"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

v. Jean Lartéguy, Yellow Fever (1962; English Translation, 1965)

Lartéguy’s La Mal Jaune is a fictional representation from the French point of view of many of the events summarized in the first section of this chapter. Unlike Bosse’s novel, the focus here is on the movers-and-shakers rather than the peasantry, who remain in the background, with politics playing a central part in the action. Lartéguy’s novel frequently evokes an air of nostalgia for the old French colony, with the author in a number of passages lamenting the passing of an era. Graham Greene, who spent some time in Vietnam during this period, admitted that he shared this nostalgia “with so many retired colons and officers of the French Foreign Legion whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi.”71

The historical context of the first part of the novel is Hanoi, late 1955, three weeks before the city is to be handed over to the Communist Viet Minh. The main characters are a group of French journalists who live in a former brothel called the Press Camp, an appropriate setting, since pre-Communist Hanoi is often symbolized in the novel as a dying whore, personified by one of the characters, Ma Lien, who commits ritual suicide on the day before the Viet Minh march into the city. At this point in time, Hanoi is an in-between state, “not yet Vietminh but…no longer French.”72 The bourgeoisie are selling off their non-portable goods, and the foreigners and the prostitutes are heading south in advance of the rigorously nationalistic and puritanical Viet Minh.

The center of the group at the Press Camp is Jerome, the character with whom the author seems most to identify, a highly respected but poorly paid journalist who speaks Vietnamese and knows everybody who is anybody on both sides of the ideological divide. As a journalist, he is always one step ahead of the others because of his inside sources and wide contacts. As he never betrays his sources, everyone is willing to talk to him. Superficially, Jerome resembles Greene’s British correspondent, Thomas Fowler. Both are aging, tolerant, world-weary but worldly wise. Unlike Fowler, however, Jerome is drawn in heroic proportions: an open, honest, and disinterested man who seems to represent what Lartéguy believes is great in French culture, the true inheritance of the French Revolution. Typically, Jerome is critical of his own reputation: “his own past sickened him with its facile generosity of spirit, its false tolerance which merely concealed indifference and superficial humanism” (95).

Another locale frequented by many important local people as well as the journalists is Ma Lien’s brothel and opium-den. The once-beautiful proprietress (called a “procuress” even though her customers procure her), has slept with most of the important men in Hanoi. Ideally situated for occasional work as a police informer, she is now in full decadence, a heavy opium-smoker whose profession is doomed to disappear under Communism. The only other important female character in the novel is Kieu, who sometimes goes by her French name, Claire: a beautiful, desirable, haughty “half-caste,” a Eurasian sexpot with whom all of the men, including Jerome, are in love. Kieu once worked for Ma Lien, who sold her, when she was a thirteen year old virgin, to a French minister and taught her how to extract money and favors from men. Kieu is currently the mistress of General de Langles, the commander of the French forces in Vietnam. She is told by everyone that she has to leave town, since it is obvious that the new regime will not tolerate sexual parasites like her, but she feels a conflict of identity because Hanoi, like herself, is a city “made up of a mixture of blood.”

In this mood, she picks up a melancholy French paratrooper, Lieutenant Kervallé, who had escaped from the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, where all his friends died—and where, he tells Jerome, “I died with them” (39). Kieu convinces herself that she is in love with this morose, hulking young officer, even though he is indifferent to her beauty, regarding her merely as a half-caste whore. None of the other men can understand why Kieu has chosen this “big lout” of a lieutenant, and Ma Lien more pragmatically warns her that he will not be able to keep her on his pay, that older men of superior rank are more her style. Jerome explains her choice of the lieutenant by his romantic melancholy in the face of loss and defeat. As he tells Julien, Kervallé “wears the tortured expression of our misfortune” (112). Kervallé abandons her, as does “her general,” who had so doted on her earlier when he even dared to take her to an official reception. He is told that such an act was inappropriate for a man of his rank, and he also realizes that he could not take Kieu back to France, where he has a wife (in a revealing passage, the general is shown walking with his wife at Versailles, noting that the Americans now have to contribute to its upkeep, a metaphor for the American aid to maintain France fighting in the colonial war). Ever resourceful, Kieu settles on Rovignon, one of the journalists from a poor suburb in Paris, who needs “an apartment that is not in a slum district” and “a woman who’s beautiful, elegant and expensive and dazzles everyone with her glamour” (179). They go to South Vietnam together.

Kervallé represents the French officer-class after Dien Bien Phu. As a professional soldier, he is a man who prefers the fraternity of the barracks to family life, and he sets out for another colonial war in Algeria or Morocco, even knowing that it too will be “lost” in Paris by the generals and politicians—by a France, he thinks, that is no longer concerned with greatness but soft and content with middle-class comfort and mediocrity. These thoughts on the loss of French greatness through an unwillingness to make sacrifices are shared by his commander-in-chief, General de Langles, who, as he leaves Hanoi, ponders the “dotage of a great nation” (137), echoing the historical remarks of the arch-conservative Admiral Thierry d’ Argenlieu about “fighting for the reestablishment of French greatness.” French High Commissioner after the war, Argenlieu had urged his compatriots to throw over the agreement of 1946 that established peaceful co-existence.73

The author evidently shares these sentiments. Even the civilian Rovignon joins in a patriotic tirade directed at his American and British colleagues. “We had such a nostalgic memory of being a great nation” (141). As if the reaction of these French characters to the loss of Vietnam prefigures the American loss twenty years later, an American journalist’s reply to Rovignon becomes prophetic: “We’ll reinforce South Vietnam and, since you’ve gone bankrupt, we’ll take your place” (141). The author seems to be nostalgic about the good old days in Indochina, brooding on the decadence of the end of an era but also fondly recalling the cultural interrelationships of colonial rule, while significantly omitting any mention of its long history of social and economic exploitation of the native population. The nostalgia may explain why the author is less than enthusiastic about the Viet Minh, who are to replace his compatriots in North Vietnam.

The two most important Communist characters are shown as intelligent and sophisticated but also, in their private conversations, ruthless and calculating. The problems that they confront in the formation of a new nation are enormous: masses of people unused to discipline, a shortage of rice, a distrusted currency. For the time being, the two leaders decide to blame the French: “I don’t like exploiting hatred,” one of them confesses, “but sometimes it’s necessary, like herbs in rice” (148). Colonel Phang, who will be promoted to general when he enters Hanoi in triumph at the head the Viet Minh 308th Division, is handsome, cultured, and possesses a winning smile. He has risen in the People’s Army through his political skills and ruthlessness, but he is haunted by his past life as Ké, the nephew of the procuress Ma Lien. In his youth, he went as a seminarian to Paris, where he soon abandoned his religious studies to join the budding Vietnamese anti-colonial nationalist movement. There, he printed leaflets, distributed clandestine newspapers, and befriended both Jerome and the leader of another political group working along similar lines—the Indochinese Nationalist Front—the man called Nguyen-Ai-Quoc, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh.

Puzzled by Jerome’s friendship with so many revolutionaries sworn to evict the French from Vietnam, Ké is told by Ho that Jerome “represents a certain French tradition of friendship and therefore fellow-feeling for all those who revolt against an established order, even if this order has been established by his country” (56). Jerome even supported Ké (Phang) economically for a while in the Paris days, but Phang, now an important man in the Party, is concerned, Jerome thinks, “to wipe out his past completely, maybe because it was still alive within him” (67). While Phang still respects Jerome personally, he distrusts journalists generally because “their freedom of speech and behavior could only jeopardize the delicate balance of military or political hierarchies” (61). The novel is consistently critical of the Communists, not as in Bosse’s novel, because of their failure to live up to the ideals of the leaders, but for the ideological rigidity of the leaders themselves. While listening to his old friend speak, for example, Jerome “wondered why the word ‘people’ suddenly sounded hollow. Ké was not fond of the people. What about Nguyen? In his eyes, the people had to be transformed into ciphers who allowed themselves to be added or subtracted from without anyone offering any resistance” (66).

The Nguyen referred to here is not Ho Chi Minh (who does not figure as a character in the novel) but Phang’s colleague in the Party, the head of Viet Minh security. Nguyen is described by Jerome as being “like the Beria of the regime” (129), a reference to Stalin’s notorious executioner. Jerome argues with Nguyen about the new man that the Communists are trying to construct, the “Vietminh man,” whom Jerome sees as too rigid a type. Nguyen replies, quite plausibly, that revolutionary discipline is essential for success in establishing a coherent society. The Viet Minh, he explains, were once a “hotchpotch” of diverse elements—orthodox Marxists, partisans, Catholics—which had to be united. People were “fused together by eight years of communal existence in the jungle, cut off from their families and social backgrounds” (69). In another sense, this exchange is a rehearsal of the old argument between Communism and its liberal critics, in which western intellectuals were critical of the intolerance and doctrinaire propaganda of Communist regimes, and the Communist leaders believed that the people in whose name they are carrying out revolution, need only to “work and obey” for the time being. In their view, there will be more tolerance later, once the regime has been consolidated and a Communist state is achieved.

According to a French captain captured at Dien Bien Phu, the Communist Viet Minh were victorious because they created a new kind of army, “a total army, in which every soldier is at one and the same time a propagandist, a schoolmaster and a policeman, every officer an administrator, a priest and an agronomist” (62). Whether meant as critique or admiration by a defeated soldier, the statement suggests the attraction of Communism for poor Asian countries, as well as why revolutionary forces like the Viet Minh and later the National Liberation Front were able to achieve victory over powerful adversaries. These revolutionary armies did not consist of military professionals but soldiers who belonged to a highly integrated political, social and military organization.

The plot complication that develops in the first part of the novel, while the Viet Minh are preparing their triumphant entrance into the city, is the presence of a potentially disruptive terrorist, Dr. Tuan-Van-Lê, another old friend of Jerome’s from Paris. Pursued by both the Viet Minh secret police and the French Sureté, or security forces, Lê is hiding in a basement with his strange companion, an assassin named Trieu. Described as a tiny, thin, gnome-like man, Lê was once a member of the Viet Minh Central Committee, said to be more acclaimed even than Ho Chi Minh, because he represented “revolt and immediate action” while Ho was thought to be overly cautious. Lê later broke with the Viet Minh to lead an anti-colonialist, anti-Communist organization called the National Resistance Front, which started up in Paris but later degenerated into a terrorist organization.

It is not explained why Lê, a ruthless man of abstemious habits, someone who might find Communism to his taste, fell out with Ho, unless it was from his own egoism and love of power. Lê’s and Trieu’s motives, in any case, remain murky: Lê is portrayed as a disillusioned idealist who has become a fanatic without program or followers; Trieu, a former peasant driven by supernatural notions of righting a wrongly ordered universe through violence. Together, they have assassinated a number of people and blown up a statue of Buddha to no apparent purpose other than create a sense of insecurity and terror. Lê compares South Vietnam to the Chinese Kuomintang, with their “gang-leaders” and “war lords,” a comparison that is not elaborated on, but the Kuomintang’s defeat by Mao’s Chinese Communists may be a presage of what was to come in South Vietnam. In his determination to stir up trouble, Lê merely wants to “maintain the character of the whole-hearted, relentless revolutionary to the bitter end” (43).

Both the French and the Viet Minh are eager to get their hands on Lê, who, they correctly surmise, is plotting mayhem to disrupt the changeover. The policeman Bernot suspects that Lê, whom he has pursued for years, is in town and imagines that he can finally flush him out by keeping an eye on Jerome. Bernot believes that in crime as well as politics “certain men find themselves at the hub of every intrigue, every plot, every coup, without ever taking an active part, being even perfectly innocent. Jerome was one of these men” (83). The Viet Minh leaders have the same idea and in fact hire the same informer to follow him. Lê tells Jerome his plan, knowing that Jerome will not denounce him to the police: he intends to eliminate the Viet Minh Administrative and Military Committee, Phang’s organization, as “one last gesture” (94), since, under the circumstances, it will be a suicide mission. He tells Jerome, who by now only wants to retire, that it is impossible to drop out of political activity because “we are all prisoners of one another” (96).

Lê’s remark also suggests the claustrophobic interlocking relationships of the men on all sides of the power struggle, each one of them bound by ties of the past. Both Phang and Lê, for example, are former friends of Jerome. Where they differ is in their dreams of the future, which the Communists Phang and Nguyen nurture but the disillusioned idealists like Lê and Jerome have abandoned. How the different sides are bound together by political necessity is shown by the episode in which Lê is killed. The French policeman Bernot discovers his hiding-place but is anxious for the Viet Minh to perform the actual assassination; at the same time, he must also get the French general’s cooperation to withdraw sentries in the area so that the Viet Minh assassins can toss in a grenade. All sides must cooperate in eliminating what is considered a loose cannon.

In the triumphant entrance of the Viet Minh, it is typical that Phang enters Hanoi discreetly, and Nguyen anonymously, while Phang’s assistant in charge of propaganda has orchestrated a parade, with ubiquitous red flags, but the parade has only a lukewarm reception despite agents planted in the crowd to lead the cheering spectators (in one minor but significant scene, the Viet Minh soldiers and the French policemen exchange cigarettes and show each other their American-made weapons). Phang cunningly holds his first press conference in English, to the fury of the French journalists. There is some tension among the Viet Minh leaders: the pro-China Ten wants to get rid of everything French, but Nguyen and Phang, aware of their western cultural roots, reject this proposal. Nguyen, who ordered the assassin Trieu taken alive, wants to make an example of him to show the apathetic people of Hanoi, who are too accustomed to seeing rulers come and go, that this regime means business. As an ideologist, however, he cannot understand a man like Trieu, who seems to act only from instinct. Trieu agrees to be killed for any purpose Nguyen wants, as long as he is kept supplied with cigarettes. Nguyen, accordingly, has him reported as a robber and the word is put out on the street that he will be tried by a “people’s court,” which is to be chosen at random, and immediately executed by the security forces. In this way, terror is instilled in the “judges,” who understand that they might have to condemn their neighbors some day in the same way, another of Nguyen’s “lessons.”

Held on France’s symbolic last day, Ma Lien’s funeral dinner is not a success. When Kieu plays traditional melancholic songs on the zither, they are drowned out by the noisy revolutionary songs of a youth organization next door, which has been placed there by her nephew, Phang, to drive her away. Jerome, along with some giggling paid mourners, will be the only member of the original group in her funeral procession: Ma Lien, like Hanoi itself, has been abandoned by her friends. Jerome imagines that he is following the funeral of all the others who died there since the French arrived, Hanoi being “a French town standing on the confines of China” (171), a formula that neatly characterizes Vietnam as a country defined by its invaders.

The end of the first part evokes an orgy of French nostalgia for a time of “communion between a yellow race, a white army and a handful of officials, adventurers and revolutionaries—all this died in Hanoi on the same day” (189), which manages, at the same time, to celebrate the colonial regime while forgetting its brutal oppression. The “corpse” of the vanished colonial world is said to have gone on “decomposing in Saigon.” The second part of the novel, accordingly, has its setting in the southern capital, although the action has little connection with the first part (the journalists and most of the other characters, for example, make only cameo appearances).

The chaos in Saigon—assassinations, riots, shifting alliances, intrigues and betrayals—contrasts with the orderly rituals of the new regime in Hanoi. The nominal leader of South Vietnam, the emperor Bao Dai, rarely visits his country, preferring to lead the life of a playboy in Cannes, financed mainly by Lê Dao (historically, Le Van Vieu), the leader of the Binh Xuyen gangsters. This organization is said to have began as a group of pirates who looted junks and were willing to work for anyone, whether Japanese or Viet Minh (Le Van Vieu was in fact a gangster whom Bao Dai granted the gambling concession and actually made a “general” in charge of the local security forces). Besides the Binh Xuyen, the government has to deal with the two religious sects, both of which have large private armies: the Hoa Hao, led by Lê-Son, a more dedicated leader than Lê Dao, and the Cao Dai, led by the ambitious Trinh Sat, whose “action committees” (assassins) have infiltrated Saigon in small groups. Trinh Sat is a terrorist who would have joined the Viet Minh if he could have been their leader; he became a Caodaist only “by force of circumstances.” He likes having a flag and troops under his command but has little patience with the Cao Dai religious ceremonies and the sect’s eclectic political and spiritual allegiances, which the author helpfully explains in a lengthy footnote (200-201).

The conflicts depicted in this second part are more complex, reflecting both the global conflict (France vs. US) and the local one (Diem’s government vs. the Sects). The sects are backed by the French, while the government, which has tolerated them as a bulwark against the Viet Minh guerrillas, is politically supported and bankrolled by the Americans and said to be headed by “a misfit who should have been a priest” (189), President Dinh-Tu (i.e. Diem). The French at this point want to avoid further military involvement but are also anxious to maintain political influence while retaining their economic interests.74 It is frankly admitted that the conflict is really about the survival of French capitalism and is being protracted by the French to gain more time, as a French leader explains it, “to enable the big French business concerns to withdraw to Africa or Metropolitan France” (223). The Americans, for their part, want a strong leader like Dinh in charge of the government to halt Communist incursions. The global and the local struggle are therefore interrelated.

President Dinh’s American advisor, Teryman (i.e. Landsdale, from Fr. terre, land), is portrayed as a sly political manipulator, “a masterly stage manager,” and an uncouth, anti-French “new Lawrence of Arabia” (199). He pressures the president to attack the Binh Xuyen in order to gain international respect, but Dinh wavers, hesitant to make a commitment. What the country really needs, Teryman thinks, is a dictator, someone like the ruthless Trinh-Sat, whom Teryman is keeping in reserve as a stick, in case Dinh tries to make a deal with the French, the carrot being the large amount of American aid. Another player, the chief of military security, “Colonel” Houang, has his own reasons for wanting to get rid of Lê Do, namely, to manipulate a vast network of followers. He does not trust the president, but for the time being their “interests” coincide.

The sects all seem to be awaiting a former French army major named Résengier to tell them what to do. Résengier is the heroic Frenchman who takes the place of Jerome in the second part. He is similarly portrayed as a legendary figure, an active soldier to Jerome’s pacific journalist, a man who also receives loyalty from everyone who knows him. He once belonged to a tightly-knit group of die-hard paratroopers evidently admired by the author, “the conquerors of virgin territories and the fighters for lost causes” (257), who become the liaison bureau with the sects. The group included two unsavory types, a former lieutenant called “Fatty,” Lê Do’s business advisor, who runs drugs and guns, and Dr. Souilhac, a libertine and opium addict.

Résengier needs the sects to force Dinh out of power, but he realizes the difficulty of fighting against Teryman’s promise of American money. The day he arrives the government troops begin firing on the Binh Xuyen,75 and he immediately rushes out to try to stop it. The tide of the street battle sways back and forth, resulting in a general conflagration for the poorer outlying sectors of the city with their thatch and bamboo huts. The French authorities are confident of victory but are concerned about keeping the battle out of the center of Saigon itself, the European quarter. When Résengier arrives at Lê Dao’s command post to offer his assistance, he finds the bandit leader uncharacteristically hesitant, unused to military command. Afraid to commit the four-thousand men he has in reserve, the base of his power, he flees, leaving Résengier in charge, only returning to retrieve his money. As the Frenchman observes, “the pirate in him was now asserting himself whereas the politician was collapsing with this pasteboard façade” (259).

Teryman, worried that the president will give up and negotiate, decides to play his “last card,” Trinh-Sat. The two of them burst in upon the Dinh brothers to announce that Trinh-Sat is withdrawing from the Sects’ United Front, thus isolating the Binh Xuyen and giving the government forces an advantage. Teryman intends to manipulate Trinh-Sat by appealing to his dreams of power: he will be “the first to raise the standard of revolt against the French colonialists and their hired killers” (256). President Dinh, who has been summoned to Cannes by Bao Dai and is afraid to make a move, is silently overruled by his brother (i.e. the unnamed Ngo Dinh Nhu). The brothers decide that, even though they are worried about Trinh-Sat’s dangerous pretensions, the American colonel is backing him and they will therefore just have to renege on their promise to the French and continue the attack.

For their part, the Viet Minh have not been idle in their struggle to unify north and south by finishing off “the remnants of colonialism in the south” (216). With their usual planning and efficiency, they have managed to infiltrate their agents into the rubber plantations as workers. Their plan is that the Central Committee of Cochin China (the south) will support the president, who will overthrow the emperor, at which point the Viet Minh will get control of the lower levels of the administration. Their agent is Major Co, a follower of Nguyen (General Phang has temporarily fallen into disgrace for having forgotten that the Viet Minh were now “a part of the international Communist movement”).

General Delmond (i.e. General Collins), the US Ambassador, gives Teryman another week to “make the situation clear” or he will send him home (historically, Landsdale’s mandate was independent of the American embassy). Teryman and Trinh-Sat surprise President Dinh with a bogus “popular committee” that demands more power for the people, a rather distorted reflection of the American pressure exerted on Diem to make his administration more democratic. The committee, however, has been infiltrated by Co and Teryman realizes too late that he has been fooled. He abandons “the Trinh-Sat game” without warning Trinh-Sat that Houang will have him assassinated, an act that is brought off by a clever ruse and blamed on the Binh Xuyen. With both the Binh Xuyen and Cao Dai neutralized, the devious but efficient Houang is now totally in charge of security, both civilian and military.

The fast-paced narrative shifts back and forth from Saigon to the country, where the heroic Résengier tries to salvage the French effort, even though his own countrymen are trying to expel him from Vietnam and he himself no longer knows why he fights. Another femme fatale, a red-headed “quadroon” (she had a Vietnamese grandmother) named Perle, makes an appearance as the love-interest of the second part. Like Saigon itself, an “attractive and heartless slut” (209) Perle has slept with and entranced all the men, just as Kieu had done in Hanoi. The author, like his male characters, seems to be obsessed with this type of femme fatale—the exotic beauty of mixed blood, capricious, sexually aggressive—and yet ultimately pliant for the masterful male, in this case, Résingier, an aging man with wife and children in France, but, like his fellow paratroopers, bored with bourgeois life and addicted to the noble but lost cause of colonial Vietnam. Her pre-feminist submission (“It’s he who decides and I who obey…a free woman is nonsense because by her very nature she enjoys being chained,” [340]) is perhaps the only aspect that dates the novel.

Teryman and his opposite, Résingier, are the foreign adventurers of this novel. The Frenchman knows all the sect leaders personally, since he once saved them from the Viet Minh, he is clearly qualified to do “battle with the American Colonel Teryman” (224). As one character observes, both men have old-fashioned, flamboyant and unorthodox styles of action: “Do they believe in what they’re doing, or else are they merely technicians trained in a king-making school who are practicing the tricks they’ve been taught without really understanding them?” the narrator asks (270). Well-matched adversaries, they both lose to historical circumstances, but while Teryman is seen as a cold, manipulative agent in the limited possibilities of palatial politics, Résingier is fully humanized by action and emotion. The policeman Houang, not a sentimental character, for example, says that the Frenchman “had certain qualities that Teryman will never have; he understood us and I think he was even fond of us” (309), by which the author evidently means that the Americans will never understand the Vietnamese as well as their former colonizers.

Résengier sets off for the Plain of Reeds, a vast marshy area infested with mosquitoes and leeches, in the hope of meeting up with the Cao Dai, and at the same time giving the slip to the French authorities, who are still anxious to deport him. He manages to make it, with Perle in tow, after a number of hazardous and exhausting adventures, to Lê Son, the tubercular Hoa Hao leader. As Résingier languishes, gravely ill with hepatitis, Lê Son describes his own sect, with a grand utopian vision of future victory over all other factions, as his men fight for no money, wanting only to create a truly communal “agrarian republic” that treats peasants and soldiers equally. With this ideal, The Hoa Hao would presumably find common cause with the Viet Minh, but the latter are “impious” and must also be destroyed. The novel ends as Lê Son, who knows that Résengier, his “big brother,” will die, makes a deal with an emissary from the Viet Minh, who has just arrived at the camp to trade arms for rice. The war will continue, with its shifting alliances and hard realities.

Yellow Fever is a very readable novel, filled with intriguing characters and historically related incidents, but it is not without its weaknesses as an imaginative narrative. In addition to the discrepancy between the two parts of the novel—the second part in fact might better have been turned into a sequel to the first, forming a southern version of the events following the Communist victory in the north—the narrative technique is often clumsy. For example, characters tend to reveal their thoughts by thinking “aloud”: “I’m going to dismantle my past piece by piece,” Lê says, and then goes on to do so, a technique more suitable to the stage. In a narrative, the exposition of a character’s thoughts is done to better effect through free indirect discourse—third person narration with the reader’s access to the character’s thoughts—leaving the first-person for direct-speech dialogues.