"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

While Coltart and Loye seek each other out in the hills, Diem’s occupation policy of the highlands has begun. When Coltart discovers engineers cutting a road into Koho lands, he knows he has been betrayed: “This meant Englehardt had lied. It meant Diem had broken his pledge. It meant his own word to Yé…to the other montagnards was worthless” (206). He now realizes that “like the T’ai, the Koho would pay with their freedom if not with their lives for placing their trust in a white man” (212). Englehardt justifies the betrayal by asking Coltart what, after all, was “moral” about his war. “It’s just one we’ve got to fight because the world is what it is” (215)—an argument whose apparent pragmatism conceals its ideology: what he really means is that the world as “it is” is simply one in which Communism must be stopped at any cost.

Michaud tries to console Coltart by telling him that he was merely “the judas-goat,” the one that leads the other animals to the slaughter, and that he should just cut his losses, but Coltart feels guilty at his betrayal of the tribe and seeks out Yé, who has already threatened to kill him if he returns to the hills: “he only knew he had to go back, to share the fate of the montagnards, the fate which he had helped to shape” (217). After being fingered by a VC agent at Notre Dame du Bois, he is predictably captured by Loye’s group. He is being taken to North Vietnam for exchange or execution when the group is ambushed by an American advisor and government commando unit sent by Englehardt. With both Yé and Ilouha killed in the ambush, the outcome would seem to signify Coltart’s final betrayal of his montagnard friends and the triumph of Englehardt’s pragmatism. When the commandos torture and kill the wounded Loye, who was shot while attempting to help Ilouha, Coltart can only lamely say that “[he] was just a terrorist, Yé.” The old chief, still wiser, corrects him before he himself stoically succumbs: “He was a man, Erohé.”

Hempstone’s novel therefore reiterates The Quiet American’s theme of the well-intentioned American (although Greene’s Pyle is not naïve in the way Coltart is) who brings pain and death upon those he thought he would help. Coltart’s connection with the Diem regime is simply an inheritance from his job as servant to a government that puts political priorities over lives, which is why the Diem plot, although the least developed of the three in the novel, cannot be omitted, because it serves as the motivation for the other two. In this novel, politics is a moral teacher: Loye dies because of his loyalty to Communism, which is his cultural inheritance or historical choice, but also (in the moral and ideological framework of the novel) because Communists are crueler than Americans. Coltart is simply luckier or (within the same moral context) his survival may be an opportunity for him to live out what he has learned. Although he is a much more honorable man than Greene’s Pyle, his limitation is precisely his inability to transcend his gullibility, a result of his background, his cultural heritage as well. As McWhorter observes:

He liked Harry Coltart, but in a curious way the Virginian’s world and the real world seemed to mesh only at certain points. Coltart, he mused, clings to many concepts, God, honor with a capital H, a mystical attachment to the soil, concepts which are fine in themselves but no longer have much relevance… (138).

Although the final phrase is meant to show McWhorter’s own cynicism, its truth is borne out by the events of the novel. Coltart will eventually recognize his full complicity in his failure to understand: “He and Englehardt were in it together though. Englehardt was right about that much” (266). When the worldly Frenchman, Michaud, tells him to go back to America, marry the girl-next-door and have backyard barbecues, Coltart reminds him that memory of guilt is not so pliable: “Those thoughts and faces are coming with me. They won’t fit in at the barbecue” (269)—a figurative but accurate summary of what will become the chief dilemma of the Vietnam veteran.

iii. Robert Vaughn, The Valkyrie Mandate (1974)

Vaughn’s melodramatic novel, The Valkyrie Mandate, also begins shortly before the coup that overthrew Diem.41 The Buddhist crisis has already erupted, Nhu is conducting his raids on the temples, and Lodge has been dispatched to Saigon as the new American ambassador. The presidential palace is barricaded, but the guards are lax enough that a Buddhist monk riding a Lambretta is able to penetrate the defenses and throw a bomb in a futile attempt to breach the walls. He is summarily executed by Colonel Duong, a trusted subordinate of Nhu and head of the dreaded Special Police. Duong is felicitously employed, for he is a sadist who admits he enjoys killing, even deriving sexual pleasure from executions.

By contrast, the protagonist, Lieutenant Colonel Justin Barclay, an American military advisor who works with Duoung, is a sympathetic character who not only speaks Vietnamese with admirable fluency but understands the cultural nuances and is thereby comfortable talking to anyone from the lowest peasant to the highest official. Barclay has been in Vietnam for ten years; he first came to the country with the Army Security Agency. He regards Saigon as his home town, and usually prefers the company of Vietnamese to that of his own colleagues, ugly-American types who understand so little of the culture that they employ Vietnamese translators who systematically mistranslate their propaganda. He himself, however, is playing a dangerous game as the lover of Lé, Colonel Duong’s beautiful wife. Their passionate affair constitutes a large part of the story.

Ambassador Lodge barely makes an appearance in this novel except at the beginning and end, but Diem’s arrogant brother Nhu has equal billing with Diem as a character. Nhu believes that the Americans are ignorant and will be powerless to interfere in the current crisis. He himself will handle the Buddhist question in his own way, i.e. with brutal repression, through his Can Dao, or secret police. His right-hand man, Duoung, is keen on this work, as shown by his men’s destruction of the village of Hoa Ginh. Earlier, Lé, who runs an orphanage there, was showing Barclay around when it was suddenly attacked by the NLF. After the couple escapes with the aid of the villagers, the village is attacked again, this time by Duong’s goons, who wear army uniforms to put the blame for the massacre on military leaders, many of whom are constantly plotting against the regime. Duong is so excited by the killing that he rapes his wife that same night, an act that turns his already odious character into a caricature, but at the same time allows his wife’s betrayal of him to be seen as morally acceptable and gives Barclay a personal motive for wishing Nhu and his man Duong removed from power.

Nhu is specifically mentioned in the state department cable sent to Lodge and his military aide, General McKenzie, Colonel Barlay’s Commanding Officer. The cable informs them that they are to apply more pressure on Diem to reverse his present policies and, in the absence of an appropriate response, to look into “alternative leadership.” In the novel, therefore, it is the military commander, not the CIA chief, who plots the coup with the Vietnamese generals, taking the cable as a go-ahead without even consulting the ambassador. It is also McKenzie who dubs the project “Operation Valkyrie,” selecting the name from a codebook for its dramatic sound. According to the general’s dictionary, the Valkyrie are Odin’s handmaidens who conduct the souls of fallen warriors to Valhalla, but, more to the point, it was also the code-name of the operation in which the German generals planned to assassinate Hitler. General Mackenzie, however, is foolish enough to let himself be manipulated into volunteering information to Antoine Mouchette, a Vietnam-born Frenchman who is known as the “master pimp of the Orient.” Mouchette is a shrewd survivor of previous regimes, including the Japanese occupation, and is determined to survive the demise of the present one as well, mainly through supplying his high-level clients with desirable women.

The Ngo brothers, with the help of the secret police and a network of informers planted in civil and military organizations, are aware of the plots against them, one of which has been devised by Nhu himself, a fake preemptive coup called Bravo One, an elaborate “smoke screen” designed to identify the disloyal army elements that are plotting the real coup against the regime. Nhu’s plan is to be carried out by the loyal General Tran, but the plot remains unknown to Diem himself, who is portrayed in the novel as more conciliatory to the Americans than he really was. Nhu’s coup is a phony one to mislead the Americans, who, Nhu hopes (in Henry James’ expression) “shall be hoist with their own petard” and fail to support the real, anti-Diem coup.

Barclay, who was appointed liaison officer between the Americans and the Vietnamese plotters, objects to the plot because he knows that Tran does not have the support of the other generals to bring off a successful coup, but MacKenzie takes Tran at his word and, dazzled by a beautiful prostitute, is also misled by Mouchette, who instructs him not to be receptive to other coup proposals, including the true one. Mouchette is anxious to stay on the good side of Tran and the present regime until circumstances dictate otherwise, when it becomes “time to shift his loyalties once again, so that he would land on his feet when the government toppled,” as he always manages to do (185).

With such inept Americans in the saddle, the phony coup does not come off because the junta led by “Big Linh” (i.e. the historical “Big Minh,” or Duong Van Minh) has been plotting the action that will in fact topple Diem. Barclay uncovers the phony plot through an old friend, Colonel Ling, who tells him that Tran must be bluffing since he has not actually recruited any army units. US intelligence, for its part, has learned of Diem’s attempt to propose a separate arrangement with the Communists, which in the novel is seen as his attempt to gain a cease-fire merely to deal with the plots against him. Barclay, frustrated in his attempts to inform MacKenzie about what is really going on, only succeeds in persuading Tran to postpone his phony coup in order to coincide with the real one.

The generals have to decide if they are to simply assassinate Nhu and thus make Diem more pliant (which might, however, have the opposite effect), to encircle Saigon and force a surrender, which would probably take too long, or to attack the forces loyal to Diem and risk provoking civil war, which they decide on as the swiftest and most decisive course of action. These are historically the three choices the plotting generals faced.42 To get the forces loyal to Diem out of the city, Colonel Linh asks Barclay to help by threatening to withhold US aid unless these forces are sent to the field, a power that Barclay, a lieutenant colonel, would be unlikely to have. Barclay learns, however, about an assassination list that has the names of both Doung and his wife Lé on it, and Duong tells Barclay at this point that he knows about his affair with his wife but has done nothing about it because he might need “insurance” against a coup. This restraint is plausible, but Duong’s death strikes a peculiarly false note, perhaps the weakest part of the novel. The reader is asked to believe that a scheming, sadistic murderer like Duong would seek his final peace in a Buddhist monastery, even being granted a glimpse of nirvana before he is gunned down.

The details of the last hours of Diem and Nhu conform to the historical record—Diem’s phone call to Lodge, their escape to a house in Cholon, their taking refuge in the church, and the assassination of both men in an armored personnel carrier (a fictional addition is the cruel officer who kills the Ngo brothers and is also the murderer of Lé in the end). Diem is given some dignity by quietly and courageously facing his death while Nhu constantly frets for his life, unwilling to face the inevitable. Barclay, who has already escaped an attempted assassination on the street by Tran’s men, is finally killed by his old friend Linh, with the lame explanation that Barclay’s name was the last on the list. The reader has to ask the obvious question: could not Linh, the new head of state, simply erase it?

Vaughn’s novel is a “thriller” that successfully mixes historical and fictional characters and events but leaves several questions related to the politics of the coup unanswered. Is Barclay’s assassination meant to show Linh’s ingratitude toward the man who once saved his life and therefore Linh’s unworthiness to lead the nation? General Minh, in fact, would last only three months in power, and was toppled by General Kanh in January 1964. Or is the reader meant to reflect on the fact that in violent reversals of the status quo the wrong people often get hurt? Or does the narrative simply need to avoid the reunion of the two adulterous lovers? Barclay’s death does not make sense in the terms established by the novel because he has been the only American to cooperate with the plotting generals, unless it is meant to be a critique of the American support of the coup. The only explicit indictment of that support is an observation by a French priest that “Diem was a symbol” of Vietnam’s independence, which the Americans will destroy by ousting him, but the novel is also critical of Diem’s regime as authoritarian and anti-democratic. The elections, for example, are shown to be rigged (“a burlesque,” as Barclay observes) with a numerical victory no one believed in but that MACV accepted “as evidence of the success of the democratic process” (176).

Finally, author Vaughn, a former US Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam, seems to believe that nobody in Vietnam would willingly be a Communist; those who have chosen that side must have done so for lack of a viable alternative. General Linh mentions a former comrade who is not a Communist but has managed to become the senior Vietcong commander in the Saigon area (an unlikely promotion). This worthy commander is ideologically opposed to the VC but does not go over to Diem’s army for fear that he will be simply interrogated and shot. “If we had a government that men like him could respect and trust, the VC problem would be solved” (145), Linh says, an admission that underlines the paranoia and lack of trust engendered by the South Vietnamese regime. The implication, which Linh does not seem to be aware of, is that the enemy does support and put trust in their leaders and this may be one reason why they will win.

iv. Morris West, The Ambassador (1965)

West’s novel concentrates on Diem’s persecution of the Buddhists, the conspiracy against him, and his eventual assassination, with the unwilling compliance of the American ambassador, “Maxwell Gordon Amberley,” based on Henry Cabot Lodge.43 Amberley is regarded as a shrewd professional, an ambassador for ten years but now somewhat at a loss after the death of his supportive wife. He is undertaking instruction from a Zen Buddhist master in Japan when he is called upon to deal with the current government crisis in Vietnam. An assistant explains (again, by the domino theory) that the US has become involved in the country because “we want to maintain a military foothold in Southeast Asia. If South Vietnam goes, Thailand is outflanked and Singapore is threatened,” and “we backed Phung Van Cung [Diem’s name in the novel] and his family because they were the best and strongest administrators available” but can no longer be controlled (9). Cung and his family are persecuting the Buddhist majority and will no longer listen to reason, i.e. do what the Americans tell him to do. It is essentially Amberley’s job to give him this message more firmly or help get rid of him.

The ambassador finds it exciting that the streets in Saigon are tense until he witnesses the suicide of a Buddhist monk. Because the suicide coincides with his arrival, he realizes he has been an “accomplice.” To put pressure on President Cung to cease the persecution of the Buddhists, Amberley announces the threat of US sanctions, including an immediate stop to funding and the gradual withdrawal of military personnel. His top military commander, General Tolliver, realizes that the war cannot be won as long as their allies are a liability owing to their political intrigues among the high command, demoralized troops, and rampant economic waste.

The embassy’s political advisor, Mel Adams, the voice of reason in the novel, argues that Cung’s administration is “a ramshackle dictatorship founded on mandarin ethics, warlord intrigues, the secret police and old-line Gallic Catholicism” (34). Cung has alienated the students, lost the allegiance of the rural people, and isolated himself by surrounding himself with sycophants—an accurate summary of some of Diem’s failings as president. When Amberley asks Adams what policy should be put forward in these circumstances, he advises pulling out and letting the country “determine its own future,” a policy that at the time of West’s novel seemed correct to very few Americans in high places. The ambassador, for example, objects that “Uncle Ho” would soon take over if that were the case. “He’s taking over now,” said Mel Adams flatly. “He’s taking over because the man who truly wants to rally the country lacks the talent to do it; because we are bankrupt of everything but arms, men and money” (62).

Cung has raised the ante by raiding pagodas in a number of cities, followed by a declaration of a state of siege and martial law, actions that Amberley perceives as a means of forestalling potential threats to the regime. When he goes to see Cung to protest against the brutality of the Buddhist repression, Cung counters by showing him photographs of Vietcong atrocities, such as one showing a pregnant woman disemboweled with a bayonet: “Am I to be tender with those who plan such things and then take a hypocritical refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha…This is Asia, not Geneva or Manhattan! Here the man who holds power is the strong man armed” (53). When Amberley threatens the withdrawal of arms and money, Cung does not believe him. He cites the domino theory, merely altering the metaphor: is the US really willing to let Cambodia, Laos and Thailand “fall like a house of cards? This is your last foothold in Asia” (55). That is to say, you need us as much as we need you.

Amberley is portrayed as a man of conscience pursuing an unwanted task, so the role of amoral plotter necessary to higher policy must be transferred to the CIA chief, Harry Yaffa (historically, Lucien Conein, the CIA liaison between Lodge and the plotting generals), who has helped the generals plan their coup and will help them execute it once the American government has given its approval. Cung requests that Yaffa leave the country, which Amberley cannot permit because it would be a public admission that there was an American-supported plot. Cung is sensitive to the plotting. He admits to Amberley that he cannot make popular tours of the countryside because if he leaves the palace “it may fall overnight into the hands of traitors and conspirators” (104).

Tension in Saigon mounts as a bomb is thrown in front of the ambassador’s car, which may have been Cung’s response to the sanctions. The Americans begin to fear that a separate agreement might be made with North Vietnam, undermining their whole effort in Vietnam, and they speculate among themselves about a “neutralization” process proposed by the French. In an embassy meeting, this possibility polarizes the staff, with Mel Adams proposing self-determination and Henry Yaffa supporting continued containment. At a cocktail party, a French diplomat explains that Cung will never bow to American pressure because he a “Jansenist saint” who will defend the last foothold of Christianity in Asia, a provocative notion of which Protestant Americans are likely not to have thought. The Frenchman warns that after the war is continued without a breakthrough, the US will be forced to “neutralize” under pressure from its own Congress. In effect, the Americans will have to make a worse bargain than the one they could make now.

Adams is the staff-member most concerned with saving Cung’s life. He will be disappointed in that hope when Cung and his brother are assassinated instead of spared (historically, this was originally agreed on by the conspiring generals). The general who leads the coup, however, recognizes that such things cannot always be controlled. It is admitted that Adams, who ends up resigning from the Foreign Service, is too good a man for ambassadorial rank: “he lacks the streak of amorality and opportunism which makes a first-rate negotiator” (203). Amberley’s young protégé Groton, an idealist and a serious student of Buddhism, is also unlucky—he is gunned down in the street. The ambassador seems to want to be more like these men of principle, and yet aware that he is successful in the service (“my sorry trade,” he calls it) precisely because he is not like them.

One thing that requires explanation for a novel so closely modeled on historical events is why the author has changed his historical model from an eager conspirator to a reluctant one. One answer may be that once Cung has been identified as Diem, the outcome is already known to the reader, and giving the ambassador a conscience is a way of retarding the inevitable and drawing out the narrative. West, however, seems to have greater ambitions for his protagonist. Personally sympathetic to Cung, Amberley is shown as a man wracked by moral doubt who vacillates on the coup for more than political reasons. After Amberley gets the go-ahead from Washington (historically, it was the other way around) and he gives the dinner speech that signals to the conspirators the American approval of the coup, he feels like he has betrayed Cung: “Cung was still the villain. I was still the white knight, beyond fear or reproach. It was too late now to say what I knew in my secret heart: that for all my noble words, for all my outraged virtue, I was one of the bastards, too” (117). This attitude reduces an opportunistic political decision, of the kind Amberley is shown to be good at making, to misplaced personal loyalty.

Is it immoral to dump a leader bent on destroying his own country, which happens to be in the process of becoming a client state of the nation that the ambassador represents? Or for Amberley to be what he is, a diplomat—someone who must often lie and always follow orders in the service of his country? Giving Amberley a conscience and allowing him to speak his doubts and fears does not, in this case, make him more interesting—in fact, the novel is far more agile and interesting in the exchanges where the characters act according to their public roles in the give-and-take of diplomatic maneuvering. Rather it seems to be a fictional move to make the protagonist more sympathetic, a man of spiritual depth, an adept of Zen Buddhism who might better “understand” Asians, but Amberley would have been more convincing as a cunning and cynical public figure, like the kind of character Gore Vidal portrays so well in his political novels. It sounds pretentious to have Amberley say, after he has agreed to go ahead with the coup and knows he may be blamed, that “there are no more terrors for a man who has come to terms with death and with his own damnation” (223), when neither of these outcomes is likely.

Ambassador Lodge, as shown in the historical outline in the first section of this chapter, seems to have had no such moral compunctions and was much more in favor of, and involved in, the coup than his fictional counterpart Amberley. Lodge’s cable to Secretary Rusk (August 29, 1963), for example, reads: “we should proceed to make all-out efforts to get the Generals to move promptly.”44 Washington still wanted to make an “11th hour” attempt to get Diem to initiate reforms, but Lodge replied that refusing American aid would not work. The Ngo brothers had no regard for public opinion or the opinion of anyone else except their own.45 When Diem called Lodge on November 1, the day of the coup, to ask him what the “attitude of the US” was with respect to the rebellion, he apparently wanted to know what steps Lodge himself would take to stop it, but the ambassador could not give him a truthful answer. Instead, he evasively said that he was “not acquainted with all the facts” and that the US government could not have any opinion about it, as it was only four o’clock in the morning in Washington—as if the State Department had no idea at all of a coup attempt or would not have known about it before that day.46 All that Lodge can offer Diem is his physical safety, but it is clear from the exchange of cables that Lodge “barely lifted a finger” to save Diem’s and Nhu’s lives.47

The novel’s portrait of Diem is also inaccurate. The president is portrayed in the novel as a strong but misguided politician with a serious moral sense and solid achievements behind him: the resettling of a million refugees from the north, the breaking of the power of the Binh Xuyen, and the calling upon the Americans to train his army to fight the guerrillas. He is called “a philosopher as well as a military strategist” (47), a characterization that is stretching the truth considerably if Diem is meant to be an accurate model. Such an astute man (the author would have us believe) would not persecute eighty percent of his own population without a good reason. The justification given is a CIA report “on the infiltration of Communist agents into the Sangha, the Buddhist monastic system” (47). Communist aggression was the argument for any number of desperate measures, and infiltration into the government and the army was real enough, but would a strategist-philosopher pursue such a short-sighted policy of unpopular repression that could only foment more rebellion?