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THE ROVING EYE
Vietnam: The
survivor
By Pepe Escobar
HO
CHI MINH CITY - A Vietnamese TV crew is shooting a soap
opera in a park behind the late 19th-century Notre Dame
cathedral. The leading lady, clad in a beautiful crimson
ao dai, sobs uncontrollably despite the efforts
of her partner, against the background of the city's
usual non-stop parade of motorbikes. Nguyen Phuoc Hoang
Nobel is not very impressed. He's been coming to the
park "for the last 50 years". He's experienced it all,
the riches and the squalor, the sound and the fury in
the modern history of a city that for him will always be
called Saigon.
Nobel's first language was
French: he only started learning Vietnamese when he was
10. His father lived in France and came back to Vietnam
in the 1920s, as one of the colonial power's top
officials in Indochina. Nobel was born in 1937 in Sadec.
After Vietnamese independence in 1945, his father
decided to drop his French citizenship. Little did Nobel
know this would spell enormous trouble for him decades
later.
 In 1964, Nobel was the personal bodyguard
of US ambassador General Maxwell Taylor - the man who
famously said at the time that "if we leave Vietnam with
our tail between our legs, the consequences of this
defeat in the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America
will be disastrous". Nobel and two others were the only
Vietnamese authorized to pack a .357 Magnum at all
times: "The Americans didn't trust anybody else."
In the morning of March 30, 1965, Nobel was
seriously injured in what he describes as "the first car
bombing in modern times", which occurred in front of the
US embassy in Saigon and injured deputy ambassador U
Alexis Johnson. Nobel, Johnson's bodyguard, was standing
very close to the explosion: the ambassador was on the
fifth floor of the building. Nobel was unconscious,
presumed dead, and taken to a morgue. As he recalls it,
he woke up in the middle of the night, naked, among all
the corpses, and had to smash a window with his fist to
get out. He had become a survivor.
A top
sharpshooter, Nobel continued working until 1967 as a
bodyguard to Johnson and then William Porter. He
escorted secretary of defense Robert McNamara and vice
president Hubert Humphrey on their visits to Vietnam.
After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Nobel received
the inevitable "knock on the door at midnight". "I had
lived in the residences of the ambassador and two deputy
ambassadors, and had driven with them to work every day.
For that reason I was detained for two years, and was
tortured constantly. I was assumed to have been a CIA
[US Central Intelligence Agency] agent. I tried to
explain that my position simply involved providing
security, and that I had neither political interest or
expertise. They tried to force me to write detailed
accounts of the activities of the men I served during my
employment by the US government."
Nobel recalls
that the communists hated Maxwell Taylor: "They accused
him of authorizing a strategy of mass extermination.
They seized the evangelical church where I had escorted
him every Sunday morning to worship, and turned it into
a dance hall. They promised me full rehabilitation,
including all the documents of a normal citizen, if I
would sign a statement concerning ambassador Taylor's
supposed order to Colonel Smith: 'Don't kill anyone if
you don't have to, but if you have to, do it quickly,
calmly and entirely'. They said this resulted directly
in the massacre at My Lai carried out by Lieutenant
William Calley." In March 16, 1968, under Calley's
orders, 347 people, all unarmed, and mostly women and
children, were killed by American soldiers in the
village of My Lai. Seymour Hersh broke the story - eight
months later. Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment,
but served only three years before he was pardoned by
president Richard Nixon.
History is now running
the risk of repeating itself. For American GIs during
the Vietnam War, every Vietnamese - no distinction - was
a potential communist: sooner or later every Vietnamese
became a legitimate target. For American GIs in
post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, every Iraqi - no distinction -
is a potential "remnant of the Ba'ath Party". So every
Iraqi is becoming a legitimate target. Vietnamese today
say that they understand this mechanism very well.
Nobel didn't crack under torture. He was
released in 1977, "My health and my mind had been
broken. But since I did not cooperate, I was not given
any identification papers or residence permits." And
this is how Nobel has been living for the past 30 years
in a state where everything is rigidly controlled: as a
wanderer, an urban ghost always coming back to the same
park. But his self-discipline shows: his clothes are
impeccable. His left arm, severely injured in the 1965
bombing and then subjected to torture, is a source of
excruciating pain. He usually has no money to buy
medicine, "very expensive".
In 1983, Nobel's
son, pregnant daughter-in-law and four-year-old
granddaughter became one more family added to the
legions of Vietnamese boat people desperate to escape
the communist regime. Tragedy struck: the boat sank on
May 5 in the Ham Tri River. Nobel says the government
"refused to allow any rescue operations". Fifty-six
people died, including Nobel's family.
During
most of the 1980s and the whole of the 1990s, Nobel
tried to become eligible for the US political-refugee
program. As he puts it, "I had new hope that I would be
able to live in a place where genuine democracy,
justice, human rights and freedom exist. I devoted and
even risked my life with vigor for these ideals, hoping
to enjoy the fruits of these freedoms. How woeful and
shameful it is to those of us left behind, that many
thousands of people who made less of a contribution to
the American cause have been admitted to the US because
they were able to afford to obtain the documents
required."
Nobel wrote letters to then secretary
of state Warren Christopher, attorney general Janet Reno
and the director of the Orderly Departure Program at the
US embassy in Bangkok. He doesn't know whether the
letters ever reached their destination. He was caught in
an infernal machine: the Vietnamese government's
bureaucracy prevented him from obtaining legal papers,
so he could not apply to become a political refugee.
Without an ID he could not have a residence permit for
Saigon: he was offered to move elsewhere, but he refused
to leave his city. If he had the funds he might have
been able to bribe an official to find him legal papers
- but his family was gone.
He is thankful to
someone he calls his adoptive daughter, "She helped me
to heal my injuries, which affected me physically and
mentally, even though it was a burden for her." But she
couldn't be of legal help. Because he had no papers he
couldn't get a residence permit, so he couldn't get a
job. Only recently he was issued a temporary ID card
because he translated a document for an official as a
favor.
Nobel couldn't be a more incongruous
figure set against this modern Saigon of Singapore-style
office towers, five-star US hotels, Shiseido spas
offering facials for US$50 and Vietnamese playboys in
fake Versace gear taking pictures with their cell
phones. He doesn't even have a fixed address. He remains
an acid critic of the communist obsession with control,
the "privileges of the party cadres", and what he sees
as pervasive corruption. An educated, dignified man who
manages to smile about his personal tragedy, Nobel never
blames the United States for what it tried to accomplish
in Vietnam. But he recalls "the advice of archbishop
Spellman, I accompanied him to a funeral service for a
dozen GIs who were killed by a Viet Cong missile at Tan
Son Nhat airport. He said, 'Don't worry, keep doing your
duty. If anything bad happens to you here the US
government will take watch over you until they can
secure your exit from the country'." That promise, says
Nobel, is still in the air.
At 66, Nobel is
tired of living as a ghost. He says a woman he knows
might help him get his ID, so maybe he can get his
Saigon residence permit, which will allow him the Holy
Grail: a Vietnamese passport. He says that he would like
to live and work in the US, and then finish his days in
France - his spiritual motherland. At the end of a long
conversation, he's happy with how the words of his
mother language come back to him: he says that he
doesn't have many opportunities of practicing his
French. He dreams of buying a dictionary. And he adds
that he doesn't want to go to the West just to enjoy a
better life, but "to testify to the terrible reality
that has occurred in my country. I have suffered in
silence these past decades, unable to add my voice to
the cause of human justice."
On the 20th
anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, in April
1995, Gabriel Kolko, arguably the author of the best
analysis published so far (Anatomy of a War,
paperback edition by Phoenix Press, 2001) wrote that
"the irony of Vietnam today is that those who gave and
suffered the most, and were promised the greatest
benefits, have gained the least. The communists are
abandoning them to the inherently precarious future of a
market economy which increasingly resembles the system
the US supported during the war. For the majority of
Vietnam's peasants, veterans and genuine idealists, the
war was a monumental tragedy - and a vain sacrifice."
Although he fought against the communists, for
Nguyen Phuoc Hoang Nobel the war has also been the
source of a still-running tragedy. But he has not been
broken. Armed with his passport, his dictionary and his
memories, he may finally be able to make the transition
from "suffering in silence" to acting with words.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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