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