"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

At the camp, a VC infiltrator among the strike force is discovered cutting wire along the perimeter. He is tortured by the insertion of a pin under his fingernails to give up information about an expected attack on the camp. Kornie admits that a lie detector, which is to arrive the next day, would be more effective than torture that makes the victim say only what the torturer wants to hear, but the procedure has yielded the names of five more VC among the strike force. When the polygraph arrives the next day, along with Colonel Train, the torturer of the previous day is delighted with the efficiency of the machine: “Here is truly a fine machine. Now we do not waste time. We know exactly who to torture” (47). Kornie defends himself against Train, who has come to investigate the complaints of the border transgression, by claiming the operation was necessary to “stall” the impending attack on the camp. Train is angry but shows his merit by intending to stay on for the attack. Moore also refuses to leave: “If I get myself zapped, that’s tough, but it’s my job to chance it” (52), he says, in the finest macho style of the professional soldier.

The attack, which occurs the same night, is a set-piece battle of a defense of an armed camp: mad suicide charges by a fanatical enemy, bloody hand-to-hand combat, and traitorous elements within the camp firing on the friendly forces. When the VC are inside the perimeter threatening the survival of the camp, two Special Forces men towering over friend and foe suddenly appear to shore up the faltering defense: “The strikers flock about the two Americans, and screaming curses their resistance became more ferocious than ever” (61). Even the observer Moore is carried away by the momentum of the counter-attack and leaps out of the safety of his bunker “shouting like a combatant” and heads for the wall. When yet another enemy battalion threatens to be thrown into the attack, the orders are for the Americans to “exfiltrate” (evacuate) if the camp is overrun, leaving the ARVN to fend for themselves, but they are saved from this disloyal measure by the US Air Force, which comes in bombing and strafing at the last minute. The XO has been killed and one plane shot down, but the attack has been broken and the camp saved. Colonel Train, who participated actively in the fighting, commends Kornie on his command of the men’s valiant defense of the camp but scolds him for setting charges under the bunkers of the strikers (allies) in case they were traitors—which they were and they were blown up, another point scored by Kornie. Train asks Kornie if he might be brought along on future operations, for it will be easier for him then to invent “plausible deviations from the truth when necessary” (66), a complete conversion.

The battle is made to order for a Hollywood movie, particularly a Western, in which a determined commander (Kornie) of a small group of brave white men (the advisors) and friendly natives (the strikers) has to defend the fort against a vastly superior force of hostile Indians (the VC) and their traitorous sympathizers within the camp. Victory is achieved through a combination of firepower, courage, will, and a last minute rescue by the cavalry (the Air Force). The commander is vindicated for his stubborn individualism in the end, when his superior (Train), who has joined the battle and witnessed first-hand the defenders’ mettle, is convinced that his subordinate has been right after all. The problem with Train’s reversal is that it has nothing to do with his original objection to Kornie’s unorthodox methods.

Other movie scenarios might be fashioned from the characters of other episodes. Besides the doughty Finn, Steve Kornie, these include: Captain “Brandy” Martell, a Frenchman, and Captain Jesse DePorta, a Filipino freedom-fighter, both A-team leaders, as well as the formidable Major Fritz Scharne, another Special Forces legend. A former member of Hitler Youth and anti-Communist fighter in Korea, Laos, and Vietnam, Scharne was nearly elected mayor of a city in Bavaria where he was serving with the 10th Special Forces Group. The Fascist military origin of these exemplary fighters is not commented upon by the author, but a film featuring them might be titled “The American Foreign Legion.”

At several points, Moore contends that the Special Forces owed its successes to the autonomy it enjoyed before its headquarters was split (mid-1964), and operations, intelligence, and the CO of Special Forces, Vietnam, were all moved from Nha Trang to Saigon, “where MAC-V and MAAG could keep closer rein on their unconventional activities” (67). In the episode “Home to Nanette,” for example, Major Bernard Arklin is superbly adapted to the culture of the Meo tribesmen whom he is training for strike operations against the Communist Pathet Lao. He speaks their language, understands their customs, is on friendly terms with the chief, and even takes a young, half-caste woman (against his principles as a married man) as his wife to be better accepted by the tribe. Higher authority intervenes, however, in the form of an uptight colonel named Williston, who lands his helicopter on the mountain to inform Arklin (at the same that he blows Arklin’s cover) that Special Forces are now under the command of MAC-V and that he is shocked and offended by Arklin’s unmilitary appearance (the major is dirty, has long matted hair, and is wearing a loin-cloth). He refuses to accept Arklin’s insistence that an advisor to these people has to get their confidence by becoming one of them. Williston orders him to go back with him on the chopper, but Arklin refuses, saying he is working under the auspices of the CIA and his orders are to harass the Communists any way he sees fit. Like Kornie, Arklin can only be redeemed from potential disgrace by success—in his case, a daring raid on a Pathet Lao camp, which ensures his promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel and Williston’s banishment to a dead-end assignment in the Pentagon.

For Moore’s Special Forces heroes, the work of the man of action is constantly threatened by bureaucratic rules and ignorant rear-echelon commanders, but merit usually wins out. In this respect, The Green Berets resembles Lederer and Burdick’s The Ugly American, another fiction made up of vignettes: Jim Neilson called Moore’s novel “an updated, militarized version of the Ugly American.”12 In both works, specific examples demonstrate that bureaucratic rules should never take precedence over men working in efficient if unorthodox ways in the field to combat Communism. Like Lederer and Burdick’s work of 1958, Moore’s best-seller of 1965 had considerable public influence. It is said, for example, to have even boosted enlistments in the Army to such an extent that the draft was actually suspended from January to April of 1966.13

The author constantly refers to the enemy as “Communists,” rather than VC or NLF, as if their political agenda corresponded exclusively to the presumed Soviet aim of global hegemony while taking no account of the NLF as revolutionary forces engaged in a local struggle of resistance.14 Even the indigenous people like the Meo tribesmen are said to be fierce anti-Communists, but there is no indication of how Communism as an ideology was a threat to their tribal culture or even that they understand what it was. Their real enemies, as Hempstone’s A Tract of Time (cf. Chapter Two) makes clear, are the Annamese (Vietnamese). As even Moore acknowledges, the tribesmen fight the VC for their own reasons: to avoid taxes and prevent the VC from abducting their young men for military service and confiscating their cash crop, opium.

Unlike the other authors discussed in this chapter, Moore notably does not view the Friendlies as autonomous, dignified people. Vietnamese soldiers are often depicted as childish or even bestial, who enjoy themselves by tormenting animals and whose language sounds like “monkey-talk.” When they are considered good soldiers, like Lieutenant Cau, they are smiling subordinates, keen on killing and eager to please their American advisors, who still remain superior in understanding. Moore partly explains these shortcomings by history: Diem’s family-run government allowed the LLDB (Luc-Luong Dac-Biet), the Vietnamese Special Forces who were to be modeled on the American organization, to promote officers for their association with the Diem clan or government rather than for their leadership skills. This practice inevitably led to conflicts with their American counterparts, who had to advise the incompetent leaders who were in command, a relationship that could be “a matter of life and death to Americans and Vietnamese alike” (13).

In Moore’s work, the ARVN officers are usually cowardly, not aggressive enough, or inexplicably ignorant about the basic matters of running a military operation. In one episode, a mission has to be aborted because the Vietnamese counterpart CO, Captain Nim, with a superior force, cannot control his contempt for a village of montagnards, and against his American advisor’s pleading opens up on the villagers with his carbine, starting a fire-fight that kills seventeen villagers. Still not satisfied, he wants to hand over the surviving children to his family and friends as slaves and is only stopped by the benevolent deceit of the advisors, who shuttle the children to the hospital in Nha Trang under the pretense of transporting a group of VC prisoners. The ARVN interrogators who await the shipment at the air-strip “drool” at the chance of torturing what they suppose are prisoners and are furious at being tricked by the humane Americans.

In another episode, a corrupt CO of a Special Forces camp, Lieutenant Chi, runs a clean, military-like establishment that is often shown to visitors as a model camp but still manages to drive his men to desertion. He throws them into a snake-filled pit for minor infractions, and when they desert he collects their pay for himself. He also takes kick-backs on construction projects for his model camp. The Vietnamese authorities take no action despite repeated complaints from the US advisors, and even when Chi is exposed, he is merely transferred to another camp. When not corrupt, the ARVN officers are seen as mendacious or merely stupid, but even the VC, who are represented in other works as diabolically clever, are fooled by the simple ruses of the Americans and their superior technology. Moore evidently thinks that it may be Communism and not race that makes them dupes, for in one episode, a Frenchman, a veteran of Dien Bien Phu nicknamed “Cowboy” who works for the VC, is also lured into a trap after an advisor pretends to talk too freely at a tennis club, giving away false information about an impending operation. Cowboy is ambushed and killed along with his VC advisees. His death is justified by his having helped kill American advisors.

For their part, the advisors are not averse to cynically exploiting their allies to gain their objectives. To recruit pretty female agents to spy on a VC colonel in his own territory, an intelligence man keeps his eye out for family victims of murdered village chiefs. He finds a young woman, a school-teacher, and shows her photographs he had previously taken of the mutilated corpses of her parents and younger brother and exploits her shock and hatred by talking to her “of revenge and duty to Vietnam” (111). He recruits her to become the mistress of the VC corps area commander to make it easier for the man to be kidnapped. Friendlies may also be sacrificed for military objectives: another female agent is callously left to interrogation and torture after her usefulness has been exploited. When more bodies are needed for the LLDB strike force, an advisor recruits juvenile offenders (murderers being considered especially valuable) from jail so that “their talents for mayhem and assassination can be put to work on behalf of national objectives” (114). They are regarded as good fighters who have the advantage of never deserting, and so they are issued fancy uniforms and used as decoys in an ambush situation where most of them are killed.

The last episode, “Hit ‘em Where They Live,” which describes an A-team’s operation, is the best narrated episode but the most problematic with respect to the author’s truth claims and his racist attitudes toward the Vietnamese. When Moore’s plane takes fire and the pilot has to put down at a secret training-base, he becomes curious about the operation to be launched there, but it is top-secret and he is explicitly excluded by the team-leader from going along. Nevertheless, he says that “through information from a variety of sources, I was able to project the story” (264), a common fictional procedure. The operation is an alleged incursion into North Vietnam and this episode is likely the locus of the security violations alleged by the Army when the book came out, if such an operation actually took place. More likely, given all the possibilities for such a daring and complex operation going wrong, it is sheer fabrication, but the author claims, incredibly, that it was a complete success that will adversely affect Ho Chi Minh’s negotiating position at future peace talks.

This episode also best illustrates the complementary nature of a Special Forces A-team’s skills. The team members are either dark-skinned (the team leader is Filipino in origin) or have their skins darkened. All wear clothes and carry arms and equipment that cannot be traced to American manufacture. They are trained at the secret base and dropped into enemy territory at night, a daring incursion into the “Communist heartland.” Their varied mission includes scouting targets in an industrial area, kidnapping and assassinating political officers, using opium as bargain currency, and recruiting agents as spies. Notably, this culminating episode has all but erased the presence of the Vietnamese. Montagnards are used, but the planning and execution of the operation are entirely in the hands of the Americans. Only in this way, it is implied, can nothing go wrong.

iii. Scott C. S. Stone, The Coasts of War (1966)

Stone’s novel might be regarded as a Navy version of The Green Berets. It is based, as the journalist-author claims in his Forward, on the “paramilitary organization of some 500 Chinese-style junks” operated by Vietnamese crews with US Navy advisors.15 The mission of this Junk Force, the Hai Thuyen, was to try to stop the flow of arms and supplies from North to South Vietnam that were carried in fishing-boats along the coast and in the waterways of the Delta, a traffic that would tend to increase whenever the land route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was under attack. This waterborne caravan was difficult to suppress completely because of the great number of Delta waterways that would increase in the rainy season. The relation between the American advisors and the Vietnamese in the novel is stated with frank condescension by the Junk Force leader, Lieutenant Erickson:

It was a farce to call us advisors. Everyone in the country knew it. If we didn’t take the Vietnamese in they wouldn’t go, not because they were cowards—they just didn’t know what to do, how to go about it, and no amount of talking and training would do any good. You had to take them on an ambush and show them how to kill (18).

The novel works by a clichéd contrast between two young officers: Erickson—the courageous, ruthless leader who packs a carbine, .45 pistol, and grenades wherever he goes—and his American assistant, Miller, a romantic idealist. Miller is killed in a firefight in the first chapter, so his viewpoint is presented in diary entries. Erickson’s first-person commentary, by turns tough and sentimental, is further counter-pointed by that of a Vietnamese officer, Ensign Tai. As Miller and Tai both emulate Erickson, and as he himself is given the opportunity to explain his actions, he becomes the novel’s uncontested hero, eliciting admiration not only from the Vietnamese sailors, who would follow him anywhere, but from American news correspondents and military superiors, who might be expected to question more vigorously his means, if not his motives and ends.

When Le Tuyet, the beautiful, educated Vietnamese girl with whom Miller was in love, arrives at the compound to find out about how her lover died and to offer Erickson her help in combating the Vietcong, it is predictable that they will also fall in love. The hard-nosed Erikson becomes more humanized by becoming more like Miller, who, in his admiration for Erickson’s professionalism, would have liked to have been more like him, although there is no question that the author prefers tough military professionalism over humanistic idealism.

Erickson’s aggressive tactics include attacking Vietcong strongholds on shore, as well as hostile junks, and because he enjoys these engagements he often forgets what is supposed to be his primary mission, the routine searching of fishing-boats for infiltrators, arms, and equipment, although that kind of work would evidently not be sufficiently engaging for an action novel. He himself justifies the shore attacks as a way of preempting the enemy and discouraging him from attacking the Junk Force’s stronghold, their “Fort Apache,” a compound with gun-emplacements, surrounded by barbed-wire and mines, and guarded night and day by the sailors themselves, whose families live within the compound. Erickson rules this compound like a warlord. He requires, and receives, absolute loyalty.

The neighboring village is a problem, however, because it is infiltrated by enemy agents. After the initial attack during which Miller is killed, Erickson orders the bodies of the VC killed in the action to be decapitated and their heads to be set on pikes in the village in order to “discourage any V.C. sympathizers” (13). This incident gets into the news in Saigon, and the press demands a fuller explanation. Erickson must report to his superior, Commander Hughes, who forces him to face a bevy of important news correspondents at a press-conference to explain himself. As a non-combatant, Hughes could not be expected to “understand about the V.C.,” Erickson thinks, but at the press-conference he shows himself to be as forthright in speech as in action, surprising Hughes and the correspondents by frankly admitting the deed, following up with a succinct summary of the Junk Force’s situation and a justification for his action: “You have to think about the psychology involved, the psychological climate. One V.C. head on a pike is more impressive in the village than all the speeches and leaflets and radio broadcasts that you can cook up” (35). There are a number of objections that could be made to such an argument from someone who is supposed to winning hearts and minds, but none of the correspondents makes one. Impressed with this tough, honest warrior, the correspondents incredibly cave in by renouncing their intention to pursue the story.

In another unlikely episode, Erickson’s mess-boy, a kind of camp mascot, is captured by the VC and offered as exchange for the abandonment of the compound. Erickson must refuse, and the boy is cruelly tortured and killed. In a show of bravura, Erickson strides into the village and asks for the villagers to turn in their VC agents for their elimination: “The information we seek is in return for our decision not to abandon you to the Viet Cong” (74). The villagers eventually turn the agents in—a father even turns in his son, the kidnapper, unconsciously reflecting what is often thought to be the Communist practice of giving more importance to ideological over family ties—and Erickson executes them summarily before the entire village—an act that would have endangered the villagers far more than being abandoned by an American advisor.

Erickson sees the Vietcong as evil, fit only for killing and unworthy of any kind of success. “They have been known to shoot innocent people taken from the buses, just for the hell of it” (49). In fact, the Vietcong were selective in their use of terror, concerned not to alienate the people on whom they depended and whom they were trying to win over. As a man who thinks only in terms of duty and getting-the-job-done, Erikson’s political views are naive. He says that the “reason” for Miller’s death was nothing more than a well-trained machine-gunner—i.e. professionalism, the important thing in war—and the “cause was that of freedom for this little country and the world generally” (31), to which he seems to be paying mere lip-service, for he mentions it nowhere else. He also subscribes to the Domino Theory: “…the battle line has been drawn here, in Vietnam. It could have been drawn in Malaysia or the Philippines—anywhere” (51) and believes (like US civilian leaders) that the VC “were under orders from Peking as well as Hanoi.”

There is no suspicion in the novel that the war is not being won. The climactic raid on the VC island base, the novel’s set-piece, is supported by what is said to be the first US Navy air strike against enemy bases from aircraft-carriers, the beginning of a new, aggressive phase of the war, which Erikson welcomes. This action is conducted like an old-fashioned commando raid, with the silence and cunning essential for success against a superior force, although Erickson’s plan of small dispersed groups entering a well-guarded base and lighting fires that have to be kept burning long enough to signal the target for the attacking planes depends so much on improvisation and luck that it could have gone wrong in any number of ways, but he is as successful at convincing his superiors that the island is a suitable target for this important first-strike as he is at leading his Junk Force men into battle. During the attack, he outwits the enemy several times, kills a large number of them while losing only nine men of his own, but is temporarily blinded. He will win the Navy Cross, marry Le Tuyet, and be reassigned as instructor in small-boat tactics to new officers—a happy ending despite the loss of an eye.

Erikson is an ideal type of the early advisor-hero. His combination of personal traits—courage, optimism, patriotism, professionalism—is typical. Like Moore’s Special Forces heroes, he is adept at improvisation and low-tech combat skills, using, for example, rafts, built-on-the spot, to convey equipment, and taking out sentinels with a crossbow during the big raid. The improvisational skills show an early confidence in the ability of these men to achieve victory, and the low-tech weapons suggest that the frontier skills of the classic American heroes are still possible at a time when the political justifications for the war were barely questioned.