"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

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.