as the voice of the doubting secret self (“Why should I fight when the struggle is hopeless?”) or as that of the clever brother (“I have gone over to Saigon—so can you!”), they have failed because they speak out of an alienated doppelgänger rationality for which there is no precedent in Vietnamese thought. We attempt to embody the ghost inside the villager, but there has never been any ghost there.

  The propaganda of Radio Free Vietnam, crude though it may seem with its martial music, boasts and slogans, exhortations and anathema, is closer to the pulse of Vietnam than our subtler programming of division. It offers strong authority and a simple choice. Our own statistics show that everywhere except in Saigon itself Radio Free Vietnam is the most favored listening. The Saigonese prefer U.S. Armed Forces Radio for its pop music. Our figures for Liberation Radio (NLF) indicate a small listenership but are probably unreliable. Figures for the U.S.-run services are more accurate and indicate low interest everywhere except in the cities. The provincial population listens with respect to the ferocious war-heroes, humble defectors, and brass-band disk-jockeys of Radio Free Vietnam. There is an early-evening commentary program run by Nguyen Loc Binh, a colonel in the National Police, which draws an enormous audience. Westerners are distressed by Nguyen’s crudity, but the Vietnamese like him because with rough humor, cajolements, threats, and a certain slyness of insight he has worked up a typically Vietnamese elder-brother relationship with his audience, particularly with women.

  1.4 The father-voice. The voice of the father utters itself appropriately out of the sky. The Vietnamese call it “the whispering death” when it speaks from the B-52’s, but there is no reason why it should not ride the radio waves with equal devastation. The father is authority, infallibility, ubiquity. He does not persuade, he commands. That which he foretells happens. When the guilty Saigonese in the dead of night tunes to Liberation Radio, the awful voice that breaks in on the LR frequency should be the father’s.

  The father-voice is not a new source in propaganda. The tendency in totalitarian states is, however, to identify the father-voice with the voice of the Leader, the father of the country. In times of war this father exhorts his children to patriotic sacrifice, in times of peace to greater production. The Republic of Vietnam is no exception. But the practise has two drawbacks. The first is that the omnipotence of the Father is tainted by the fallibility of the Leader. The second is that there exist penalties that the prudent statesman dare not threaten, punishments that he dare not celebrate, which nevertheless belong to the omnipotent Father.

  It is in view of such considerations that I suggest a division of responsibilities, with the Vietnamese operating the brother-voices and we ourselves taking over the design and operation of father-voice.

  [I omit three dull pages on details of interface between intelligence and information services; on the problem of security among the South Vietnamese; and on the longed-for assumption of responsibility by them.]

  1.41 Programming the father-voice. In limited warfare, defeat is not a military but a psychic concept. To the ideal of demoralization we pay lip service, and insofar as we wage terroristic war we strive to realize it. But in practise our most effective acts of demoralization are justified in military terms, as though the use of force for psychological ends were shameful. Thus, for example, we have justified the elimination of enemy villages by calling them armed strongholds, when the true value of the operations lay in demonstrating to the absent VC menfolk just how vulnerable their homes and families were.

  Atrocity charges are empty when they cannot be proved. 95% of the villages we wiped off the map were never on it.

  There is an unsettling lack of realism about terrorism among the higher ranks of the military. Questions of conscience lie outside the purview of this study. We must work on the assumption that the military believe in their own explanations when they assign a solely military value to terror operations.

  1.411 Testimony of CT. There is greater realism among men in the field. During 1968 and 1969 the Special Forces undertook a program in political assassination (CT) in the Delta Region. Under CT a significant proportion of the NLF cadres were eliminated and the rest forced into hiding. The official report defines the program as a police action rather than a military one, in that it identified specified victims and eliminated them by such subject-specific means as ambush and sniping. The official explanation for the success of the program is that the NLF lost face because the populace were made to see that NLF operatives had no defense against their own weapon of assassination.

  The men who carried out the killings have a different explanation. They knew that the intelligence identifying NLF cadres was untrustworthy. Informers often acted out of personal envy and hatred, or simply out of greed for reward. There is every reason to suspect that many of those killed were innocent, though innocence among the Vietnamese is a relative affair. Not only this. I quote one member of an assassination squad: “At a hundred yards who can tell one slope from another? You can only blow his head off and hope”. Nor only this. We must expect that when they knew they had been marked down, the more important cadres would have slipped away. So we must regard the official count of 1250 as grossly inflated with non-significant dead.

  Yet CT was a measurable success. In concert with the more orthodox activities of the National Police it brought about a 75% drop in terror and sabotage incidents. Investigators using advanced non-verbal techniques—in Vietnam all verbal responses are untrustworthy—recorded a progressive muting of such positive reactions as rage, contempt, and defiance in subjects from villages where before 1968 the NLF had held sway. After phases of insecurity and anxiety their subjects settled into a state known as High Threshold, with affect traits of apathy, despondency, and despair.

  Once again those who knew the flavor of the moment tell the story best. I quote: “We scared the shit out of them. They didn’t know who was next”.

  Yet fear was no novelty to these Vietnamese. Fear had bound the community together. The novelty of CT was that it broke down the community not by attacking the whole but by facing each member with the prospect of an attack on him as an individual with a name and a history. To his question, Why me? there was no comforting answer. I am chosen because I am the object of an inscrutable choice. I am chosen because I am marked. With this non sequitur the subject’s psyche is penetrated. The emotional support of the group falls into irrelevance as he sees that war is being waged on him in his isolation. He has become a victim and begins to behave like one. He is the quarry of an infallible hunter, infallible since whenever he attacks someone dies. Hence the victim’s preoccupation with taint: I move among those marked for death and those unmarked—which am I? The community breaks down into a scurrying swarm whose antennae vibrate only to the coming of death. The nest hums with suspicion (Is this a corpse I am talking to?). Then, as pressur
e is maintained, the coherence of the psyche cracks (I am tainted, I smell in my own nostrils).

  (My explication of the dynamics of this de-politicizing process is strikingly confirmed by the studies of Thomas Szell in the de-politicizing of internment camps. Szell reports that a camp authority which randomly and at random times selects subjects for punishment, while maintaining the appearance of selectivity, is consistently successful in breaking down group morale.)

  What is the lesson of CT? CT teaches that when the cohesiveness of the group is weakened the threshold of breakdown in each of its members drops. Conversely, it teaches that to attack the group as a group without fragmenting it does not reduce the psychic capacity of its members to resist. Many of our Vietnam programs, including perhaps strategic bombing, show poor results from neglect of this principle. There is only one rule in Vietnam: fragment, individualize. Our mistake was to allow the Vietnamese to conceive themselves as an entire people huddled under the bombs of a foreign oppressor. Thereby we created for ourselves the task of breaking the resistance of a whole people—a dangerous, expensive, and unnecessary task. If we had rather compelled the village, the guerrilla band, the individual subject to conceive himself the village, the band, the subject elected for especial punishment, for reasons never to be known, then while his first gesture might have been to strike back in anger, the worm of guilt would inevitably, as punishment continued, have sprouted in his bowels and drawn from him the cry, “I am punished therefore I am guilty”. He who utters these words is vanquished.