ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

i. The Vietnam War

ii. The Soldiers

iii. The Narrative Literature of the War

iv. The Present Study

Part I Partisans

Chapter One Early Adventurers

i. Lieutenant-Colonel Landsdale

ii. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

iii. William J. Lederer & Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (1958)

iv. M. J. Bosse, The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959)

v. Jean Lartéguy, Yellow Fever (1962; English Translation, 1965)

vi. Epilogue: Ward Just, A Dangerous Friend (1999)

Chapter Two Fictional History & Historical Fiction: The Fall of Diem

i. President Ngo Dinh Diem

ii. Stuart Hempstone, A Tract of Time (1966)

iii. Robert Vaughn, The Valkyrie Mandate (1974)

iv. Morris West, The Ambassador (1965)

v. Conclusions

Chapter Three Advisors & Friendlies: Pro-War Novels

i. Optimism in the early phases

ii. Robin Moore, The Green Berets (1965)

iii. Scott C. S. Stone, The Coasts of War (1966)

iv. Richard Newhafer, No More Bugles in the Sky (1966)

v. Gene D. Moore’s The Killing at Ngo Tho (1967)

vi. James Crumley, One to Count Cadence (1969)

vii. Charles Larson, The Chinese Game (1969)

vii. Conclusions

Chapter Four Advisors & Friendlies II: Ambivalent Warriors

i. Doubt sets in

ii. David Halberstam, One Very Hot Day (1967)

iii. Daniel Ford, Incident at Muc Wa (1968)

iv. John Rowe, Count Your Dead (1968),

v. Alan Clark, The Lion Heart: a Tale of the War in Vietnam (1969)

vi. Josiah Bunting, The Lionheads (1972)

vii. Bo Hathaway’s A World of Hurt (1981),

viii. Donald McQuinn, Targets (1980)

ix. Conclusions

Chapter Five Soldiers & Civilians

i. Protestors & Reporters

ii. Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (1968)

iii. Pamela Sanders, Miranda (1978)

iv. Thomas Fleming’s The Officers’ Wives (1981)

v. Joan Didion, Democracy (1984)

vi. Takeshi Kaiko’s Into a Black Sun: Vietnam 1964–65 (1968, English trans. 1983)

vii. Bernard Kalb and Martin Kalb, The Last Ambassador (1981)

viii. Conclusions

Part II Modes and Genres

Chapter Six Combat Memoirs

i. Autobiographical War Writings

ii. Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

iii. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (1977)

iv. Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1975)

v. Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone (1978)

vi. W.D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie—A Combat Marine’s Memoir (1983)

vii. Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (1983)

viii. Tobias Wolff, In Pharoah’s Army—Memoirs of the Last War (1994)

ix. Conclusions

Chapter Seven Allegory

i. Allegorical Vietnam

ii. Jonathan Rubin, The Barking Deer (1974)

iii. Asa Baber, The Land of a Million Elephants (1971)

iv. Victor Kolpakoff, The Prisoners of Quai Dong (1967)

v. Norman Mailer, Why Are in Vietnam? (1967)

vi. Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers (1974)

vii. Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1975)

viii. Conclusions

Chapter Eight Combat Realism

i. Conventions of Realism

ii. Robert Roth, Sand in the Wind (1973)

iii. Stephen Philip Smith, American Boys (1975)

iv. Tom Suddick, A Few Good Men (1974)

v. William Pelfrey, The Big V (1972)

vi. William Turner Huggett, Body Count (1973)

vii. Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (1974)

viii. Conclusion

Chapter Nine Combat VS. Ideology

i. Two Authors

ii. James Webb, Fields of Fire (1978)

iii. John Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (1983)

iv. Comparisons & Conclusions

v. Epilogue: Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2010)

Chapter Ten Deviations

i. Alternatives to Realism

ii. William Wilson, The LBJ Brigade (1966)

iii. James Park Sloan, War Games (1971)

iv. John Clark Pratt, The Laotian Fragments (1974) & Vietnam Voices (1984)

v. Ward Just, Stringer (1984)

vi. Lloyd Little, Parthian Shot (1975)

vii. Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers (1979)

viii. Conclusion

Chapter Eleven Inventions: Fantasy & Metafiction

i. Literature of the Optative Mode

ii. William Eastlake, The Bamboo Bed (1969)

iii. Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (1975)

iv. Nicholas Rinaldi, Bridge Fall Down (1985)

v. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

vi. Conclusions

Chapter Twelve Correspondents

i. Reporters in the Nam

ii. Library of America collection: Reporting Vietnam (1998)

iii. John Sack, M (1966)

iv. Harrison E. Salisbury, Behind the Lines—Hanoi (1967)

v. Jonathan Schell, The Village of Ben Suc (1967) & The Military Half (1968)

vi. Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers (1976)

vii Mary McCarthy, Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968)

viii. James Jones’ Viet Journal (1973)

ix. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1968)

x. Conclusions

Chapter Thirteen Ordinary People: Oral Memoirs

i. War Stories & Oral History

ii. Al Santoli, Everything We Had: an Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-Three Soldiers Who Fought It (1981)

iii. Mark Baker, Nam—The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (1987)

iv. Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six American Women Who Served in Vietnam (1985)

v. Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984)

vi. Conclusion

Chapter Fourteen Vets: The Return of the Repressed

i. A.R. Flowers, De Mojo Blues (1985)

ii. Jack Fuller, Fragments (1984)

iii. Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1985)

iv. Larry Heineman, Paco’s Story (1986)

v. Stephen Wright, Meditations in Green (1983)

vi. Michael H. Cooper, Dues: a Novel of War and After (1994)

vii. Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994)

viii. Conclusion

Bibliography

Primary Works

Secondary Works

Acknowledgments

Parts of this book in modified form have appeared elsewhere:

A shorter version of Chapter Six: “Combat Memoirs of the Vietnam War,” in: VIA LITTERAE. Vol. 5, N o. 1, jan/jun 2013. Universidade de Goiás. Anápolis, Goias, PP. 257-280.

A shorter version of Chapter Seven: “Allegorical Narratives of the Vietnam War,” in: REVISTA ESTUDOS ANGLO-AMERICANOS. Abrapui, S. Paulo. Edição 35, 2012.

A modified and expanded version of Section ii, Chapter Eleven: “Deviations from Realism in the Vietnam War Novel,” VERTENTES São João del-Rei, MG, Brazil, no. 34, July-December 2009, pp. 42-52.

A shorter version of Chapter One: “Art Imitates Life: Edward G. Landsdale and the Fiction of Vietnam,” in: ACTA SCIENTARUM—Language and Culture. Vol. 31, No. 1, Jan-June 2009, pp. 95-102

A modified version of Section ii, Chapter One, “American Interference: A Political-Cultural Reading of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. VERTENTES. São João del-Rei, MG, no. 30, July-December 2007, pp. 129-137.

I would like to give thanks to several people who were helpful in the research and writing of this book: to Prof. John Clarke Pratt, with his unmatched knowledge of the literature of the war, my advisor who guided me in the planning and writing of the first half of the book during my stay as visiting scholar at Colorado State University, and to the college, which lent me an office and computer, and the library and staff of special collections at CSU; to the Department of English and Corresponding Literatures at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and Prof. Eliana Àvila, my advisor there; to the College of Letters (FALE), of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), which granted me six months sabbatical leave on those two occasions; to my colleagues of the Center for Study of War, Literature and the Arts (NEGUE), especially José Otaviano Mata Machado, Marcela Gontijo, Elcio Cornelsen, and Volker Jaeckel, for their help and many useful discussions.

My special thanks to my former student and co-founder of NEGUE, Luiz Gustavo Vieira, who spent many hours with me discussing war, literature, and other aspects of life, and who read the entire manuscript, correcting mistakes and offering valuable criticisms at every point.

Luiz Gustavo—a valuable friend, student, colleague, and often teacher—to whom I gratefully dedicate this book.

There it is…The phrase was much used by stoic grunts everywhere.

Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

There it is, they‘d say. Over and over—there it is, my friend, there it is—as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can´t change what can´t be changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.

Tim O‘Brien, The Things They Carried

Introduction

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time,

and your government when it deserves it”

(Mark Twain)

i. The Vietnam War

With the end of World War II, the economically developed and politically stable democracies, the so-called First World nations, led by the United States, engaged in the global struggle known as the Cold War with the Second World or socialist states in Eastern Europe, which were unified and controlled by the Soviet Union. The conflict had actually begun before the war was over, with the “Big Three”—the US, the USSR, and Great Britain—planning to divide up the globe among them, but the opening salvo of the Cold War, at least symbolically, was fired by Winston Churchill in a speech of March 1946 in the United States, when he declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” a warning about what he regarded as the danger to the “Free World” of Soviet expansionism and the lack of the necessary western military strength to counteract it. While President Truman apparently approved of the content of this speech, which took place in his home state of Missouri and pointedly referred to the “special relationship” of the US and Great Britain, US officials feared that what Churchill really wanted was to enlist their country in propping up the crumbling British Empire. For his part, Josef Stalin predictably referred to the speech as imperialistic “war mongering.”1

The Cold War was waged for the hearts and minds, as well as the material wealth, of the rest of the planet, inevitably grouped together as the “Third World.” This was a geographically, politically, and culturally diverse group of countries that could only be perceived as a cluster of states by their common condition of instability, because, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, they formed what was, in effect, “a worldwide zone of revolution—whether just achieved, impending or possible.”2 Attempting to suppress it, the United States identified this revolutionary instability with the Soviet Union, which in turn attempted to exploit it, for the postwar Pax Americana reigned only over the First World and could not for the time being reach or affect the Second World, which remained under the control of the Warsaw Pact. The fear engendered on both sides by the prospect of global thermonuclear war between the two superpowers actually contributed to the military stability even while the maneuvering of propaganda and espionage contributed to the political instability of the Cold War. According to Hobsbawm,

Almost from the start of the Cold War, the U.S.A. set out to combat this danger [i.e. revolution] by all means, from economic aid and ideological propaganda through official and unofficial military subversion to major war; preferably in alliance with a friendly or bought local regime, but if need be without local support.3

The many wars waged against perceived global Communist expansion, numbering over a hundred between the end of World War II and the demise of the Soviet Union and other Communist states in the late 1980s, were all fought in the Third World. The most extensive of these wars, and the only one, besides the Korean War of 1950-1953, in which American troops fought, was the war in Vietnam. This conflict may be described from a longer historical perspective as the “Vietnam Wars,”4 since Vietnam’s anti-colonial war against the French (1945-1954) was taken up again right after World War II once the Japanese had been driven out of the region by the Allied forces and the Vietnamese. The war(s) in Vietnam did not even end with the withdrawal of the American interventionist forces in 1973 and the subsequent fall of South Vietnam in 1975. The unified north and south, now officially called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, suppressed continued opposition in the south of the country, invaded Cambodia to overthrow the US-supported regime of Pol Pot, and resisted a Chinese incursion that was only the most recent one of centuries of attempted Chinese expansionism southward into Vietnam.

What is generally thought of as the Vietnam War is more narrowly defined as the ten year hot war (1965-1975) waged between the South Vietnamese government supported by the US, and the revolutionary forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF), the official name of the Communist guerrilla insurgents in South Vietnam—known by the anti-Communist southern regime derogatively as “Vietcong,” or Vietnamese Communists—which was encouraged and later supported, but crucially not controlled, by the government of North Vietnam.5

One might contest, however, this ten year period of the American War in Vietnam as too brief to comprehend (in both senses) the conflict, especially since American intervention in colonial Indochina began as early as the 1950s, with the US taking over the conflict after the decisive military defeat of the French by General Vo Nguyen Giap’s forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.6 Simply put, the American war in Vietnam was waged based on the goal of a South Vietnam free of Communism, but how that goal was established is worth examining. Fortunately, the process has been described in detail by the US government itself in the collection of documents that came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers.”

The Pentagon Papers were based on “investigative reporting by Neil Sheehan, written by Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, E.W. Kensworthy and Fox Butterfield,” from the collected papers and documents of the secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam War, originally commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. They consisted of a “massive top-secret history of the United States role in Indochina,” which took a year and a half to write, was written by anonymous government historians—including officials from the State department, intellectuals from government financed institutes, and military career officers—and incorporated material from the White House, the CIA and the military Joint Chiefs of Staff. There were some 3000 pages of narrative history and more than 4000 pages of documents appended to the narrative, all collected in 47 volumes. Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst for the Rand Corporation, illegally copied the collection of secret documents.7 The New York Times obtained most of the collection and began publishing a series of articles based on them in June 1971. The US Justice Department tried to suppress publication, alleging a breach of “national defense interests,” but, in June of the same year, the Supreme Court upheld the right to publish under the First Amendment to the Constitution.8

The narrative leading up to the ten year war may be summarized as follows. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original plan for placing French Indochina under international trusteeship to prepare it for independence was diluted at the 1945 Yalta Conference in the interests of European colonialism. The British, fearing for their own overseas colonies and aided by President Truman’s administration, which, for its part, feared postwar Communist gains, supported the restoration of French sovereignty after the war, ignoring the North Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh’s plea for the help of the US in preventing that outcome. The Eisenhower administration also gave the French material support in their ultimately unsuccessful attempt to suppress the Viet Minh, the anti-colonialist forces in the north, who had fought for independence against Japan before finally defeating the French.9

The Truman Doctrine (1947) had pledged American resistance to Communism wherever it should emerge. The succeeding president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. believed that Ho Chi Minh, who had repeatedly, unsuccessfully, and—as it would turn out, tragically—sued for US support against French colonialism, even citing the values stated in the American Declaration of Independence, was initially ignored and eventually deemed “an instrument of international Communism.”10 With the end of World War II and throughout the following decades, however, Ho Chi Minh was more concerned with keeping his country independent of all foreign forces, including Communist China on his northern border. The Americans, however, believed that the Chinese (and the Soviets) were dictating strategy and supplying arms to North Vietnam. Ho accepted the aid of weapons and supplies from both Moscow and Beijing but there is no hard evidence that he allowed these politically allied nations to impose their strategies of defense on North Vietnam.11

According to Fox Butterfield, the “watershed decision” to intervene in Indochina first came after the fall of Nationalist China to the Communists (1949) under Mao Zedong. At this development, Washington, fearing further Communist advances in Asia, abruptly ended its wavering about whether or not to support French colonial interests by offering financial aid to the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai, a puppet of French colonialism, and to the French military forces, to fight against the anti-colonial, Communist-led Viet Minh (eventually, the US would pay $1.1 billion in 1954, or 78% of the French war effort).12 With this decision, the US committed itself inexorably to blocking further Communist expansion in Asia. The justification for this came to be called the “Domino Theory,” first enunciated by the National Security Council (NSC) in February 1950. Never seriously questioned, the Domino Theory supposed that the “loss” of a single country to Communism would endanger all the neighboring countries and eventually all of Asia and even beyond.13 The principal justification for the war in Vietnam therefore was the strategic need to “hold the line,” or, in the language of the controlling metaphor, to prevent the dominoes (states) from tumbling one after another.

David Halberstam claims that it was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, the ultimate cold warrior, who believed in “our cause, our innocence and our worthiness”—as well as our political advantage—for Dulles was convinced that the US could go into Vietnam without the taint of French colonialism: “We could start in South Vietnam,” Dulles decided, “by sending a couple of hundred American advisors there” (curiously, however, Dulles also thought that American chances for success in Vietnam were no more than one in ten).14 As stated above, by 1950, the official policy of the US government on Indochina, as stated in NSC 64, declared that the Communists’ war was “one phase of anticipated plans to seize all of Southeast Asia,” and recommended that all practicable measures be taken to prevent further expansion.15 As a response to the French military defeat by the Viet Minh forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Eisenhower publicly invoked the Domino Theory, which would be cited then and thereafter as signifying the global danger of other countries falling to Communism—a predictable tragedy that only firm American intervention could prevent.

The argument about when the war actually began is nicely reflected in a passage from Michael Herr’s Dispatches:

You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1945 as the reference date; if you saw far back as War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. ‘Realists’ said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission folk insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing eJthat had gone before wasn’t really war.”16

Politically, the US engagement in Vietnam may be said to have begun with the division of the country. With the signing of the Geneva accords on July 21, 1954, the country was split into what was to be regarded as two military zones along the 17th parallel, to be administered by two civilian governments: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to the north, and what was then called the “State of Vietnam” in the south. The military forces pertaining to both sides were to regroup north and south of this line after the signing of the agreement, and nationwide elections were to be held within a two-year time period to decide who would govern the entire country.17 The US refused to sign the agreement, thereby undermining its effectiveness, because it was thought that Ho Chi Minh, who was widely perceived as the leader opposed to foreign occupation, would win the elections. Responsibility for maintaining order belonged to the signatories of the armistice: the DRV in the north and the French in the south. Three months before the deadline for holding the elections, however, the French forces pulled out, in effect turning over political power in the south to the anti-Communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dulles had, in any case, already begun bypassing the French and dealing directly with Diem.18

A hot war erupted when Diem, encouraged by the Americans, declared the southern part of the country the independent Republic of South Vietnam (1955). The guerrilla forces of the NLF in the south thereupon devoted themselves to undermining Diem’s regime. The US sent military advisors, civilian aid workers, and a great deal of money to South Vietnam to aid the southern regime in repressing the opposition in a series of actions that were justified and approved of at the time as part of a praiseworthy effort to help preserve the freedom of the new nation by repelling a supposed Communist invasion from the north. It is surprising to learn from the Pentagon Papers that the US military was initially opposed to sending troops to Vietnam. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised: “Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token U.S. armed forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited U.S. capabilities,”19 a realistic assessment compared to the wishful thinking of the American civilian officials who would prevail.

In short, the US government gave up Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declared opposition to European colonialism toward the end of World War II for a policy of what would be called the “containment” of Soviet expansionism.20 Note that this expansion was assumed to be directed by Moscow, even in Third World countries like Vietnam that were not controlled by it. Every US president in the half century from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan championed and implemented some form of this policy, most materially those who held office during the war—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon.

In reply to speculation after the assassination of Kennedy (November 1963) that he would have called a halt to the war, Heydrick Smith, writing on the Kennedy years, concludes that in fact the president “transformed the ‘limited-risk gamble’ of the Eisenhower administration into a ‘broad commitment’ to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam,” often by secret measures that concealed from the American public the extent of the US role there. The US had not signed the Geneva accords but had promised not to undermine them. The expansion of military personnel, the sending of 400 Special Forces troops to South Vietnam as military advisors, however, was only the first breach of the Geneva agreement. This force was run by the CIA rather than the regular military so that “it was possible to handle these troops covertly,” and the number of advisors soon rose to 16,000.21 Smith adds that specific measures that were not disclosed included the beginning of a “covert warfare campaign in North Vietnam.”22

In his “bear any burden in the defense of liberty” 1961 inaugural address, Kennedy reiterated presidential guarantees of the cause, and the speech had considerable influence on the nation’s idealistic youth. The president saw Vietnam as a “test case” of the nation’s determination to maintain its commitments.23 His civilian advisors, drawn from the country’s intellectual and corporate elite, “the best and the brightest” in David Halberstam’s ironic words, scorned the accumulated knowledge and experience of the academic and government experts on Asia, believing in the superiority of their own class and education to make the right decisions.

John Kenneth Galbraith has asserted, however, that this Harvard-educated power elite knew nothing about the world, “ours or theirs,” believing that it was enough to know the “difference between a Communist and an Anti-Communist” without regarding the changing nuances of history and by clinging to the ideology of the Cold War that was still the prevailing line of thinking in US foreign policy in the 1960s.24 The rabid anti-Communist McCarthyism of the early 1950s had not completely died and still had a major influence on the thought and policies of politicians of both parties, particularly the Democrats, who felt especially vulnerable to attacks on their patriotism for being (as the expression went) “soft on Communism.” On the other hand, most Vietnamese perceived the Viet Minh, their leader Ho Chi Minh, and later the NLF, as liberators from a series of foreign oppressors: first, the French, then the Japanese, again the French, and eventually the Americans.

After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson would give continuity to his policies by retaining the former administration’s key figures—Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense, and McGeorge Bundy as National Security Council advisor—men who thought that the expanded global role of the US had increased the importance of holding the line in Indochina.25 If the containment of Communism had worked in Europe, where internationally recognized spheres of influence were established after World War II, it was mistaken to try to extend that policy to Asia, where the specter of Red China sent out more tremors. Besides, holding the line in Southeast Asia was based on the mistaken assumption that Communism—which was not only a political system, but also a set of practices, a creed, and an ideology—could be contained militarily. Even if that were possible without another world war, it would probably have been counter-productive at the time. The threat perceived as embodied in China was not so much military as political and cultural.26

The implementation of US policy was carried out with the arrival of civilian and military advisory and support personnel in southern Vietnam. The Saigon Military Mission (SMM) was to be led by Colonel Edward G. Landsdale, a notorious figure who will appear as a model for a character in several novels that will be discussed in these pages. The SMM was to enter Vietnam quietly and assist the Vietnamese, not the French, in unconventional warfare, with the French being retained as friendly allies.

The following years saw Ngo Dinh Diem as the USA’s favorite anti-Communist, although his increasingly autocratic rule alienated American leaders, who tried to link US financial and military aid to governmental reforms on his part, which he resented and often ignored. When he and especially his powerful brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who were Catholics, began to repress the protests of the Buddhist majority, which led to the self-immolations of Buddhist monks that shocked world opinion, the popularity of the government dropped to an all-time low. Popular discontent focused on Nhu and his outspoken wife, known as Madame Nhu (who notoriously referred to the Buddhist monks’ suicides as “barbecue”). Eventually, the Ngo brothers would be ousted by a coup of conspiring military commanders with the direct connivance of the CIA and its experienced operator Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, a veteran of the Indochina war.

The Pentagon’s secret study shows that “Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d’état that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.”27 The Ngo brothers were assassinated only a few weeks before Kennedy himself perished by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas (it is noteworthy that Kennedy had championed the Catholic anti-Communist Diem back in the 1950s, well before he became the US president). The Pentagon study points out that Diem’s ouster presented an excellent opportunity for the US to disengage from South Vietnam and the taint of propping up an oppressive and anti-democratic government, but the effect was that US officials discovered that the war against the NLF had been much worse than had been thought and decided that it therefore ought to do more, not less, for the South Vietnamese government. The Pentagon Papers concludes that “by supporting the anti-Diem coup the US had inadvertently deepened its involvement.”28

The argument for direct military intervention was based on the alleged aggression of North Vietnam, which continued to be cited as an example of Communist bad faith. US officials always claimed that the National Liberation Front, the so-called Viet Cong, was merely the southern arm of North Vietnam and was controlled by Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital. In fact, the NLF was founded and sustained as a southern organization of resistance to Diem—a CIA report of December 1964 confirmed the NLF’s indigenous origins at that late date.29 Butterfield, in his chapter on the origins of the insurgency in the Pentagon Papers account, confirms that “the war began largely as a rebellion in the South against the increasingly oppressive and corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.”30 He goes on to argue that North Vietnam was “concentrated on its internal development.” The cadre members who remained in the south after the division of the country were ordered to engage only in “political struggle.” They evidently believed that they would eventually wrest control of the country through elections or through the collapse of the Diem regime from its own internal weakness.31

In any case, the Pentagon study makes it clear that the provocation for war initiated with the Americans: “an elaborate program of covert military operations against the state of North Vietnam” began in February 1964.”32 Covert operations included U-2 spy plane reconnaissance, the kidnapping of people for intelligence information, parachuting psyche war and sabotage teams into North Vietnam, commando raids to blow up bridges, and the bombardment of coastal installations by PT boats.33 Bombing raids that began in Laos against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao (Communist guerrilla) troops were a prelude to the bombing of North Vietnam by the Johnson administration “to bring more military pressure against North Vietnam.”34 The bombing of North Vietnam increased as the NLF rebellion was prosecuted successfully in the South.35 The inability of the post-coup Saigon government under General Khanh to compete politically with Hanoi negated the possibility of a political settlement between the Vietnamese themselves, because it was believed that “it would result in a Communist take-over and the destruction of the American position in South Vietnam.36 What American officials and politicians insisted was the North Vietnamese “aggression” that prevented a peaceful settlement must be seen in this context.37

The pretext for the hot war came with the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964), in which two US Navy destroyers in North Vietnamese waters, on a spying mission for the NSA, were said to have been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. A top secret analysis of the incident completed in 2000, however, “concluded that the second attack, the one actually used to justify the war, never took place.” Instead, NSA officials withheld 90% of the information on the incident from the Johnson administration officials, except for what “supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers.” The alleged attack, based on this misinformation, led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which justified President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on North Vietnam without a formal declaration of war from Congress, as required by the US Constitution.38

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed on August 7, 1964, unanimously in the House and with the only two dissenting votes in the Senate cast by Wayne Morse and Ernest Greuning, who would later become leading opponents of the war. The resolution gave the executive broad authority to act and had no time limit, but it gave misleading assurances that the US would not escalate its involvement. Senator Morse said the US had provoked the attacks on the ships in the Tonkin Gulf by escorting South Vietnamese boats too close to the shore, charged the government with a “snowjob” about the attacks on northern coastal installations, and correctly foresaw disastrous consequences. Historian Robert D. Schulzinger notes that between August 1964 and July 1965, the US passed the “point of no return” in Vietnam, with the role of troops changing from advisors to combatants and the number of troops doubling.”39

The shift from advisors to combatants is one way of officially dating the beginning of the American Vietnam War. In March 1965, General Westmoreland, in what Stanley Karnow calls “one of the crucial decisions of the war,” requested a detachment of 3,500 Marines to be based in Da Nang, purportedly to protect the air base, which was the beginning of his repeated requests for more men. The build-up would reach almost 200,000 men by the end of that year. This first contingent of American ground forces (i.e. not counting the Special Forces units and other personnel already acting as advisors to the South Vietnamese Army) stirred up no political opposition because President Johnson presented it as a temporary expedient.40 In accordance with Johnson’s newly aggressive posture, the era of the US advisors to South Vietnam in the first half of the 1960s therefore drew to a close, and with the arrival of these combat troops a new phase of the war began with optimistic but generally ineffective operations both in the air and on the ground, which lasted until the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968, when the earlier optimism began to be replaced by serious doubt.

General Maxwell Taylor, a commander in the Korean War, wanted these early combat troops to maintain merely a defensive role, authorizing patrols into a surrounding but limited area, but General William C. Westmoreland, an administrative commander with little experience in combat leadership, had no confidence in the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) and insisted that US forces actively seek out and engage the enemy—the notorious “Search and Destroy” strategy, which prevailed from 1965 forward. In one of few major battles of the war, the Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division successfully fought the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) at the Ia Drang Valley, with heavy casualties on both sides. Thereafter, the NVA and NLF forces would avoid large battles with American forces, owing to the superiority of American firepower and air support in such confrontations, preferring to engage their enemy using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, in which they were successful. On the American side, punitive excursions beyond the original perimeter soon escalated, accompanied by annual incremental increases in troop levels. The “Americanization” phase of the war had begun in earnest.

In the 1980s, conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan attempted to “rewrite” the history of the Vietnam War as a noble cause doomed by faint-hearted policies that ensured that the US would not prevail, a notion that many military men and civilians would claim thereafter, expressed in the popular phrase “they wouldn’t let us win.” What they evidently thought had been lacking was a policy that resembled Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s notorious advice to “bomb ‘em back to the stone age.” Given the international pressures of the period, however, of which Johnson and his advisors were well aware, unrestricted warfare waged on a civilian population was never an option. During the 1964 presidential campaign, the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater had talked about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, making the incumbent Johnson appear so restrained by comparison that the latter was actually elected as the “peace candidate.”41 Johnson, however, soon gave into the pressures of the civilian advisors he had inherited from Kennedy and waged a more aggressive war to achieve the long desired but elusive military victory, including, one month before the landing of the first ground forces, a long-range bombing campaign, “Operation Rolling Thunder,” designed, in the expression of the period, “to bring North Vietnam to its knees.” In their persistence in the use of bombing to secure submission, however, the US leaders seriously underestimated Vietnamese endurance. Stanley Karnow wrote that President Johnson “eventually failed because he misjudged the enemy’s capacity to withstand pain, believing there was a threshold to their endurance.” 42

General LeMay, Defense Secretary McNamara, and presidential advisor Walt W. Rostow firmly believed in the effectiveness of long-range bombing to win the war. Significantly, all three men had participated directly in the long-range bombing campaign of Germany during World War II: McNamara had masterminded the campaign, LeMay had commanded it, and Rostow had selected targets. And yet, so-called “precision bombing” during that war had a poor record: the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that both civilian resistance and German industrial production actually seemed to increase after the bombing. It was the inaccuracy of this strategy that eventually led to “area bombing,” which increased civilian casualties, and, as Paul Fussell has suggested, led “inevitably, as intensification overrode scruples, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”43 The lone dissenter among Johnson’s civilian advisors was George Ball, who had apparently learned something from his participation in the bombing campaign of the earlier war. As a result of his dissension and persistent opposition to escalating the Vietnam War, however, Ball became increasingly isolated from Johnson’s “hawks” and from the president himself.

The other civilian advisors only disagreed with General LeMay’s call for the unrestricted nature of the bombing of the previous war. They supported bombing but insisted on selected targets to avoid population centers and the international censure that would surely follow. They mistakenly thought, however, that bombing would—again, in the face of evidence from the last war, which suggested that such attacks actually hardened the will of the enemy—weaken the morale of the civilian population and make Ho Chi Minh give in, or at least negotiate a settlement on favorable terms. The strategy of a limited bombing campaign would also have the advantage of being easier to control from Washington, where the targets were actually selected on a daily basis by Johnson and his civilian advisors.44

Air power would turn out to be militarily effective only toward the end of the US intervention, in the “Linebacker” campaign (1972) ordered by Nixon in response to the NVA’s major three-pronged offensive against South Vietnam after the withdrawal of nearly half a million US troops. Without the American presence on the ground, the NVA commander, General Giap (the victor of Dien Bien Phu), who had successfully waged the war for the north up to that time, finally adopted “the conventional, large-unit tactics that American air-forces are highly trained to counter.”45 This more unrestricted bombing campaign, however, which illegally extended the war into Cambodia, only temporarily saved South Vietnam from collapse. Despite earlier fears of losing prestige by abandoning the intervention in Vietnam, the bombing aroused, as critics had anticipated earlier, worldwide condemnation and accusations of genocide.

In 1967, a large operation involving thousands of American and South Vietnamese forces, called “Operation Cedar Falls,” was launched with the aim of finding the long suspected headquarters of the NVA.46 It failed in that elusive objective but it did uncover an extensive underground network of tunnels in the area called the Iron Triangle, which revealed the extent of the military resistance to Diem in the south. In the same year, McNamara testified to a Senate subcommittee that the bombing raids had not achieved the twin objectives of reducing the flow of supplies from north to south and undermining the morale of the North Vietnamese, which were their original justification.

The turning-point of the war has been seen by most commentators as the Tet Offensive of January 31, 1968, the all-out NVA and NLF surprise attack on South Vietnamese and American government installations in Saigon and other cities that was, according to historian David Schmitz, “arguably, the most important event of the Vietnam War,”47 for it changed the American public’s perception of the possibility for victory and forced the US government to reevaluate. At great human cost to the oppositional forces—more than 80,000 of their troops were killed or captured—units from both north and south drove into the seven largest cities of South Vietnam and thirty provincial capitals from the Delta to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) but were eventually repulsed after savage fighting. The Tet offensive was designed by the North Vietnamese planners to instigate a general insurrection among the South Vietnamese population, in which mission it failed. On the other side, the outcome was regarded by the US press as an American military victory but a psychological and political defeat.48 In the end, Halberstam insists, “it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam; it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy.”49

The year of the Tet Offensive revealed that the war was tearing American society apart. In March, Lieutenant William Calley led Charlie Company of the Americal Division’s 11th Brigade into the group of villages known as My Lai and perpetrated the massacre of up to four-hundred civilians, an atrocity that shocked the American public. The general feeling was: how could our boys behave like Nazis? President Johnson, buffeted by a long series of setbacks, announced that he would not seek re-election. Violence escalated at home as protests against the war became ever more numerous and aggressive. In August, a group of antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago was savagely set upon by Mayor Daly’s police as the nation watched on television. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke out against the war and encouraged a united effort by civil rights and antiwar organizations, was assassinated in April. And Robert Kennedy, who was expected to step in as the Democratic candidate to bring a halt to the war, was assassinated in June.

In November, Richard Nixon, with only 43% of the vote, was elected president, promising an “honorable” end to the war (as Eisenhower’s Vice-President back in 1954, Nixon had wanted to send American troops to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu, an idea that was squelched by Eisenhower). Instead of withdrawing from the war, Nixon instead extended it for several more years, undermining the Paris peace talks by sending a secret emissary to reassure the South Vietnamese government and by ordering the covert bombing of Cambodia to destroy enemy supply routes and base camps, which set off nationwide student protests. During the Christmas season of 1972, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in the most intense campaign of its kind ever, again setting off protests all over the country. Nixon’s rhetoric of “peace with honor” could not conceal the continuing American goal of a non-Communist Vietnam, essential to his chief advisor Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik global strategy.50 It was, however, secret negotiations between Kissinger, who would become Nixon’s Secretary of State, and North Vietnam’s Le Duc, which began in 1970, that would eventually lead to the withdrawal of US troops in 1973.

With the implementation of Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” in which military responsibility was handed back to South Vietnam, defeat was virtually inevitable, and in fact came two years later, with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, followed by the reunification of the country by the North Vietnamese military and civilian authorities. By that time, the war had claimed over 57,000 American, and an estimated one to two million Vietnamese and other Indochinese, lives. The first article of the Paris Agreement, which formalized the withdrawal, stated: “The United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam.”51 That is to say, nearly twenty years later and all the attendant deaths, suffering, and costs, the United States was back to square one.

Ultimately, American policy in Southeast Asia was based on a misunderstanding of historical, political, and military realities. Despite the fears of American leaders, the press, and the public, there had never been a global Communist expansion controlled by Moscow. As Hobsbawm has argued, “there is no real evidence that [the U.S.S.R.] planned to push forward the frontiers of communism by revolution until the mid 1970s,” that is, by the time that the Vietnam War had ended.52

The war had far-reaching political, as well as economic and social, consequences. It divided the Democratic Party—with two presidents from that party leading the nation into Vietnam—to such an extent that it never recovered its reputation since the 1930s as the progressive party of working people. The economic boom after World War II ended in 1963 with the global oil crisis, but also owing to the immense cost of the Vietnam War, which resulted in part in the downward spiral of working people’s incomes that continues until today. The social and historical significance of the war continued to be felt long afterward.53 The American public’s confidence in its government had been dealt a mortal blow, which gave an impulse to the “New Right” in subsequent years and the candidacies of men like Ronald Reagan, who actually campaigned for government office on anti-government platforms.

ii. The Soldiers

In contrast to historical works, the imaginative literature of the war has focused on its soldiers, most of whom were ignorant of, or indifferent to, the momentous events that have been described in the previous section. More than two million Americans eventually went to Vietnam, only a small part of whom actually saw combat. Robert D. Shulzinger claims that the combatants made up no more than 20% of the US forces at any time, with 80% comprising supply and support personnel, but most of the fiction and memoirs written by ex-soldiers are, not surprisingly, by combat veterans. The number of women estimated to have served in Vietnam constitutes a small minority, between 8,000 and 15,000.54 The fighting men had an average age of nineteen, as opposed to that of twenty-six for the combatants of World War II, and over 60% of all the men killed were between seventeen and twenty-one.55 These youths came primarily (80%) from poor or working-class neighborhoods, with a proportionally greater number coming from rural or small-town environments.56

In his important sociological study of these soldiers, Working-Class War (1993)—from which these statistics are quoted—Christian Appy has demonstrated that the class-division between those who would fight the war and those who would protest it was in fact ensured by government policy. The reserve manpower for wars was historically designed to be made up of men in the Army Reserves and the National Guard, but neither of these groups, which are made up of older men from more secure socio-economic environments, was called up for active service in Vietnam: out of a million reservists and national-guardsmen, only 37,000 were mobilized and only 15,000 sent to Vietnam. In fact, many men tried to enlist in the National Guard as a way of avoiding the draft and being sent to war, including the (later) Republican President, George W. Bush, who, with his father’s influence, was admitted into the Air National Guard in Texas. Restrictive admission policies to these units were a way of ensuring that the underprivileged strata of society would not be able to avoid being drafted. Besides, as Appy argues, going into the army after high-school, or even before graduating, was perceived by working-class youths as much an expected and unavoidable part of their lives as going to college was for those of their middle-class counterparts.57

The US government apparently wanted to maintain the war at a low social profile. Medical deferments, for example, were easier to obtain by the more socially and economically privileged classes, and college students were exempted from military service through a policy of draft-deferments for those who were able to maintain a certain grade-point average in their classes.58 As the war ground on and the need for manpower increased, these socially-selective policies were not relaxed; on the contrary, the government continued to resort to the underprivileged, its primary replacement depot. Secretary McNamara’s program known as “Project 100,000” was designed to call up an additional 300,000 men who had been previously rejected from the armed forces because of low test scores. Through this program, youths of the underclass (80% high-school dropouts, 40% African Americans), would be given the opportunity to acquire employable skills and, incidentally, go to war in the place of students and reservists. These men did go to war (half of all the men who had entered the program did so, more than a third directly into combat), and they were both court-martialed and killed at twice the usual rate without acquiring the promised skills.59

It is notable that the patriotic motives (stop Communism, promote freedom) cited as the nation’s justification for going to war were admitted by only 11% of the enlisted men who volunteered in 1964 (a percentage that dropped to 6.1% four years later, when the war was more unpopular). Appy lists a variety of other motivations, social and cultural, that were given by the men who joined the armed forces: a) escape (bad home, mean streets, the police); b) a strong need, however undefined, for self-affirmation; c) solidarity with high-school and working-class buddies; d) a job-prospect in a future perceived as generally hopeless; e) assimilation of the media culture (especially war movies); f) pressure from fathers, uncles, and other men who had fought in previous wars; and g) a traditional cultural assumption of war as a rite-of-passage to manhood.60 It can be readily perceived that these various motivations may be interlocking joint influences, for example, (a), (b) and (d), or (e), (f) and (g).

Once these men, whatever their true motivations, were in the Armed Forces, they were taught, as part of the military’s indoctrination program, that they were helping an Asian nation to resist Communism, preserve democracy, and protect freedom. Their actual war experiences, however, contradicted those expressed aims at every turn. Communism turned out to have widespread popular support in both North and South Vietnam, even while the soldiers were told they were saving South Vietnam from Communist aggression. Accordingly, in the fiction of the war, the need to stop Communism tends to be invoked only by officers and “lifers,” as career soldiers were contemptuously called in the Army by the others, as if a career in the Army was a life sentence.

Soldiers newly arrived “in-country” learned that South Vietnamese civilians were often Vietcong or Vietcong sympathizers, and they naturally began to ask themselves why the South Vietnamese should be saved from an enemy with which they were in such obvious sympathy. Even worse, there was no training, or, for that matter, no accurate method for telling the difference between friend and foe, a circumstance that greatly increased the American soldier’s anxiety and suspicion towards his supposed allies.61 While the obstinate silence of the civilians whom the troops were supposed to be protecting was an important advantage enjoyed by the NLF (Vietcong), it was a source of constant frustration to the American soldiers trying to glean information about its intentions, whereabouts, and movements.

Given these circumstances, the veterans who emerged from this war were, in a number of important ways, unlike those of previous wars. There was a high rate of desertion. For those men who had terminated their tours, as many as 70,000 suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.), a condition that in previous wars had been known as “shell shock” or “combat fatigue.” In addition, material and psychological problems resulting from the shortage of jobs in a less responsive economy, as well as an often hostile civilian reception, made it more difficult for these returnees to readjust to civilian life. Citing one indicator of social and psychological maladjustment to civilian life, Walter Capps claims that there were as many suicides among veterans from 1975 to 1990 as combat deaths in the war itself.62

For his part, Samuel Hynes has called the labeling of Vietnam veterans as victims one of the war’s necessary myths:

The story has been absorbed into the Vietnam story for the same reason that all war myths are accepted—because it gives events a comprehensible shape that is consistent with the myth of the war itself—the Bad War that was lost. Because the war was wrong, because children were killed and a country was devastated, men who fought there were devastated too.63

In support of his hypothesis of the myth of the veteran-victim, Hynes goes on to quote statistics showing that most men who went to Vietnam were not damaged by the experience and so their stories “have not entered the canon of Vietnam memoirs.”64 But one may legitimately ask how many men from this undamaged majority were actual combatants. Apart from the difficulty of assessing psychological damage, especially of men who do not overtly complain of it, the acceptance by veterans of their experience is perhaps true of any war, but it is also true that a great many Americans who fought in World War II and were supported by virtually the entire nation were also psychologically damaged—more, in fact, than were actually killed.

Many people, including veterans of earlier wars, have scorned the Vietnam vets as “losers” and “crybabies,” but the distress of these men was real and may partly be explained by the unique circumstances of the war. Psychological research has shown that killing in war actually causes more distress than the fear of being killed or seeing other men killed. General S.L.A. Marshall, the US Army’s chief military historian during World War II, found that the majority of men in combat did not even fire their weapons: “Fear of killing, rather than being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual,” Marshall wrote in his influential study Men Against Fire (1947), citing cultural upbringing and religious education against the taking of human life as the cause.65

Marshall’s findings were incorporated by the US Army into new training techniques to teach soldiers how to perceive their enemies as “targets” rather than as people and therefore be more willing to fire upon them. Trainees were also taught to fire at an area target like bushes or clumps of trees, rather than recognizable individuals, a technique facilitated by the newer, fully automatic weapons.66 The revised training regime was successful: by the time of the Vietnam War, as many as 90% of the men were firing their weapons. The technical success, however, had a psychological price: a study of veterans (1999) found that soldiers who had killed, or believed they had killed, people in combat had higher rates of P.T.S.D.67

Another way of making soldiers more willing to kill their declared enemies is through demonization, a technique that is more effective when dealing with a racial “other.” The Japanese during World War II, for example, were represented in propaganda as sub-human and so especially worthy of being killed. The Vietnamese enemy were subject to similar perceptions: dehumanizing epithets such as “gooks,” “dinks,” “slopes” and the like were routinely used among soldiers (as can be constantly seen in the fictional literature), and, like the Japanese in the former war, the Vietnamese enemy was seen as treacherous and fanatical, but there may be other cultural factors at work here that go beyond prejudice and racism. Jonathan Shay sees the roots of the demonization of the enemy in Biblical texts, using as illustration I Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath, which he argues shows David’s lack of respect for his enemy. Shay’s contrasts this Biblical text with the duel of Hector and Ajax, in Homer’s Iliad, where neither warrior shows disrespect for the other.68

A great deal of blame has been assigned to American soldiers for morally despicable acts committed in Vietnam. The mother of Paul Meadlo, one of the men who participated in the My Lai massacre, is said to have complained: “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer”. Meadlo was ordered by his platoon leader, Lt. Calley, to open fire on a group of civilians, and they both stood about ten feet from the victims, blazing away on full automatic: “It was pure carnage, with heads shot off along with limbs…” After a few minutes, Meadlo was emotionally unable to continue. Only a few children who had been protected by their mothers remained alive, but “Calley opened fire again, killing them one by one.”69

Without exculpating Calley, who led the massacre, or the men who followed him (some of them refused), it should be more widely understood that, historically, evil has been perpetrated by every army upon both POWs and civilians in virtually every war. In World War II, atrocities committed by American soldiers remained unknown to the general public because reports and images of such acts were censored by the government propaganda apparatus, which, in the absence of television cameras and independent reporting, was more effective in controlling images and information from battle zones.

It is also noteworthy that the GIs in Vietnam have assumed a greater share of responsibility for their actions than veterans of previous wars, a point that becomes clear when one compares the fiction and memoirs of the two world wars with those of Vietnam. In his discussion of Larry Heinemann’s novel Close Quarters (1977), in which the characters engage in atrocities, Tobey C. Herzog asks if the responsibility for such acts belongs to the individuals, what he calls “the evil within,” or the war environment, “the evil without.” He concludes that the issue is evaded in this novel as well as in others, but adds that “evidence in Heinemann’s novel points toward an environmental cause.”70 Cornelius Cronin has argued in his discussion of atrocities that, contrary to the external cause theory, in this particular aspect the Vietnam veterans may be differentiated from their counterparts in earlier wars:

There is a clear sense that evil and good are inextricably mixed in war, and that soldiers must see themselves as individuals capable of acting and therefore capable of performing evil actions. World War I and II soldiers tended to see themselves as passive, as being acted upon by the war and their societies.71

There is a consensus among commentators that another important reason for the distress of the Vietnam veterans, as compared to those men who had undergone the horrors of combat in earlier wars, is the awareness of the Vietnam veterans that they had been singled out and that their sacrifices were not appreciated because they were pointless. It is worth noting that during World War II, nearly every able-bodied man in the United States, 12 million in all, from every social class and occupational group, went into the armed forces. There was a popular perception, Paul Fussell writes, that World War II was the most democratic war ever fought:

Some readers will remember the Vietnam antiwar slogan “What if there was a war and nobody went?” Well, in 1939-45 there was a war and everybody went, or nearly everybody: all classes, all races, both sexes. Civilians, too, worked, suffered, sometimes fought, died. For once in human history, a war was fought that was everybody’s war.72

These soldiers had the full support of a civilian population that agreed with their president that the war was necessary and just, requiring a united effort by all Americans, but the case of the Vietnam combatants was markedly different. In the oral and written accounts, the men in Vietnam constantly register bitter complaints about what they consider Vietnamese ingratitude. But as Frances FitzGerald has argued, after the US had set up a military dictatorship in Vietnam, defended it against all native resistance, killed or maimed thousands of Vietnamese, made thousands more homeless and destroyed their livelihoods, it was unrealistic to expect the Vietnamese to feel gratitude, especially when it was felt that the Americans were using Vietnamese soil to fight a war that was really directed against the USSR and China.73 Such geopolitical matters, however, were of little concern to the fighting men, who were misled about their role as liberators, since they often harbored in their minds the stories of fathers and uncles and the heroic cinematic images (such as the often seen films of American troops marching and riding triumphantly into Paris) of World War II.

In their disillusionment, these soldiers came to realize that instead of liberators they were regarded by both the Vietnamese people and an increasing segment of their own people as brutal invaders, because once in the field they were often ordered by superiors to do things that resulted in the destruction of villages and the terror of the civilian population—hardly the most effective way to win hearts and minds. Such acts generated negative feelings toward the American soldiers, which were often returned with interest. As extreme reactions, outrage and anti-Vietnamese feeling could result in atrocities. By this logic, it is no accident that the My Lai massacre, the worst recorded atrocity, occurred in 1968, the year of the highest number of American casualties.

Another factor contributing to increased stress was lack of motivation. In the limiting circumstance of the one-year tour, the men naturally wanted to be in the field for the shortest time possible to reduce their chances of being killed or wounded. As Ward Just wrote: “The principal criticism of the twelve-month tour was that it tended to institutionalize impermanence. Men in Vietnam were transients, traveling salesmen of war and democratic processes.”74 Their adversaries, however, knew that they were in the war for the duration and were far more ideologically motivated. The American combatants in Vietnam were in fact aware of their own lack of motivation compared to the apparent dedication, staying-power, and moral purpose of their adversaries. As one man put it, “we were playing games and they were fighting for keeps.”75 As Fox Butterfield has described the enemy, they were

men who were well-disciplined enough to march down the [Ho Chi Minh] trail even while thinking that for the vast majority of them it would be a one-way trip. They were men who subsisted for weeks at a time on little better than a handful of rice and some roasted salt. They were bombed by B-52s that fly so high they could neither see nor hear them until the bombs exploded. Once in the South they were not able to send or receive mail; and if they died, their families were not notified for years afterwards, if ever.76

What the men of the revolutionary forces lacked in sophisticated weaponry they made up for in commitment, as can be seen by comparing their combat effectiveness with that of the far less motivated soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), who fought well only when they were protecting their native villages. Political lessons were as important a component of the NLF and NVA soldier’s life as military training. Communism was taught as, and perceived to be, a political system that offered greater material prosperity and justice for the Vietnamese people as a whole, as well as liberation from foreign rule, a notion that is much more plausible to soldiers fighting on their own soil. In the fictional narratives, American soldiers are often represented as well aware of the enemy’s commitment, as seen in this dialogue between two “grunts” (infantry soldiers):

“They really come at you.”

“They’re hard-core.”

“They come right at you. And they keep coming until you kill them…They ain’t never gonna stop, are they, Pablo?”

“We’ll never stop them.”77

In this aspect—a much greater individual commitment to winning the war—the soldiers of the NVA and NLF were, ironically, akin to the Allied soldiers of World War II who were the cultural touchstone of the young American soldiers who went to Vietnam. The notion of the necessity of decisively defeating the enemy before going home, ingrained in the combatants of World War II, was regarded as hopeless by their American counterparts in Vietnam. With the lack of any territorial gains—those defined “lines” that moved slowly but relentlessly forward toward Germany and Japan, the enemy homelands—how could progress toward victory be measured? By the staff, it was measured by the “body count,” a consequence of General Westmoreland’s declaration that the conflict was a war of “attrition.” The sole concern of the lowly American soldier in Vietnam therefore was to avoid becoming a statistic by lasting out his individual tour of duty—exactly one year (thirteen months for Marines). “How many days?” became the overriding question, from which arose the frequently evoked superstitions and comic cult practices (jokes, calendars) of the “short-timer,” the man who had a only short period remaining before being recycled back to the US. The short-timer phenomenon may have actually increased anxiety because it ensured a greater degree of individualism and lack of cohesion in the unit. No one wanted to die when he had only a short time to return to the “World.”

American soldiers, who were well trained and equipped, are reported to have fought well up to 1968, when the suffering and frustrations of taking part in a war they realized they could not win begin to take their toll. Combatants felt keenly the futility of a war whose progress was based on body counts rather than conquered territory, and they understood the tactical weakness of search-and-destroy missions, which drew fire from a well-concealed enemy on the ground, who could then be shelled by artillery or bombed, strafed, rocketed and napalmed by US aircraft. Being used as “bait” to draw enemy fire was, unsurprisingly, deeply resented.

Once the troop withdrawals began in 1969, the continuation of the war became even more pointless to those fighting it. Discipline broke down in some units and became weaker overall, as seen by the increase in the shirking of patrols and “fragging” attacks on officers (2000 reported incidents, in which, for example, a fragmentation grenade is thrown under an officer’s bunk), as well as milder forms of protest like the wearing of peace signs and helmet graffiti. Evidence of relaxed discipline may be also seen in attitudes (racial tensions) and practices (drug use) imported from the US. A large number of men smoked Cannabis both on and off duty, and a significant number (an estimated 10%) were doing hard drugs like heroin to bear the pressure.78 These numbers suggest that the military was now manned by draftees who were not ready to die for what they perceived as an abandoned cause.79

iii. The Narrative Literature of the War

The literature of the Vietnam War has been to a great extent the production of the men who fought it and reflects the conclusions about the American soldiers reached in the previous section. This literary production, in all its variety, constitutes the “American Literature of the Vietnam War,” as Stewart O’Nan has properly called it.80 It is worth recalling that the war is called the American War by the Vietnamese. There are now a growing number of works written by Vietnamese-Americans that are taking their place within the corpus of Asian-American literature, as well as imaginative works written by non-Asians about Vietnamese immigrant communities in the United States.81

The most notable fictional work written by a Vietnamese American is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s superbly written The Sympathizer (2015), about the fall of Saigon and its aftermath. The unnamed narrator is a “spook,” but “one able to see any issue from both sides.” His narrative is a “confession” to his Communist superiors, written in a re-education camp, about his time served as the aide-de-camp and intelligence officer to an ARVN general during the time in which he was actually an infiltrated NVA spy. The novel shows him to be sympathetic to both the cause of North Vietnam and the plight of the people of the defeated south, as well as a close observer of American politics and culture.82

The radical critic Don Ringnalda has argued against the possibility of any narrative representation of the war “getting it right” because of the ineffectiveness of any master narrative to explain such a complex event. This may be true, but every narrative adds something to the whole picture and most fictional narratives of war, especially those written by subalterns or enlisted men have always focused on a limited field of action. Ringnalda views these narratives as simultaneously attracting and repelling. Aestheticising war is perhaps impossible to avoid completely despite the depiction of its horrors (cf. the Iliad), but readers must reflect—something that is more difficult for filmgoers, who are willing voyeurs—on war as spectacle versus war as historical moment.

Most of the narratives discussed here focus on the American soldier, but there is a broader perspective in the earlier literary works that reflect the period before the United States became the overwhelming presence in Vietnam, as well as in the later works that reflect social and cultural concerns that go beyond the war itself. Although the Vietnamese people are explored in the exile and immigrant literatures mentioned above, as well as in the plethora of historical and cultural studies that followed the war, in the American novels, autobiographies, and memoirs of the war discussed in this book the Vietnamese tend to be stereotyped. As O’Nan puts it: “In work after work, Vietnam and the Vietnamese are merely backdrops for the drama of America confronting itself.”83 The anti-war feminist writer Lynne Hanley states the situation more bluntly:

…virtually all our well-known representations of Vietnam in literature and film ask us, first and foremost, to pity the white American soldier—to share his guilt, to weigh his wounds, to forgive his degradation, to understand his loyalties, to admire his endurance, to appreciate his betrayal, to recognize “the superior spiritual status” of the American soldier “trapped by history, dragged down into the animal mud” of Vietnam.”84

Hanley’s assessment is harsh, but with the exceptions discussed in Renny Christopher’s book on exile narratives, it is undoubtedly true. At the same time, one might ask what these unprofessional soldier-writers were supposed to write about if not their own experiences, and it seems that the indictment Hanley makes of the American literature and films for their “shockingly thin version of the Vietnamese” in the representations is not a condemnation of the soldier-writers but of American society and culture as a whole. As she observes, and as Frances FitzGerald shows again and again in her book Fire in the Lake (1970), the failure to understand the Vietnamese “was very close to the heart of our problems in that country.”85

Because most of the war narratives were written by veterans, they have also been included in what is called the “literature of trauma,” thus connecting them with survivor narratives from other wars and other kinds of traumatic experiences, a grouping that makes explicit the status of the veteran as victim. Although certainly not all veterans would classify themselves in this way, the classification has the merit of showing how their narratives are “the product of three coincident features: the experience of trauma, the urge to bear witness, and a sense of community.”86 Through their narratives, these soldier-writers have borne witness to, and, to some extent, come to terms with their traumas while at the same time establishing common ground—a community—with other survivors.87

Remembering also remains an important experience for the culture as a whole, especially American culture, which tends, like other cultures, to mythologize its past. Ringnalda, for example, complains that

much of America’s memory of Vietnam is on the [Catch-22’s Snowden’s] hip wound inflicted on the proud myths of the City on a Hill. And sad to say, much of its energy is focused on restoring those myths. Too often the radical wound goes unattended, perhaps out of collective and in individual fear that it’s beyond treatment.88

Ringnalda cites novelist Tim O’Brien, who told a group of students that the First Gulf War, so soon after Vietnam, proved that the latter war never happened: “History and memory had been air-brushed out of existence.”89 The misinterpretation of history can be a way of reinterpreting reality, and it has not been confined to the war in Vietnam. World War II was a horrific historical event that has been relentlessly mythologized as the “Good War” ever since its close in 1945. As Fussell, a student of the culture of the two world wars, has written, “America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and thus been able to use such understanding to re-interpret and redefine the national reality.”90 Although some commentators have drawn connections between American myths and attempts to explain—or explain away—the war, Marilyn B. Young argues that the war is too large an event in our consciousness to be able to will it to disappear:

What militarists deplore as the Vietnam syndrome can better be understood as a relatively unique event in American history: an inability to forget, a resistance to the everyday workings of historical amnesia, despite the serious and coordinated efforts of the government and much of the press to “heal the wounds” of the war by encouraging such forgetting.91

One motive for this will to forgetfulness is that until Vietnam, defeat in war, with the exception of the American South, had not been a part of American historical experience. Indeed, the collective trauma of defeat seemed to be so strong that the Vietnam War was forgotten—repressed—for a decade. But it refused to go away, insisting on being recovered because of the traumatic collective consciousness of national defeat.

In the meantime, historians, social scientists, literary critics, and other scholars have attempted to explain the war for their own purposes. Here, as always in American history, American literature has played an essential critical role in interpreting the collective past. In Philip K. Jason’s view, “the imaginative literature of the Vietnam War, broadly defined, participates—whether overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously—in a struggle for the national memory.”92 Another important critic, Milton J. Bates, also reminds us how literature may play different interpretive roles: “the war story, like war itself, is politics by other means.”93 Bates argues that other critics who have written lucidly about the literature of the war (e.g. Myers, Melling, Capps, Martin), have shown how popular culture, especially film, “endorsed President Reagan’s attempt to make Vietnam a ‘noble cause’,” while the more serious literature has “resisted the conservative drift of popular myths.”94 In this study of the Vietnam War literature, I shall pay more attention to the serious literature of the war but also discuss a few popular works that mythologize the war and its American participants.

The memory inscribed in the fiction and memoirs of the war is a necessary and important part of this work of historical recovery. The culture of the past, as Northrop Frye once said, is not only the memory of mankind but also of our own buried life. Politicians like Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and George Bush, as well as their conservative epigones, have done their best to bury Vietnam, with its lingering smell of defeat—defeat being perceived as somehow un-American. As one of the soldier-writers, Philip Caputo, has written: “Our self-image as a progressive, virtuous, and triumphant people exempt from the burdens and tragedies of history came apart in Vietnam, and we had no way to integrate the war or its consequences into our collective and individual consciousness.”95 The attempted conservative transformation of the historical experience of the war into myth has already taken place in popular fiction and film, in which patriotic distortions serve to mythologize the war’s sad realities.96

It is my contention in this book that the serious literature of the war has refused that time-honored cultural move. As Hynes has written, the Vietnam War

lingers in American minds like the memory of an illness, a kind of fever that weakened the country until its people were divided and its cause was lost. That fever is in the narratives Americans have written about the war, and it makes their soldiers’ tales different from the tales of other modern wars—not simply because the United States lost, though that had not happened before, but because in the loss there was humiliation and bitterness and the burden of complicity in a nation’s moral failure.97

The American literature of the Vietnam War is dominated by narratives, fictional and non-fictional,98 although the distinction between fictional and non-fictional has often been called into question in those very narratives, as will be seen in Chapter Six on war memoirs and some of the later chapters. The more conventional combat narratives, like those of the two world wars, recall and recreate characters from the military rank-and-file, the soldiers who actually fought, forming therefore a literature of experience that maintains thematic continuity with the narratives of previous wars, a theme developed in Chapter Eight on combat realism. A character from a fictional work by Tim O’Brien, one of the most important novelists of the war, recognizes this connection in his novel Going After Cacciatto (1978), when the narrator refuses to concede that the elemental experience of the men in Vietnam was distinct from that of previous wars:

War kills and maims and rips up the land and makes orphans and widows. These are the things of war. Any war. So when I say there is nothing new to tell about Nam, I’m saying it was just a war like every war. Politics be damned. Sociology be damned…I’m saying that the feel of war is the same in Nam or Okinawa—the emotions are the same, the same fundamental stuff is seen and remembered.99

The insistence on the experience of war as universal, a claim made by so many previous war novels, holds true with respect to the individual soldier under the stress of combat, the focus of many of these works, including those examined here. When a man is under fire, it hardly matters to him who is doing the firing or the shelling, or why it is taking place, but it is also true that wars qua historical events are significantly different and are experienced in different ways. The motivations and concerns of the combat infantryman in any war are rarely a question of global politics, but the men who fought in World War II knew, even when they did not want to be there, that they had to win the war before they could go home. The cynicism of the men who fought in Vietnam, on the other hand, is closer to that of the combatants of World War I, who also experienced individual and collective disillusionment from their participation in a kind of war for which they had not been prepared. The soldiers in Vietnam often suspected that their war would never be won and that their sacrifices were therefore in vain. The point is succinctly made by O’Brien in the very same novel cited above, in speaking of the soldiers in Vietnam (“They”), with allusions to those of World War II as a meaningful contrast:

They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory of satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause.100

Not only the tone but the structure of the narrative works was to a certain extent pre-determined. Because the soldier’s individual tour of duty lasted a single year, the narrative trajectory of the war narratives dealing with individual experience has been determined by this time bracket. These works have a typical narrative arc.101 They begin with the new soldier arriving in Vietnam—with his prewar and training experiences either presented as a kind of prologue or inserted later into the body of the text as flashbacks—struggling to adapt to the disorienting atmosphere of the war, confronting his fear at his first taste of battle, gradually leaving behind his New Guy status to become an accepted member of the group, and, after experiencing hardships, horrors, and even some joy, ends with his boarding the “Freedom Bird,” the plane that will take him back to the “World,” as soldiers called the States, home, or civilian life. In many accounts, however, the story does not end there, as the “World” itself has become a place that seems alien to the returning vet. Chronologically, the part of this master-narrative that takes place in Vietnam is conveniently contained within the year-long in-country time bracket. Chronologically, it may therefore be contrasted with the World War II narrative accounts that cover an individual’s experiences during a single battle, or a campaign, or even the entire war.

The individual narrative of Vietnam can also be seen as forming a part of an overall historical narrative within which the individual works may be read. In a widely cited bibliographical commentary (1987), John Clark Pratt divided the narrative fiction of Vietnam into a “tragic drama” of five acts, including prologue and epilogue, a scheme that has the virtues of making evident the fundamental historical grounding of the narratives and allowing the insertion of a great number of works. It is characteristic of the novels, Pratt writes, that they “have as their crisis actions the events of a major political, social, or military upheaval,”102 for example, the assassination of Diem, the Tet offensive, a major military operation, or the fall of Saigon. It has been suggested more recently that although Pratt’s scheme has been useful for grouping the first wave of novels, works that can be “primarily defined as combat novels,” in recent years a “second stage” of imaginative works has emerged that focus on the return of the veteran to civilian life. These novels chronologically overlap the war and postwar years.103

Other new works (which may be seen as constituting a third stage in Vietnam fiction) have brought the war home, “expanding” it chronologically and spatially as well as thematically, to include narratives that treat the reverberations of the war in American society and culture beyond the experiences of individual veterans. Clearly, both volume and scope of what was once confidently called the “Vietnam novel” have greatly increased, so that Philip K. Jason can even include science-fiction novels that allegorize the war and detective novels with hard-boiled protagonists who were Vietnam veterans as examples of Vietnam War novels.104 Evidently, this category, like that of the larger category of the “war novel” within which the Vietnam War novel may be placed, has in turn become part of the “loose, baggy monster” that Henry James saw as the essence of the novelistic genre.

iv. The Present Study

The list of narrative works on the Vietnam War continues to grow (one bibliographer lists 3,500 titles since 1977 to his time of writing, although only a fraction of these are imaginative works),105 It is therefore obvious that every work, perhaps even quite a number of deserving ones, cannot be discussed by a single writer. Starting from a list compiled by Pratt, as well as his bibliographic commentary and personal suggestions, I have tried to include a much larger number of works than usual in the critical commentaries of previous books and articles. Such commentaries proliferated during an earlier period, but they seemed to me to constantly recycle criticism of a half-dozen of the same works. In the present study, I have therefore tried to discuss a much greater number of works than are usually discussed, including a few that have to my knowledge never been discussed. To do this required providing extensive plot-summaries, although these have been intertwined with the criticism of the novels in question. It is unlikely that any reader (except perhaps one writing a book like the present one) would read all these novels in their entirety; retelling their stories at length has the function of informing the reader of several works on the same subject or theme that he/she may not wish to read while helping him select one he/she might like to read. I myself have never particularly enjoyed reading articles or hearing lectures on works that I had not read but that seemed to presuppose that I had. At the same time, to appeal to non-academic readers, I have tried to keep Lit-Crit jargon to a minimum, introducing such terms only when it seemed useful for the discussion at hand. Finally, as Tobey C. Herzog did with his study of the combat literature, I have also tried to establish parallels with earlier works of war literature.

As for the organization of discussing these works, I have generally followed Pratt’s proposed bibliographical chronology, which has two axes: in reading Vietnam fiction, he writes, one “should establish two frames of reference...first, the approximate place and time period of the book’s internal action; and second, an external frame of reference that includes a knowledge of the basic historical events plus the book’s date of writing and publication.”106 The only difficulty to this admirable plan is that while the basic historical events ground the fiction in history, the date of writing (an indeterminate time after the events depicted) cannot always be established.

The early narratives on Vietnam discussed in Part I, “Partisans” (cf. Table of Contents), are more easily arranged chronologically. These works are particularly interesting for their varied political attitudes and perspectives, which are often missing in later narratives that take the war for granted and concentrate mainly on action and events. To begin the study of narratives of the Vietnam War, four novels are discussed in the first chapter. They are distinguished by their diverse national points of view—British, American, French, Vietnamese—and will be examined in the order of their historical chronology as determined by the time of their internal action. Three of these novels are said to have been based on the exploits of the quintessential American adventurer, Edward G. Landsdale. The first section, accordingly, focuses on his life and activity within the historical context of the early American participation in Vietnam during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Graham Greene’s seminal novel of 1955, The Quiet American, whose context is the French struggle with the Viet Minh during the years 1951-52, seems to have inspired both Lederer and Burdick’s Cold War tract, The Ugly American (1958), and a more recent response, Ward Just’s A Dangerous Friend (1999), a “rewriting” of Greene’s novel but about events that occur over a decade later. Both M. J. Bosse’s The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959) and Jean Lartéguy’s Yellow Fever (1962) give an imaginative glimpse into the historical events of the French colonial war in the mid-Fifties, albeit from opposite sides.

Chapter Two is devoted to five novels that have varied political stances on the Diem regime, its demise, and related military events in the year 1963. Chapters Three and Four discuss a fairly large number of novels that represent the fighting during the period of American advisors after Diem’s fall: the years 1963-64. Certain themes and character types are introduced in these two chapters as being pervasive in the works discussed, even while the individual novels vary widely both in literary value and political attitudes. The fictions examined in Chapter Three, mostly published in the pre-Tet mid-1960s, I have defined as “pro-war” (e.g. the best-selling The Green Berets, by Robin Moore, 1965). These novels are more optimistic and naïve about motivations and possible outcomes. By contrast, those discussed in Chapter Four, which were published in the late 1960s or even later, exhibit greater sophistication in handling the political and moral ambivalence of their characters, and, probably not coincidentally, seem to me to be more accomplished literary works.

Finally, Chapter Five discusses works written by civilians that view the war from the “outside,” whether through the character of a journalist standing apart from it (Pamela Sanders, in Miranda, 1978) or involuntarily immersed in the fighting (Takeshi Kaiko, in Into a Black Sun, 1980). The war in these works is portrayed on a larger canvas—both in space (Miranda) and time (Thomas Fleming’s The Officers’ Wives, 1981). Kaiko’s work, as well as the earliest example analyzed in this chapter, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night (1968), take a step further by problematizing the status of the narrator-observer, and in so doing become good examples of the blurred line between fiction and non-fiction present in so many of the more interesting works to come out of the war. The Kalbs’ The Last Ambassador (1981) is included here to give closure to the historical sequence that began with Morris West’s The Ambassador (1965), discussed in Chapter Two.

Part II, “Modes and Genres,” as the title suggests, is less concerned with the historical sequence and more focused on types of narrative. It discusses novels and autobiographical works published mostly in the late 1960s or the 1970s. Written by combat veterans about events that took place starting with the intervention of American combat units from 1965 onward, these works—with the important exception of the numerous combat novels in the mode of realism—tend to be critical of the war. As suggested above, what makes the narrative literature of the Vietnam War interesting, as compared to that of World War II, is the great variety of types of fictions, the narrative strategies employed in fictional and non-fictional works, and the blurring of dividing lines between the two. The chapters in this part have accordingly been organized according to narrative strategies, both traditional and innovative.

Autobiographical memoirs are a traditional form of war writing. The Vietnam versions discussed in Chapter Six illustrate the traditional (Philip Caputo’s Rumors of War, 1977), the polemical (Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, 1976), the comic (Tobias Wolf’s In Pharaoh’s Army, 1994), and the unorthodox (Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone, 1975), as well as other examples. Chapter Seven discusses half a dozen allegorical novels, which is an unusual type of narrative for war novels but a traditional form of older literature. The extremes here may be illustrated by Norman Mailer´s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), a hunting tale that recalls classic American fictions, and Joe Haldeman´s The Forever War (1975), a science-fiction novel about an intergalactic war.

In terms of quantity, most fictional works about the war are combat novels written by soldier-authors that are also in the mode of traditional realism. These novels show the greatest continuity with the fictions of previous wars and the least variation in narrative structure. I have chosen nine examples of these for Chapter Eight, perhaps a greater number than is needed, in the hope that their common narrative themes and strategies, and their nearly interchangeable characters, become that more apparent. Chapter Nine discusses two examples of lengthy and more explicitly ideological combat novels that have been more highly praised in the press than the examples in Chapter Eight, as well as more widely discussed in the critical literature: James Webb’s Fields of Fire (1978) and John Del Vecchio’s The Thirteenth Valley (1983). They relate stories similar to those of the novels discussed in Chapter Eight, but are more concerned with both describing and justifying the war. My last example of the combat novel, Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn (2010) is the most recent work and serves as an Epilogue to this chapter, perhaps the last traditional combat novel to be written about Vietnam. It exemplifies how the combat novel of realism is a perennial and popular form, taking up so many of the characters and themes of both this and previous wars.

Finally, more oblique narrative approaches to the representation of war, commonly known as postmodernist, can be seen in the imaginative works discussed in Chapter Ten, where “Deviations” from traditional realism are examined, and Chapter Eleven, “Inventions,” where even more radical narrative strategies of fantasy and metafiction point to a possible future of the Vietnam novel. It is argued that the fictions discussed in these two chapters—unlike those of Chapter Eight and Nine—could only have emerged from the Vietnam War.

Part III, “Alternatives,” discusses other types of narratives, as well as fictions about the postwar period. Chapter Twelve features works by journalists, which are generally critical of the political motives behind the war, and, unlike the works discussed in Chapter Three, not just the way it was fought. The political stances and the reporting styles of novelists Mary McCarthy and James Jones are contrasted, as well as those of journalists Harrison Salisbury and Jonathan Schell. Finally, Michael Herr’s postmodernist Dispatches (1977), a widely praised work that challenges traditional journalistic narratives, calls into question the notion of the narrative representation of the war itself.

Chapter Thirteen discusses the less “literary” oral narratives of veterans, a form, it is argued, which is crucially intermediated by journalist-editors. Chapter Fourteen, “The Return of the Repressed,” concludes this book with discussions of fictional works produced by soldier-writers about their experiences as returning veterans. Chronologically, these novels—some of which are among the most critically well-received of all the writings about the war—have expanded time schemes that cover the postwar lives of their characters, typically moving from home to the war and back again. Some of these works, notably Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green (1983), could have been discussed in Part II for their interesting generic features and innovative narrative strategies, but the thematic emphasis, the reflection on the war in retrospect, seemed me to justify their being included here. Conversely, Tim O’Brien’s critically acclaimed The Things They Carried (1990) takes up the theme of the veteran after the war, but I have included it in an earlier chapter on narrative inventions. It seems likely that the important works on Vietnam now being written, and to be written in the future, are likely to be of this kind. We probably already have too many gritty combat novels—even while popular culture has churned out a seemingly endless series of what might be called Vietnam action stories—but there may never be enough analytical and imaginative works to help us reflect better on the meanings of the war and its important place in the history and culture of the United States.

1 March 5, “This day in history.” www.history.com

2 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 434.

3 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 434.

4 The term is taken from the title of Marilyn B. Young’s The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990.

5 Mary McCarthy, in a discussion of the terms used to designate the National Liberation Front, points out that although the term “Viet Cong” (Vietnamese Communist) was a derogatory label (like “Commie” in the US in the 1950s) and therefore unacceptable to the North Vietnamese, for whom the correct term was “People’s Liberation Army,” it became the common term “in the Western World” to refer to the insurgent forces. She writes that “the derogatory term was “Charlie,” an abbreviation for Victor Charlie, or radio parlance for the Viet Cong. She also writes that just the initials VC were a “half-affectionate diminutive, like ‘G.I.’” McCarthy, Hanoi (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), p. 74. In my discussions of the literary works in succeeding chapters, I usually refer to the fighters of the National Liberation Front (NLF) as Vietcong or VC, owing to the greater familiarity of these terms, but, based on that literature, I cannot distinguish any real difference, positive or negative, in VC, Vietcong, Viet Cong, Victor Charlie, or just Charlie, terms that American soldiers seemed to use indifferently, although they understandably never called their enemy the NLF.

6 The Pentagon Papers, as published by The New York Times (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 54.

7 Ellsberg tells the story in his memoir Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York:Viking, 2002).

8 Summarized, with quotes, from the Introduction by Neil Sheehan, pp. ix-x. The Pentagon Papers cited in this and subsequent chapters always refers to the Times collection in the form of the Bantam paperback of 677 pages. The Pentagon Papers are often the source for the facts cited in many histories of the war.

9 Schulzinger, Robert D. A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 17-21. It is sadly ironic that Ho Chi Minh worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the predecessor of the CIA--during World War II, helping to rescue downed American pilots.

10 Herring, George C., America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. Second Edition (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 25; Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest; Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine, 1992), p. 145

11 The Rector of the important Vietnamese University of Hué told the American reporter and writer Ward Just on his trip to that city that the war was really between the Americans and the Chinese., saying that “the Vietnamese had no real part to play except to offer the state”. On the same trip, Just interviewed a revolutionary student leader “who did not feel a part of what the war was supposed to be about, nor especially anxious to die for what they regarded as American foreign policy objectives.” Just, Ward S., To What End—Report from Vietnam (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968), pp. 132, 134.

12 Butterfield, Fox, “The Truman and Eisenhower Years 1945-1960,” Chapt. 1, Pentagon Papers, p. 10.

13 Butterfield, Pentagon Papers, pp. 3-4.

14 Qtd. in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 47.

15 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 46.

16 Herr, Michael, Dispatches err (New York:Vintage edition, 1991), p. 49.

17 Young, Marilyn B., The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: Harper’s, 1991), p. 42.

18 Sullivan, Marianna P., France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 51-54.

19 Qtd. by Butterfield, The Pentagon Papers, p. 13.

20 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1969; New York: Ballantine, 1992), p. 339. The term “containment” is attributed to the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan.

21 Smith, Hedrick, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 3, “The Kennedy Years: 1961-1963,” p. 79.

22 Pentagon Papers, p. 91.

23 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 75.

24 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 60.

25 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 113.

26 Morganthau, Hans, “We Are Deluding Ourselves in Vietnam,” in: The New York Times Magazine (April 18, 1965), rptd. in: The Vietnam War: Interpreting Primary Documents, ed. Nick Treamor (New York: Greenhaven Press, 2004), pp. 176.

27 Smith, Hedrick, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 4, “The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem: May-November 1963,” pp. 158-159.

28 Pentagon Papers, pp. 158-159.

29 Cable, Larry, Conflicts of Myths (New York: NYU Press, 1986), p. 225.

30 Butterfield, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 2, “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam,” p. 67.

31 Butterfield, Pentagon Papers, pp. 69, 73.

32 Sheehan, Neil, Pentagon Papers, Chapt. 5, “The Covert War and Tonkin Gulf: February-August 1964,” p. 235.

33 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 238.

34 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 239.

35 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 242.

36 Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers, p. 243.

37 Vlastos, Stephen, “America’s ‘Enemy’: the Absent Presence in Revisionist Vietnam War History,” in: Rowe, John Carlos, and Rick Berg (eds.), The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 66.

38 All the quotes are cited from James Bamford’s review of Matthew M. Aid´s The Secret Sentry: The Untold Story of the National Security Agency: “Who’s Who in Big Brother’s Database?” in: The New York Review of Books (November 5, 2009), p. 30. The second quotation is taken from Aid’s text.

39 Schulzinger, The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975, pp. 152-154.

40 Karnow, Vietnam—A History. 1983. (Revised Edition, New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 432.

41 Boettcher, Thomas, Vietnam—the Valor and the Sorrow (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1985), p. 212.

42 Karnow, Vietnam—A History, p. 412.

43 Fussell, Paul, Wartime. Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 16. Fussell notes that 14% of the bombs dropped turned out to be duds.

44 Boettcher, Vietnam—The Valor and the Sorrow, pp. 209-212.

45 Boettcher, Vietnam—The Valor and the Sorrow, p. 262.

46 Cf. Chapter 12, below, for journalistic commentaries on this operation.

47 Schmitz, David F., The Tet Offensive: Politics, War and Public Opinion (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. xiii.

48 Bowman, John S. (ed.), The Vietnam War Day by Day (Hong Kong: Mallard Press, 1989), p. 120. For a detailed description of how the Tet Offensive failed as a military operation, see Chapter 10 of Victor David Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 349-439.

49 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 379.

50 Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 221-223.

51 Qtd. in Pratt, John Clark, Vietnam Voices (New York: Penguin,1984), p. 551.

52 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 436.

53 In a review of the 2017 documentary “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Frances Fitzgerald writes that Burns was asked why he had undertaken the project: “Burns said that more than forty years after the war ended, we can’t forget it, and we are still arguing about it.” Novick added that we are all “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Fitzgerald, “The Pity of It All,” The New York Review of Books, November 23, 2017, p. 30.

54 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 285.

55 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, p. 319. There seems to be an erroneous perception that World War II was also fought by teenagers, as reflected, for example, in the title of Paul Fussell’s memoir, The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (New York: Modern Library, 2003). As stated above, the average age of American soldiers in that war was 26, reflecting no doubt the universal participation of men in what was seen as a necessary war.

56 While only 2% of Americans in the 1960s came from towns with populations of fewer than one-thousand people, four times as many of those who died in the war (i.e. 8%) came from towns of that size. Appy, Christian G., Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, 1993), p. 14.

57 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 12.

58 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 37

59 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, pp. 319-320; Appy, Working-Class War, p. 33. Appy adds that only 6% received training, mostly in elementary reading skills, as compared to the 40% trained for combat.

60 These various motives are commented on, with examples, by Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 44-85.

61 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 106.

62 Capps, Walter H., The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience. Second Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 1. A caveat here: poet-scholar-veteran William H. Ehrhart, LaSalle University Library Director, and veteran John Baky, spent considerable time tracing the origin of that statistic, which “seems to go back to a 1976 pamphlet put out by the AFSC…that offers no basis for the assertion, no footnote, no source; the ‘fact’ is simply stated without support” (Ehrhart, personal communication).

63 Hynes, Samuel, The Soldiers’ Tale—Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 221.

64 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, p. 222.

65 Baum, Dan, “The Price of Valor,” in: The New Yorker (July 12 & 19, 2004), pp. 45-46. The findings of Marshall, in Men Against Fire (New York: William Morrow, 1947) have had considerable impact on the US Army. Marshall also wrote a widely distributed manual for soldiers in the Vietnam War. For Marshall’s influence: Frederick D. Williams, SLAM: The Influence of S.L.A. Marshall on the United States Army (Ft. Monroe, VA: US Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1990).

66 Baum, “The Price of Valor,” p. 46.

67 Baum, “The Price of Valor,” p. 46. The study referred to is a PhD dissertation (1999) by Rachel McNair on the psychological effects of violence, using data from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, which interviewed 1,700 veterans in the 1980s. Reanalyzed P.T.S.D. data obtained from these veterans suggested that one in five veterans suffered from the malaise, rather than one in three, as formerly believed. Baum, however, thinks that this new analysis may have been motivated by the desire of the Veteran’s Administration to cut back expenses for their treatment (p. 46).

68 Shay, Jonathan, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994), pp.108-109 and 111-115.

69 Bilton, Michael and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York, Penguin, 1992), pp. 120-121. This book was an outgrowth of a British TV documentary and contains the photographs of the massacre by an Army Sergeant that served as proof at Calley’s trial. Many veterans naturally resented being called “baby-killers” by American civilians, but this terrible crime was evidence that the accusation was at least true for some soldiers in some documented cases.

70 Herzog. Tobey C., Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 106.

71 Cronin, Cornelius A., “Lines of Departure: the Atrocity in Vietnam War Literature.” In: Jason, Philip K. (ed.), Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 215.

72 Fussell, Paul, Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 113, emphasis in the original.

73 FitzGerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), p. 359.

74 Just, To What End—Report from Vietnam, p. 71.

75 Qtd. in Appy, Working-Class War, p. 233.

76 Fox Butterfield, “Who Was This Enemy?” The New York Times Magazine (February 4, 1973), rptd. in: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975 (New York: Library of America: 1998), pp. 408-409.

77 Roth, Robert, Sand in the Wind (New York: Miracle Books, 1974), pp. 563-564.

78 Herring, America’s Longest War; p. 243; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 422-423. For Loren Baritz, the figure for hard-drug users is much higher: 28%. Baritz, Backfire: A History of how American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 315.

79 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 422.

80 O’Nan, Stewart, “Introduction” to The Vietnam Reader, ed. Stewart O’Nan (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), p. 1.

81 For example, Renny Christopher’s The Vietnam War/The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

82 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove Press, 2015). The quote is from page one.

83 O’Nan, “Introduction” to The Vietnam Reader, p. 3.

84 Hanley, Lynne, Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), pp.103-104. The internal quotations are cited by the author from Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook (1973).

85 Hanley, Writing War, p. 105; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, passim.

86 Tal, Kali, “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma.” In: Jason, Fourteen Landing Zones, pp. 217-218.

87 Tal, in “Speaking the Language of Pain” (cf. previous note) argues that while trauma resulting from war, the holocaust, rape, etc. can be managed, it cannot be completely exorcized, as it can never really be forgotten.

88 Ringnalda, Don, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War (Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), p. viii.

89 Ringnalda, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, p. 91.

90 Fussell, Wartime p. 268.

91 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, p. 328.

92 Jason, Philip K., Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 3.

93 Bates, Milton J., The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 2.

94 Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam, p. 3.

95 Caputo, Philip, “Postscript.” A Rumor of War (1977; New York: Owl Book, 1996), p. 353-354).

96 The novels of Stephen Coonts may be cited as examples: Flight of the Intruder (NewYork: Pocket Books, 1987) about a Navy renegade bomber pilot later adapted into a film, as well as the two sequels to Rambo: First Blood starring Sylvester Stallone (1985/88).

97 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, p. 177.

98 Jason, “Introduction,” Fourteen Landing Zones, p. xiv.

99 O’Brien, Tim, Going After Cacciato (New York: Dell, 1978), p. 237, italics in the original.

100 O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, p. 320.

101 Jacqueline Lawson believes that virtually all the soldier-writer accounts are divided into these distinct phases. See Lawson, “‘Old Kids’: The Adolescent Experience in the Non-Fiction Narratives of Vietnam,” in: Searle, William (ed.), Search and Clear: Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), p. 27.

102 Pratt John Clark, Bibliographic Commentary, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” in: Lomperis, Timothy J., “Reading the Wind” The Literature of the Vietnam War: An Interpretative Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 127.

103 Jason, Acts and Shadows, p. 77. It should be said, however, that Pratt’s scheme in “From the Fiction, Some Truths” does contemplate other works besides combat novels.

104 See, for example, the works mentioned and discussed in chapters 4, 7, and 8 of Jason’s Acts and Shadows.

105 There are 666 novels listed in the Third Edition of Newman’s bibliography (1966), while Wittman (1989) lists 582 literary and adventure novels, 481 personal narratives up to 1988. Newman, John, Vietnam War Literature: an Annotated Bibliography about Americans Fighting in Vietnam (Landham, Md: The Scarecrow Press, 1996); Wittman, Sandra M. Writing About Vietnam: A Bibliography of the Literature of Vietnam Conflict (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989).

106 Pratt, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” p. 124.

Part I Partisans

Chapter One

Early Adventurers

In such dangerous things as wars the errors which

proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst

(Karl von Clausewitz)

i. Lieutenant-Colonel Landsdale

It will be recalled from the Introduction that in the mid-1940s, at the end of World War II, the French colonial army was allowed by the Allies to regain control of Hanoi, at which point the Communist Viet Minh forces faded back into their bases in the countryside to fight an eight-year-long guerrilla war of resistance to the restoration of French control. Meanwhile, as part of its effort to halt Communist advances in Southeast Asia, the US recognized the French puppet emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai (February 1950), thereby declaring itself to be an adversary of the Viet Minh leader, Ho Chi Minh. For their part, the Viet Minh built a political organization strong enough to sustain the guerrillas and field a regular army that was eventually successful at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954).

The imbalance of power in Vietnam was therefore evident by 1954, when the Viet Minh had military and political control of most of Vietnam. During the chaotic situation following the defeat of the French and the migration southward of Catholics and non-Communists after the division of the country into north and south, the southern leader Ngo Dinh Diem, who would be the future President of South Vietnam, barely controlled the capital city of Saigon, much less the rest of the country.1 American leaders reasoned that an expert in dealing with Asian Communist revolutionaries might therefore be useful to the beleaguered Diem. This expert turned out to be the most important of the early American adventurers: Edward G(eary) Landsdale, an Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel on loan to the CIA. Landsdale was both instrumental in convincing President Eisenhower that the US should support South Vietnam against an imminent Communist take-over and indispensable in maintaining Diem, or, to give him his full name, Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem, in power. With American support, Premier and Defense Minister Diem eventually deposed Bao Dai and adopted his imperial flag.

Landsdale arrived in Vietnam on June 1, 1954, the day the Viet Minh celebrated their victory over the French by blowing up an ammunition dump, and (as he noted himself) “rocking Saigon throughout the night.”2 Landsdale came to Saigon to command the top-secret Saigon Military Mission (SMM), to install resistance teams in the north to delay the consolidation of that part of the country while he supported the non-Communist government in the south. By the time of the Geneva deadline prohibiting the introduction of additional military personnel into either side of the country, Landsdale’s teams were already active in paramilitary operations and psychological warfare, perpetrating acts of sabotage and spreading misinformation in both north and south. They were unsuccessful in the areas held by the Viet Minh, however, and many of Landsdale’s Vietnamese agents in the north actually defected to that side.

The sabotage activities included destroying government printing-presses and pouring contaminants into bus motors to undermine the transportation system. Misinformation included the distribution of leaflets about harsh government measures in the north, and a successful rumor campaign that the US would support a new war against the north employing atomic weapons, a rumor that greatly added to the flow of refugees to the south, many of whom, already encouraged by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and organized by Landsdale’s teams, were transported in US Navy ships to the south.3 Thus began the exodus of one million Catholics, which is fictionalized in M.J. Bosse’s novel, The Journey of Tao Kim Nam, discussed in section iv, below.

Landsdale was one of those men of action, usually described as “legendary” or “flamboyant,” who seem as fantastic as any fictional character, an example of the type that novelist Philip Roth once complained about: a real person that would be the envy of any novelist. Roth’s question “Can anybody have imagined him if he did not really exist?” referred to Richard Nixon, but it is, if anything, more pertinent to Landsdale, who inspired more than one fictional character in the early literature of the war (cf. sections ii, iv and v, below) and was far more influential in supporting the American effort in Vietnam than any of his fictional counterparts. After retiring from the Air Force in 1963, with the rank of Major General, he returned to Saigon in 1965 as “special assistant for pacification under [Ambassador Henry Cabot] Lodge.”4

Landsdale was born in 1908 and educated at UCLA. He served in the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II and later went to the Philippines as counsel to the Philippine Defense Secretary, Ramon Magsaysay, whom he aided in the successful counter-revolutionary repression of the Communist Hukbalahap insurgency, and later helped to become president. Landsdale is said to have developed “the basic concept that Communist revolution [was] best opposed by democratic revolution,” and, with his success in the Philippines he was accordingly sent to South Vietnam as a CIA operative in 1954, where he urged the development of a counterinsurgency force instead of a conventional army (he also “reportedly helped develop the US Special Forces,” which arose as a counter-insurgency force within the US Army).5 He is described in The Pentagon Papers as “well-known but mysterious” and “reticent about his role.”6

Besides his skills in unconventional warfare, Landsdale was evidently a man who could gain the friendship and confidence of Asian leaders. It was his intention to make Diem a progressive, non-Communist national hero on the model of Magsaysay and turn the Vietnam of the Sixties into a Philippines of the Fifties, and he was sent to Vietnam by John Foster Dulles explicitly with that mission.7 The difficulty with this plan was that the two Asian countries were very different. It was unrealistic to think that Landsdale would be as successful in Vietnam as he had been in the Philippines, a former American colony that had granted long leases to US military bases in exchange for independence in 1946. As Neil Sheehan points out, the Philippines was a 95% Christian country that had already been westernized and Americanized for almost half a century:

Landsdale’s Filipinos were Brown Americans...their Independence Day was the Fourth of July. They spoke English with a slightly out-of-date American slang. They liked jazz and much else in American popular culture...They staged operations against the Huks with names like Four Roses, for their favourite whiskey, and Omaha, after the D-Day beachhead at Normandy. The CIA was notorious for hiring Filipinos to staff its Asian operations because they were so Americanized.8

As for the Vietnamese people, on the other hand, “[i]t was not patriotic in Vietnam to collaborate with the Americans. To many Vietnamese, the Americans stood for colonialism, oppression, and social injustice.”9 And the leaders of the two countries could not have been more different: the deeply suspicious, autocratic, and unpopular Diem was nothing like the honest, charismatic Magsaysay.10

Landsdale, nevertheless, was a tireless defender of what he hoped would be a popular “Third Force” government in South Vietnam, neither colonialist nor Communist. Although he was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading the arrogant Diem to personify the Third Force ideal, he did become Diem’s best American friend (he actually lived in the presidential palace), mentor, and champion, indispensable for keeping the Diem regime in power. In November 1954, for example, Landsdale “single-handedly” prevented a coup d’état of Bao Dai’s officers.11 He contradicted Eisenhower’s new Ambassador to South Vietnam, General Lawton Collins, who advised the president that Diem should compromise with the powerful Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects that Diem had grossly mishandled. Landsdale urged Diem rather to use bribery and trickery, and only in the last resort, violence (the two sects had private armies), and he promised the aid of an auxiliary military force to do so. In 1955, he “masterminded” the campaign that subdued the military arms of the sects.12

General Collins distrusted Landsdale, whom he called a “romantic visionary” (and informally “that crazy bastard”) and regarded his protégé, Diem, as a “crank,” and he urged Dulles to get rid of them both and resume cooperation with the French.13 By April 1955, Dulles was ready to dump Diem, as the French also desired, but Landsdale lied to Diem about Dulles’s intention to replace him, believing that Diem could do the job. The French, who still had 75,000 troops in South Vietnam, did not intervene for fear of upsetting the US, but they supported the sects clandestinely in order to oppose Diem, a situation that is fictionalized in Jean Latérguy’s novel Yellow Fever (1962), discussed in section v, below.

To make his protégé appear a more convincing leader, Landsdale persuaded Diem to counter-attack the Binh Xuyen, a powerful criminal organization that also had a private army. With Landsdale’s auxiliary force to help him, Diem’s troops crushed the Binh Xuyen on the streets of Saigon. Dulles thereupon countermanded his earlier order and the cable urging Diem’s removal was burned.14 Thanks to Landsdale, the US was now solidly behind Diem. Landsdale “sealed the commitment” by rigging the plebiscite that deposed Bao Dai and established Diem as President of the newly declared Republic of Vietnam.15 Had Dulles followed General Collins’s advice to get rid of Diem, the subsequent history of Vietnam, and that of the United States, might have been very different. It is generally agreed that the French would have sooner or later given up Vietnam to the Communists.16

In an attempt to counter Communist influence in the countryside and the villages, where the “hearts and minds” of the people had to be won, Landsdale persuaded Diem to initiate a Civic Action program, which eventually failed because of Diem’s complete lack of interest in popular reforms. The land reform that Landsdale urged him to make for the same reasons actually ended up reversing the pattern of land ownership in the Mekong Delta (after the Viet Minh had made improvements in the direction of greater equality) toward the prewar levels of concentration of land in the hands of a very few. Half of the farmers remained landless.17

Lansdale was also adept at courting American leaders. He was a favorite of President Kennedy, who received him at the White House only a few days after the inauguration. Advisor Walt W. Rostow gave the president Landsdale’s report on the current situation in Vietnam, which he read “with horrified fascination.” The report predicted an enemy offensive before the end of the year that could, in Landsdale’s view, be checked by American effort. Kennedy urged McGeorge Bundy of the National Security Council to get the story of Landsdale’s anti-Communist exploits in the Philippines published in the popular magazine The Saturday Evening Post, presumably to publicize him as a heroic figure in the struggle against Communist tyranny.18 As FitzGerald puts it, Landsdale had “faith in his own good motives…a man who believed that Communism in Asia would crumble before men of goodwill with some concern for ‘the little guy’ and the proper counterinsurgency skills.”19

In a crucial mission in October 1961, Kennedy sent Landsdale, along with arch cold-warrior Rostow, on General Maxwell Taylor’s mission to Vietnam to evaluate what could be accomplished by US forces there. According to David Halberstam, The Taylor-Rostow Report revealed “a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the war.”20 It was contemptuous of an enemy that had for centuries successfully resisted foreign invasion; it assumed that the people and the government of South Vietnam were identical; and it was endorsed by a general who himself had seen the danger of ground war and the limits of air-power in Korea and who ignored the warnings of his great predecessor, General Matthew Ridgeway. Nevertheless, with reservations by Robert McNamara, the report would eventually be adopted as policy. It advised an increase in the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) and the introduction of an American military task force.21 It may be concluded then that Landsdale was directly influential in bringing about the American War in Vietnam, both in his advisory capacity to the American leadership and through his influence on Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. As Neil Sheehan has succinctly put it, South Vietnam was in no small measure the creation of Edward G. Landsdale.22

ii. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

When the first important novel in English about Vietnam was written, Greene’s The Quiet American, the United States had not yet arrived there in force. The novel’s setting is Saigon in the final years of French colonial rule in Indochina before Dien Bien Phu. Internal evidence suggests that the events of the novel take place in 1951-1952, since at one point the narrator, Thomas Fowler, a British newspaper correspondent, observes that any news he might report will go unnoticed because everyone now wants to read about the Korean War.23 There is also a reference in the text to “de Lattre” (114), that is, Commanding General Jean de Lattre Tassigny, who died of cancer in January 1952, after a trip to the US to plead for an increase of American aid.24

At this point in time, the Americans were not yet militarily involved but were giving the French material aid, including arms, to prosecute the colonial war. Fowler at one point watches American bombers being unloaded on the docks (the US began subsidizing the French military effort in 1950).25 Characters in the novel are constantly aware that large areas of the country, even the other side of the river in Saigon, are controlled by the Vietminh, whose clandestine organization seems to have ubiquitous eyes and ears, as well as closed mouths. With reference to the Viet Minh agent whom Fowler meets, for example, “everybody here knew all about Mr Muoi, but the police had no key which would unlock their confidence” (142).

It has been assumed by most commentators that Landsdale was the model for Greene’s title character, the operative Alden Pyle—notably, Charles Currey, in his biography: Edward Landsdale: The Unquiet American (1988).26 Charles J. Gaspar’s entry on the novel in the Vietnam Encyclopedia, on the other hand, argues that Pyle is a composite figure, blending Landsdale with Leo Hochstetter, a member of the American legation in Saigon.27 Judith Adamson, in her critical study of Greene, argues that the real-life model for Pyle was an American attached to an economic aid mission (perhaps Hochstetter, although he is not named), who once shared a room with Greene and lectured him on the necessity of creating a “third force” in Vietnam that he thought might be led by the self-styled General Thé, as actually occurs in the novel.28 Greene himself comments on this encounter in his memoir Ways of Escape (1980). He assumed that the man in question worked for the CIA but noted that his “companion bore no resemblance at all to Pyle, the quiet American of my story—he was a man of more intelligence and less innocence.”29

The long-running, back-and-forth controversy over a positive identification of Landsdale as Pyle is perhaps best illustrated by John Clark Pratt, who, in an early commentary on Vietnam War fiction, wrote that Pyle was “unmistakably modelled on Landsdale,” who was also the model for “a major character” in at least two other novels.30 In a footnote, Pratt added that “Landsdale believes he was the model,” because in 1983, he told Pratt (who was, like Landsdale, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the US Air-Force) that he thought he was the model, noting that both he and Pyle owned dogs. In the Introduction (1996) to his critical edition of Greene’s novel, however, Pratt evidently changed his mind, pointing out that the historical context of the novel, the years 1951-1952, predates Landsdale’s actual arrival in Vietnam: one month (incognito) in June 1953, and then the two years that he headed the SMM in 1954-56.31

Greene, for his part, always denied that he knew Landsdale personally, commenting in an interview for the British Sunday Telegraph (in 1975) that he had “never had the misfortune to meet” him.32 Of course, Greene would not have to have actually met Landsdale in order to use him as a fictional model, only to have heard of him, but it is not altogether certain that the two men—despite Greene’s denial—did not meet. Pratt cites a letter apparently addressed to himself in which Landsdale mentions that the French hated the Cao Daist General Thé (who goes by his real name in the novel), for having had the popular French General Chanson killed: “I was his [Thé’s] American friend and the French used to mock me about him in the presence of Greene.”33 In an interview with his biographer, Charles Currey, Landsdale mentions at least one episode when such a thing happened, recalling that a group of French officers, with Greene among them, booed him at the Continental Hotel. And yet, as Pratt observes, even this evidence is suspect, because Landsdale did not actually meet Thé until 1954, by which time Greene had left Vietnam and was already at work on the novel.34

If the Landsdale-Pyle mystery will never be completely solved, it is likely that its origins have arisen, as Pratt suggests, from the legendary character of Landsdale’s “exploits in the Philippines and Vietnam after World War II [which] have provided not only historians but also journalists, novelists and filmmakers with material for their countless stories and myths.”35 That is to say, Landsdale’s exploits, not the man himself, may have served as any number of fictional models. Pratt, finally, neatly sums up both the inconclusiveness of the factual evidence and its ultimate insignificance when he comments that “given the outcome of the American presence in Vietnam, perhaps Landsdale should have been the model after all,”36 a recognition of Landsdale’s mythical, even metonymical presence in Vietnam for the Americans who came later. Decades after its publication, The Quiet American has continued to astonish readers with its prophetic vision of the disruptive American presence in Vietnam, which would only gradually be recorded in fiction and non-fiction by American writers. The “prescience” of the novel, as much as its artistry, has accordingly been celebrated by critics.37

The principal narrative voice and the moral conscience of the novel is Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged English correspondent, who is rather burned out from personal disappointments in his past. Fowler has left his ex-wife, his lover, and England for the east, where he finds contentment in Saigon with his beautiful young Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, and the nightly opium pipes that she prepares for him. Disenchanted rather than cynical, Fowler is a basically decent man who feels at home in the country (he frequently explains the “situation” there to foreign visitors), but he chooses to think of himself as an uninvolved, apolitical observer of the war, a mere “reporter.” He has no desire for an imminent promotion to an editorship in England, where he might have to produce “opinion,” and to leave Vietnam. ‘“I’m not involved. Not involved,’ I repeated. It had been an article of my creed” (27). His eventual involvement becomes the moral and political crux of the novel.

Fowler befriends the newcomer Alden Pyle, an earnest son of a professor from strait-laced Boston, apparently eager, naïve, and idealistic, a young man of good intentions but little understanding. “With his gangly legs and crew-cut and wide campus gaze, he seemed incapable of harm” (16), Fowler observes. Pyle’s All-American boyishness seems out of place in the Euro-Asiatic culture of Saigon, once known as the “Paris of the Orient.” Rather, he “belonged to the skyscraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch and the chicken sandwiches on the Merchant limited” (19). Although Pyle insists in his polite, well-meaning manner that he has learned a lot from Fowler, Fowler perceives that Pyle has his own priorities, moral and political, which no contrary knowledge may be allowed to disturb: “I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East,” Fowler complains, “which he had known for as many months as I had years” (10). Nor is Pyle, who seems to think in grand abstractions, much of a listener. “He didn’t even hear what I said: he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West: he was determined…to do good, not to any individual person, but to a country, a continent, a world” (17). Even after some harrowing experiences in the country, Pyle remains “impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance” (162).

Pyle’s manner and appearance, however, are deceptive. He pretends to work for a medical mission but is actually a CIA operative in charge of covert operations, and therefore far less innocent than Fowler imagines. The title of the novel, in one sense, refers to Pyle’s need for secrecy. Phuong is the first one to call him a “quiet American,” although evidently in a literal sense. With Pyle’s lack of French and her lack of English, he is unable to talk to her, but this quietness takes on a more sinister aspect when the reader later discovers that Pyle speaks fluent Vietnamese. Fowler personally likes Pyle for his quiet, respectful manner, so different from his loud and boorish compatriots, like the correspondent Granger, who gets stumbling drunk in public and sees any Vietnamese woman as “a piece of tail.” A more sympathetic character, Vigot, the French policeman who reads Pascal, says of Pyle after his death that he was “a very quiet American,” with the implication that his reserve was tactical rather than personal. With Fowler, however, Pyle is tediously loquacious, especially when expounding his political theories. He will become “quiet” only when terminally silenced by the Viet Minh, with the collaboration of Fowler himself.

Commentators have noted that Pyle and Fowler thematically represent the classic dichotomy of innocence and experience. The two men immediately find themselves in competition for the affection of the lovely Phuong, who is guided (“managed” is perhaps a more appropriate word) by her older sister, who, in the face of an uncertain future, wants her to have the financial security of a stable relationship with a foreigner. Before she met Fowler, Phuong worked as a hostess in a respectable dance-hall, and the threat of eventually slipping down into the desperate prostitution of the House of Five-Hundred Women, which survives on the trade of French soldiers, is a possibility that Pyle recognizes, and he claims that he wants to protect her. Angry at Pyle’s presumption, Fowler tells him that Phuong needs no protection because he is aware that her serene behavior does not quite disguise a hard-headed approach to her future prospects, including leaving him for Pyle. Her name, which means “Phoenix,” suggests that she will survive.

The problem for Fowler is that he can offer Phuong real affection and conversation (they speak French together) but only temporary security. Because his English wife will not grant him a divorce and because he may be recalled to England by his newspaper, a future with Phuong is doubly uncertain. Pyle, who falls in love with Phuong at first sight and is championed by the scheming older sister, thinks he can provide what Fowler lacks: youth, marriage, children, and a safe and stable future in the US. Because of the supposed language difficulty, however, his courtship of the lady comically depends on his rival. In his boy-scout-like ethical code, he feels that he must make his suit in a thoroughly above-board fashion, doing nothing behind Fowler’s back, which even includes asking Fowler to translate when he asks Phuong to leave Fowler for himself. Pyle’s first name, Alden, may be an allusion to—but a reversal of—the go-between role of John Alden, the favorite of the lady to whom he must plead the case for Miles Standish, in Longfellow’s narrative poem The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858).

Beyond the love triangle, the three main characters may also be read as representations of their respective cultures.38 Phuong, an oriental sexual fantasy for western white men (she is beautiful, quiet, and unobtrusive—“One always spoke of her like that in the third person as if she were not there” (44)—as well as sensual and pliant), I would suggest that she also represents the Vietnamese prize for competing western political projects. Fowler, in this reading, would be European colonialism, which wants to maintain possession. In one of their many arguments over the correct behavior of foreign powers in Vietnam, Fowler defends the French on the basis that they are “dying every day” in their colonial war, which at least removes empty abstractions from their policy: “I’d rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it” (94), Fowler says, sounding like the French characters in Lartéguy’s Yellow Fever. He tells Pyle about the harm that the British did to their allies in Burma with “phony liberalism” and the concern for maintaining a good conscience. In a dialogue that suggests Phuong’s symbolic role, Pyle says he has Phuong’s own “best interests” at heart, which irritates Fowler with its egotism and naiveté: “I don’t care about her interests…I’d rather ruin her and sleep with her than…look after her damned interests…If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone” (58). The Old World colonialist only wishes to use Phuong—the country and its resources—for his own benefit. The New World moralist wants to save her from herself.

Pyle would then represent the United States, newest player in the Indochina game for control over a small, obscure country, which will be blown out of proportion in the following quarter of a century into a major center of world conflict. He is inspired and guided by the writings of one York Harding, the author of several earnest works of political analysis, with titles like The Advance of Red China, The Challenge to Democracy, and The Role of the West. Pyle believes fervently in the “Third Force” that Harding champions: a national party or popular group that is neither colonialist nor Communist and that will be willing to fight the Viet Minh to ensure an American-style democracy in a united Vietnam. Harding’s character may be based on a professor of political science at Michigan State, Wesley Fischel, a friend of Diem and Landsdale, who proposed in books and articles political and economic strategies for the “modernization” (i.e. Americanization) of Vietnam in order to combat Communist influence there. One of his widely read articles, with an oxymoronic title, “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule,” was seriously discussed in academic journals.39

The intellectual Harding and his young disciple Pyle, now in the field in Southeast Asia to implement the master’s theories, base their plans of action on the Domino Theory, the belief that the fall of Indochina to Communism would bring about the immediate collapse of other neighboring nations. The theory is alluded to in a reference that shows that the argument was hardly new in the Fifties and that there were already skeptics about its relevance. In an argument with Pyle about what the Vietnamese people really want, Fowler claims that they only want food, peace, and no white men around telling them what to do. Pyle, the idealist, insists that what they do not want is Communism:

“If Indo-China goes…”

“I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean?” (93).

After the “loss” of China to Mao’s Communists in 1949, US policymakers were determined to prevent any further such losses in the global competition for dominance. Dulles, it will be recalled from the Introduction, was convinced that Ho was “an instrument of international Communism,” even though the Vietnamese revolution, contrary to continued American belief, was a genuine nationalist movement not controlled by either Moscow or Beijing.40 Where Pyle, and by implication the Americans, go wrong is in the assumption that while the French in Vietnam had failed by trying to perpetuate colonialism, Americans would succeed in providing a Third Force, “a viable, non-Communist alternative to the Vietminh.”41 What Fowler comes to believe may be summed up by Frances FitzGerald:

What was not so well appreciated by the Americans as by the French who had fought the war was that the new Vietnamese government [of Ho Chi Minh] had a stronger claim to legitimacy than did most governments in Southeast Asia, for it was the government that had mobilized the entire population, both urban elites and rural peasantry, to fight the war of national liberation.42

In the novel, the unlikely local candidate for implementing this alternative Third Force is the renegade General Thé, former Chief of Staff for the Cao Dai sect, which has taken to the hills. As Fowler tells Pyle, General Thé is “only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy” (156). Thé is what is now called a terrorist: his men bomb a café during the daytime in the center of Saigon. The bomb kills over fifty people, including a number of women and children, who are always present in town at that particular time of day. This act of terrorist provocation was actually planned by Pyle, who, as agent provocateur, intends to put the blame on the Communists in order to discredit them. Fowler has by now become sickened by all the violence he has witnessed in the war: “I know myself and I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually” (113). The three final adverbs are to the point, for it is Fowler’s antipathy to senseless killing and his pity for the victims of acts that he has personally witnessed that make him morally different from Pyle, who is indifferent to his victims because they are simply abstractions that have got in the way of his master plan. When he sees their blood on his shoes, he cannot even recognize it for what it is:

“Blood, I said, ‘Haven’t you ever seen it before?’”

He said, “I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister” (161).

Pyle can only express regret that the explosion was not postponed once the scheduled parade was called off, at which Fowler remonstrates:

Do you expect General Thé to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s Press. You’ve put General Thé on the map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe” (162).

Pyle confesses that he has not dismissed Thé as number one American protégé even after this incident, but has only reprimanded him for his mistake in not postponing the bombing. “If he came to power with our help, we could rely on him” (174), Pyle explains, implying that the important thing is Thé’s anti-Communist stance, not his heinous acts. For Pyle, the plan takes precedence over the imperfect individuals chosen to execute it, just as the difficult and unpopular Diem would be regarded as the only hope for US planners a few years later. Outraged by Pyle’s part in the bombing and his inability to feel any moral responsibility, Fowler makes his existentialist choice to embrace commitment, reversing his earlier conviction of the need to stay uninvolved. Somewhat reluctantly, since his choice amounts to the betrayal of a friend, he agrees to set up Pyle for execution. “Sooner or later,” his contact Muoi reminds him, “one has to take sides if one is to remain human” (172)—an echo, although from the opposite side of the ideological fence, of the advice given Fowler by the French pilot, Captain Trouin.

Greene shows that such choices are never morally simple, as seen by the several ironies that evolve from Fowler’s decision and its consequences. Fowler must betray Pyle, who once saved his life, and he is motivated to do so by a sense of decency and a desire to prevent more violence. In a further irony, just as Fowler is about to lose everything, his life dramatically improves, as if he were being rewarded for his act: he is allowed by his newspaper to stay in Vietnam to cover the news now that Vietnam has heated up, and he can marry Phuong now that his wife has changed her mind and granted him a divorce.

As a narrative, this well-crafted novel has also been read as a detective story, a kind of fiction that is said to have attracted the author because it was concerned with “pursuing and ferreting out the truth” in an otherwise dubious moral universe.43 There are some of the usual conventions of crime fiction: a mystery surrounding a murder, the search for the truth, even a French police inspector, Vigot, who claims he is not Maigret.44 The reader learns that Pyle is dead at the beginning of the novel, which creates curiosity to discover what happened and “whodunit,” and there are also the required twists and turns in the plot, as well as a complex chronology, before the mystery is solved. In this case, the pursuit of the killer requires the detective-narrator (Fowler) to tell the story in retrospect, without ferreting out the truth in the classic sense of crime fiction, since it turns out that he is also the “killer.” While a full confession to Vigot (as the conventions demand) is withheld, Fowler is able to reconstruct his story at the end for himself and the reader. Despite these apparent conventions, reading the novel as a crime fiction turns out to be not very illuminating, because Pyle’s murder is not revenge, one of the familiar motives of murder-mysteries, and Fowler is not a fugitive from the law but from his own disturbed knowledge.45

As a character, Alden Pyle is an aggregation of some negative qualities that Greene evidently thinks are wrong with American culture. One presumed national trait is Pyle’s lack of any sense of irony, which often makes for comic misunderstandings between him and the ironic Fowler. Another is his preference for mythical history. Talking to Fowler about his first dog, “Prince,” Pyle tells him that he named the creature after the Black Prince,

“You know, the fellow who…”

“Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“The history books gloss it over” (72).

In the context of the climactic bombing episode, this allusion makes a moral as well as an historical point.

Another trait, Pyle’s political naiveté (he is hardly “innocent,” as often described by critics), leads him to place his hope in the Cao Dai sect, even though Fowler warns him that the French do not trust its followers. Pyle’s reply, that a “man becomes trustworthy when you trust him,” makes Fowler think that the reply itself “sounded like a Caodaist maxim.” Greene evidently intends for his novel to expose the dangers of so-called “American innocence” and the national preference for myth over history. Successful intervention in a foreign civil war depends on knowledge, as opposed to mere “intelligence.” The lack of knowledge, “innocence” (to quote Fowler) “becomes a kind of insanity” (162). In this reading, Greene’s novel is more an indictment of cultural ignorance and political shortsightedness that often results in dangerous national policies than simply a negative portrait of a well-meaning but misguided individual.

Accordingly, upon publication of his novel, Greene was widely accused of being anti-American. In one hysterical editorial, for example, the middle-brow magazine The Saturday Evening Post, characterized the novel as “Hate-America Propaganda.” Even the respected journalist A.J. Liebling, reviewing the novel in the highbrow magazine The New Yorker took Greene to task for America-bashing.46 Greene was accused by a number of people of believing that “America is the symbol of all that has gone wrong: materialism, godlessness, adult innocence, neutrality.”47 And yet Greene, whose anti-Americanism was political, need not be confused with his character Fowler, who finds certain aspects of American mainstream culture vacuous, a critique that, in any case, American writers and cultural critics—Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, to name the most distinguished—have been making about their country since the nineteenth century.

Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love would, of course, include marriage and Junior and Mother’s Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to hell with everybody (62).

The petulance here is Fowler’s, but that final sentence, with its suggestion of an independent foreign policy whose moral certainties disregarded the opinion of the rest of the world, was precisely how the US proceeded when it became involved in Vietnam.48 It should also be noted that Fowler is aware of his anti-American sentiments and their connection with his jealousy of his rival. In talking to Phuong, he confesses:

I began—almost unconsciously—to run down everything that was American. My conversation was full of the poverty of American literature, the scandals of American politics, the beastliness of American children. It was as though she were being taken away from me by a nation rather than by a man. Nothing that America could do was right. I became a bore on the subject of America, even with my French friends, who were ready enough to share my antipathies (138-139).

In another episode, however, Fowler’s anti-American antipathy is ill-conceived. At a Press Conference in Hanoi, “a too beautiful” French colonel is briefing the correspondents, weaving “his web of evasion,” but the loutish American correspondent Granger persists in asking why the colonel refuses to give out the number of French casualties: “Is the colonel seriously telling us…that he’s had time to count the enemy dead and not his own?” (63). Granger presses his questions and the colonel gradually loses his patience even to the point of accusing the Americans of not sending more material aid (which was the gist of General de Lattre’s complaint to Truman and Acheson when he visited the US shortly before his death). Fowler is critical of Granger’s “bullying voice” and behavior as inappropriate and aggressive, believing that Granger resented the colonel for not looking like “a man’s man,” as if the colonel’s beauty and the correspondent’s vulgarity are more relevant than their arguments. Granger’s personality aside, a more critical and aggressive American press corps early in the war might well have made it more embarrassing for US officials to weave their own web of evasion.

John Pratt argues that accusations of Greene’s anti-Americanism must be tempered by the favorable critical comment on the novel in a number of American periodicals.49 In the decade following publication, the novel was widely read and accepted by the American public, which by that time had a more realistic understanding of the American commitment. A more serious accusation was a factual one: the attack on Greene’s novel for being defamatory, specifically with respect to American responsibility for the explosion in the center of Saigon, in which (the historian Robert D. Schulzinger claims) the US was never proven to be involved.50 By way of reply, Greene, in his introduction to the 1973 edition of the novel, cites several hushed up incidents that implicate American Foreign Service personnel in terrorist acts.51

One of the novel’s epigraphs is taken from Byron’s Don Juan (1819-24), every line of which is relevant to the American presence in Vietnam:

This is the patent age of new inventions

For killing bodies and for saving souls,

All propagated with the best intentions.

For new inventions, read dependence on technological weaponry; for saving souls, read “winning hearts and minds”; for best intentions, read “containment.” The novel is prescient at several points. Fowler’s description of what the French were up against in the north sounds very much like what the Americans would encounter in the south: “A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress” (23). Civilian casualties and the omissions and false reports of the press, which kept the American public in ignorance about the real progress of the war later on, are also a part of the conflict represented in the novel. At one point, Granger candidly admits what reporting the war in northern Vietnam is like, a routine in which perceptions are carefully controlled by the French military:

I fly to Hanoi airport. They give us a car to the Press Camp. They lay on a flight over the two towns they’ve recaptured and show the tricolour flying. It might be any darned flag at that height. Then we have a Press Conference and a colonel explains to us what we’ve been looking at. Then we file our cables with the censor. Then we have drinks.” (34)

Fowler, on an unauthorized journey to Phat Diem in the north, realizes the impossibility of writing about the results of a guerrilla attack on the city, which he can see for himself: “Now after four days, with the help of parachutists, the enemy had been pushed back half a mile around the town. This was a defeat: no journalists were allowed, no cables could be sent, for the papers must carry only victories” (47). The expectation of contact is similarly frustrating. As Fowler waits anxiously for an attack to begin, two shots are fired and he thinks “this is it,” but the victims turn out to be only a woman and her six year old son: “’Malchance,’ the lieutenant said” (52).

Another important aspect, not only of the Vietnam War but of any war, is how the novel shows that the “truth” about what actually happens depends upon who controls the interpretation. When Fowler asks the French lieutenant in command of the Foreign Legion unit to which he attaches himself how much longer the battle will last, the lieutenant replies: “This is just a diversion. If we can hold out with no more help than we got two days ago, it is, one may say, a victory” (54).

The journey Fowler takes, which is unauthorized and therefore the first important departure from his stance as an uninvolved reporter, wakes him up to the reality of the military situation as well as its human costs. When the soldiers have to cross the canal, it is so clogged with the bodies of people who had been caught in a crossfire that the punt becomes stuck. Fowler’s description is revealingly non-journalistic: “I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-grey, and as anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy” (50-51).

These experiences gradually undermine Fowler’s resolve to remain aloof, and yet he is aware that the moral indignation that has moved him to act against Pyle has personal, legal, and political implications—he will have to dissimulate with Vigot, whom he likes, and aid the Viet Minh, whom he does not know. Because of this moral dilemma, political readings have generally been less important in the vast critical literature that has accumulated around the novel than might be expected. According to Jim Neilson, a Marxist critic who analyzed the critical reception of The Quiet American over several decades, readings of the novel have moved “from a defense against charges that Greene was anti-American and a focus on existential and Christian themes to a recognition of Greene’s prescience and an interest in his race and gender constructions.”52 All these thematic emphases, according to Neilson, have obscured the political meanings. It is to be expected that criticism of a major writer’s fiction would try to make connections among his various works—hence, the obsessive critical concern with existentialist choice and the dark side of Greene’s moral universe—but Neilson is surely right to be impatient with the critical insistence on such readings in the post-Vietnam climate, where the political (and moral) issues of American intervention are so relevant.

One notorious political reading was the first film adaptation by Joseph Mankiewicz (1958), filmed in Saigon, which altered certain details, as well as the ending of the novel, to make the story more suitable to Cold War sensibilities. For example, when Fowler reads the book before his window—the signal to go ahead with Pyle’s murder—he reads a passage from Othello (rather than Kipling, as in the novel), to suggest that his motive is jealous revenge rather than moral indignation at Pyle’s political activity. And at the end of the film, Vigot proves to Fowler that Pyle was innocent of the bombing; it was really perpetrated by the Communists.53

Greene was unsurprisingly angry at this willful distortion, as were the British reviewers of the film, but Mankiewicz offered no apologies, even claiming that Fowler was one of those “ice-blooded intellectuals…whose intellectuality is really just a mask for completely irrational passion,”54 which makes nonsense not only of the character but of his moral dilemma in the novel. The distortion of the novel’s politics is not confined to conservative interpretations, according to Neilson, who complains that even liberal political readings of the novel “have continued to read American foreign policy as well-intentioned,”55 which is most likely due to the liberal politics of most literary critics. In Neilson’s Marxist reading, American policy in Vietnam was not the result of well-intentioned but misguided innocence (as he claims even Greene seemed to think), but “a logical and necessary means of maintaining capitalist hegemony.”56 Neilson cites Haim Gordon’s book on Greene to support an interpretation in which The Quiet American can be seen as exposing the horrors perpetrated by the US government “in its greed and lust for power,” and how these horrors have been “instigated, supported, and covered up by the western powers.”57 What seems clear, in any event, is that as long as the Vietnam War inspires the writing of fictional works and provokes both literary and political debate, Greene’s seminal novel will be at the center of these discussions.

iii. William J. Lederer & Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (1958)

The Ugly American was a best-selling novel (four million copies) later adapted into a less successful homonymous film (1963), starring Marlon Brando and directed by George Englund.58 Lederer and Burdick’s work is essentially a polemical argument worked up into fiction. “This book is written as fiction; but it is based on fact,” the authors claim in an introductory note, a statement that might apply to almost any work of fiction, although it usually means to signal the present work’s serious intentions. The authors were Asian experts rather than professional writers of fiction. When the book was published, Lederer had been special assistant to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, while Burdick was an academic specialist in Southeast Asia at the University of California, Berkeley.59 Despite these impressive credentials, their novel is at the same time politically naïve and a true reflection of Cold War thinking. Jim Neilson claims that the authors evidently held “the belief that simple American know-how can overcome revolutionary political movements that arose from dire socioeconomic problems and the cruel legacy of colonialism.”60

As a literary effort, The Ugly American is far inferior to Greene’s novel or, for that matter, all the other novels discussed in this chapter, but as a cultural document it is revealing of the political climate of the period on which it had considerable influence. John Kennedy, planning to run for the presidency on an anti-Communist foreign policy platform, was one of four senators who gave copies of the novel to their colleagues, evidently to alert them to the dangers of Communism in Asia and the hitherto inadequate efforts of the US government to stem the red tide.61 Lt. Col. John Vann, a later adventurer in Vietnam both as soldier and civilian—he is the subject of Neil Sheehan’s biography-history of the war, A Bright Shining Lie (1988)—read and approved of the novel. Vann also said that he hoped to emulate Landsdale, who had arrived in Vietnam eight years earlier, in his own work there. Vann believed that Landsdale, unlike the inept “ugly Americans” of the novel, really “understood” Asians.

According to Sheehan, The Ugly American, whose title is an obvious play on Greene’s (and possibly meant to “correct” Greene’s view of Vietnam), “was accepted well into the 1960s as an example of serious political thought,” an assessment reflected in the novel’s reception, both popular and critical.62 The historian Joseph Buttinger was one of the few critics who—in a detailed, fifty-page review in Dissent (Summer 1959 issue)—discussed the book’s inanity, distortions, and falsehoods.63 Neilson thinks that Buttinger went to such lengths because he believed that the novel had too much influence on contemporary foreign policy debates. Schulzinger has made an even greater claim for the book’s influence on foreign policy: “as political propaganda setting the stage for a war, The Ugly American had an impact similar to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the years before the American Civil War.”64 Like Stowe, Lederer and Burdick seem certain that God was on their side, and, as a corollary, the enemy (Communism) was both godless and ruinous.

The nearly plotless novel (if it can be called that) consists of a collection of stories that are little more than fictional portraits of Americans in “Sarkhan” (Vietnam) and other Asian countries. The Americans are divided into two types: the dedicated and effective representatives of their nation, and the reprehensible “ugly Americans” who seem to be, in the view of the authors, most of the people actually over there in some official capacity—hence, the need for this alarmist tract. The characters belonging to the dedicated group are given individual portraits, but they all turn out to comprise a recognizable if idealized American type, both idealistic and pragmatic, genuinely interested in helping Asians as well as improving the image of their own country abroad. They are all democratic, can-do, plain-spoken men (and one woman) who heartily dislike politicians, officials, and bureaucrats, both American and Asian, regarding them as ignorant, interfering, and indifferent to the lives of native peoples. These “good” Americans invariably learn to speak the native language, take an interest in the national culture and local customs, get out into the countryside to see how people really live, establish warm relationships with them, and, in turn, earn their respect. They tend to distrust large and expensive projects but possess some practical skill that will be useful in improving the everyday lives of the “Sarkhanese” with whom they come in daily contact. As if all this were not enough, none of them have a profit motive but are selfless in sharing their gifts.

The first of these, John Colvin, was an OSS agent in Sarkhan during World War II, when he learned to love the country. He returns after the war to teach the Sarkhanese how to breed cattle, drink milk, make powdered milk, and make use of the by-products of stock-breeding, after which he will sell out his share and leave the country. Framed by a former Sarkhanese comrade who has gone over to the Communists, Colvin is deported. Another example is Homer Atkins, who is “ugly” only in the sense that he is physically homely. An engineer, he builds a simple pump to get water up to higher ground for irrigation, and he democratically shares his idea with the local mechanic of a poor village. Together they work out the technical problem of an apparatus that will use only local, inexpensive materials. Quite soon, the village begins to look like a model enterprising American town, with everyone building or selling the new pump, but Atkins declines to patent his invention. His wife, Emma, who is also homely and good, sets out to correct the bent backs of the old villagers, who have become deformed by using short-handled brooms but have accepted this painful condition as their fate (the immovable Asian mind). Emma, who “was not bound by centuries of tradition,” convinces the villagers to use a long-handled substitute, whereupon the old folks begin to stand up straight, and the grateful villagers build a shrine in honor of the American couple. This condescending, “colonialist” attitude of the authors to native intelligence seems to be invisible to them throughout; their whole approach to winning Asian hearts and minds is absurdly simplistic. The complete trust of the authors in “Yankee ingenuity” does not allow them to suspect, in Neilson’s formulation, that “elite ownership of land, lack of access to education, a corrupt and repressive political system, and a nearly feudal class division are not obstacles to capitalist victory.”65

One character, Tom Knox, exemplifies how a “good” American can become corrupted and turned into an “ugly” one. An Iowa poultry farmer, Knox is sent to Cambodia as an agricultural expert. He is friendly, serious, non-bureaucratic, and bent on raising the protein level of poor villagers by improving their poultry stock and increasing the egg output. Balked by bureaucrats and politicians with their own priorities, he threatens to return to the US and campaign to congressmen for his simple scheme of improving Sarkhanese daily life at low cost. His fatal flaw of a fascination for the exotic, however, is exploited by evil French and Cambodian diplomats, because their respective governments are more interested in capital-intensive projects like roads and mechanized farms. Knox is bought off by a lavish round-the-world trip, in the course of which he rather improbably forgets his protest and gives into the luxury of seeing the exotic sights.

Knox’s upper-echelon counterpart is Senator Brown, the tough old head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who goes to “Vietnam” (i.e. not Sarkhan) as part of his Asian fact-finding mission, on which he will base his recommendations for the year’s overseas funding. Despite his determination to talk to ordinary people and low-ranking technicians and to bypass the bureaucrats to find out what is really going on, the embassy staff is ready for him, with an exhausting program of long walks and heavy dinners with plenty of wine to slow him down and dull his wits, as well as factual presentations prepared by the staff to misrepresent the actual situation, including photographs of Communist atrocities, and a translator who has been instructed by the ambassador to mistranslate hostile or inappropriate interviewees. All of this is designed to convince the well-meaning senator that the French are winning the war and therefore deserve more US aid.

Other “good” Americans are actually fighting the Communists for Asian hearts and minds, although they too are not being heeded. Father John X. Finian, a Jesuit priest, becomes an anti-Communist missionary in Burma, where he cultivates a small group of nine men and manages to convince them, as he manipulates them, that they are making their own decisions in choosing American over Communist aid. The group’s main triumph is spreading misinformation on the radio after planting a spy at a meeting of the local Communists to discredit them in the eyes of the villagers.

Another eager warrior, Major James (Tex) Wolchek, a veteran paratrooper of World War II and Korea, is ready to drop into Dien Bien Phu with a group of Legionnaires when the news arrives that it has fallen to the Vietminh. Tex accompanies the French on military operations and sees that although they are doing everything right according to the conventional rules of war, they are still losing. The Communists are “fighting by a different rule book,” he points out to the French commander, Major Monet, and this is not a mere metaphor, for the “book” is Mao’s manual on guerrilla warfare, which Tex has read. He acquires a clandestine copy, and he, Monet, and the American Ambassador MacWhite read it aloud together and work out a plan of operation for an attack on a village (although it is unlikely that the two officers would accept the civilian MacWhite on equal terms relating to a military op) in which they presumably turn Mao’s tactics against the Communists and defeat them.

It is absurd to suggest that the French lost the war because they did not read Mao. In fact, they did read him, but, like the Americans who replaced them, they did not seem to realize that the Vietnamese Communists never stressed military action without political motivation, even to their soldiers. In any case, the confused narrative of the battle suggests that Mao´s tactics are hardly the issue, for the French soldiers achieve their victory from superior firepower and the element of surprise—hardly unconventional warfare. When Tex and Monet, based on this single success, try to sell the French and American higher commands on their method, the Eurocentric generals remain unconvinced, not from tactical but racist motives, refusing to accept that Asians could have changed the accepted ways that wars have always been fought. They are shown to be wrong when shortly afterwards the French have to evacuate Hanoi. That the military is blind to what is really happening is shown again in the episode where Homer Atkins informs an incredulous group of French generals of the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “Impossible!” they reply.

The main example of how a “good” American can be discarded by the system is the story of the Honorable Gilbert MacWhite, who becomes US Ambassador to Sarkhan in 1954, a capable administrator and determined Cold Warrior, who “regarded his anticipated combat with the Communists as the capstone of his career” (81). MacWhite, however, makes several fatal mistakes. He is unable to fathom that the two elderly Chinese servants at the Embassy are Communist spies. When he reports that “the Vietnamese, both Communist and non-Communist, hated the French” as exploitative colonialists (hardly news to any outside observer, it would seem), the duped Senator Brown claims “from first-hand knowledge” that he must be in error.

MacWhite receives a letter from the Secretary of State, who personally likes him, listing his diplomatic mistakes (i.e. everything, according to the authors, that he did right in Sarkhan) and hinting that he resign. MacWhite replies with a longer letter in which he informs the Secretary why the US is not winning hearts and minds in Asia:

I do not think the Russians will ever resort to thermonuclear warfare. They won’t have to. They are winning much too easily to run the risk of annihilation by retaliation…the Russians will win the world by their successes in a multitude of tiny battles…[and] the sum of these battles will decide whether our way of life is to perish or to persist (225).

This is an example of the sort of reasoning that ensured that Americans would take up the cudgel in Vietnam.

In the authors’ view, the “ugly Americans” are those people who are totally unprepared for their mission abroad, unlike the Russians, as MacWhite points out in his letter, who are doing everything right. The Americans know nothing of the countries that they are sent to and, since they do not learn the native language, they are unable to read the local newspapers and can communicate only with the English-speaking elite. They isolate themselves in the “golden ghetto” of privilege, hang out at the “Press Club or the American Club or at the Officer’s Club” and in their ignorance of how people really think are incapable of representing the best interests of the United States—all valid criticisms.

In an interview, a Burmese journalist who apparently represents the authors’ viewpoint succinctly defines the “ugly American” even while insisting that he admires the Americans he meets in the United States: “A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious” (123). The problem is shown to begin with the civilian personnel that the State Department recruits to work abroad. As MacWhite complains, the emphasis in recruiting people for the Foreign Service is on good salaries and favorable exchange rates, commissary privileges, free housing, government vehicles, and native servants. Rather, he thinks, candidates should show a willingness to face challenges, work long hours, make sacrifices, live in modest housing, eat native food, read Marx, Lenin, and Mao (i.e. the know-your-enemy strategy), give up private automobiles, and learn difficult languages. Is it any wonder, MacWhite asks, rather redundantly, that we attract only mediocrities?

Such people include both MacWhite’s predecessor and his successor as ambassador to Sarkhan. Louis Sears, his predecessor, is a political party man and appointee who is just putting in time at the post until he can secure a tenured federal judgeship. Sears is a man who knows nothing of the country to which he is ambassador and cares even less. He calls the Sarkhanese “monkeys” and, unable to recognize a dedicated American, believes in the set-up that the Communists arranged for John Colvin and has him sent home. His successor is Joe Bing, the Ugly American made visible: a fat, brassy, glad-handing public-relations type who “knows everybody”—except the nationals.

Not only are civilians members of the wrong type. Captain Boning (sic) of the US Navy, is another example. He is part of the American Delegation to an Asian conference on arms, which will decide which American arms should be distributed and to whom. The conference leader Solomon Asch has experience as a tough labor-negotiator, but even he cannot prevent Boning, their technical expert, from dozing off at meetings and not being sufficiently prepared to come up with fast, accurate answers for the Asian delegates. Boning has also been set up, going out with an attractive Chinese doctor every night, a lapse that causes the conference to flounder. This is meant to be an example of the lack of professionalism that the Russians, far more serious and effective in their diplomacy, successfully avoid.

Colonel Hillandale (based on Landsdale) is one of the “good” Americans in the novel, but also a fantastic caricature of Landsdale in the Philippines. Hillandale is a palm-reading “six-foot Swami from Savannah,” and a harmonica-playing “Ragtime Kid,” “one of those happy, uninhibited people who can dance and drink all night and then show up at eight fresh and rested” (92). He can “jam” with an orchestra on his harmonica, “improvising Satchmo himself” (sic) and shows his democratic spirit by eating in little Filipino restaurants. He also studies Tagalog at the university in his spare time, and is popular with politicians, including soon-to-be President Magsaysay, as well as taxi-drivers and bandleaders. Only the counselor at the American Embassy refuses to be overwhelmed by his talents and charm.

John Clark Pratt, taking note of Lederer and Burdick’s caricature-like portrait, believes that Hillendale is “one of the inept, short-sighted Americans” in the novel, which may suggest that he is one of the “Ugly Americans” that I have described above.66 From the point of view of Lederer and Burdick, however, Hillendale shares more features with the other so-called “good” Americans of the novel: he is sympathetic to the natives, antipathetic to the bureaucrats, and generally effective in handling difficult situations. Internal evidence in fact shows that he is supposed to be one of the good guys: MacWhite’s letter to the Secretary of State lists only five men out of the “three hundred” Americans who have passed through the Embassy in some capacity: “One of them was a Catholic priest, one was an engineer, one an Air Force Colonel, one a Major from Texas, and one a private citizen who manufactures powdered milk,” namely, Father Finian, Homer Atkins, Colonel Hillendale, Major Kolchek, and John Colvin, respectively.

To ensure support for Magsaysay in the upcoming election, Hillandale goes alone on a motorcycle to a province where “the Communist propagandists had done too good a job” (93). By playing favorite Filipino tunes on his harmonica, he attracts a crowd that he encourages to “sing along,” and talks about the cost of living in America, managing to convince this potentially hostile crowd that not all Americans are rich. The reader is asked to believe that in a single afternoon, this simpático American is so successful at overriding Communist propaganda that 95% of the people of the province turn out to vote for Magsaysay and his pro-American platform.

In the second episode in which Hillandale is involved, he is equally imaginative but less successful. On loan from the Filipinos to Sarkhan, he is invited to the Philippine Ambassador’s dinner party in “Haidho,” the Sarkhanese capital, where he is asked by the ambassador to entertain the guests by reading their palms while the chef makes his final preparations. George Swift, the American chargé d’affairs, is contemptuous and sarcastic about “vaudeville tricks” (he means parlor tricks) at a diplomatic reception, but Hillandale shuts him up by revealing some embarrassing things about his past. The Prime Minister, impressed by this exhibition, asks to have his own palm read in private, which is to be done a day or two after the proper protocol has been observed. Swift, who is responsible for this contact, simply ignores it and thereby insults the Filipinos and causes Hillandale to lose an opportunity to tell the King that the “stars” (Hillandale can also do astrological charts) have advised troops be sent on maneuvers to the northern border, where Chinese Communist troops have massed.

Earlier, on a walk through the streets of Haidho, Hillandale had astutely noted that astrologers and palmists in Sarkhan had offices that resembled those of fashionable doctors in the US and that their shingles outside these offices “all indicated that these practitioners had doctors’ degrees” (148), which reminds the Colonel that he has had the foresight to get his own diploma from the “Chungking School of Occult Sciences.” The opportunity for American mystical influence has been lost, however, for Swift, one of the “Ugly Americans,” has undone the efforts of someone who understands the Asian mind enough to use astrology for his purposes.

As Landsdale’s pupil and admirer, John Vann said, with unconscious racism: “Landsdale understood that Asians were people, that you could discern their desires and play upon those desires to your advantage.”67 Whether Landsdale had actually studied astrology is unclear, but like Hillandale he did make opportunistic use of it in his misinformation campaign in North Vietnam. One of Landsdale’s clandestine tactics for harassing the Hanoi government and encouraging emigration to the south was bribing astrologers to make the desired predictions. In the words of The Pentagon Papers: “In the South, the team hired Vietnamese astrologers—in whose art many Asians place great trust—to compile almanacs bearing dire predictions for the Vietminh and good omens for the new Government of Premier Diem.”68

iv. M. J. Bosse, The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959)

Bosse’s novel, which deserves to be better known, has its starting point with the partition of Vietnam in 1954 into North and South Vietnam in accordance with the Geneva agreements. The novel shows how the division affected the lives of rural people from the north, leaving aside Euro-American viewpoints to give a sympathetic portrayal of Vietnamese characters caught in a social upheaval that they hardly understand but that profoundly disrupts their lives. Here, for example, is the protagonist, Nam, right after his arrival in Haiphong, from which he will embark southward. He is amazed that there are no sentries or barbed-wire in the city, and he wanders around town gawking at the buildings and well-dressed women:

He stared at passing soldiers. They had the long noses, indeterminable ages, indistinguishable faces of white men, and they talked the way they walked—briskly…Nam stopped in front of one house, pink and colonnaded, a Western house undoubtedly because it was four stories high. Fronting it was grass, a whole plot of earth wasted on unimportant grass. Here was land enough to provide for a family of ten.69

With this technique of estrangement, the reader here becomes the foreigner, the other, seeing what would be a familiar kind of people, building, and yard through the protagonist’s eyes.

The narrative follows the classic pattern of the picaresque journey. The traveler is a resourceful young man, the eponymous hero known simply as “Nam,” as if he were representative of his country. It is also to the point that Nam often has to go by different names and play different roles, be now strong and decisive, now hesitant and deferential. The novel seems to be saying that bending to circumstance and improvising a proper role is necessary for these people struggling to survive under a succession of masters: French, Viet Minh, American, and South Vietnamese. The journey is hazardous, replete with material want, physical hardship, and psychological anxiety. Nam makes the classic metaphorical equation of a journey with life itself: “Nam gradually learns that the world was not a circle of peaceful days and nights, but it was more like the road itself, moving into the unknown” (225).

His journey consists of several stages: i) Nam’s departure from his native village and his murder of a guard; ii) the rigorous overland journey, punctuated by stops at villages along the way and marked by encounters with other people, mostly Catholics, who are trying to reach the ships that will take them south; iii) the sea journey from Haiphong to Saigon on an American ship; iv) the arrival in Saigon and his adventures there. The departure from Nam’s Catholic village, Ba Lang, is precipitated by the success of the Viet Minh in the war. The son of a mandarin landowner, Nam is literate and knows French. With his older brother in the priesthood, the family’s ten hectares of rice land would fall to him, an inheritance that would ensure his future as a farmer and the respect accorded him within the village. Nam is not a dreamer; he is content to follow traditional patterns of living, but when these patterns are radically disrupted by the war, he resigns himself to what life offers at the moment and tries not to regret things that he cannot control. Despite setbacks and losses that would drive many to despair, he never looks back.

How life is to be different under the Viet Minh is shown when his group enters the village. Political harangues, called “the Lesson,” are obligatory, and new taxes are levied, which the villagers do not understand: “unity contributions, and public subscriptions, and taxes for a thing called future development” (18). To undermine the power of the village priest, Nam’s brother, the time for hearing Mass is changed to coincide with the Lesson, by which the local Commissar means to suggest that the village church is no longer needed. The priest’s defiance brings on a threat to his life, symbolically in the form of a single chopstick—to be jabbed into his ear if he does not submit. He warns his brother Nam that his resistance will be paid not only by himself but by his whole family: “I am dead, I know that…And if you stay, you too are dead” (25). Nam must leave immediately; he is given money, a jade crucifix, and a piece of paper with instructions for the journey, which he is to memorize and then destroy. With great regret at leaving behind “the real wealth he had,” the family rice fields, Nam sets out on a journey that will take him first east, then north to Haiphong.

Immediately, he runs into trouble, in the form of a guard who demands le passeport, a document demanded of every traveler who strays far from his village. When the guard threatens to take him back, Nam reacts instinctively by killing the man with a knife. By this act, he is fatally committed to the journey south, like it or not: “Why would so many people have reason to go to Haiphong? He had none, not really, until he had killed the guard” (35). Many of the people who share Nam’s journey from north to south are Catholics who were urged by their priests to leave, who were even told that Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary had “gone south” (as one of Landsdale’s rumor campaigns actually put it). These people feared mistreatment or reprisals by the Viet Minh as well as by those people who remained, a well-founded fear on the evidence of the novel.

The second phase of the narrative begins with Nam on the road, a long journey on foot, and, in the later stages, by bus and boat (his progress can be followed on a map on the inside cover of the first edition, marked off by the names of the villages he reaches). There are frequent checkpoints, which show how completely the Viet Minh control the northern countryside. At the first, he has to lie about his origins to conceal his real identity, but the soldier does not believe him: “You smell only of manure, not fish, and your tongue is sharper than any fisherman’s” (43). Nam bribes the man; the Viet Minh soldiers encountered along the way are usually peasants, who are often corrupt and cruel, but rarely stupid.

At Vinh, the local people are hostile toward the refugees, calling them “traitors,” and the newcomers are herded into a compound, where pressure is brought to bear to make them give up and go home. A rousing patriotic rally is held in the square in front of the compound. The refugees are given no food and an offer of a water buffalo is made to anyone who goes back to his native village. A former tradesman, who explains that he is going south, “where the piastres are,” because the north is no longer “the weather for a merchant” (50), tells Nam that this offer is a ruse—it is always the same men who take up the offer. The narrative has a number of episodes that mean to show the continuous attempts of the Viet Minh to secure the people on the land, discouraging the exodus by patriotic appeals as well as deceit and outright force.

The refugees are made to convert their money to the new Viet Minh currency, stamped with the image of Ho Chi Minh. Nam feels satisfied that he gets back almost twice the amount in the exchange, but the merchant laughs at him: “The Vietminh will send money they got from you south and buy goods in Saigon. What you gave up was better money” (64). On a bus, the driver and guard stop at regular intervals to shake down the passengers, who must pay for the handfuls of rice they eat as well as so many piastres per kilometer traveled; those without money have to get off the bus. Nam’s book, one of his few possessions (a classic given him by his father) arouses suspicion in these illiterate peasants. They confiscate his jade crucifix as well as the book, and try to extort more money, but he has slyly distributed his money on different parts of his person to avoid losing it all. He does not waste time lamenting his losses: the “book had lost him a ride and a costly crucifix. He was well rid of the book” (90).

As he pursues his journey, “The sign of war was everywhere, and it was a negative sound: a lack of sound…no yapping or clucking or trumpeting” (91). When a group he travels with arrives at Than Hoa, they listen to a speech that will be heard repeatedly along the road. Refugees do not reach Saigon as the French promise, they are told, but are shipped to Africa, “a land of savages where men are strangled when too old for work. Americans, who have developed a great bomb, need more victims for testing: “that was why American ships were at Haiphong—to buy Viet slaves from the French” (105). These stories have an impact on the ignorant refugees, as do the myriad rumors that pop up whenever a new place is reached or new event takes place. In their insecurity and fear, these people are always prepared to believe the worst, and rumor campaigns prove to be an effective way to make them give up their plans to migrate south. Remembering the stories of old men in his home village, however, Nam is always skeptical: “Words but no medicine: that was what Nam was learning to expect from commissars. Words but no food. Words and detours, words and robbery, words and the vanity of peasants” (110). He thinks that the Commissars are no different from the priests: “Have faith...that’s what the le Commissaire says” (113).

The father of Lia, a woman he loves, dies. “To Nam that was a truth easier to grasp than the truth of seers, and of priests. Here was death. He had seen it before…There was solace for him in this lack of mystery” (116). He buries the old man and on the same night Lia gives herself to him and it is understood they will be man and wife. He accepts the gift of her father’s Japanese knife: “Think of it as the gift I would bring you from my father” (118), but he loses her in the confusion resulting from a botched escape by boat. “How foolish to accept a plan which so obviously had been devised blindly, out of greed not sense” (135), he chides himself. At Ninh Binh, further up the coast, he seeks out a man, Ton, who had known his father. The house is ramshackle from the outside, which turns out to be a clever disguise: “That a life of such luxurious calm lay behind the shabby façade of this house was a source of great wonder to Nam.” (144). The cunning, widely traveled Ton has achieved a separate peace with the enemy. “This too Nam admired: old Ton could hate the Vietminh and still live comfortably with them” (145). As Ton explains, “A man who feeds his enemies has no worry.”

Nam befriends a young man named Hai, a small-time thief and confidence-man with his own methods of survival. The two men become involved in another escape operation, but once again the operation is betrayed and soldiers appear on the beach just as the party is ready to sail. The boat takes a few hits but manages to pull away while Hai runs into the fishing-village, making a lot of noise to draw off the soldiers. With luck, the boat reaches the islands at the mouth of the Red River a few kilometers from Haiphong and is picked up by a French patrol boat. In fact, the refugees have made it to the port of North Vietnam right before the Viet Minh takeover. Nam realizes that now that he is out of their zone he can use his family name again, which is all that he has left in the world now that he has lost his land, family, woman, and friend.

In Haiphong, Nam is reminded of how far he has come in both distance and experience: “When a man left a place, all he could keep of it was a vague memory. Even if it had been the source of his life, now, away from it, it was only a detail or two—perhaps the image of a cedar in a field” (185). Memories are also insufficient to sustain a difficult present life and uncertain future. To buy food, the always pragmatic Namnamn decides to sell the Japanese knife that Lia had given him: “He would sell it because a gift from one’s woman was not worth much without the woman—not when life made money worth more than memory” (191).

The refugees are taken to a camp where they are sheltered in American-made tents designed for fifty people but packed with a hundred. Wild rumors proliferate: Chinese gunboats have machine-gunned thousands of people; the Vietminh are going to break the treaty and kill everyone in the camp; an epidemic is devastating another camp and would reach this one within days, and yet some people, frightened of what is to come, refuse to leave: “They grew fat and became the chief critics of the camp and slept most of the time” (199). A soldier who fought with the French tells stories about the Americans that Viet Minh propaganda could hardly improve on: “They worshipped a god of cleanliness, these Americans, and so if a man vomited on their ships, they cut his hands off…When their officers got hungry and wished for something special, they cut up a child and ate it” (201). On the way to the boats, the stories and rumors circulate unabated: the D.D.T. that the refugees are sprayed with is made of “terrible spirits” that will determine who can ship out: “the smoke kills off the weak.” A man harangues the frightened people with a description of a Viet Minh poster he has seen of the American ships: “the boats in the poster had their fronts open upon the water and were tipped, spilling people into the sea” (223).

The third phase of the narrative, the sea journey, lasts a week. The American crew is completely unaware of what is going on with their passengers: “They did not know a man had been murdered, or to what extent some passengers had been threatened by black marketeers” (225). The murder victim was extorting the navy-issued food from the passengers and then selling it back to them at high prices. A group of disgruntled men, urged on by a priest, get together and throw the fat man overboard. Everyone had expected the Americans to punish the exploiters, but to the general disappointment, “Americans show no more pride than dogs…Americans did not have the courage to punish men who made fools of them” (237). The reader understands that the Americans either did not know or were indifferent to these events, another example of narrative “estrangement.”

At their arrival in Saigon, the final stage of the narrative, the refugees are greeted with a brass band and a speech from the mayor but then left to their own devices. Nam’s suspicions about the good treatment on the sea voyage makes him think that “there was one reason for such good treatment—get cheap labor for the camp in Saigon” (247) and he jumps off the truck to avoid that fate. The south turns out to be inhospitable to northern refugees. After Nam runs out of money and has to find work, he decides to become a trishaw driver but the other drivers run him off, having no desire to share their customers from what they see as the riff-raff “off the boats” who threaten their livelihood. Nam resorts to begging, which turns out to be hard work. Once more, rather than lament his fate he adapts, learning the best attitudes to strike, the best places to beg (near bars, casinos, and brothels), and the best human types to beg from (Americans are best, although, in his pride, he cannot bear the contempt they have in their eyes), the Singhalese, sometimes the French; the worst are the Algerians, who kick him).

Fortuitously, Nam spots Lia, his woman from the road, who has become the mistress of a married Frenchman. She tells him how she escaped and met a man on the ship who promised to take her to a cabaret for a fee, where she could learn to dance and dress in the western fashion and earn a living off foreigners. Lia is a prototype of the ubiquitous Vietnamese bar-girl in later novels. When she offers him money, he refuses, telling her that he will come for her. “Come for me? You do not have enough money for a banana” (257), she replies. He is not so much humiliated by this retort as surprised, for by traditional standards women are supposed to be obedient. “I am ashamed for your father,” he says and walks away. As the weeks go by, he finds that he no longer remembers her as a colonial whore, “her toneless voice, her unfamiliar eyes” but in the images of their nights together on the way to Haiphong. Once again, it does not pay to lament the past.

While begging outside the big casino owned by the Binh Xuyen, the Vietnamese mafia, he sees the owner get out of his big car and his bodyguards beat up a beggar foolish enough to approach him. The beggar turns out to be Hai, who has had many adventures since that day in the fishing-village (he was able to hustle some money on the boat but now has to admit that “Saigon hands are faster than mine”). His plan is to work a religious con-game, doing the work of God for the Cao Dai sect, which, he has discovered “were soldiers more than preachers, and merchants more than soldiers” (269), but he is killed by a stray bullet during a riot. Saigon is currently in the throes of political and social upheaval: Viet Minh agents, Caodaists, Hoa Hao, and Nationalist soldiers “all come together in vicious mêlées that more often than not left someone dead or wounded on the cobblestones” (268). The novel ends when Nam, who has lost his woman and his friend for the second time, decides to go to the labor camp after all, which Hai informed him was not really too bad, just unsuitable for one who is used to living off other people’s money.

The Journey of Tao Kim Nam might be called “Vietnamese picaresque,” with the tragi-comic adventures of a protagonist who, like the classic picaro, is forced to live on his wits and for the present moment alone. Picaresque narratives reflect the every-man-for-himself circumstances of a precarious social environment, where official authority is often the oppressor and survival depends on a combination of lucky breaks and individual cunning. The novel throughout emphasizes the disruption of traditional patriarchal continuity in the Vietnamese family, its close ties, and the relegation of women to subservient roles. Although Nam, at the start of his journey, “had shown little interest in the news of the French and Vietminh War, which has been raging five years” (16), these larger events determine his life in ways that he could not have imagined. Nam is politically naïve but no fool; he successfully overcomes the obstacles of capricious weather, surly officials, greedy soldiers, lack of money, and constant hunger by being “quick” (smart, clever, cunning), by learning from experience, keeping his own counsel and concealing information, and listening carefully.

In this novel about anonymous people, the political background is taken for granted rather than explicitly evoked. President Ngo Dinh Diem, who is never mentioned, has yet to restore order in his confused kingdom and gain the confidence of the Americans who are to maintain him in power. He will continuously neglect reforms that might have given him some legitimacy in the face of Communist successes for a palatial preoccupation with maintaining the power of his family through repression and military force.70 At the same time, the novel’s portrayal of the Viet Minh is hardly sympathetic. The idealism of Ho Chi Minh is nowhere in evidence except in debased form—in the slogans mouthed by the commissars. What is seen at the ground level is the petty cruelties and exploitation of common soldiers and officials, who, at the same time, claim that the refugees fleeing the regime are traitors. Without engaging the political aspects of Vietnamese society in any depth, this well-written novel, which seems to have been totally neglected by commentators, provides a glimpse of the enormous social problems of the entire country, north and south, especially the poverty and ignorance of the peasants who formed 90% of the population during the period.

v. Jean Lartéguy, Yellow Fever (1962; English Translation, 1965)

Lartéguy’s La Mal Jaune is a fictional representation from the French point of view of many of the events summarized in the first section of this chapter. Unlike Bosse’s novel, the focus here is on the movers-and-shakers rather than the peasantry, who remain in the background, with politics playing a central part in the action. Lartéguy’s novel frequently evokes an air of nostalgia for the old French colony, with the author in a number of passages lamenting the passing of an era. Graham Greene, who spent some time in Vietnam during this period, admitted that he shared this nostalgia “with so many retired colons and officers of the French Foreign Legion whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi.”71

The historical context of the first part of the novel is Hanoi, late 1955, three weeks before the city is to be handed over to the Communist Viet Minh. The main characters are a group of French journalists who live in a former brothel called the Press Camp, an appropriate setting, since pre-Communist Hanoi is often symbolized in the novel as a dying whore, personified by one of the characters, Ma Lien, who commits ritual suicide on the day before the Viet Minh march into the city. At this point in time, Hanoi is an in-between state, “not yet Vietminh but…no longer French.”72 The bourgeoisie are selling off their non-portable goods, and the foreigners and the prostitutes are heading south in advance of the rigorously nationalistic and puritanical Viet Minh.

The center of the group at the Press Camp is Jerome, the character with whom the author seems most to identify, a highly respected but poorly paid journalist who speaks Vietnamese and knows everybody who is anybody on both sides of the ideological divide. As a journalist, he is always one step ahead of the others because of his inside sources and wide contacts. As he never betrays his sources, everyone is willing to talk to him. Superficially, Jerome resembles Greene’s British correspondent, Thomas Fowler. Both are aging, tolerant, world-weary but worldly wise. Unlike Fowler, however, Jerome is drawn in heroic proportions: an open, honest, and disinterested man who seems to represent what Lartéguy believes is great in French culture, the true inheritance of the French Revolution. Typically, Jerome is critical of his own reputation: “his own past sickened him with its facile generosity of spirit, its false tolerance which merely concealed indifference and superficial humanism” (95).

Another locale frequented by many important local people as well as the journalists is Ma Lien’s brothel and opium-den. The once-beautiful proprietress (called a “procuress” even though her customers procure her), has slept with most of the important men in Hanoi. Ideally situated for occasional work as a police informer, she is now in full decadence, a heavy opium-smoker whose profession is doomed to disappear under Communism. The only other important female character in the novel is Kieu, who sometimes goes by her French name, Claire: a beautiful, desirable, haughty “half-caste,” a Eurasian sexpot with whom all of the men, including Jerome, are in love. Kieu once worked for Ma Lien, who sold her, when she was a thirteen year old virgin, to a French minister and taught her how to extract money and favors from men. Kieu is currently the mistress of General de Langles, the commander of the French forces in Vietnam. She is told by everyone that she has to leave town, since it is obvious that the new regime will not tolerate sexual parasites like her, but she feels a conflict of identity because Hanoi, like herself, is a city “made up of a mixture of blood.”

In this mood, she picks up a melancholy French paratrooper, Lieutenant Kervallé, who had escaped from the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, where all his friends died—and where, he tells Jerome, “I died with them” (39). Kieu convinces herself that she is in love with this morose, hulking young officer, even though he is indifferent to her beauty, regarding her merely as a half-caste whore. None of the other men can understand why Kieu has chosen this “big lout” of a lieutenant, and Ma Lien more pragmatically warns her that he will not be able to keep her on his pay, that older men of superior rank are more her style. Jerome explains her choice of the lieutenant by his romantic melancholy in the face of loss and defeat. As he tells Julien, Kervallé “wears the tortured expression of our misfortune” (112). Kervallé abandons her, as does “her general,” who had so doted on her earlier when he even dared to take her to an official reception. He is told that such an act was inappropriate for a man of his rank, and he also realizes that he could not take Kieu back to France, where he has a wife (in a revealing passage, the general is shown walking with his wife at Versailles, noting that the Americans now have to contribute to its upkeep, a metaphor for the American aid to maintain France fighting in the colonial war). Ever resourceful, Kieu settles on Rovignon, one of the journalists from a poor suburb in Paris, who needs “an apartment that is not in a slum district” and “a woman who’s beautiful, elegant and expensive and dazzles everyone with her glamour” (179). They go to South Vietnam together.

Kervallé represents the French officer-class after Dien Bien Phu. As a professional soldier, he is a man who prefers the fraternity of the barracks to family life, and he sets out for another colonial war in Algeria or Morocco, even knowing that it too will be “lost” in Paris by the generals and politicians—by a France, he thinks, that is no longer concerned with greatness but soft and content with middle-class comfort and mediocrity. These thoughts on the loss of French greatness through an unwillingness to make sacrifices are shared by his commander-in-chief, General de Langles, who, as he leaves Hanoi, ponders the “dotage of a great nation” (137), echoing the historical remarks of the arch-conservative Admiral Thierry d’ Argenlieu about “fighting for the reestablishment of French greatness.” French High Commissioner after the war, Argenlieu had urged his compatriots to throw over the agreement of 1946 that established peaceful co-existence.73

The author evidently shares these sentiments. Even the civilian Rovignon joins in a patriotic tirade directed at his American and British colleagues. “We had such a nostalgic memory of being a great nation” (141). As if the reaction of these French characters to the loss of Vietnam prefigures the American loss twenty years later, an American journalist’s reply to Rovignon becomes prophetic: “We’ll reinforce South Vietnam and, since you’ve gone bankrupt, we’ll take your place” (141). The author seems to be nostalgic about the good old days in Indochina, brooding on the decadence of the end of an era but also fondly recalling the cultural interrelationships of colonial rule, while significantly omitting any mention of its long history of social and economic exploitation of the native population. The nostalgia may explain why the author is less than enthusiastic about the Viet Minh, who are to replace his compatriots in North Vietnam.

The two most important Communist characters are shown as intelligent and sophisticated but also, in their private conversations, ruthless and calculating. The problems that they confront in the formation of a new nation are enormous: masses of people unused to discipline, a shortage of rice, a distrusted currency. For the time being, the two leaders decide to blame the French: “I don’t like exploiting hatred,” one of them confesses, “but sometimes it’s necessary, like herbs in rice” (148). Colonel Phang, who will be promoted to general when he enters Hanoi in triumph at the head the Viet Minh 308th Division, is handsome, cultured, and possesses a winning smile. He has risen in the People’s Army through his political skills and ruthlessness, but he is haunted by his past life as Ké, the nephew of the procuress Ma Lien. In his youth, he went as a seminarian to Paris, where he soon abandoned his religious studies to join the budding Vietnamese anti-colonial nationalist movement. There, he printed leaflets, distributed clandestine newspapers, and befriended both Jerome and the leader of another political group working along similar lines—the Indochinese Nationalist Front—the man called Nguyen-Ai-Quoc, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh.

Puzzled by Jerome’s friendship with so many revolutionaries sworn to evict the French from Vietnam, Ké is told by Ho that Jerome “represents a certain French tradition of friendship and therefore fellow-feeling for all those who revolt against an established order, even if this order has been established by his country” (56). Jerome even supported Ké (Phang) economically for a while in the Paris days, but Phang, now an important man in the Party, is concerned, Jerome thinks, “to wipe out his past completely, maybe because it was still alive within him” (67). While Phang still respects Jerome personally, he distrusts journalists generally because “their freedom of speech and behavior could only jeopardize the delicate balance of military or political hierarchies” (61). The novel is consistently critical of the Communists, not as in Bosse’s novel, because of their failure to live up to the ideals of the leaders, but for the ideological rigidity of the leaders themselves. While listening to his old friend speak, for example, Jerome “wondered why the word ‘people’ suddenly sounded hollow. Ké was not fond of the people. What about Nguyen? In his eyes, the people had to be transformed into ciphers who allowed themselves to be added or subtracted from without anyone offering any resistance” (66).

The Nguyen referred to here is not Ho Chi Minh (who does not figure as a character in the novel) but Phang’s colleague in the Party, the head of Viet Minh security. Nguyen is described by Jerome as being “like the Beria of the regime” (129), a reference to Stalin’s notorious executioner. Jerome argues with Nguyen about the new man that the Communists are trying to construct, the “Vietminh man,” whom Jerome sees as too rigid a type. Nguyen replies, quite plausibly, that revolutionary discipline is essential for success in establishing a coherent society. The Viet Minh, he explains, were once a “hotchpotch” of diverse elements—orthodox Marxists, partisans, Catholics—which had to be united. People were “fused together by eight years of communal existence in the jungle, cut off from their families and social backgrounds” (69). In another sense, this exchange is a rehearsal of the old argument between Communism and its liberal critics, in which western intellectuals were critical of the intolerance and doctrinaire propaganda of Communist regimes, and the Communist leaders believed that the people in whose name they are carrying out revolution, need only to “work and obey” for the time being. In their view, there will be more tolerance later, once the regime has been consolidated and a Communist state is achieved.

According to a French captain captured at Dien Bien Phu, the Communist Viet Minh were victorious because they created a new kind of army, “a total army, in which every soldier is at one and the same time a propagandist, a schoolmaster and a policeman, every officer an administrator, a priest and an agronomist” (62). Whether meant as critique or admiration by a defeated soldier, the statement suggests the attraction of Communism for poor Asian countries, as well as why revolutionary forces like the Viet Minh and later the National Liberation Front were able to achieve victory over powerful adversaries. These revolutionary armies did not consist of military professionals but soldiers who belonged to a highly integrated political, social and military organization.

The plot complication that develops in the first part of the novel, while the Viet Minh are preparing their triumphant entrance into the city, is the presence of a potentially disruptive terrorist, Dr. Tuan-Van-Lê, another old friend of Jerome’s from Paris. Pursued by both the Viet Minh secret police and the French Sureté, or security forces, Lê is hiding in a basement with his strange companion, an assassin named Trieu. Described as a tiny, thin, gnome-like man, Lê was once a member of the Viet Minh Central Committee, said to be more acclaimed even than Ho Chi Minh, because he represented “revolt and immediate action” while Ho was thought to be overly cautious. Lê later broke with the Viet Minh to lead an anti-colonialist, anti-Communist organization called the National Resistance Front, which started up in Paris but later degenerated into a terrorist organization.

It is not explained why Lê, a ruthless man of abstemious habits, someone who might find Communism to his taste, fell out with Ho, unless it was from his own egoism and love of power. Lê’s and Trieu’s motives, in any case, remain murky: Lê is portrayed as a disillusioned idealist who has become a fanatic without program or followers; Trieu, a former peasant driven by supernatural notions of righting a wrongly ordered universe through violence. Together, they have assassinated a number of people and blown up a statue of Buddha to no apparent purpose other than create a sense of insecurity and terror. Lê compares South Vietnam to the Chinese Kuomintang, with their “gang-leaders” and “war lords,” a comparison that is not elaborated on, but the Kuomintang’s defeat by Mao’s Chinese Communists may be a presage of what was to come in South Vietnam. In his determination to stir up trouble, Lê merely wants to “maintain the character of the whole-hearted, relentless revolutionary to the bitter end” (43).

Both the French and the Viet Minh are eager to get their hands on Lê, who, they correctly surmise, is plotting mayhem to disrupt the changeover. The policeman Bernot suspects that Lê, whom he has pursued for years, is in town and imagines that he can finally flush him out by keeping an eye on Jerome. Bernot believes that in crime as well as politics “certain men find themselves at the hub of every intrigue, every plot, every coup, without ever taking an active part, being even perfectly innocent. Jerome was one of these men” (83). The Viet Minh leaders have the same idea and in fact hire the same informer to follow him. Lê tells Jerome his plan, knowing that Jerome will not denounce him to the police: he intends to eliminate the Viet Minh Administrative and Military Committee, Phang’s organization, as “one last gesture” (94), since, under the circumstances, it will be a suicide mission. He tells Jerome, who by now only wants to retire, that it is impossible to drop out of political activity because “we are all prisoners of one another” (96).

Lê’s remark also suggests the claustrophobic interlocking relationships of the men on all sides of the power struggle, each one of them bound by ties of the past. Both Phang and Lê, for example, are former friends of Jerome. Where they differ is in their dreams of the future, which the Communists Phang and Nguyen nurture but the disillusioned idealists like Lê and Jerome have abandoned. How the different sides are bound together by political necessity is shown by the episode in which Lê is killed. The French policeman Bernot discovers his hiding-place but is anxious for the Viet Minh to perform the actual assassination; at the same time, he must also get the French general’s cooperation to withdraw sentries in the area so that the Viet Minh assassins can toss in a grenade. All sides must cooperate in eliminating what is considered a loose cannon.

In the triumphant entrance of the Viet Minh, it is typical that Phang enters Hanoi discreetly, and Nguyen anonymously, while Phang’s assistant in charge of propaganda has orchestrated a parade, with ubiquitous red flags, but the parade has only a lukewarm reception despite agents planted in the crowd to lead the cheering spectators (in one minor but significant scene, the Viet Minh soldiers and the French policemen exchange cigarettes and show each other their American-made weapons). Phang cunningly holds his first press conference in English, to the fury of the French journalists. There is some tension among the Viet Minh leaders: the pro-China Ten wants to get rid of everything French, but Nguyen and Phang, aware of their western cultural roots, reject this proposal. Nguyen, who ordered the assassin Trieu taken alive, wants to make an example of him to show the apathetic people of Hanoi, who are too accustomed to seeing rulers come and go, that this regime means business. As an ideologist, however, he cannot understand a man like Trieu, who seems to act only from instinct. Trieu agrees to be killed for any purpose Nguyen wants, as long as he is kept supplied with cigarettes. Nguyen, accordingly, has him reported as a robber and the word is put out on the street that he will be tried by a “people’s court,” which is to be chosen at random, and immediately executed by the security forces. In this way, terror is instilled in the “judges,” who understand that they might have to condemn their neighbors some day in the same way, another of Nguyen’s “lessons.”

Held on France’s symbolic last day, Ma Lien’s funeral dinner is not a success. When Kieu plays traditional melancholic songs on the zither, they are drowned out by the noisy revolutionary songs of a youth organization next door, which has been placed there by her nephew, Phang, to drive her away. Jerome, along with some giggling paid mourners, will be the only member of the original group in her funeral procession: Ma Lien, like Hanoi itself, has been abandoned by her friends. Jerome imagines that he is following the funeral of all the others who died there since the French arrived, Hanoi being “a French town standing on the confines of China” (171), a formula that neatly characterizes Vietnam as a country defined by its invaders.

The end of the first part evokes an orgy of French nostalgia for a time of “communion between a yellow race, a white army and a handful of officials, adventurers and revolutionaries—all this died in Hanoi on the same day” (189), which manages, at the same time, to celebrate the colonial regime while forgetting its brutal oppression. The “corpse” of the vanished colonial world is said to have gone on “decomposing in Saigon.” The second part of the novel, accordingly, has its setting in the southern capital, although the action has little connection with the first part (the journalists and most of the other characters, for example, make only cameo appearances).

The chaos in Saigon—assassinations, riots, shifting alliances, intrigues and betrayals—contrasts with the orderly rituals of the new regime in Hanoi. The nominal leader of South Vietnam, the emperor Bao Dai, rarely visits his country, preferring to lead the life of a playboy in Cannes, financed mainly by Lê Dao (historically, Le Van Vieu), the leader of the Binh Xuyen gangsters. This organization is said to have began as a group of pirates who looted junks and were willing to work for anyone, whether Japanese or Viet Minh (Le Van Vieu was in fact a gangster whom Bao Dai granted the gambling concession and actually made a “general” in charge of the local security forces). Besides the Binh Xuyen, the government has to deal with the two religious sects, both of which have large private armies: the Hoa Hao, led by Lê-Son, a more dedicated leader than Lê Dao, and the Cao Dai, led by the ambitious Trinh Sat, whose “action committees” (assassins) have infiltrated Saigon in small groups. Trinh Sat is a terrorist who would have joined the Viet Minh if he could have been their leader; he became a Caodaist only “by force of circumstances.” He likes having a flag and troops under his command but has little patience with the Cao Dai religious ceremonies and the sect’s eclectic political and spiritual allegiances, which the author helpfully explains in a lengthy footnote (200-201).

The conflicts depicted in this second part are more complex, reflecting both the global conflict (France vs. US) and the local one (Diem’s government vs. the Sects). The sects are backed by the French, while the government, which has tolerated them as a bulwark against the Viet Minh guerrillas, is politically supported and bankrolled by the Americans and said to be headed by “a misfit who should have been a priest” (189), President Dinh-Tu (i.e. Diem). The French at this point want to avoid further military involvement but are also anxious to maintain political influence while retaining their economic interests.74 It is frankly admitted that the conflict is really about the survival of French capitalism and is being protracted by the French to gain more time, as a French leader explains it, “to enable the big French business concerns to withdraw to Africa or Metropolitan France” (223). The Americans, for their part, want a strong leader like Dinh in charge of the government to halt Communist incursions. The global and the local struggle are therefore interrelated.

President Dinh’s American advisor, Teryman (i.e. Landsdale, from Fr. terre, land), is portrayed as a sly political manipulator, “a masterly stage manager,” and an uncouth, anti-French “new Lawrence of Arabia” (199). He pressures the president to attack the Binh Xuyen in order to gain international respect, but Dinh wavers, hesitant to make a commitment. What the country really needs, Teryman thinks, is a dictator, someone like the ruthless Trinh-Sat, whom Teryman is keeping in reserve as a stick, in case Dinh tries to make a deal with the French, the carrot being the large amount of American aid. Another player, the chief of military security, “Colonel” Houang, has his own reasons for wanting to get rid of Lê Do, namely, to manipulate a vast network of followers. He does not trust the president, but for the time being their “interests” coincide.

The sects all seem to be awaiting a former French army major named Résengier to tell them what to do. Résengier is the heroic Frenchman who takes the place of Jerome in the second part. He is similarly portrayed as a legendary figure, an active soldier to Jerome’s pacific journalist, a man who also receives loyalty from everyone who knows him. He once belonged to a tightly-knit group of die-hard paratroopers evidently admired by the author, “the conquerors of virgin territories and the fighters for lost causes” (257), who become the liaison bureau with the sects. The group included two unsavory types, a former lieutenant called “Fatty,” Lê Do’s business advisor, who runs drugs and guns, and Dr. Souilhac, a libertine and opium addict.

Résengier needs the sects to force Dinh out of power, but he realizes the difficulty of fighting against Teryman’s promise of American money. The day he arrives the government troops begin firing on the Binh Xuyen,75 and he immediately rushes out to try to stop it. The tide of the street battle sways back and forth, resulting in a general conflagration for the poorer outlying sectors of the city with their thatch and bamboo huts. The French authorities are confident of victory but are concerned about keeping the battle out of the center of Saigon itself, the European quarter. When Résengier arrives at Lê Dao’s command post to offer his assistance, he finds the bandit leader uncharacteristically hesitant, unused to military command. Afraid to commit the four-thousand men he has in reserve, the base of his power, he flees, leaving Résengier in charge, only returning to retrieve his money. As the Frenchman observes, “the pirate in him was now asserting himself whereas the politician was collapsing with this pasteboard façade” (259).

Teryman, worried that the president will give up and negotiate, decides to play his “last card,” Trinh-Sat. The two of them burst in upon the Dinh brothers to announce that Trinh-Sat is withdrawing from the Sects’ United Front, thus isolating the Binh Xuyen and giving the government forces an advantage. Teryman intends to manipulate Trinh-Sat by appealing to his dreams of power: he will be “the first to raise the standard of revolt against the French colonialists and their hired killers” (256). President Dinh, who has been summoned to Cannes by Bao Dai and is afraid to make a move, is silently overruled by his brother (i.e. the unnamed Ngo Dinh Nhu). The brothers decide that, even though they are worried about Trinh-Sat’s dangerous pretensions, the American colonel is backing him and they will therefore just have to renege on their promise to the French and continue the attack.

For their part, the Viet Minh have not been idle in their struggle to unify north and south by finishing off “the remnants of colonialism in the south” (216). With their usual planning and efficiency, they have managed to infiltrate their agents into the rubber plantations as workers. Their plan is that the Central Committee of Cochin China (the south) will support the president, who will overthrow the emperor, at which point the Viet Minh will get control of the lower levels of the administration. Their agent is Major Co, a follower of Nguyen (General Phang has temporarily fallen into disgrace for having forgotten that the Viet Minh were now “a part of the international Communist movement”).

General Delmond (i.e. General Collins), the US Ambassador, gives Teryman another week to “make the situation clear” or he will send him home (historically, Landsdale’s mandate was independent of the American embassy). Teryman and Trinh-Sat surprise President Dinh with a bogus “popular committee” that demands more power for the people, a rather distorted reflection of the American pressure exerted on Diem to make his administration more democratic. The committee, however, has been infiltrated by Co and Teryman realizes too late that he has been fooled. He abandons “the Trinh-Sat game” without warning Trinh-Sat that Houang will have him assassinated, an act that is brought off by a clever ruse and blamed on the Binh Xuyen. With both the Binh Xuyen and Cao Dai neutralized, the devious but efficient Houang is now totally in charge of security, both civilian and military.

The fast-paced narrative shifts back and forth from Saigon to the country, where the heroic Résengier tries to salvage the French effort, even though his own countrymen are trying to expel him from Vietnam and he himself no longer knows why he fights. Another femme fatale, a red-headed “quadroon” (she had a Vietnamese grandmother) named Perle, makes an appearance as the love-interest of the second part. Like Saigon itself, an “attractive and heartless slut” (209) Perle has slept with and entranced all the men, just as Kieu had done in Hanoi. The author, like his male characters, seems to be obsessed with this type of femme fatale—the exotic beauty of mixed blood, capricious, sexually aggressive—and yet ultimately pliant for the masterful male, in this case, Résingier, an aging man with wife and children in France, but, like his fellow paratroopers, bored with bourgeois life and addicted to the noble but lost cause of colonial Vietnam. Her pre-feminist submission (“It’s he who decides and I who obey…a free woman is nonsense because by her very nature she enjoys being chained,” [340]) is perhaps the only aspect that dates the novel.

Teryman and his opposite, Résingier, are the foreign adventurers of this novel. The Frenchman knows all the sect leaders personally, since he once saved them from the Viet Minh, he is clearly qualified to do “battle with the American Colonel Teryman” (224). As one character observes, both men have old-fashioned, flamboyant and unorthodox styles of action: “Do they believe in what they’re doing, or else are they merely technicians trained in a king-making school who are practicing the tricks they’ve been taught without really understanding them?” the narrator asks (270). Well-matched adversaries, they both lose to historical circumstances, but while Teryman is seen as a cold, manipulative agent in the limited possibilities of palatial politics, Résingier is fully humanized by action and emotion. The policeman Houang, not a sentimental character, for example, says that the Frenchman “had certain qualities that Teryman will never have; he understood us and I think he was even fond of us” (309), by which the author evidently means that the Americans will never understand the Vietnamese as well as their former colonizers.

Résengier sets off for the Plain of Reeds, a vast marshy area infested with mosquitoes and leeches, in the hope of meeting up with the Cao Dai, and at the same time giving the slip to the French authorities, who are still anxious to deport him. He manages to make it, with Perle in tow, after a number of hazardous and exhausting adventures, to Lê Son, the tubercular Hoa Hao leader. As Résingier languishes, gravely ill with hepatitis, Lê Son describes his own sect, with a grand utopian vision of future victory over all other factions, as his men fight for no money, wanting only to create a truly communal “agrarian republic” that treats peasants and soldiers equally. With this ideal, The Hoa Hao would presumably find common cause with the Viet Minh, but the latter are “impious” and must also be destroyed. The novel ends as Lê Son, who knows that Résengier, his “big brother,” will die, makes a deal with an emissary from the Viet Minh, who has just arrived at the camp to trade arms for rice. The war will continue, with its shifting alliances and hard realities.

Yellow Fever is a very readable novel, filled with intriguing characters and historically related incidents, but it is not without its weaknesses as an imaginative narrative. In addition to the discrepancy between the two parts of the novel—the second part in fact might better have been turned into a sequel to the first, forming a southern version of the events following the Communist victory in the north—the narrative technique is often clumsy. For example, characters tend to reveal their thoughts by thinking “aloud”: “I’m going to dismantle my past piece by piece,” Lê says, and then goes on to do so, a technique more suitable to the stage. In a narrative, the exposition of a character’s thoughts is done to better effect through free indirect discourse—third person narration with the reader’s access to the character’s thoughts—leaving the first-person for direct-speech dialogues.

Although this novel is politically the most complex of the five examples discussed in this chapter, and the French viewpoint on Vietnam becomes of considerable interest to the Anglophone reader, it must also be said that author wants to retain for the French a certain colonialist, pseudo-native moral authority that he is unwilling to extend to the next group of foreign intruders. For example, a Viet Minh leader is made to say that it would be simple to fight the Americans or any other country, because “it would merely be war. Against the French it’s civil war” (309). This misplaced notion of brotherhood is not borne out by the historical realities of the French colonialist regime.

vi. Epilogue: Ward Just, A Dangerous Friend (1999)

The journalist-novelist Ward Just’s novel about American civilian advisors, A Dangerous Friend,76 is a much more recent example than the novels discussed in the previous sections, but it is discussed here because it strikingly echoes Graham Greene’s novel in a number of ways, no doubt consciously so. The title, for example, could be aptly applied to Greene’s character, Alden Pyle. The narrative is retrospective and thoughtful and the narrator laments the outcome of events. Americans in this novel also believe that they can build a viable South Vietnamese nation and their efforts likewise result in the deaths of many Vietnamese. Finally, Greene’s theme of the need for moral and political choice, the need to choose sides, is extended by Just and ironically reversed.

The action takes place during the period following the assassination of Diem, at the end of the period when advisors to the South Vietnamese government were thought to be the answer to its difficulties and before US combat troops were called in. The unnamed narrator, an advisor who has already spent three years in Saigon in the mid-Sixties and then returns for the dramatic finale in 1975—he claims to be one of the last people off the roof of the US Embassy—is recalling the early days “when civilians still held a measure of authority” (2) from a perspective of this later time, “when things went to hell generally, and the best of us lost all heart” (1). This perspective is chosen because he thinks it is “always necessary to look forward and backward at the same time.” As the reader “knows[s] the end of things as well as I do” (11), that is, how the war turns out, he does not leave the inconsequential ends of his characters to an epilogue but reveals them before he even begins his story.

That story will end with a military action, the bombing of a village that sums up the ultimate failure of their work, “the Effort,” as they called the war in those days. The narrator insists, however, that “this is not a war story” but “a different cut of history, a civilian cut, without feats of arms or battlefield chaos” (1-2). Like Alden Pyle, these civilians were going to change the world by building a nation:

We went to Vietnam because we wanted to…we showed up for work at one of the agencies or the embassy or Landsdale’s outfit or the Llewellyn Group…thousands of us recruited from all over the government, from foundations, think tanks, and universities…We reorganized their finances. We built roads, bridges, schools, and airstrips (2-3).

To put in place a viable bureaucracy for this work is the aim of Dicky Rostok, a true believer in the Domino Theory and the tireless head of the Llewellyn Group, which is a well-funded organization “separate from the aid bureaucracy already in place, with its own mission and chain of command and communications with Washington” (18-19). The Group would “report directly to the office of the secretary of defense, with a collateral brief from the office of the national security advisor in the White House” (22). It has, however, only vaguely defined duties. It is not intended for intelligence, the province of the already overstaffed CIA, but “for research and rapid reaction when the usual channels broke down” (23).

The Group will be active in civic projects. “In the last analysis, as the president said, the Vietnamese have to fight their own war” and so the Effort, in Rostok’s view, must be winning civilian hearts and minds. Nation-building is thus regarded as “the velvet fist that complements the army’s iron fist” (18). It is an indication of how successful the Effort will be that “the revolution did not hesitate” but “grew along with the American arsenal, and the raids and subversion and sabotage,” none of which “was justified by the statistics, so painstakingly assembled” (99).

Another idealist is Sydney Parade, “a bit player” recruited by Rostok who comes to the Group to replace a former policeman who had become an embarrassment to the Group by drinking heavily and becoming involved with teenaged prostitutes. Sydney’s wife leaves him when he announces his decision to go to Vietnam, which he justifies by comparing himself to her father. “My father fought Nazis,” she retorts, “In Czechoslovakia, his homeland. The Nazis had invaded, just as you are doing. Listen. My father was not on your side. My father was on the other side” (29).

At Tay Thanh, the Group’s headquarters in Vietnam, Rostok tells his staff that without the military forces of MACV and the money and contacts of the CIA he is concerned with the power that knowledge gives: “We’ve got to know things that the rest of them don’t know from a source of information they can’t figure out” (94), because if they do find out, they will steal the information. Reliable knowledge, he believes, comes from quantification, so the Group “tried to build a narrative from the numbers” (98-99) to evaluate constantly shifting circumstances and assess the situation. Rostok’s aim is to “quantify progress in such a way that no one could dispute it” (100). Events, however, conspire to subvert his bureaucratic conception of reality.

For example, after Sidney has failed to obtain a letter of introduction in France from French planters by the name of Armand, he comes into contact with the branch of the family in Vietnam by coincidence. No one will tell him where the plantation is located but he happens to be at the market at the same time as Mrs. Armand (Bebe), who also comes from Chicago, who is having a miscarriage and losing blood, but before driving her to the French hospital in Saigon, he has to resolve an argument with one of the men present (who turns out to be local cadre of the VC), rural types who suppose that Americans support their war. This man supposes that Sidney, who is wearing jeans and has long hair, must have met, or at least seen, his hero Che Guevara, because Che “is a revolutionary hero in America and speaks often at university rallies and in Washington” (108). This comic misunderstanding probably saves Sidney’s and Bebe’s lives.

Bebe’s husband Claude is grateful to Sidney for helping to save her life even though she loses her twin babies, and invites him to the Cercle Sportif, where the French colonial elite once met for drinks, swimming, and tennis but is now dominated by Americans. Claude tells him that two Americans there, who claimed to be rubber-brokers, offered him an astronomical sum for his harvest but were really only interested in political or military information about his area. The French planters have had bad experiences with the Americans, who think that the war is “everybody’ war,” and are expected to collaborate. The planters, however, have to maintain neutrality if they want to continue on their plantations without harassment from the VC. The conversation recalls the talks between Pyle and Fowler in The Quiet American, where the American does all the talking. Like Pyle, Sidney is unable to communicate his vision of the future, his conviction that “America was irresistible,” that the war would “consume all South Vietnam” and there would be “no sanctuaries” (134), implying none for Claude and Bebe. Claude assures him that the revolutionary forces will never give up, but Sidney believes victory is inevitable once America has committed itself to it. “Go away for a few years,” he says, sounding like Pyle, “and when you come back South Vietnam will look like—California!” (135).

The worldly wise Frenchman (a common type in American novels of the war) is skeptical at this “earnest imperialist who believed in California” (100), while Sydney sees Claude and Bebe as pleasant, civilized people who live “between the lines” with their quiet, comfortable life on the plantation, “living as if there were no revolution and no reason to choose sides” (122). As it happens, he will force them to choose sides in spite of themselves and in the process destroy their way of life. To Bebe he says “we live in different countries. I’ve invented one and you’ve invented another, and somewhere there’s a third that’s undiscovered.” “Reinvention is the opiate of the Americans,” she replies (177).

The couple’s unwilling involvement comes about by the capture of an American advisor. An ARVN airborne assault on a VC base camp is botched through bad intelligence, resulting in a number of dead, wounded, and missing, including a Captain Smalley, who happens to be the nephew of a US Congressman, which means an official inquiry will be carried out. The military argues about how to get him back, concerned about his possible propaganda value for the enemy. The Group learns of the incident through Pablo Gutterman, who has lived and worked in Indochina since the mid-Fifties and married a Vietnamese woman. “His information was rarely wrong,” Sidney observes, but since it was obtained from private sources it irritates Rostok. Gutterman also reports that the military has requested the Group for help, which arouses Rostok’s suspicion because it has never done so before. He thinks the military might be looking for someone with whom to share the blame.

Some out-of-the-way information turns up: Claude Armand tells Sidney at lunch on the plantation that one of his workers has informed him that Smalley is being held in the Tay Thanh district. When he asks if Rostok can be trusted, Sidney warns him about his boss’s fixation with power and control, but Claude believes Sidney can be trusted to do the right thing. It turns out that the Vietcong who are holding Smalley do not know what to do with him; as local peasants, they feel “out of their depth” and want to wait for instructions from distant, unsympathetic commissars about what to do with the American prisoner. Sydney receives a message from Claude, as promised, with a map detailing Smalley’s location but nothing else. At a Group meeting, Sydney reveals the map to Rostok, who suspects Claude is the source and wants to take the map to MACV. Gutterman, who understands the nuances better, knows that Smalley would simply disappear if the military were called in and he volunteers to go alone. He had once visited some of his wife’s relatives in the village of Song Nu and would be remembered by his panama hat, which attracted a lot of attention at the time.

Rostok reluctantly agrees and Gutterman goes alone, guided by locals. Smalley is alive but debilitated, and Gutterman has to half-carry him back. Rostok is waiting with a television crew to capitalize on Smalley’s rescue. When Gutterman sees a flight of phantom jets and soon afterwards hears a series of explosions, he realized that “Song Nu had ceased to exist” (234). He is the first victim of Rostok’s betrayal. His wife leaves him and he resigns from the Group, but like Greene’s Thomas Fowler he cannot imagine leaving Vietnam. “He was an expatriate, but that did not make him a colonial. He was an American who worked for Americans, but that did not make him an imperialist” (239), he thinks to himself. He goes from job to job but is persona non grata and eventually disappears.

Sydney also feels guilty over his responsibility in the destruction of Song Nu. He learns that Rostok gave the information to the military for their after-action report. “The map was Claude Armand’s; you were the messenger, and Pablo [Gutterman] the retriever,” Rostok tells him (246-247). In the end, each man had made his choice. Sydney also resigns and the Armands have to leave their home, their plantation, their life. As Bebe tells Sidney, the most persistent rumors “had them as informers whose collaboration with the Americans had resulted in the destruction of Song Nu” (253). Sydney tells her that it was Rostok who gave them away but admits that he and Gutterman had been careless. “You’re a dangerous friend, Sydney,” she says, “You come from a dangerous country” (254).

In the beginning, the narrator hinted that his story is “the story of one man with a bad conscience and another with no conscience and the Frenchman and his wife who lived in the parallel world” (2): that is: Sidney, Rostok, and the Armands, with Gutterman’s sacrifice a bonus. The novel further complicates Greene’s moral imperative of making political and moral choices, the difficult decision of choosing sides. The Armands, who try to remain neutral, are betrayed into choosing sides by Rostok and (unwillingly) by Sydney, and their peaceful colonial life, their attachment to the land where their children are buried, is over. The three members of the Group have initially made their choice by joining it, accepting its can-do spirit and Cold War ideology, but each of them reacts in a different way to what happens. By offering Rostok their information, that is, by not having confidence in their own ability to act independently, Sydney and Gutterman have, in effect, also chosen him as “a dangerous friend.” Rostok, like Greene’s Alden Pyle, predictably retains his initial optimism, but unlike Pyle escapes punishment and shows that in the end he has understood nothing:

We didn’t know what we really wanted, so we went in one toe at a time thinking the Vietnamese could do it themselves, with our support and know-how. It was an illusion…We’d have to take over. We’d run the war and run their economy and stabilize the government and secure the countryside. We knew we could do it, we didn’t have the will to do it then. But we have the will now. Those early days, we’re lucky we weren’t thrown out like the French were. Simple fact, we came in with too little (250).

As the narrator has observed in the first chapter of the novel, Joseph Conrad was one of Rostok’s favorite authors: “not the Conrad of the African jungles but the Conrad of the open seas” (5). He evidently means the Conrad of Lord Jim rather than of Heart of Darkness. Rostok, like Tuan Jim, is keen for adventure, “open to possibilities,” but unlike Jim not willing to give the rest of his life over to rectifying his mistake. And unlike Marlow in the latter work, he is unable to perceive the evil and violence of exploitation disguised as civilized benevolence.

Adventurism, in the sense of reckless intervention in a country by a foreign government, is applicable to the American characters of the novels examined in this chapter. They are “innocent” only in their inability to perceive possible outcomes that were unforeseen as a result of their patriotic enthusiasm and political ignorance. Like Pyle, Rostok chooses to ignore the death or ruin of people he means to help in spite of themselves. The Vietnamese are simply shouldered aside. Rostok’s proposed program can be summed up in his formula for the salvation of South Vietnam: “We’d have to take it over.” Taking over was what would come to be called the “Americanization” of the war.

1 Young, Marilyn B., The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: Harper’s, 1991), p. 38-48.

2 Landsdale, Edward, “Report from Saigon Military Mission” (1954-55), in: Gettleman, Marvin E., Jane Franklin, Marilyn B. Young, and H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and America: A Documented History, Second Edition (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 83. In this document, Landsdale gives an account of the Saigon Military Mission’s activities, most of which were in violation of the Geneva accords.

3 The Pentagon Papers, as Published by the New York Times, by Neil Sheehan, et al. (New York: Bantam edition, 1971), pp. 16-18; Young, The Vietnam Wars, p. 45; FitzGerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), pp. 76; Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975. Second Edition (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 44.

4 The Pentagon Papers, p. 634.

5 The Pentagon Papers p. 634.

6 The Pentagon Papers, p. 634.

7 Gettleman, et al., Vietnam and America: A Documented History, p. 83.

8 Sheehan, Neil, A Bright Shining Lie—John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 142.

9 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 144.

10 An early and ultimately prophetic analysis of Diem’s bizarre personality, family influence, undemocratic style of government, and self-defeating military policies was made by Stanley Karnow in The Reporter (Jan. 19, 1961), reprinted as “Diem Defeats His Own Best Troops,” in: Sheehan, Neil, et. al, Reporting Vietnam, vol. 1, Library of America, 1998, pp. 3-17.

11 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 51.

12 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, pp. 137-138.

13 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 139.

14 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 80.

15 Schulzinger, Robert D., A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 86; Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 141.

16 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 139.

17 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 76; Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, pp. 139; 182-183.

18 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 99; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 78; Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 76.

19 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 78.

20 Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest (1969; New York: Ballantine, 1992). p. 172. For General Taylor’s report, see Document No. 27, “Taylor’s Summary of Findings on his Mission to South Vietnam,” and Document No.28, “Evaluations and Conclusions of Taylor’s Report on Vietnam,” Pentagon Papers, pp. 144-148.

21 Schulzinger, A Time for War, pp. 107-111.

22 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 138.

23 Greene, The Quiet American (1955; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962), p. 34. Further page references to this edition of the novel will be given within parentheses.

24 John Clark Pratt pinpoints the novel’s time frame more precisely, as the six months from September 1951 to February-March 1952. See Pratt, “Introduction” to the Viking Critical Edition of The Quiet American (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. xii.

25 Kahin, George M., and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York: Dial Press, 1967), p. 32.

26 Currey, Charles, Edward Landsdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

27 Gaspar, Charles J., “Edward Landsdale,” in: The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, ed. Spencer Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 153.

28 Qtd. in Pratt, the Viking Critical Edition, p. 481.

29 Qtd. in Pratt, the Viking Critical Edition, p. 321.

30 Pratt, John Clark, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” a Bibliographic Commentary, in: Lomperis, Timothy J., “Reading the Wind” The Literature of the Vietnam War: An Interpretative Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 126.

31 Pratt, “Introduction” to the Viking Critical Edition, p. xv.

32 See Christopher Robbins, New York Times Book Review (June 18, 1989), p. 36, for Greene’s denials.

33 Pratt, “Introduction” to the Viking Critical Edition, p. xv, emphasis in the original.

34 Pratt, “Introduction” to the Viking Critical Edition, p. xv.

35 Nashel, Jonathan, “Edward Landsdale and the American Attempt to Remake Southeast Asia, 1945-1965,” Ph.D dissertation, Rutgers University, 1994, qtd. in Pratt, Viking Critical Edition, p. 313. Nashel thinks that Landsdale was the prototype of another controversial American military legend, Lt. Col. Oliver North of the Iran hostage crisis.

36 Pratt, “Introduction” to the Viking Critical Edition, p. xv, emphasis in the original.

37 For example, by R.H. Miller, Understanding Graham Greene (University of South Carolina Press, 1990), p. 106.

38 Miller, Understanding Graham Greene, p. 109, also reads the triangle as a political representation, calling it a “metonymy…for the larger struggle.”

39 See Pratt, Viking Critical Edition, pp. 315-316.

40 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 25.

41 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 42.

42 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, pp. 64-65.

43 Gaston, George. The Pursuit of Salvation: A Critical Guide to the Novels of Graham Greene (Troy, N.Y: Whitson Publishing Co., 1984), p. 59.

44 Malamet, Elliott, The World Remade: Graham Greene and the Art of Detection (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 96.

45 Gaston, The Pursuit of Salvation, p. 62.

46 The text of Leibling’s review, “A Talkative Something or Other,” is reprinted in Pratt’s Viking Critical Edition, pp. 347-355.

47 Atkins, John, Graham Greene. (London: Calder and Boyars, 1966), p. 232.

48 The historian Schulzinger adopts the phrase “And to hell with everybody” for the title of Chapter 4, A Time for War, which deals with the American presence in Vietnam from 1954 to 1960.

49 Pratt, “Introduction” to the Viking Critical Edition, p. xiii.

50 Schulzinger, A Time for War p. 70.

51 Greene, “Introduction,” The Quiet American (London: William Heineman, 1973), pp. xviii-xix.

52 Neilson, Jim, Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 87.

53 Paraphrased from Renny Christopher’s comments on Mankiewicz’s film, in Pratt’s Viking Critical Edition, p. 308.

54 Qtd. from Judith Adamson, Graham Greene and the Cinema (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), p. 88.

55 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 87.

56 Neilson, Warring Fictions, pp. 87-88.

57 Gordon, Haim, Fighting Evil: Unsung Heroes in the Novels of Graham Greene (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 30, 36. Qtd. by Neilson, pp. 87-88.

58 Lederer, William J., and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: W.W. Norton, 1958). Page numbers given in parenthesis refer to the Crest (1960) paperback edition.

59 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 98.

60 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 94.

61 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 98.

62 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 75.

63 Neilson, Warring Fictions, pp. 95-96.

64 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 98.

65 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 92.

66 Pratt, Bibliographic Commentary for Reading the Wind, p. 126.

67 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 42.

68 Sheehan, et al., The Pentagon Papers, p. 17.

69 Bosse, M.J., The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 190. Further page numbers referring to this edition will be inserted within parentheses in the text.

70 Short, Anthony, The Origins of the Vietnam War (London: Longman, 1989), p. 34.

71 Greene, Ways of Escape, qtd. In Pratt, Viking Critical Edition, p. 480.

72 Lartéguy, Jean, Yellow Fever, 1962, translated by Xan Fielding (New York: Dutton, 1965), p. 23. Further page numbers referring to this edition will be inserted within parentheses in the text.

73 Buttinger, Joseph, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 380.

74 Sullivan, Marianna P. France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 52-53.

75 According to Young, The Vietnam Wars, p. 49, the fighting broke out on April 27, 1955, although the novel cites April 25.

76 Just, Ward, A Dangerous Friend. Further references to thus edition of the novel will be inserted within parentheses in the text.

Chapter Two

Fictional History & Historical Fiction: The Fall of Diem

South Vietnam was an American invention, conceived

by Dwight Eisenhower but delivered by John Kennedy

(Loren Baritz, Backfire).

South Vietnam was essentially the creation of the United States

(The Pentagon Papers).

i. President Ngo Dinh Diem

The major sign of the failure of the US project of nation-building in South Vietnam was the fall of its American-chosen leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. In this chapter, four early novels that deal with Diem’s dramatic final days will be examined. They share roughly the same time frame: the seven-month period from the outbreak of the Buddhist crisis in May 1963, which both exposed and brought to a head public dissatisfaction with Diem’s regime, to his US-assisted assassination in November 1963. In this first section, an overall chronological review of Diem’s career will be given to suggest why Diem was assassinated; more specifically, the events leading up to his death will clarify how the assassination came about. The American involvement in the coup d’état that led to the assassination of Diem and his brother Nhu is, according to Anthony Short, “probably the most painful and controversial episode of the Vietnam War,” but was also “arguably, something that was inherent in the logic of US intervention.”1

In all fairness, Diem’s obstacles to governing were formidable: war lords and competing religious sects, a powerful bandit organization (Binh Xuyen), the influx of nearly a million refugees to southern Vietnam from the north, coup factions within his own army, and northern Viet Minh cadres left behind in the south after the division of the country that were bent on inspiring insurrection. Diem took steps to deal with these problems and solidify his position in accordance with the following time-table. On June 18, 1954, he became Prime Minister of South Vietnam. The exodus of people from the north, mainly Catholics, with the aid of the US Navy, to South Vietnam began the same year, and numbered nearly a million people, furnishing Diem with a ready-made anti-Communist constituency in the south.2 US policymakers affirmed support for his regime while encouraging him to seek a broader basis of political support and to establish more democratic institutions.3 Diem gained control of the military by suppressing the rebellion of his Chief of Staff, General Hinh,4 and began to consolidate his political power by appointing members of his family to the cabinet. He agreed to the needed reforms stipulated in a letter from President Eisenhower (October 24, 1954) as a pre-condition to American aid,5 all of which went directly to Saigon. Diem launched the first of a series of agricultural reform measures (February 1955), but they resulted in more inequalities than before and created unrest among the peasants, which the Communist opposition exploited to its advantage.6

Diem’s forces did battle with the Binh Xuyen and the sects (March-May 1955)—action that is portrayed in two of the novels examined in Chapter One.7 Although Secretary of State Dulles and General Collins discussed replacing Diem, his champion Edward Landsdale urged the embassy to continue supporting him. The French, British, and Americans held talks in Paris (May 7-13, 1955), agreeing to support Diem’s government but expressing the wish to see it more representative. The following day, Diem declared that he was not bound by decisions made at conferences in which he had not participated.8 He launched, however, a successful offensive against the Hoa Hao sect (June 1955) and broke its resistance. Pham Van Dong, the foreign minister of North Vietnam, proposed consultations with the south to prepare for the nationwide elections stipulated by the Geneva Accords for July 1956. Diem replied in a broadcast (July 6, 1955) that since the accords were not signed, South Vietnam was not bound by them.9

The US leadership, including President Eisenhower, did not believe that if Ngo Dinh Diem ran he could defeat Ho Chi Minh, who was popularly perceived as the national liberator from foreign rule, both Japanese and French. For his part, Senator John F. Kennedy declared that free elections could not be held, for the results would inevitably be stacked against the South.10 Life magazine, published by the staunchly anti-Communist Catholics Henry and Claire Booth Luce, gave credence to the American lack of confidence in Diem when (in Life’s issue of May 13, 1957) it considered Diem’s refusal to hold elections as one of his greatest achievements, because the refusal would prevent his country from committing “national suicide.”11 In a rigged referendum abetted by Landsdale (October 1955), in which Diem received one-third more votes in Saigon than there were registered voters, he deposed Bao Dai and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as President, Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The new regime was immediately recognized by the US, five European and three Asian nations.12

By January 1956, Diem’s ruthlessness in purging what remained of Viet Minh cells in the south did not enhance his popularity in his own country and lost many potential allies.13 In Diem’s visit to the United States (May 5-19, 1957), Eisenhower called him the “miracle man” of Asia.14 Guerrillas immediately began a campaign of assassination of South Vietnamese officials (over 400 by the year’s end) that was meant to disrupt his government. He reacted by appointing more military men to administrative positions, which indirectly helped the guerrillas through the neglect of the population’s social and economic problems.15 With the resettlement of the northern refugees, Diem enjoyed perhaps the only popular support for his regime during the years 1955-57, but thereafter his policies only generated discontent.16 At a certain point, the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) took up the training of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN),17 and South Vietnam became, in effect, a client state of the US. Millions of dollars in aid, most of which went to the military, poured into South Vietnam annually, and were mostly spent on maintaining Diem and his family in power.18

Popular resistance to Diem gradually began to materialize. A peasant uprising in the Mekong Delta attacked and overthrew village administrations (January 17, 1960), which was a reaction to the oppressive measures of the regime in building and maintaining the hated “agrovilles.” In August of the same year, US intelligence produced an estimate that the South Vietnamese government had to win the support of the peasants or discontent would increase.19 Diem also encountered resistance by his own troops in Saigon. In the paratroop revolt (November 11-12, 1960) led by two colonels, which initiated the cycle of plotting against his regime, Diem was declared incapable of saving the country from Communism, and American intelligence confirmed the dissatisfaction with his inability to inspire resistance to it.20 As if to confirm this perception, there was a dramatic increase in revolutionary activity on the part of Diem’s adversaries. North Vietnamese leaders, who had already authorized limited armed resistance and selected assassinations of officials in South Vietnam, hoped that an indigenous southern movement would lead the insurrection there. They were concerned with consolidating their gains in the north, but their southern strategy received unsolicited help from Diem himself as his unpopularity grew. The southern revolutionary forces united in December 1960 to form the National Liberation Front (NLF)—an organization originally intended to “rally all those disaffected with Diem,” including non-Communists, to push toward independence.21

The US government remained committed to prevent a Communist takeover by means of financial and military support of Diem’s regime. President Kennedy sent one fact-finding mission after another to Vietnam, most of which were optimistic about the possibility of victory. In one report, Defense Secretary McNamara and General Taylor, for example, thought that a military program of anti-guerrilla war might reduce insurgency to “organized banditry” by 1965.22 Diem did not make the American effort easy, although he promised Kennedy in a letter (December 14, 1961) that he would be content to “liberalize” his regime in return for a large increase in aid.23 In January 1962, the US Air Force began flying defoliating missions in Vietnam, and in the following month the organization that would take over responsibility for conducting the war, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), under General Paul Harkins, was installed in Saigon (February 8, 1962).24 Two weeks later (February 27), two Vietnamese pilots flying American planes, in protest against Diem’s prosecution of the war, bombed and strafed the presidential palace, but Diem and his family escaped harm.25

This attack confirmed Diem in his belief that his true enemies were domestic. His “strategic hamlet” program, essentially a renewal of the agrovilles, also proved ineffective and was used mainly by Diem and his brother Nhu to increase their control in the countryside.26 As government repression continued, social ferment increased, culminating in the so-called Buddhist crisis. In a country where Buddhists constituted 70% of the population, twenty thousand Buddhists celebrating the traditional birthday of the Buddha were fired on, resulting in nine dead and twenty wounded. Diem, whose government was dominated by Catholics (10% of the population) because he thought that they were more politically reliable, blamed the shooting on the Vietcong.27 The crisis reached its climax in June, when the monk Thich Quand Doc set himself on fire at a Saigon intersection as a political and moral protest. The widely circulated news photo of this gruesome spectacle brought the regime’s repression of Buddhists to international attention. Diem resisted American requests to defuse the crisis and lost US support.

At home, President Kennedy began to express doubts about Diem, even proclaiming on television that the South Vietnamese leader had become out of touch with his own people. When the rumors emerged that Diem’s brother Nhu had cut a pragmatic deal with the Communists to deal out the Americans and stop fighting the war, the US government began to exert pressure on Diem to discard Nhu, and when that failed, began to consider supporting a military coup.28 Kennedy appointed Henry Cabot Lodge, his former Republican opponent, as Ambassador to Vietnam to reduce criticism of his Vietnam policy before the 1964 election.29 Before Lodge arrived in Saigon (August 22, 1963) to replace Diem’s friend, the current US Ambassador Frederick Nolting, anti-government plotting was already taking place: General Tran Van Don had informed CIA operative Lucien Conein on July 4 that a coup was being planned.30 The Ngo brothers, who controlled an extensive network of spies, suspected that Lodge was sympathetic to a plot against them. The conspirators, led by General Duong Van Minh (nicknamed “Big Minh”), were cautious about committing themselves, because earlier attempts had been aborted for fear they would not be firmly backed by the US. Lodge encouraged the conspirators with promises that the US would not interfere, while the US government insisted on maintaining “plausible denial” of Lodge’s participation.31

Tran Van Don proposed to Diem that he declare martial law to prosecute the war more effectively, but the real motive of the conspirators was to consolidate forces for the coup, while Diem and his brother hoped to implicate the army in cracking down on the Buddhists. Accusing the Buddhists of being Communist inspired, Nhu used members of an organization loyal to him, who were disguised as regular army soldiers, to attack Buddhist temples on August 22, 1963, beating, killing, and arresting hundreds of monks, students, and activists. Spontaneous demonstrations took place in various cities as a reaction, and President Kennedy himself emitted a protest.32 Ambassador Lodge met with Diem, who refused to dismiss his brother Nhu. At the same time, Lodge assured the generals of support if Diem did not agree to this demand as well as other necessary reforms. On October 5, General Minh met with Conein for assurances that the Americans would not hinder the coup and continue with aid afterward. On the same day, Lodge dismissed Saigon CIA chief John Richardson, who had his doubts, and reported to Kennedy that the coup was on. Although Generals Harkins and Taylor also expressed misgivings, Lodge did not deliver this message to the conspirators. Kennedy had left the decision up to him.33

The coup finally took place on November 1, 1963, only three weeks before Kennedy’s own assassination. The South Vietnamese generals laid siege to the presidential palace. The Ngo brothers first thought that the attack signaled a “counter-coup” that had been planned by Nhu and General Dinh, who controlled most of the forces around Saigon, but Dinh had in fact joined the rebellious generals. Diem was unable to get any support to suppress the attack and finally agreed to surrender. Lodge denied knowledge of the coup to Diem and offered him asylum in the embassy to save his life, but Diem and his brother Nhu fled to St. Francis Xavier Church in Cholon, the Chinese district of Saigon, where they were arrested and assassinated (November 2, 1963) under orders by Minh.34 As an immediate reaction, political prisoners were released from Saigon jails and the strategic hamlets in the countryside were destroyed by the peasants. The assassination, with American compliance, may be seen as symptomatic of the insistence of installing undemocratic leaders in other countries for the convenience of ideological or material self-interest.

ii. Stuart Hempstone, A Tract of Time (1966)

Hempstone’s novel views the events surrounding the fall of Diem from the perspective of the Vietnamese Central Highlands.35 It is the most complex and skillfully wrought of the works discussed in this chapter. The prose often evokes Hemingway:

Harry watched them come, trying to engrave on his mind the pattern of their coming, with the pale sun and green of the forest behind them, the abandoned long-house toppled on its side. It was something he wanted to take with him, to remember, to keep when it was all over. There was always, he found, something you wanted that way, something that summed it up for you and that nobody could take away (15).

There is an implicit contrast in the novel between this semi-wild region, inhabited by the indigenous peoples whom the French collectively called montagnards, or mountain-folk, and the urban space of Saigon, whose leaders will determine the fate of these tribal peoples. Divided into several language groups, the montagnards had had a distinct culture for thousands of years within the country. First enlisted by the French to fight against the Viet Minh, they were recruited by both sides during the American war (their casualties were exceptionally high, estimated at one-third of a total of one million people).36 Among Diem’s political blunders was his refusal to accommodate the ethnic minorities like the montagnards and the Chinese, or to conciliate the large religious sects like the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao. The montagnards were doomed by geography; they lived and hunted in an area that controlled strategic supply routes from north to south. Instead of courting them, Diem sought to reduce their influence by means of a Land Development Program that forcibly resettled them and put ethnic Vietnamese on their lands. By 1963, this policy had divided them into tribes that either supported the NLF or claimed independence from all outside authorities.37

To prevent the montagnards from assisting the Vietcong, the CIA developed a village defense program that was to be implemented by the US Special Forces, which armed and supplied them.38 Special Forces teams had begun training montagnards since 1961, creating the basis for the so-called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG). The village defense project was designed to combine military defense with socio-economic improvement programs. The montagnards evidently saw military service as an opportunity to protect themselves and their mountain highlands against the encroachment of ethnic Vietnamese,39 and the US in turn saw this attitude as an opportunity to control the highland supply route. Diem’s disregard for ethnic minorities and his incompetent ARVN commanders, however, often resulted in the unwillingness of the CIDGs to fight for the government, a situation that is reflected in Hempstone’s novel.40

Politically, the author is skeptical about any successful outcome for the war at the same time that he seems to uphold his protagonist’s anti-Communist ideals. When a correspondent asks an American captain in the field, an advisor to an ARVN artillery battery, if the war is being won, the man replies, “Wouldn’t say that. But we sure aren’t winning” (141). Diem’s betrayal of the montagnards, one of the reasons why he is portrayed in the novel as a leader who does not deserve to survive, is shown in two narratives that run parallel to the public narrative of the Saigon coup outlined above. These three narrative strands are alternated in small clusters of chapters.

In the Diem narrative, the Ngo brothers reveal themselves through their private dialogues, in which they are mainly concerned with staying in power by dealing with the multiplying crises in an ad hoc manner. For example, they install General Trang, a man entirely moved by greed, into the lucrative Saigon command in order to control the local situation more easily: corruption is thus institutionalized for the continuance of political survival. Their conversations also make it clear that any requests from the montagnards and other ethnic groups will have to wait until the current crisis is resolved. “The main thing is the Buddhist plot” (81), they conclude. The cynical pragmatism of the government is reflected in similar attitudes expressed by the leader of the CIA operation intended to support the regime.

In the novel, it is Diem who suggests raiding the Xa Loi pagoda and arresting the dissidents and Nhu who worries about the political repercussions of the wholesale arrests: “The army, if it could not defeat the Vietcong, at least could handle street mobs. But the riots forced him to make arrests and he knew that this antagonized the army. Each of the arrested demonstrators, bonze or student or coolie, had relatives in the army” (173). Nhu’s plan is to uncover the ringleaders through torture applied by a Chinese sadist named Mong Le. Nhu regards torture as a distasteful but necessary method of extracting information, with a fastidiousness that makes him doubly repugnant. He also resents “his role of eminence gris to the regime” (180) because he considers himself the stronger of the two brothers.

The various motives of the plotters against the regime are plausibly summed up by General Trang: Nhu’s secret police, the regime’s unwise persecution of the Buddhists, Diem’s lack of leadership, the military’s resentment of counselor Nhu, and the constant change of military commands. Trang shares these sentiments but has survived so far by being shrewd and cautious: “He had won his general’s stars not by achieving great victories but by avoiding terrible defeats” (191), an admission that reveals the impossibility of waging a successful war. Victory or defeat is not uppermost in the minds of the generals, who have more to gain by maintaining “a permanent stalemate”:

As long as the war lasted, the power and the prestige of the generals would remain high, more American money and U.S. equipment would continue to flow into the country, there would be countless opportunities for a clever officer to make himself a wealthy one (191-192).

The main narrative concerns the protagonist Harry Coltart and his efforts to maintain the montagnards as a strong partisan group in the fight against the Vietcong. A CIA operative, his political and military mission becomes complicated by his personal involvement with the Koho tribe. He forms a blood-brother relationship with the Koho chief, Yé, who gives him his teenage daughter, Ilouha, as a wife. Coltart constantly tries to convince Yé that the Vietcong are his people’s enemies. When Yé demands to know why this is so, Coltart replies: “Because they are Communists. Because they will enslave you. Because they will steal your land and make cattle of you” (21). Yé is understandably more concerned with his people’s welfare than questions of ideology, and he also knows that his people’s traditional enemies have been the Annamese (Vietnamese) of the plains. To the Annamese, “the montagnards were moi, savages, animals to be shot on sight” (24).

For this tribal people, stories are often the best argument. Coltart tells about the T’ai people from the north, who have felt the negative Communist influence on their lives. “You know they are taxed, that their young hunters are taken for the militia, that their chiefs are voiceless and cast aside like broken gourds?” (32). The patjao, or priest, points out, however, that such a situation may prevail in the north, but in these lands the Vietcong pay for food, news, and scouts, and they leave the montagnard women alone, in blatant contrast to the Annamese, who (the chief adds), “take our food, even when our granaries are almost empty. They break our laws. They use our women. They take our young men for the army, when they can catch them’” (33). These cogent arguments cannot be refuted by Coltart, a circumstance that would seem to be a critical objection to his presence, but he is liked personally by the chief and the tribe, and personal acceptance counts for much in their culture. He has, for example, mastered the local customs as well as the language, as he demonstrates in a ceremony of tribal chiefs by slaying a water buffalo with a single blow, which is considered a good omen, but despite his pleading Coltart cannot change the historical reality of hostility to the Vietnamese. He decides he can only get the allegiance of the tribe by means of a promise from Diem himself to respect the montagnard lands, which would in turn be respected as law by the tribe. As it is nearly a foregone conclusion that Coltart will fail, the attempt makes him the tribe’s doomed champion, a man who becomes disillusioned by his experience with the CIA and the American policy of backing Diem in any situation.

Coltart even suspects that an American victory in Vietnam is an elusive, probably unrealistic goal, but from a sense of duty he persists in trying to keep the montagnards in the fight. Yé demands of him the formal promise that “the Annamese soldiers will stay out of these hills, that no roads will be cut, that we shall be left to rule ourselves according to our own” (36). Coltart goes to Saigon in the hope of extracting this promise through his CIA boss, Englehardt, a man he trusts. He knows that Englehardt has always protected his operatives in difficult circumstances, but the CIA has its own political priorities. Diem is under pressure from reporters and the US embassy, the strategic hamlet program is not working, the Buddhist crisis is approaching, and a troublesome reporter named McWhorter is calling for the end of the Diem regime. As Englehardt tells Coltart, it is not the right time to rock the boat with ethnic minority questions. As for American strategy, Diem is their only hope: “He’s tough, intelligent, and has the will to fight. Finally, I know, if John McWhorter doesn’t, that there’s no alternative to Diem” (55). As a clincher, he invokes the domino theory. “We could lose this war…And if we lose it, we’ve lost all Southeast Asia, from Cambodia to Indonesia” (56). Eventually, Englehardt lies to Coltart about Diem’s assurances to keep him and the montagnards holding the line until troops can be sent into the mountains.

Although the correspondent McWhorter is portrayed unsympathetically (he finds it exciting to go on missions where men will kill, about which he can write “a very nice little story”), he is independent of the American mission and more perceptive about the war than is Coltart, who should have taken him more seriously. On Diem, who would cancel the troublesome correspondent’s visa if it were not a public admission to the Americans of his repression of the press, McWhorter’s remarks are perceptive: “We can’t win with this Catholic mandarin, Harry. He’s nothing but a yellow Frenchman…We need Asian leadership here” (89). It is through McWhorter’s eager eyes that the reader sees the shelling and looting of the presidential place, the failure of Nhu’s false coup, and the end of the regime, although to McWhorter’s great disappointment, Diem and Nhu have already fled. He has failed to get his scoop, the final interview with the toppled president, but he will still be rewarded with an editorship for his reporting.

While McWhorter serves as a political guide, a Frenchman named Michaud, who was born and lived much of his life in Vietnam, serves as his (a)moral guide. Frenchmen often serve in novels about the war as cynical but truthful observers of the situation, in contrast to disillusioned American idealists (cf. Greene’s The Quiet American and Just’s A Dangerous Friend). Michaud functions in just this way as a kind of foil to Coltart, his scarred face a sign of the price of knowledge and experience. He tries to convince Coltart that his guilt is out of place in the present situation. “Don’t wish, Harry, unless you can wish for a clean conscience. What a trade we apprenticed ourselves to! Clausewitz and Jomini say nothing about what it is like to betray a simple people” (112). He asks Coltart why the Americans think they can succeed with sixteen thousand men when the French failed with a quarter of a million, and Coltart thinks the difference is that the Vietnamese are fighting for their “freedom,” an answer that Michaud scorns as the vision of a “schoolboy” who does not take into consideration political complexities. He himself, for example, can operate as a rubber planter without being attacked by the Vietcong only because he pays taxes to both sides.

The third narrative functions as a counter-narrative to the second, with which it eventually converges, setting up an ideological antagonist to Coltart a Communist from the Rhadé tribe named Loye. Michaud is the link between Loye and Coltart, as a former comrade-in-arms of both men (Coltart in Korea and as Loye’s commanding officer in the French war against the Viet Minh). It is to the author’s credit that Loye is no caricature, as so often happens with characters who represent the Vietcong: he is given a complete past, from hunter of the hills and son of a tribal chief, to colonial soldier fighting for the French, to laborer and informant for the NLF. He has aspirations toward military command in this new war against foreigners, and his thoughts show him to be perceptive about the situation: “During the day, part of the country was Diem’s. But after dark the country shrunk to the tips of the bayonets of Diem’s soldiers cowering in their sandbagged forts. In the end, because of this, Loye thought, we will win” (102).

From the lectures he attends in Cholon, Loye has also learned his political lessons: “Did not the Vietcong stand for that which every Vietnamese wanted; rights for ethnic and religious minorities, an end to corruption and venality, the crushing of the landlords, the lowering of taxes?” (59). To become a member of the Party, which he wants badly, he works as a laborer at an AID mission, picking up information that he can pass on about the destination of rice shipments, and he also studies at the tactical school, waiting for a chance to carry out a mission that will impress his superiors. The chance arrives with the summons to a pagoda, where a Buddhist bonze, who is in reality a Party man, offers him a command in the Koho hills of his youth. He must stop the montagnard cooperation with Diem and the Americans by protecting the coolie caravans. The Koho sector is particularly important because of the American agent known as Erohé, the Elephant (Coltart’s tribal name). Loye is to win the Koho chief, Yé, away from this alliance and either discredit or kill the white man Erohé. Besides Loye’s desire to carry out the mission successfully and gain the confidence of the party cadres, he has an additional, personal motivation: Coltart’s wife, Ilouha, was originally promised to him.

Loye shows his military skills at careful planning and swift execution while leading a raid on the montagnard mission and hospital, Notre Dame du Bois. At the same time, he is ruthless and cruel in action, murdering the kindly French priest, Father Dupleix, who once patched up his wounds, and even decapitating him, impaling his head on a stake, and stuffing his genitals in his mouth. This ghastly atrocity is justified as a means of luring Coltart out of the hills. “He was a little sorry about the business of having to kill the priest, but he was a Boc [white man] and undoubtedly an enemy of the people” (150), a formulation that sacrifices personal feelings to political necessity and is probably intended to reveal the presumed Communist tendency to substitute slogans for analysis. The two antagonists are both expert in the practice of war, but Coltart is contrasted favorably with Loye precisely because of his commitment to people—the montagnards, Yé, Ilouha, even his mendacious boss, Englehardt—over political slogans.

While Coltart and Loye seek each other out in the hills, Diem’s occupation policy of the highlands has begun. When Coltart discovers engineers cutting a road into Koho lands, he knows he has been betrayed: “This meant Englehardt had lied. It meant Diem had broken his pledge. It meant his own word to Yé…to the other montagnards was worthless” (206). He now realizes that “like the T’ai, the Koho would pay with their freedom if not with their lives for placing their trust in a white man” (212). Englehardt justifies the betrayal by asking Coltart what, after all, was “moral” about his war. “It’s just one we’ve got to fight because the world is what it is” (215)—an argument whose apparent pragmatism conceals its ideology: what he really means is that the world as “it is” is simply one in which Communism must be stopped at any cost.

Michaud tries to console Coltart by telling him that he was merely “the judas-goat,” the one that leads the other animals to the slaughter, and that he should just cut his losses, but Coltart feels guilty at his betrayal of the tribe and seeks out Yé, who has already threatened to kill him if he returns to the hills: “he only knew he had to go back, to share the fate of the montagnards, the fate which he had helped to shape” (217). After being fingered by a VC agent at Notre Dame du Bois, he is predictably captured by Loye’s group. He is being taken to North Vietnam for exchange or execution when the group is ambushed by an American advisor and government commando unit sent by Englehardt. With both Yé and Ilouha killed in the ambush, the outcome would seem to signify Coltart’s final betrayal of his montagnard friends and the triumph of Englehardt’s pragmatism. When the commandos torture and kill the wounded Loye, who was shot while attempting to help Ilouha, Coltart can only lamely say that “[he] was just a terrorist, Yé.” The old chief, still wiser, corrects him before he himself stoically succumbs: “He was a man, Erohé.”

Hempstone’s novel therefore reiterates The Quiet American’s theme of the well-intentioned American (although Greene’s Pyle is not naïve in the way Coltart is) who brings pain and death upon those he thought he would help. Coltart’s connection with the Diem regime is simply an inheritance from his job as servant to a government that puts political priorities over lives, which is why the Diem plot, although the least developed of the three in the novel, cannot be omitted, because it serves as the motivation for the other two. In this novel, politics is a moral teacher: Loye dies because of his loyalty to Communism, which is his cultural inheritance or historical choice, but also (in the moral and ideological framework of the novel) because Communists are crueler than Americans. Coltart is simply luckier or (within the same moral context) his survival may be an opportunity for him to live out what he has learned. Although he is a much more honorable man than Greene’s Pyle, his limitation is precisely his inability to transcend his gullibility, a result of his background, his cultural heritage as well. As McWhorter observes:

He liked Harry Coltart, but in a curious way the Virginian’s world and the real world seemed to mesh only at certain points. Coltart, he mused, clings to many concepts, God, honor with a capital H, a mystical attachment to the soil, concepts which are fine in themselves but no longer have much relevance… (138).

Although the final phrase is meant to show McWhorter’s own cynicism, its truth is borne out by the events of the novel. Coltart will eventually recognize his full complicity in his failure to understand: “He and Englehardt were in it together though. Englehardt was right about that much” (266). When the worldly Frenchman, Michaud, tells him to go back to America, marry the girl-next-door and have backyard barbecues, Coltart reminds him that memory of guilt is not so pliable: “Those thoughts and faces are coming with me. They won’t fit in at the barbecue” (269)—a figurative but accurate summary of what will become the chief dilemma of the Vietnam veteran.

iii. Robert Vaughn, The Valkyrie Mandate (1974)

Vaughn’s melodramatic novel, The Valkyrie Mandate, also begins shortly before the coup that overthrew Diem.41 The Buddhist crisis has already erupted, Nhu is conducting his raids on the temples, and Lodge has been dispatched to Saigon as the new American ambassador. The presidential palace is barricaded, but the guards are lax enough that a Buddhist monk riding a Lambretta is able to penetrate the defenses and throw a bomb in a futile attempt to breach the walls. He is summarily executed by Colonel Duong, a trusted subordinate of Nhu and head of the dreaded Special Police. Duong is felicitously employed, for he is a sadist who admits he enjoys killing, even deriving sexual pleasure from executions.

By contrast, the protagonist, Lieutenant Colonel Justin Barclay, an American military advisor who works with Duoung, is a sympathetic character who not only speaks Vietnamese with admirable fluency but understands the cultural nuances and is thereby comfortable talking to anyone from the lowest peasant to the highest official. Barclay has been in Vietnam for ten years; he first came to the country with the Army Security Agency. He regards Saigon as his home town, and usually prefers the company of Vietnamese to that of his own colleagues, ugly-American types who understand so little of the culture that they employ Vietnamese translators who systematically mistranslate their propaganda. He himself, however, is playing a dangerous game as the lover of Lé, Colonel Duong’s beautiful wife. Their passionate affair constitutes a large part of the story.

Ambassador Lodge barely makes an appearance in this novel except at the beginning and end, but Diem’s arrogant brother Nhu has equal billing with Diem as a character. Nhu believes that the Americans are ignorant and will be powerless to interfere in the current crisis. He himself will handle the Buddhist question in his own way, i.e. with brutal repression, through his Can Dao, or secret police. His right-hand man, Duoung, is keen on this work, as shown by his men’s destruction of the village of Hoa Ginh. Earlier, Lé, who runs an orphanage there, was showing Barclay around when it was suddenly attacked by the NLF. After the couple escapes with the aid of the villagers, the village is attacked again, this time by Duong’s goons, who wear army uniforms to put the blame for the massacre on military leaders, many of whom are constantly plotting against the regime. Duong is so excited by the killing that he rapes his wife that same night, an act that turns his already odious character into a caricature, but at the same time allows his wife’s betrayal of him to be seen as morally acceptable and gives Barclay a personal motive for wishing Nhu and his man Duong removed from power.

Nhu is specifically mentioned in the state department cable sent to Lodge and his military aide, General McKenzie, Colonel Barlay’s Commanding Officer. The cable informs them that they are to apply more pressure on Diem to reverse his present policies and, in the absence of an appropriate response, to look into “alternative leadership.” In the novel, therefore, it is the military commander, not the CIA chief, who plots the coup with the Vietnamese generals, taking the cable as a go-ahead without even consulting the ambassador. It is also McKenzie who dubs the project “Operation Valkyrie,” selecting the name from a codebook for its dramatic sound. According to the general’s dictionary, the Valkyrie are Odin’s handmaidens who conduct the souls of fallen warriors to Valhalla, but, more to the point, it was also the code-name of the operation in which the German generals planned to assassinate Hitler. General Mackenzie, however, is foolish enough to let himself be manipulated into volunteering information to Antoine Mouchette, a Vietnam-born Frenchman who is known as the “master pimp of the Orient.” Mouchette is a shrewd survivor of previous regimes, including the Japanese occupation, and is determined to survive the demise of the present one as well, mainly through supplying his high-level clients with desirable women.

The Ngo brothers, with the help of the secret police and a network of informers planted in civil and military organizations, are aware of the plots against them, one of which has been devised by Nhu himself, a fake preemptive coup called Bravo One, an elaborate “smoke screen” designed to identify the disloyal army elements that are plotting the real coup against the regime. Nhu’s plan is to be carried out by the loyal General Tran, but the plot remains unknown to Diem himself, who is portrayed in the novel as more conciliatory to the Americans than he really was. Nhu’s coup is a phony one to mislead the Americans, who, Nhu hopes (in Henry James’ expression) “shall be hoist with their own petard” and fail to support the real, anti-Diem coup.

Barclay, who was appointed liaison officer between the Americans and the Vietnamese plotters, objects to the plot because he knows that Tran does not have the support of the other generals to bring off a successful coup, but MacKenzie takes Tran at his word and, dazzled by a beautiful prostitute, is also misled by Mouchette, who instructs him not to be receptive to other coup proposals, including the true one. Mouchette is anxious to stay on the good side of Tran and the present regime until circumstances dictate otherwise, when it becomes “time to shift his loyalties once again, so that he would land on his feet when the government toppled,” as he always manages to do (185).

With such inept Americans in the saddle, the phony coup does not come off because the junta led by “Big Linh” (i.e. the historical “Big Minh,” or Duong Van Minh) has been plotting the action that will in fact topple Diem. Barclay uncovers the phony plot through an old friend, Colonel Ling, who tells him that Tran must be bluffing since he has not actually recruited any army units. US intelligence, for its part, has learned of Diem’s attempt to propose a separate arrangement with the Communists, which in the novel is seen as his attempt to gain a cease-fire merely to deal with the plots against him. Barclay, frustrated in his attempts to inform MacKenzie about what is really going on, only succeeds in persuading Tran to postpone his phony coup in order to coincide with the real one.

The generals have to decide if they are to simply assassinate Nhu and thus make Diem more pliant (which might, however, have the opposite effect), to encircle Saigon and force a surrender, which would probably take too long, or to attack the forces loyal to Diem and risk provoking civil war, which they decide on as the swiftest and most decisive course of action. These are historically the three choices the plotting generals faced.42 To get the forces loyal to Diem out of the city, Colonel Linh asks Barclay to help by threatening to withhold US aid unless these forces are sent to the field, a power that Barclay, a lieutenant colonel, would be unlikely to have. Barclay learns, however, about an assassination list that has the names of both Doung and his wife Lé on it, and Duong tells Barclay at this point that he knows about his affair with his wife but has done nothing about it because he might need “insurance” against a coup. This restraint is plausible, but Duong’s death strikes a peculiarly false note, perhaps the weakest part of the novel. The reader is asked to believe that a scheming, sadistic murderer like Duong would seek his final peace in a Buddhist monastery, even being granted a glimpse of nirvana before he is gunned down.

The details of the last hours of Diem and Nhu conform to the historical record—Diem’s phone call to Lodge, their escape to a house in Cholon, their taking refuge in the church, and the assassination of both men in an armored personnel carrier (a fictional addition is the cruel officer who kills the Ngo brothers and is also the murderer of Lé in the end). Diem is given some dignity by quietly and courageously facing his death while Nhu constantly frets for his life, unwilling to face the inevitable. Barclay, who has already escaped an attempted assassination on the street by Tran’s men, is finally killed by his old friend Linh, with the lame explanation that Barclay’s name was the last on the list. The reader has to ask the obvious question: could not Linh, the new head of state, simply erase it?

Vaughn’s novel is a “thriller” that successfully mixes historical and fictional characters and events but leaves several questions related to the politics of the coup unanswered. Is Barclay’s assassination meant to show Linh’s ingratitude toward the man who once saved his life and therefore Linh’s unworthiness to lead the nation? General Minh, in fact, would last only three months in power, and was toppled by General Kanh in January 1964. Or is the reader meant to reflect on the fact that in violent reversals of the status quo the wrong people often get hurt? Or does the narrative simply need to avoid the reunion of the two adulterous lovers? Barclay’s death does not make sense in the terms established by the novel because he has been the only American to cooperate with the plotting generals, unless it is meant to be a critique of the American support of the coup. The only explicit indictment of that support is an observation by a French priest that “Diem was a symbol” of Vietnam’s independence, which the Americans will destroy by ousting him, but the novel is also critical of Diem’s regime as authoritarian and anti-democratic. The elections, for example, are shown to be rigged (“a burlesque,” as Barclay observes) with a numerical victory no one believed in but that MACV accepted “as evidence of the success of the democratic process” (176).

Finally, author Vaughn, a former US Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam, seems to believe that nobody in Vietnam would willingly be a Communist; those who have chosen that side must have done so for lack of a viable alternative. General Linh mentions a former comrade who is not a Communist but has managed to become the senior Vietcong commander in the Saigon area (an unlikely promotion). This worthy commander is ideologically opposed to the VC but does not go over to Diem’s army for fear that he will be simply interrogated and shot. “If we had a government that men like him could respect and trust, the VC problem would be solved” (145), Linh says, an admission that underlines the paranoia and lack of trust engendered by the South Vietnamese regime. The implication, which Linh does not seem to be aware of, is that the enemy does support and put trust in their leaders and this may be one reason why they will win.

iv. Morris West, The Ambassador (1965)

West’s novel concentrates on Diem’s persecution of the Buddhists, the conspiracy against him, and his eventual assassination, with the unwilling compliance of the American ambassador, “Maxwell Gordon Amberley,” based on Henry Cabot Lodge.43 Amberley is regarded as a shrewd professional, an ambassador for ten years but now somewhat at a loss after the death of his supportive wife. He is undertaking instruction from a Zen Buddhist master in Japan when he is called upon to deal with the current government crisis in Vietnam. An assistant explains (again, by the domino theory) that the US has become involved in the country because “we want to maintain a military foothold in Southeast Asia. If South Vietnam goes, Thailand is outflanked and Singapore is threatened,” and “we backed Phung Van Cung [Diem’s name in the novel] and his family because they were the best and strongest administrators available” but can no longer be controlled (9). Cung and his family are persecuting the Buddhist majority and will no longer listen to reason, i.e. do what the Americans tell him to do. It is essentially Amberley’s job to give him this message more firmly or help get rid of him.

The ambassador finds it exciting that the streets in Saigon are tense until he witnesses the suicide of a Buddhist monk. Because the suicide coincides with his arrival, he realizes he has been an “accomplice.” To put pressure on President Cung to cease the persecution of the Buddhists, Amberley announces the threat of US sanctions, including an immediate stop to funding and the gradual withdrawal of military personnel. His top military commander, General Tolliver, realizes that the war cannot be won as long as their allies are a liability owing to their political intrigues among the high command, demoralized troops, and rampant economic waste.

The embassy’s political advisor, Mel Adams, the voice of reason in the novel, argues that Cung’s administration is “a ramshackle dictatorship founded on mandarin ethics, warlord intrigues, the secret police and old-line Gallic Catholicism” (34). Cung has alienated the students, lost the allegiance of the rural people, and isolated himself by surrounding himself with sycophants—an accurate summary of some of Diem’s failings as president. When Amberley asks Adams what policy should be put forward in these circumstances, he advises pulling out and letting the country “determine its own future,” a policy that at the time of West’s novel seemed correct to very few Americans in high places. The ambassador, for example, objects that “Uncle Ho” would soon take over if that were the case. “He’s taking over now,” said Mel Adams flatly. “He’s taking over because the man who truly wants to rally the country lacks the talent to do it; because we are bankrupt of everything but arms, men and money” (62).

Cung has raised the ante by raiding pagodas in a number of cities, followed by a declaration of a state of siege and martial law, actions that Amberley perceives as a means of forestalling potential threats to the regime. When he goes to see Cung to protest against the brutality of the Buddhist repression, Cung counters by showing him photographs of Vietcong atrocities, such as one showing a pregnant woman disemboweled with a bayonet: “Am I to be tender with those who plan such things and then take a hypocritical refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha…This is Asia, not Geneva or Manhattan! Here the man who holds power is the strong man armed” (53). When Amberley threatens the withdrawal of arms and money, Cung does not believe him. He cites the domino theory, merely altering the metaphor: is the US really willing to let Cambodia, Laos and Thailand “fall like a house of cards? This is your last foothold in Asia” (55). That is to say, you need us as much as we need you.

Amberley is portrayed as a man of conscience pursuing an unwanted task, so the role of amoral plotter necessary to higher policy must be transferred to the CIA chief, Harry Yaffa (historically, Lucien Conein, the CIA liaison between Lodge and the plotting generals), who has helped the generals plan their coup and will help them execute it once the American government has given its approval. Cung requests that Yaffa leave the country, which Amberley cannot permit because it would be a public admission that there was an American-supported plot. Cung is sensitive to the plotting. He admits to Amberley that he cannot make popular tours of the countryside because if he leaves the palace “it may fall overnight into the hands of traitors and conspirators” (104).

Tension in Saigon mounts as a bomb is thrown in front of the ambassador’s car, which may have been Cung’s response to the sanctions. The Americans begin to fear that a separate agreement might be made with North Vietnam, undermining their whole effort in Vietnam, and they speculate among themselves about a “neutralization” process proposed by the French. In an embassy meeting, this possibility polarizes the staff, with Mel Adams proposing self-determination and Henry Yaffa supporting continued containment. At a cocktail party, a French diplomat explains that Cung will never bow to American pressure because he a “Jansenist saint” who will defend the last foothold of Christianity in Asia, a provocative notion of which Protestant Americans are likely not to have thought. The Frenchman warns that after the war is continued without a breakthrough, the US will be forced to “neutralize” under pressure from its own Congress. In effect, the Americans will have to make a worse bargain than the one they could make now.

Adams is the staff-member most concerned with saving Cung’s life. He will be disappointed in that hope when Cung and his brother are assassinated instead of spared (historically, this was originally agreed on by the conspiring generals). The general who leads the coup, however, recognizes that such things cannot always be controlled. It is admitted that Adams, who ends up resigning from the Foreign Service, is too good a man for ambassadorial rank: “he lacks the streak of amorality and opportunism which makes a first-rate negotiator” (203). Amberley’s young protégé Groton, an idealist and a serious student of Buddhism, is also unlucky—he is gunned down in the street. The ambassador seems to want to be more like these men of principle, and yet aware that he is successful in the service (“my sorry trade,” he calls it) precisely because he is not like them.

One thing that requires explanation for a novel so closely modeled on historical events is why the author has changed his historical model from an eager conspirator to a reluctant one. One answer may be that once Cung has been identified as Diem, the outcome is already known to the reader, and giving the ambassador a conscience is a way of retarding the inevitable and drawing out the narrative. West, however, seems to have greater ambitions for his protagonist. Personally sympathetic to Cung, Amberley is shown as a man wracked by moral doubt who vacillates on the coup for more than political reasons. After Amberley gets the go-ahead from Washington (historically, it was the other way around) and he gives the dinner speech that signals to the conspirators the American approval of the coup, he feels like he has betrayed Cung: “Cung was still the villain. I was still the white knight, beyond fear or reproach. It was too late now to say what I knew in my secret heart: that for all my noble words, for all my outraged virtue, I was one of the bastards, too” (117). This attitude reduces an opportunistic political decision, of the kind Amberley is shown to be good at making, to misplaced personal loyalty.

Is it immoral to dump a leader bent on destroying his own country, which happens to be in the process of becoming a client state of the nation that the ambassador represents? Or for Amberley to be what he is, a diplomat—someone who must often lie and always follow orders in the service of his country? Giving Amberley a conscience and allowing him to speak his doubts and fears does not, in this case, make him more interesting—in fact, the novel is far more agile and interesting in the exchanges where the characters act according to their public roles in the give-and-take of diplomatic maneuvering. Rather it seems to be a fictional move to make the protagonist more sympathetic, a man of spiritual depth, an adept of Zen Buddhism who might better “understand” Asians, but Amberley would have been more convincing as a cunning and cynical public figure, like the kind of character Gore Vidal portrays so well in his political novels. It sounds pretentious to have Amberley say, after he has agreed to go ahead with the coup and knows he may be blamed, that “there are no more terrors for a man who has come to terms with death and with his own damnation” (223), when neither of these outcomes is likely.

Ambassador Lodge, as shown in the historical outline in the first section of this chapter, seems to have had no such moral compunctions and was much more in favor of, and involved in, the coup than his fictional counterpart Amberley. Lodge’s cable to Secretary Rusk (August 29, 1963), for example, reads: “we should proceed to make all-out efforts to get the Generals to move promptly.”44 Washington still wanted to make an “11th hour” attempt to get Diem to initiate reforms, but Lodge replied that refusing American aid would not work. The Ngo brothers had no regard for public opinion or the opinion of anyone else except their own.45 When Diem called Lodge on November 1, the day of the coup, to ask him what the “attitude of the US” was with respect to the rebellion, he apparently wanted to know what steps Lodge himself would take to stop it, but the ambassador could not give him a truthful answer. Instead, he evasively said that he was “not acquainted with all the facts” and that the US government could not have any opinion about it, as it was only four o’clock in the morning in Washington—as if the State Department had no idea at all of a coup attempt or would not have known about it before that day.46 All that Lodge can offer Diem is his physical safety, but it is clear from the exchange of cables that Lodge “barely lifted a finger” to save Diem’s and Nhu’s lives.47

The novel’s portrait of Diem is also inaccurate. The president is portrayed in the novel as a strong but misguided politician with a serious moral sense and solid achievements behind him: the resettling of a million refugees from the north, the breaking of the power of the Binh Xuyen, and the calling upon the Americans to train his army to fight the guerrillas. He is called “a philosopher as well as a military strategist” (47), a characterization that is stretching the truth considerably if Diem is meant to be an accurate model. Such an astute man (the author would have us believe) would not persecute eighty percent of his own population without a good reason. The justification given is a CIA report “on the infiltration of Communist agents into the Sangha, the Buddhist monastic system” (47). Communist aggression was the argument for any number of desperate measures, and infiltration into the government and the army was real enough, but would a strategist-philosopher pursue such a short-sighted policy of unpopular repression that could only foment more rebellion?

v. Conclusions

Two of these novels about the fall of Diem were published two or three years after the actual coup and the other one (Vaughn’s) nearly a decade later. The events of the coup and probably even its motivations had by this time been established, but the novels have been discussed here in this particular order, not according to dates of publication but to the respective “distances” of their fictional protagonists from Diem’s person and destiny. In this perspective, the distance proportionally decreases, although even in the first two novels discussed (Hempstone and Vaughn), close ups of Saigon’s palatial politics are given whenever Diem himself appears as a character. The details of the execution, which took place inside an armored military vehicle, and the final thoughts and reactions of the victims had to be imagined by the novelists. In every case, what Diem and Nhu were actually thinking and planning must be deduced from the results in the historical accounts. In these novels, however, they are given voices and personal motives, which account for the differences in these works of political and moral emphases.

It has been argued that the first and best of the novels discussed, Smith Hempstone’s A Tract of Time, is furthest from the events leading up to the coup in Saigon, although those events will come to determine what happens in the highlands of central Vietnam, where most of the action takes place. Coltart, the CIA operative who works with the mountain tribes, is caught in a conflict of allegiance between these indigenous people, whose confidence he has gained, and the representatives of his own government, who have their own priorities. He discovers to his sorrow that Diem’s government has, historically and culturally, little sympathy for its montagnard allies, and even less so in the confusion generated by the president’s imminent fall.

The second novel, Robert Vaughn’s The Valkyrie Mandate, views the coup from closer up, through the eyes of an US Army officer who is directly involved as the liaison between the US mission and the rebel Vietnamese generals. There is here another conflict of loyalties. Like the protagonist of Hempstone’s novel, the conflict between the protagonist’s position as an American officer and his devotion, in this case, to Vietnamese culture and its people, proves fatal. If Hempstone seems to be saying that it is impossible to be a man of honor and serve the South Vietnamese government, Vaughn is saying that it is impossible to serve the Vietnamese people by serving its government.

The third novel, Morris West’s The Ambassador, gets even closer to the central crisis of the time by putting the reader inside the mind of the American ambassador who is directly involved in the coup that ousted Diem, showing the political crisis with more complexity and greater moral nuance than the other examples and creating various characters based on actual participants. The main problem with West’s version as historical fiction is the misrepresentation of his historical models. It has been shown here how Amberley is far less complicit in the coup than Lodge was, but Cung’s statesmanship is also exaggerated if it is meant to represent Diem’s. The ambassador recognizes Cung’s achievements in reconstructing his country, including agricultural reforms, expanded commerce and industry, and increased news communications; what is not admitted are the fear of nationwide elections, the rigged referendum, the fact that the vaunted agrarian programs were perceived as “unmitigated disasters,”48 or that the massive influx of American aid that maintained South Vietnam did not prepare it to be an independent nation of industry and commerce.49

Nor can Cung’s achievements, modest as they are, outweigh his defects as a leader, all admitted by Amberley: he is an elitist, a Catholic who persecutes Buddhists in a largely Buddhist country, a president dependent on American aid but resentful of interference, a man who isolates himself from his people and delegates responsibility only to his family, and a politician singularly inept at handling crises. As for the prosecution of the war, the ambassador admits that “military operations were hampered by political considerations” (161): offensive operations did not take place because military commanders and provincial governors did not get along, and the president was more concerned with threats to his regime than fighting the Communists.

It is as if the insistence of all these authors to portray Diem as a flawed but well-intentioned leader was a means of upping the ante on the conspirators’ (and the ambassador’s) moral dilemma. In all three novels, Diem is represented as a sympathetic human being, even a strong leader, who has unfortunately clung to misguided political policies or undemocratic methods. By contrast, his ruthless and conniving brother Nhu becomes a sort of scapegoat for the regime. None of the novels voice any suspicion that Diem may have relegated the dirty work of his autocratic regime to his brother intentionally, that their collusion may have been their modus operandi, a union of divergent roles necessary for the project of sustaining their family in power.

In an interesting contrast to these fictional versions, important historical accounts of the war portray Diem as directly responsible for his own destruction and even cite a lack of personal qualities that partly explain his political failures. Stanley Karnow, for example, refers to Diem’s “inflexible pride” and his style of “ruling like an ancient emperor.”50 In a chapter devoted to Diem, Frances FitzGerald calls him “the sovereign of discord.”51 George C. Herring argues that Diem was an autocrat, who merely to please his American advisors “occasionally paid lip-service to democracy but in actual practice assumed actual powers.”52 Bernard Fall points out that Diem thought that political “compromise has no purpose and opposition of any kind must of necessity be subversive.”53 Robert D. Schulzinger notes Diem’s “inability to generate popularity in the countryside and his adamant refusal to delegate responsibility to anyone other than his brothers.”54 Finally, Marilyn B. Young sums up the relationship of the US government and the Diem regime in this way: “what the United States had labored mightily to produce was not a democratic, independent new nation-state but an autocratic ruling family held in place by a foreign power.55 Mutual dissatisfaction led inevitably to Diem’s fall.

1 Short, Anthony, The Origins of the Vietnam War (London: Longman; 1989) p. 263.

2 Bowman, John S. (ed.), The Vietnam War Day by Day (Hong Kong: Brompton Books Corporation, 1989), p. 14.

3 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 14.

4 Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 193.

5 Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 196.

6 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 16.

7 See Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 203, for the confrontation with the sects, and p. 206, for the battle with the Binh Xuyen.

8 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p.16.

9 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 17.

10 Boettcher, Thomas, Vietnam—the Valor and the Sorrow (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1985), pp. 149-150.

11 Qtd. In Boettcher, Vietnam—the Valor and the Sorrow, pp. 407-408.

12 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 17.

13 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 18.

14 Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 215.

15 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, pp. 18-19.

16 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day , p. 18.

17 Young, Marilyn B., The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: Harper’s, 1991), p. 332.

18 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 18.

19 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, pp. 19-20.

20 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, pp. 20-21.

21 Herring, George C., America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975. Second Edition (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 68.

22 Qtd. in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 102. See Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, pp. 246-247, for the equally optimistic Taylor-Rostow report.

23 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 22.

24 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, pp. 22-23.

25 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 23.

26 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 24.

27 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 27.

28 Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, pp. 205-206.

29 Schulzinger, Robert D., A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 118-119.

30 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 27.

31 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 122.

32 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day p. 27-28.

33 Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day pp. 28-29.

34 Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam—A History (Rev. Ed., New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 694.

35 Hempstone, Smith, A Tract of Time (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1966). Page references to this edition will be inserted within parentheses in the text.

36 Berman, David. M., “Montagnards,” in: Tucker, Spencer C. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War—A Political, Social, and Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 276.

37 Berman, “Montagards, p. 276.

38 Fitzgerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), pp. 238-239.

39 Berman, “Montagnards,” p. 276.

40 Tucker, Encyclopedia, p. 435. According to Berman (in: Tucker, Encyclopedia, p. 277), the montagnards through a United Front Organization for Oppressed Peoples (FULRO is its French acronym) carried on open revolt against the government for years, which in turn became concerned about the montagnards’ military strength. FULRO even staged several uprisings at Special Forces camps in 1964, which resulted in the program being abandoned. The CIDG strike force then came under the control of the US Army patrolling the Laotian and Cambodian borders, but these developments came after those narrated in the novel.

41 Vaughn, Robert, The Valkyrie Mandate (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974). Page numbers to this edition will be inserted within parentheses in the text.

42 Cf. Karnow’s summary of the coup in Vietnam—A History, p. 310.

43 West, Morris, The Ambassador (New York: Pocket Book edition, 1975). Page references to this edition will be inserted in parenthesis in the text.

44 Gettleman, Marvin, et al., Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 227.

45 Gettleman, Vietnam and America, pp. 231-232.

46 Gettleman, The United States and Vietnam, pp. 235.

47 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 122.

48 Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 102.

49 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 63.

50 Karnow, Vietnam—A History, p. 293.

51 Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, pp. 72-137.

52 Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 64.

53 Fall, Bernard, The Two Vietnams: A Political and Military Analysis (New York; Praeger, 1967), p. 237.

54 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 94.

55 Young, The Vietnam Wars, p. 59.

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