Among the handful of Americans present was big, clunky Major Lucien Conein – ‘Black Luigi’, ‘Lou-Lou’ or ‘Three-Finger Lou’ – an American born in France who had returned to his birthplace in 1939 to share the French defeat, then served with the OSS in Europe and southern China. As leader of Col. Edward Lansdale’s US military advisory group in North Vietnam, he was now charged with organising stay-behind teams. Conein was a caricature of a semi-secret warrior – hard-drinking, tough, outspoken, often outrageous: he once expressed his exasperation with a stalled automobile engine by emptying a .45 pistol into it. Now, in the midst of the throng of Vietminh shuffling by, he suddenly punched the air and shouted in Vietnamese, ‘Long live Ho Chi Minh!’ This won him a cheer from surrounding communists, who failed to perceive that he was mocking them – as he would continue to do through the years that followed.
Before the end came for the French, Norman Lewis mused uncertainly about ‘whether it had all been worth it – the brief shotgun marriage with the West, now to be so relentlessly broken off. Had there been, after all, some mysterious historical necessity for all the bloodshed, the years of scorn, the servitude, the contempt? Would the free Nations of Indo-China, in their coming renascence, have gained in the long run from the enforced rupture with the old, unchanging way of life, now to be replaced, one presumed, by a materialist philosophy and the all-eclipsing ideal of the raised standard of living?’
An elderly peasant who lived beside Route 1 said: ‘The happiest day in my whole life was when I saw two truckloads of French soldiers leaving Hue for the last time. They drove by my house, and looked so sad.’ France left behind the graves of ninety-three thousand of its soldiers, who had died since 1945 in the futile struggle to cling to Indochina. Those men had no Kipling to weave for them shrouds of romance. A decade later in Saigon, however, a legend was spun that the fallen of Groupe Mobile 100 had been buried beside Route 19 in the Central Highlands where they perished, standing upright in the stiffness of death, facing towards France.
5
1 ‘A REGIME OF TERROR’
Northern and southern Vietnam have always been as different as are their regional counterparts in Britain, the US, Italy and many other nations, even employing slightly different obscenities: the common expletive ‘fuck mother’ translates as du me in Saigon, dit me in Hanoi. In the years that followed the Geneva Accords, both fell into the hands of oppressive authoritarian regimes. That of Ho Chi Minh, however, profited from some notable political advantages. While the North was devastated by the war, subjected to a destitution rapidly worsened by communist economic policies, it became far more efficiently disciplined. Ho had spent less of his own life in Vietnam than had Ngo Dinh Diem. As victor in the independence struggle, however, he commanded immense prestige, and deployed his charisma and charm to formidable effect on the international stage. Moreover, by exercising iron control over information and access, North Vietnam veiled from foreign eyes its uprisings, purges and killings. In the South, by contrast, the follies and cruelties of the Diem regime took place in plain view: many peasants found Vietnamese landlordism no more acceptable than the French variety, and learned nothing of the worse plight of their Northern brethren. Only much later would Southerners come to look back on ‘the six years’ – the period between 1954 and 1960 – as a lost idyll, because relatively few of their countrymen killed each other.
Following the 25 July 1954 ceasefire, a vast exodus from the North took place, as a million people who feared the new rulers – businessmen, servants of the French, landlords, anti-communists and above all Catholics – fled the country by land, sea and air. It was a time of turmoil, sunderings, fears and farewells. Vietminh cadres stopped buses carrying fugitives to the port of Haiphong down Route 1, urging and sometimes compelling passengers to remain. Nguyen Duong’s modestly prosperous family, small businesspeople, suffered a disaster: in the throng at an airfield outside Hanoi, his mother briefly set down the bag containing all their portable wealth in jewellery and gold. Within seconds it vanished, never to be seen again: they started a new life in Saigon almost penniless.
Even as the Northern government-in-waiting issued a Dienbienphu commemoration mug, pathetic scenes took place in Hanoi as its more prosperous citizens stacked possessions in the streets outside their homes, for disposal at firesale prices. Some families split. Nguyen Thi Chinh’s father Cuu, head of a once-rich landlord family, told the sixteen-year-old girl and her nineteen-year-old brother Lan that they would go south – one daughter had already left, after marrying a French doctor. The night before they flew, he gave each teenager a belt containing a little money, some food and essentials. Very early next morning, however, Chinh was shaken awake by Lan, who whispered to her, ‘Come outside.’ On the road they found a friend of her brother’s holding two bicycles. Her brother said, ‘We’re going to join the revolution. Father would understand, but he wouldn’t give permission.’ Chinh was appalled. She pleaded, begged, screamed, dragged at the bikes’ handlebars, all in vain. Lan and his friend pedalled away.
Distraught, she wakened her father. He decided that she must leave as planned, while he stayed behind to search for Lan. A few hours later she found herself among a pushing, shouting, desperate mob at the airport, boarding a cargo plane. Her father at their parting gave her a gold bracelet. On arrival in Saigon she was consigned to a refugee camp, where through the weeks that followed she sobbed relentlessly. At last she encountered a kindly family friend who said, ‘Come and stay with us’; two years later she married his son. She would hear no more of her brother for almost forty years.
Tran Hoi, serving as an apprentice with the French Air Force, had no hesitation about moving to Saigon with his squadron. His mother, however, determined that she must stay behind to sell their house and the family bus company. Hoi flew south aboard a C-47: ‘I cried all the way – Vietnamese never abandon their relations.’ He would have sobbed louder had he known that he would have no further contact with his kin until 1998. He embarked on a life in the South that was always tinged with sorrow, because on holidays and feast days he could never again make the pilgrimage to a family home.
By bus, train, car and on foot, families trekked to Haiphong to board ships, mostly provided by the Americans. It was later claimed that US agents staged a propaganda campaign to frighten Northerners into flight. That there was propaganda is beyond dispute, including atrocity stories fabricated by the American conservative ‘hero’ Dr Tom Dooley, author of a mendacious best-selling memoir Deliver Us From Evil. Equally well-attested, however, are the tragedies that befell many of those who remained, accepting the false assurances of Ho Chi Minh that they had nothing to fear.
Landlord’s son Nguyen Hai Dinh was eighteen when his only sister joined the flight southward. He himself remained. ‘Why? Because I was very stupid … We had thought the French were colonial oppressors until the communists took over, then we started to think of the French as our friends.’ All those possessed of property or education became marked for exclusion, even death, under the new order. Dinh found that his class background made him ineligible to attend university, or to occupy any responsible job. His new ideology teacher said: ‘In the past this country was feudal: now it belongs to the peasants and workers. You have no country.’ His father was stripped of citizenship rights for five years as an ‘anti-social element’, and obliged to scratch a living as a cook for Party cadres. Dinh came to hate everything about his own society, above all the impossibility