"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

“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.