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

of a Literature of Trauma.” In: Jason, Fourteen Landing Zones, pp. 217-218.

87 Tal, in “Speaking the Language of Pain” (cf. previous note) argues that while trauma resulting from war, the holocaust, rape, etc. can be managed, it cannot be completely exorcized, as it can never really be forgotten.

88 Ringnalda, Don, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War (Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), p. viii.

89 Ringnalda, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, p. 91.

90 Fussell, Wartime p. 268.

91 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, p. 328.

92 Jason, Philip K., Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 3.

93 Bates, Milton J., The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 2.

94 Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam, p. 3.

95 Caputo, Philip, “Postscript.” A Rumor of War (1977; New York: Owl Book, 1996), p. 353-354).

96 The novels of Stephen Coonts may be cited as examples: Flight of the Intruder (NewYork: Pocket Books, 1987) about a Navy renegade bomber pilot later adapted into a film, as well as the two sequels to Rambo: First Blood starring Sylvester Stallone (1985/88).

97 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, p. 177.

98 Jason, “Introduction,” Fourteen Landing Zones, p. xiv.

99 O’Brien, Tim, Going After Cacciato (New York: Dell, 1978), p. 237, italics in the original.

100 O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, p. 320.

101 Jacqueline Lawson believes that virtually all the soldier-writer accounts are divided into these distinct phases. See Lawson, “‘Old Kids’: The Adolescent Experience in the Non-Fiction Narratives of Vietnam,” in: Searle, William (ed.), Search and Clear: Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), p. 27.

102 Pratt John Clark, Bibliographic Commentary, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” in: Lomperis, Timothy J., “Reading the Wind” The Literature of the Vietnam War: An Interpretative Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 127.

103 Jason, Acts and Shadows, p. 77. It should be said, however, that Pratt’s scheme in “From the Fiction, Some Truths” does contemplate other works besides combat novels.

104 See, for example, the works mentioned and discussed in chapters 4, 7, and 8 of Jason’s Acts and Shadows.

105 There are 666 novels listed in the Third Edition of Newman’s bibliography (1966), while Wittman (1989) lists 582 literary and adventure novels, 481 personal narratives up to 1988. Newman, John, Vietnam War Literature: an Annotated Bibliography about Americans Fighting in Vietnam (Landham, Md: The Scarecrow Press, 1996); Wittman, Sandra M. Writing About Vietnam: A Bibliography of the Literature of Vietnam Conflict (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989).

106 Pratt, “From the Fiction, Some Truths,” p. 124.

Part I Partisans

Chapter One

      Early Adventurers

      In such dangerous things as wars the errors which

      proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst

      (Karl von Clausewitz)

i. Lieutenant-Colonel Landsdale

      It will be recalled from the Introduction that in the mid-1940s, at the end of World War II, the French colonial army was allowed by the Allies to regain control of Hanoi, at which point the Communist Viet Minh forces faded back into their bases in the countryside to fight an eight-year-long guerrilla war of resistance to the restoration of French control. Meanwhile, as part of its effort to halt Communist advances in Southeast Asia, the US recognized the French puppet emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai (February 1950), thereby declaring itself to be an adversary of the Viet Minh leader, Ho Chi Minh. For their part, the Viet Minh built a political organization strong enough to sustain the guerrillas and field a regular army that was eventually successful at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954).

The imbalance of power in Vietnam was therefore evident by 1954, when the Viet Minh had military and political control of most of Vietnam. During the chaotic situation following the defeat of the French and the migration southward of Catholics and non-Communists after the division of the country into north and south, the southern leader Ngo Dinh Diem, who would be the future President of South Vietnam, barely controlled the capital city of Saigon, much less the rest of the country.1 American leaders reasoned that an expert in dealing with Asian Communist revolutionaries might therefore be useful to the beleaguered Diem. This expert turned out to be the most important of the early American adventurers: Edward G(eary) Landsdale, an Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel on loan to the CIA. Landsdale was both instrumental in convincing President Eisenhower that the US should support South Vietnam against an imminent Communist take-over and indispensable in maintaining Diem, or, to give him his full name, Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem, in power. With American support, Premier and Defense Minister Diem eventually deposed Bao Dai and adopted his imperial flag.

Landsdale arrived in Vietnam on June 1, 1954, the day the Viet Minh celebrated their victory over the French by blowing up an ammunition dump, and (as he noted himself) “rocking Saigon throughout the night.”2 Landsdale came to Saigon to command the top-secret Saigon Military Mission (SMM), to install resistance teams in the north to delay the consolidation of that part of the country while he supported the non-Communist government in the south. By the time of the Geneva deadline prohibiting the introduction of additional military personnel into either side of the country, Landsdale’s teams were already active in paramilitary operations and psychological warfare, perpetrating acts of sabotage and spreading misinformation in both north and south. They were unsuccessful in the areas held by the Viet Minh, however, and many of Landsdale’s Vietnamese agents in the north actually defected to that side.

The sabotage activities included destroying government