"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 The Pentagon Papers, p. 634.

5 The Pentagon Papers p. 634.

6 The Pentagon Papers, p. 634.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

50 Schulzinger, A Time for War p. 70.

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

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

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

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

55 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 87.

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

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

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

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

60 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 94.

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

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

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

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

65 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 92.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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