|
Vietnam The Tradition of Militancy
Vietnam's past is characterized by a strongly martial spirit
tempered by war, invasion, rebellion, insurgency, dissidence, and
social sabotage. In their view, the Vietnamese have always lived
in an armed camp. The first "deities" of Vietnam, before the time
of recorded history, were not gods but generals. Vietnam's naval
fleet in the ninth century supposedly was the largest on earth.
In the tenth century, when its population could not have numbered
more than 2 million, its army purportedly stood at 1 million.
Asia's first military academy was founded in Hanoi in the
thirteenth century. The fourteenth century produced Tran Hung Dao
(1230-1300), the greatest of all Vietnam's many military
geniuses, who was consistently able to win battles against vastly
superior forces. According to tradition Nguyen Hue (also known as
Emperor Quan Trung, 1742-92), another great military leader,
fielded an army so disciplined that for the battle of Dong Da in
1789 he forced-marched his troops 600 kilometers to fight an
uninterrupted five-day battle that left "mountains of enemy
dead." Vietnamese of all political views take pride in these
figures from antiquity and seem particularly fond of those most
clever in combat, such as the general who persuaded his opponent
that he had two armies when the second was only a phantom. Those
who sacrificed themselves on some grand battlefield are also
fondly remembered. For instance, the Hai Ba Trung legend,
reminiscent of the story of Jeanne D'Arc, originated early in the
first century A.D. It tells of the two Trung sisters, who led
their army in a futile effort against a vastly superior Chinese
force. Defeated, they drowned themselves in a Hanoi lake. Members
of a thriving mystic cult continued to worship the lake in the
1980s despite official disapproval. Vietnam's standard histories
depict the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as times of
continual rebellion predating the rise of post-World War II Asian
nationalism. The century of French colonialism is described as
one long, unbroken battle involving virtually all Vietnamese.
Contemporary Hanoi historians describe Vietnam's national
tradition as one in which every Vietnamese is a soldier. They
cite the famed historical record, Annam Chu Luoc
(Description of Annam, by Le Tac, circa 1340): "During the Tran
dynasty all the people fought the enemy. Everyone was a soldier,
which is why they were able to defeat the savage enemy. This is
the general experience throughout the people's entire history."
This tradition is said to arise not from militarism, but rather
from a spirit of chinh nghia (just cause), which connotes
highly moral behavior rooted in rationality, compassion, and
responsibility. The historians assert that the spirit of chinh
nghia sustained the Vietnamese in their long struggle against
the Sinicization (Han-hwa) efforts of the Han Chinese, and
later against French colonialism and American neocolonialism.
Drawn from this, then, is a special kind of martial spirit, both
ferocious and virtuous. It is because of chinh nghia that
the Vietnamese have been victorious, while usually outnumbered
and outgunned. Chinh nghia is the mystique that
imparts unique fighting capabilities to the Vietnamese: first, it
mobilizes the people and turns every inhabitant into a soldier;
second, it applies the principles of "knowing how to fight the
strong by the weak, the great numbers by the small numbers, the
large by the small."
Just as Prussia has been Europe's most fought-over ground,
Vietnam is Asia's. For centuries the Vietnamese battled the
Chinese, the French, the Americans, the Khmer, and again the
Chinese. In between they battled the Thai, the Burmans, the Lao,
the Cham, the montagnards, and each other in regional and
dynastic combat. In the view of Vietnam's neighbors, Vietnamese
campaigns since the fifteenth century have been offensive rather
than defensive. But Vietnamese school children are taught that in
these wars the Vietnamese always were the victim, never the
aggressor. With respect to Vietnam's national security, the point
is not whether Vietnamese perceptions are factually correct, but
that the Vietnamese act on them.
In Hanoi's view, Vietnam faced an extraordinarily difficult
and complex geopolitical scene in the 1980s, one that was filled
with both external and internal dangers; in meeting these threats
the country suffered from some strategic weaknesses and enjoyed
certain strategic strengths. The conclusion appeared to be that
Vietnam could deal with these dangers because of its confidence
that its strengths outweighed its weaknesses and that, regardless
of the threat presented, the Vietnamese cause, as in the past,
would prove triumphant. The ruling Political Bureau and the
People's Army of Vietnam
(
PAVN--see Glossary) High Command long
ago developed several firm policies to achieve this end: that
Vietnam must remain more or less permanently mobilized for war;
that it must maintain as large a standing army as the system can
support; that, as far as it is able, it must be self-sufficient
in protecting itself and not rely on outside assistance or
alliance; and that internally it must maintain a tightly
organized, highly disciplined society capable of maintaining a
high level of militant spirit among the general population.
This threat perception, and the leadership's response to it,
have had the net effect of creating in Vietnam a praetorian
society dedicated to the preservation of the existing order. It
makes the Vietnamese, as Premier Pham Van Dong observed to a
Western journalist, "incurable romantics." The society in the
1980s looked back at the First Indochina War (also known as the
Viet Minh War--see Glossary) and
Second Indochina War (see Glossary) as an era of
high deeds and heroism contrasting
unfavorably with humdrum postwar life.
Data as of December 1987
|
