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Chapter 2 Massacres in the Year of the Monkey, 1968 28 “Pump out the water and catch the fish” was one of the informal instructions to some foreign combat troops deployed to Vietnam. The instruction was a clever, cynical distortion of a slogan used for the Vietnamese resistance wars: “People are the water, and our army the fish.”1 Truong Chinh, one of the founders of the Indochinese Communist Party and the party’s radical theoretician, employed the fishpond metaphor to explain the meaning of the “people’s war” to the masses in a language that was graphically familiar to them.2 The paradigm of the people’s war was a marriage between two conventional doctrines of warfare : the doctrine of “just war” and the idea of “total war.”3 It was based on a radically relativist view of warfare that envisaged two substantively different kinds of war on the same battlefield—the “revolutionary, popular and just” war versus the “counter-revolutionary, anti-popular and unjust” war.4 The people’s wars are justified, Truong Chinh argued, for they are “wars against oppressors and conquerors to safeguard the freedom and independence of the peoples.”5 The legitimacy of people’s war is derived also from the war’s total nature. A people’s war is a war of the people as a whole, not of the army alone, and it is conducted by the people and for the people. In this popular, mobile, guerrilla warfare, Truong Chinh asserted, the people are the eyes and ears of the army, and they should feed and keep the soldiers and help the army in sabotage and battle .6 This integration of civilians with the army is supposed to reach an ideal state when “each inhabitant [is] a soldier, each village a fortress.”7 This idealistic model of a morally just, methodically total, generalized people’s political and military struggle contributed to the image that this was a “war without fronts” fought by an “invisible enemy.”8 The model might have turned to reality in some places of armed conflict, yet, in most places under crossfire, it remained an abstraction or a partial reality throughout the war’s duration. A great number of people in central and southern Vietnam supported the people’s war, and a greater number of people were sympathetic to the war’s heritage of anticolonial struggles against France and Japan.9 What preoccupied most people in central Vietnam during the war, however, were day-to-day survival and subsistence . The abstraction of total war had to be weighed against concrete needs for survival, and this painful negotiation was indeed a genuine people ’s struggle in the streets during the violent Cold War. This paradigm of the people’s war also became a reality, with tragic consequences, to some of those who fought against the paradigm. The U.S.-Saigon administration’s village pacification strategy imposed on civilians the often impossible choice of displacement or persecution. This strategy was intended precisely to pump out “the water” (the people) to find “the fish” (the enemy combatants). It separated people from the basis of their subsistence and the locale of their religious and moral attachment. It was still rare to find the real enemy. The Saigon military bureaucracy continued to encourage its soldiers to produce tangible statistical results—demonstrating the number of enemy combatants they killed among the elusive guerrilla enemy—and thereby opened the possibility of inventing enemies within the more accessible, stagnant pool of civilians.10 The already precarious distinction between combatants and civilian noncombatants became dangerously and tragically irrelevant to some operations in hazardous or confused areas. Thus rose additional idioms among the soldiers assigned to the pacification of villages: “Kill clean, burn clean, destroy clean,” “Anything you see is all Vietcong,” “Children also spy,” “Better to make mistakes than to miss.” From 1966 to 1969, the ideal of a people’s war—“each inhabitant [is] a soldier, each village a fortress”—was brought across the unbridgeable theoretical gap between the two different kinds of war. Atrocious war crimes resulted from the lethal translation of a pond metaphor from a culturally familiar abstraction to an imagined alien reality.11 The civilian massacres during the Vietnam War may be divided into two distinct, though related, patterns. In one type of killing that was more prevalent, the scale of violence was relatively limited and the victims Massacres in the Year of the Monkey 29 [18.116.63.236] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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