Vietnam: Power and Stability
“
Winds come and go. The Mountain stays.”
Posted by: Hound Dog
Vietnam has been on a continuous war footing for over a hundred years. It has been at war with great powers near and far and it has never ever lost. Time and time again, the Vietnamese have proven that they are willing to take losses that are nothing short of catastrophic in order to achieve victory over foreign aggressors. Time ad time again, people have made the mistake of assuming that Vietnam had come out of their last war weaker than they went into it. Vietnam has triumphed over Japan twice, over Cambodia twice, seen the ends of China, Champa, and the Dega Alliance, they've had victory over France, Laos, and the Dayaks, but their victory with the most historical impact was their victory over The United States. Both because the US had previously gone a century and a half without losing a war, and also because it was the first war that the United States had fought where the man on the street didn't think they were the “good guys” (although it certainly wouldn't be the last). That war shattered the psyche of Americans and led directly to the downfall of the most powerful empire on Earth. And if you want to do things in Vietnam, I suggest using that.
Vietnam has strict visa requirements and gives wide powers to an extensive and efficient police force to track foreigners in the country. But they also have a thriving misery tourism industry for North Americans. They don't understand it, since for them the war with the US was just one of many, but they benefit from it and they even encourage it. So while you have to explain what you're doing and where you're going in pretty exhaustive detail to customs and the federal police, you can get away with some crazy shit if you preface it with some bizarre tie-in to the US-Vietnam war. If you come from (or claim to come from) any part of the former US or have ancestors who did, then requests to get into the country and wander around looking at battlefields from a hundred years ago is probably going to get a fast track approval.
What this means in practice is that if you have a mercenary contract on the Laotian border and you want to come in from the Vietnamese side for whatever reason, you actually ca do that, regardless of the presence of federal police with a hankering to nose into your business. You could come up with some elaborate lie and maybe get believed and maybe get detained, but if you just tell them that you intend to dress up in camouflage and wander around off grid on the Laotian border for a few weeks, “because your great grandfather fought in the Tet Offensive”, the authorities will roll their eyes and just let you do that. Guys running around in fatigues at the old battle sites is a big business for them, and they put up with it.
Vietnam is an anomaly both in the region and the world. It still runs itself according to the precepts of mid-twentieth century communism. It's not a throwback country like Kurdistan or Moldavia, it's literally just still doing that. Which is not to say that it is unchanged from a century ago, because it is not. While the politburo still exists, and there is still only one political party allowed, there are now “factions” that do their own political organization and would be considered policlubs if they were anywhere else. While the nation is still “communist” they also recognize corporate extraterritoriality, and even have their very own state-owned corporation that operates throughout the world.
Dak Seang
“
If the forest will fight us to the death, then we shall slay the forest.”
Dak Seang is a fortified city on the border with the Montagnard Confederation in Kon Tum province. A decade ago it was considered to be on the border with both Laos and Cambodia, with the regions over the border being effectively controlled by the Plig and their human tribal allies, but now that the Plig have annexed their controlled portion of Laos, it's all Montagnard Confederation over the border. There is a feeling of continuous siege in Dak Seang, in no small part because it is essentially under continuous siege. When the Plig began growing the forests and overrunning villages in 2014, Dak Seang was mostly known for being a minor town that served the then-regional capital of Polei Kan with its airport. However, with years of assault by the forests and the Plig, the region was forced to rely more and more on the airport for supplies.
Gradually, nearby towns and villages were destroyed one by one, and with a heavier and heavier military presence around Dak Seang, the displaced people went where the jobs were. Dak Seang's status as a gradual accumulation of a larger and larger defensive work is plainly visible in the city's layout today. Each expansion to the city was accompanied by the addition of new defensive works, and thus each neighborhood is cordoned off with walls and guard towers. With the entire area under continuous martial law, you'd think that it would be practically impossible to get in or out. But fortunately there was a battle of Dak Seang back in
1970 where a lot of helicopters came in and out to resupply the American forces while they were being sieged by the Vietnamese. If you claim to be descended from one of the green berets or helicopter medics, you can pretty much get the run of the place.
Dak Seang is a money sink for the Vietnamese government, resources are continuously sent in to wage a constant war of attrition with the Plig that the Vietnamese forces cannot realistically lose no matter how many times giant boars rush the defenses. But it isn't just a place where the government sends land mines and artillery shells and soldiers with little expectation of seeing them come back – Dak Seang also sends out a tremendous amount of raw materials. The forest is growing towards the city walls every night, and the Vietnamese cut it back every day. And that's a lot of
wood. There are similar upwellings of ore as the mountains form and reform only to be torn to shreds by giant metal monsters.
The city doesn't really have a civilian government at all, it is
literally conceived of as a military base despite the presence of permanent residents and a civilian economy. The commander is General Bùi Qui. And she is called “the turtle lady” because of the implacable defensive stance she has organized for the city. While she is a military officer, she also has ensured that there is a substantial amount of investment in the economy. Under her command, the city has been able to produce more and more of what it needs in on-site factories. At this time it is estimated that Dak Seang could hold out in a siege without resupply for half a year, and that number might be pessimistic.
Still, while the strategy in Dak Seang is primarily a build and turtle one, the Vietnamese
are constantly on the lookout for some means to actually kill the forest. Considerable amounts of research has been spent on the so-far fruitless search of a means to actually cut off the abilities of the Plig to project force.
Ho Chi Minh City
“
Where can I go to get all the weapons? Because I need a lot of weapons.”
Ho Chi Minh City used to be called Saigon about a century ago and was the site of the last stand of the Americans back then. Foreigners come in droves to see the reenactments of the “Fall of Saigon”. Ho Chi Minh City has become the
most foreigner friendly city in Vietnam, and has a huge expatriate community. Vietnam has a lot of corporate connections, and most of them build their offices here, where the politburo is far enough away for them to get away with stuff and the economy is vibrant enough to sustain them. It
also has a tremendous black and gray market, and is the place war mongers go when they want to get their hands on coveted Vietnamese military hardware.
Southeast Asia has been a mercenary hotspot for several hundred years, and Ho Chi Minh City has been relatively stable for about 70 of that. As that is the longest that
any major city has been able to claim relative stability in the region, it is a prime place for meetings and bases for operations. Numerous mercenary outfits have regional offices in Ho Chi Minh, and the city has the country's largest and most vibrant shadowrunner community. It's also home to the largest community in the country, period. Ho Chi Minh is a sprawling metroplex hemmed in only by the Mekong Delta and the Saigon River. The whole expanse has about 20 million people, and is one of the largest cities on the planet.
Ho Chi Minh City boasts its own tunnel city in the district of Cu Chi. The Cu Chi Tunnels were originally built by the Viet Cong during the war of unification as a way to hide from American and ARVN forces, but in the decades since they were expanded into a major tourist destination. In the 40s it was discovered that Orks and (especially) Dwarves actually prefer living under ground, and major residential developments were added. It's like the Ork Underground of Seattle or Halferville of San Francisco, but there's no stigma to it at all. A hundred years ago there were about 120 kilometers of tunnels. Today it's close to four times that.
Running the Shadows in Ho Chi Minh
You might think that being in a city with a lot of foreign corporations, huge amounts of poorly controlled weapons, and a general disinterest on the part of the central government to the doings or safety of those corporations would make something of a haven for shadowrunners. And you'd be
right. Ho Chi Minh has a shadowrunning community to rival Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok. But there are definitely things that a shadowruner should know before going here for a job or a permanent base of operations.
The first thing is that you should under no circumstances mention your family. I know you're in East Asia, so you probably think you should drop references to your honored grandfather or something. Don't do it. They take that commie “Draw A Line” thing seriously in Vietnam, and if you imply even for a moment that you let family considerations enter professional thought patterns, people will treat you like you wore your pants on your head. The next thing to understand is that the Năm Cam basically don't exist inside Vietnam. They are big internationally, but within the home land they've been basically destroyed. That's why they are constantly trying to drum up support for various invasions of Vietnam. Point is: your Năm Cam contacts are worth less than nothing in Ho Chi Minh. The big players in the underworld here are Korean Jo-Pok, Triads, and the black clad Federal Police themselves.
Beyond that, you'll want to figure out how to live and hide in Vietnam. Vietnam doesn't have a SINless population. I don't mean that they don't acknowledge their SINless population, I mean they literally don't have one. They go out and put numbers on
everyone. After the Champa insurrection, they even went out to the little villages and tagged everyone. If you want to get into Vietnam, you
need at least a fake SIN. If you show up even momentarily without a number in the system, a number will be assigned to you. They won't wait until you get arrested for a crime like in the CAS. On the flip side, Vietnam's data sharing treaties are pretty minimal, so you don't need a very
good fake SIN if it's supposedly based outside Vietnam, Russia, Czechoslovakia, or Aztlan (they share SIN data with those countries, so fabrications that involve them are
much more likely to blow up in your face).
Now the job structure itself. You are getting work from someone named Mr. Nguyen. That's just the regional variation of Mr. Johnson, don't worry about it. You might be given missions to do any of the standard stuff: extraction, sabotage, wetwork, or whatever. But whatever it is that you're doing, you're expected to do it quietly. The police in Vietnam aren't contractors, they are armed and motivated paramilitaries, and they only turn a blind eye to the shenanigans in Ho Chi Minh because it is advantageous to the state for them to do so. If stuff starts blowing up or enough civilians get caught in the crossfire to make the news, the heat will get turned up
high. The Vietnamese shadowrunning community simply doesn't even have a word for Pink Mohawk jobs, that sort of thing is literally unthinkable.
Enemies of the State
“
What is dissent but a attack on our ideals? What is crime but an attack on our society?”
Vietnam tries to maintain an image as a country which has very little crime and a great deal of unanimity amongst the people. And this is actually basically true. When elections are held various factions win and lose, but 80% of the vote does go to one branch or another of the Vietnamese Fatherland Front, and the different factions are not really that different one from another. Crime seriously is pretty low compared to any country in the immediate vicinity. Vietnam has nationalized police, and they are on the whole much harder to bribe than Lonestar or Knight Errant, and they have done an impressive job of crushing not only separatist groups but also criminal syndicates within their borders.
And yet, for all that, they
do have criminal organizations. They don't have the power of the Yakuza or the reach of the Vory, but they exist. And if you're looking to do some shadow work in Vietnam, you'll probably want to work with them. Vietnamese syndicates you may be familiar with from elsewhere just don't exist in Vietnam. The Năm Cam rings were
stamped out within the actual country, and now only exist among Vietnamese expats elsewhere in the world. The 5T Triad is made of Vietnamese people, but it was created in Australia and never made its way back to the fatherland. The Red Hand is active in Czechoslovakia, but it was also
created in Czechoslovakia (back when it was still Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Oberpfalz). There is actually very little overlap between the criminal gangs active in Vietnam and the criminal gangs active elsewhere in the world that have Vietnamese people in them.
The Rễ
It is difficult to overstate how much power the Vietnamese military has in Vietnamese society. The military
directly employs 3% of the population, and its share of GDP is substantially higher. So it should come as no surprise that the Vietnamese military has its own criminal syndicate working inside it. It's known as the Rễ, and their motto is that they are underground and feed the tree. Practically what they do is sell off Vietnamese military equipment that has been marked as lost or destroyed on the black market and bring in contraband and hookers for military personnel. Members of the Rễ have ranks in that organization that are completely independent of their rank in the actual military.
Rắn Hổ Mang
Rắn Hổ Mang is a mercenary organization that is registered in Ho Chi Minh. They have a snake theme to their uniforms and equipment and hire out to commit terrorism around the world. Most analysts believe that they are a shell corporation for Yǎnjìngshé in Yunnan. According to their charter, they aren't supposed to break the laws of Vietnam, but Yǎnjìngshé breaks those laws all the time by supplying military assistance to Yunnanese smugglers and conducting terrorist activities along the Yunnan and Guangxi borders. Federal police haven't established that Rắn Hổ Mang's masked commander is necessarily the same as Yǎnjìngshé's; but the moment they do, expect them to have to fight their way out of the country. Rắn Hổ Mang has some impressive tech and magical support, and the inevitable showdown between them and Vietnamese special forces is probably going to be ugly.
The Hundred Birds Triad
The Zhuang are a minority population in Vietnam and the majority people of the adjacent nation of Guangxi. They are a Tai people, closely related to the Lao, Dong, and Siamese. And there is a criminal syndicate called the Hundred Birds Triad that makes most of its money by bringing in goods from Japan and Siam. They are mostly non-violent and most of their crime is simply reselling foodstuffs, clothing, and simchips from other countries – without paying the appropriate taxes and duties of course. The Triad also deals in other kinds of contraband from time to time.
The A18
Vietnam doesn't go through new intelligence agencies as often as Russia does, but the famous and brutal A18 agency that regularly appears as the villains in Siamese spy thrillers from the fifties was replaced by the CCC in the mid sixties after A18's spectacular failures during Crash 2.0. How does this relate to organized crime? Well, A18 didn't
exactly disband like it was supposed to. Much of the organization still exists, and the buro chief has basically become a crime boss. They infiltrate regular and công an bảo vệ police agencies and finance their shadier operations by reselling goods seized in police raids and by regular extortion.
The Vietnamese Nationalist Front
Inspired by dramatic tales of the ARVN, but even more inspired by direct cash payments by Japanese corporations, the VNF is an opposition group that tries to undermine the Vietnamese state and create a new, more corp-friendly government. Unlike most other organizations branded as “enemies of the state”, the VNF literally and specifically sees themselves as exactly that. Their actual power is pretty limited, but you wouldn't know that if you got all your news about Vietnamese politics from Japanese newsfeeds.
- When Japan got in their fight with Vietnam over islands in the South China Sea, they started feeding any resistance groups they could find in Vietnam to try to get more leverage. Since then, they've been sending cash and weapons to the VNF just as a force of habit.
- Simba
Enchanted Vietnam
“
Awesome means that it inspires awe, not that it is good.”
The Vietnamese government is atheistic and mundane, and is extremely conflicted about what to do with the geomantically powerful locations of the region. On the one hand, they are cultural treasures and often as not UNESCO Heritage Sites, but on the other hand they are a genuine source of power that the government cannot command or control. So far, the government's treatment of these places has been schizophrenic – alternatingly praising and promoting them as a source of tourism and civic pride and cordoning them off with soldiers and red tape. Here are some of the most controversial ones:
Son Doong Cave
“
The interior of the Earth is surprisingly habitable.”
The largest cave in the world is in Quang Binh Province, near the Laotian border. It goes down dozens of kilometers, has layer after layer of actual
jungle in it, it's own fast flowing river, and if you go down far enough in it you end up in another world because the damn thing sits on a metaplanar portal. It is part of the Ke Bang Forest Restricted Area, and there are numerous caves around it that go down dozens of kilometers and have hundreds of chambers that contain grottoes with underground foliage and flora and fauna found nowhere else in the world. It is important to stress the fact that these caves had underground forests in them well before 2012 rolled around, which sprouted around shafts of light that shone through cracks in the ceiling. But since then, the forests have gradually grown out into the permanent darkness. The Vietnamese government allows researchers and explorers into the caves, but only with approval from the central committee, and only with a military escort. And even then, no outsiders have been allowed to explore more than 8 kilometers into that thing since 2048.
- The Draco Foundation has applied for a research permit every year since their founding, and been rebuffed every time.
- Ringmaster
- The Naga don't call this cave Son Doong, they call it “Patala” and they want it – bad. Of course, they'd have to get through 175 kilometers of Siam and another 175 kilometers of Laos just to get to the part Vietnam is willing to fight them over, but that doesn't mean they aren't considering it.
- Heartfinder
- The Montagnard Confederation lays claim to it as well, and when they draw their own borders they include the entirety of Ke Bang Forest. The word is that the Vietnamese army has one or more Plig chained up inside Son Doong, or maybe in one of the nearby caverns like Phong Nha. But the Vietnamese have held them cold at the Ho Chi Minh Trail for 69 years – all the Montagnard gains have been on the Laotian side of the border.
- Bɨryekomo
Hạ Long Bay
Located in Northern Vietnam, Hạ Long Bay is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It's also a smuggling haven that ships contraband into and out of Vietnam. Rising out of the sea are literally thousands of limestone rocks whose tops are often as not covered with dense foliage. Many of these rocks have sea caves in them, and smugglers have set up miniature secret docks all over the area. Vietnam makes a token attempt to patrol the waters, but while they regularly sink smuggling vessels, it's not really much in light of the amount of small boat traffic that makes connections with Hainan, Guangxi, and the Canton Confederation.
The waters also have an odd effect that comes on whenever the moon is full. During those times, an enchantment comes on that allows animals to breathe the water. It's still the ocean, so it's salty as hell and extremely unpleasant, but you can do it. There is a lot of smuggling going on during the rest of the month, but that one day smugglers go
nuts. Secret stashes in underwater caves get used and people literally
walk contraband in and out of the country.
- There is a tribe of merrow who have been after something in Hạ Long. They won't go in for whatever reason, but they pay metahumans in pearls to check out parts of the sea bottom they are interested in.
- VanHelsing
Ngoc Son Temple
The capital of Hanoi is a drab industrial hellhole that is probably not a place you will go if you're a foreigner and aren't working for Aztechnology or the Combine. But it
is the capital and has been since the country was known as “North Vietnam”, and there is a lot of nationally important administration and industry there. And right in the middle of the city is a 19th century Buddhist temple on Hoam Kiem Lake. Next to the temple is a three and a half tonne turtle named Kim Qui, who may in fact be the golden turtle god who made a magic sword for Emperor Lê Lợi, paving the way for Vietnamese independence from China in 1428. The government has a weird love-hate relationship with the temple and the turtle. On the one hand, the entire affair glorifies Vietnamese independence and national heroes. But on the other hand the mythical sword Thuận Thiên is still lost, and there are more than a few people in the government afraid that the turtle will make someone the rightful emperor of Vietnam.
- This is not an idle worry on their part. In 2046 some guy had a shiny sword made and used magic to grow very tall and claimed the title of Emperor. The sword was a fake, but he still got himself a pretty serious revolt going before the police took him down.
- Chun The Unavoidable
Tây Ninh Holy See
Cao Dai is a confusing syncretic religion that simultaneously believes in the Buddhist cycle of death and rebirth and the one-true-god of Islam. They were also started by a French civil servant in Vietnam in 1926. Their holy symbol is the all-seeing-eye, they venerate ancestors, recognize Jesus as one of the Buddhas, and they don't eat meat. And their main temple is in the southern city of Tây Ninh. There are an
unbelievable amount of watcher spirits around that temple, the temple itself has some sort of astral gateway that they use to receive divine guidance, and the religion's roughly two million adherents has made it simply too big for the state to crush without a really good reason.