The Loser Has
All The Chips
Bill Clinton will visit Vietnam this week, the first US president to do so since America's humiliating exit 25 years ago. No city will welcome him more than Hanoi. There are good reasons for it.
Nov 13, 2000

No need to bring the flak jacket, Bill. Just kidding. This is one advice he won't need, unlike Lyndon B. Johnson when he came to Saigon (capitalist Vietnam's capital) three decades ago.

In fact, if the US President were to talk to any Vietnamese below the age of 30, he'll probably say he has never seen a flack jacket in his or her life.

The army he will encounter will be in jackets and ties fighting to have more things American, not less - more investment, more trade, more technology and more tourists. If he visits the US Consulate, he may even see battalions of teens wanting to study in US colleges.

In short, the Saigon that Clinton will probably see will be a city of excitement and promise, unlike the one I first laid eyes on when I arrived in 1966 as a rookie correspondent on my first overseas assignment. I was then 26 years old.

It was a tumultuous time for Southeast Asia. A year earlier, Singapore had to leave Malaysia, with whom relations were stormy. The East, as Beijing was singing, was red.

In Vietnam, the war was intensifying and America was getting deeper and deeper into it. This was made evident by the flourishing bars flourishing along Rue Catinat (or Tu Do) and the waterfront.

My earliest impression was seeing a South Vietnamese soldier (with his wife and two children) throwing a stone at an empty yellow-and-blue taxi which had refused to pick his family up. I was to learn why. These little Renault Dauphines preferred to take Americans and other foreigners because they could charge a lot more.

I had just arrived at Saigon's Tan Son Nhat Airport with a thumping heart heading for the Reuters office at Han Thuyen. It was in a pleasant park-filled neighbourhood sandwiched between the President's Palace on the left and the Catholic Basilica on the right.

The flight lasted two hours but it seemed like eternity. It was the first time I had ever flown in a plane and the first foreign country I had visited outside Malaysia. Ours was not a travelling generation.

And here I was - in wartime Vietnam.

It was only two weeks earlier than I was called to the office of Jimmy Hahn, Reuters' Southeast Asia Manager, who dropped the Saigon shocker - a one-year assignment - on me. A fast-thinking Korean, Jimmy is father of Lorraine Hahn, today's host of CNN's Business Asia programme.

In flight, I saw an assortment of people one could imagine heading into a war. If you can't, just think of the film Casablanca. You'll see the same - fortune hunters, military men, spies, diplomats, civil engineers from R-MK an American construction giant and smugglers.

Most of the smugglers were Singaporeans wearing Montagut shirts and sprouting Rolex watches (on both hands), Parker pens and wielding a samsonite bag with more branded goodies. On their return flight their luggage would be a lot lighter and they would be counting US dollars.

These chaps had a gleam in their eyes and a fast mouth that could talk their way out of any trouble. So confident were they that they were spilling their operation to me knowing I was a journalist. I quickly decided to distant myself from them for fear that I would be mistaken for one of them.

At any rate my mind was filled with anxiety. Even the beautiful ao dai wearing Vietnamese air hostesses could not lure my attention away for long. What was a war zone like?

What happened if the Vietcong were to attack the airport when I arrived? I saw myself dodging bullets as I made my way to the immigration counter. Or dashing from tree to tree to escape machinegun bullets!

Instead I found a beautiful city of tree-lined boulevards and roadside cafes that were more French than American, although under the weight of a huge influx of American dollars (later reaching US $1 billion a day), things were changing.

Across the streets of Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown, taking the main Tran Hung Dao I was happy that the only sign of a war were the barbed wire fences and sandbags strewn around government buildings.

Rex Cinema, near Nguyen Hue - the Street of Flowers - was a film starring James Garner and Doris Day dubbed in French, the language of the rich and powerful in those early days.

The Vietnamese elites, mostly Catholics and refugees from the north, sent their children to French schools, took holidays in Paris and proudly talked of their membership at the blue-ribbon Circle Sportif Club.

Not only was there no shooting in the city on the first day, the second, or third day. That was to come later. In 1966, it was still a series of little platoon-size battles, pleasantly kept away from the capital. The enemies were a bunch of pajama-clad Vietcong guerillas. The large North Vietnamese divisions had not yet entered the fray.

And when they came a year later , things became very nasty and painful all round. Attacks were company, then battalion, size, involving regulars from North Vietnam. It was accompanied by an increase in urban terrorist attacks.

Communist-front organisations, from students to Buddhists, from writers to trade unions, they began to stir up anti-government causes. Most were anti-war.

The main objective was to raise the toll of American deads. That was becoming easier in the cities as the number of Americans rose and they made easy targets. Vietcong "suicide squads" riding motorbikes were becoming active, tossing grenades or satchels at them.

To get around the midnight-am curfew and get to use US military facilities like transport (helicopters for short distance) accommodation and news coverage, correspondents were given a Press Card.

As a reporter for an international news agency, I got a civilian rank of "Colonel" and Priority Three (one to five). This means I could pull ranks on lesser souls and bump them off while fighting over the use of military facilities, airplane seats, telephones (always crowded) and accommodation.

The war deteriorated gradually - then rapidly. Americans were omnipresent. They were driven through the streets of Saigon in vans surrounded by wire mess that looked like a mobile cage.

Vietnamese kids would initially chase after them, shouting "Big Monkeys" as they went by. At night the same kids would tug at them asking for "piastres". (local currency) or "Eh, GI you want boom-boom?" (sex), or selling them marijuana. As the US dollars swarmed the country, Americanising it, the fabric of the Vietnamese society came under strain, turning the elite and the business class into corrupt, greedy people hell-bent to make money.

The generals began fighting among themselves for power. Military coups were frequent affairs. One day, you were a strong general and the next you're washing dishes in Paris. Women readily became prostitutes.

An early casualty was, of course, French culture and French language. The citron soda made way for Coca-Cola. The upper class stopped sending their children to Paris or to the local Alliance Francaise to study. Instead they rushed to study language.

South Vietnamese diplomats abroad switched to English. James Garner now spoke in his own voice no longer in French. Since everybody wanted to work for the Americans so everybody went to night classes to learn English. This has become Vietnam's strength today.

Secondly, the American role created a crutch mentality. Their troops were here. let them fight. Among the South Vietnamese army units, only a few were elite fighters - the paratroopers, some Rangers and the First Division defending Hue.

Thirdly, corruption flourished. Most ministers, generals and police chiefs were on the take and it reached all the way down. Their children were exempted from the army. On any given day, one could walk into any cinema and round up a battalion or two of draft-dodgers.

After the US decided on an orderly pullout, I decided to drive across nine provinces south of Saigon to find out whether the American ally would be able to survive by itself. The Americans called it Vietnamisation, transferring the war to the Vietnamese. They would supply money, equipment and military advice but no troops.

I lay sandbags on the floor of a jeep (for fear of landmines), rented from the wife of a Saigon colonel for US $100 a month and set off. I did the trip in 21 days and wrote some two dozen features.

In a two-part series, I concluded that without the Americans Saigon would not be able to survive. The US had just pulled out its 9th Division from the south and the South Vietnamese army and paramilitary forces (30 per cent infiltrated), had taken over. I did not find a single US provincial advisor who said: "Yes, they can do it" The majority simply shook their heads.

My own view was based on a simple calculation. If 545,000 American troops and one million South Vietnamese were losing the war, how could one million Saigon troops minus the Americans win it?

Wait a minute, were the allies losing the war? My logic: "Yes, no army would pull out of a battlefield if it was winning it."

But this week, when Bill Clinton arrives he will not look like the leader of a vanquished country. He's got all the chips of a winner.

Seah Chiang Nee