"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War
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).