"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns
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