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

is also homely and good, sets out to correct the bent backs of the old villagers, who have become deformed by using short-handled brooms but have accepted this painful condition as their fate (the immovable Asian mind). Emma, who “was not bound by centuries of tradition,” convinces the villagers to use a long-handled substitute, whereupon the old folks begin to stand up straight, and the grateful villagers build a shrine in honor of the American couple. This condescending, “colonialist” attitude of the authors to native intelligence seems to be invisible to them throughout; their whole approach to winning Asian hearts and minds is absurdly simplistic. The complete trust of the authors in “Yankee ingenuity” does not allow them to suspect, in Neilson’s formulation, that “elite ownership of land, lack of access to education, a corrupt and repressive political system, and a nearly feudal class division are not obstacles to capitalist victory.”65

      One character, Tom Knox, exemplifies how a “good” American can become corrupted and turned into an “ugly” one. An Iowa poultry farmer, Knox is sent to Cambodia as an agricultural expert. He is friendly, serious, non-bureaucratic, and bent on raising the protein level of poor villagers by improving their poultry stock and increasing the egg output. Balked by bureaucrats and politicians with their own priorities, he threatens to return to the US and campaign to congressmen for his simple scheme of improving Sarkhanese daily life at low cost. His fatal flaw of a fascination for the exotic, however, is exploited by evil French and Cambodian diplomats, because their respective governments are more interested in capital-intensive projects like roads and mechanized farms. Knox is bought off by a lavish round-the-world trip, in the course of which he rather improbably forgets his protest and gives into the luxury of seeing the exotic sights.

      Knox’s upper-echelon counterpart is Senator Brown, the tough old head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who goes to “Vietnam” (i.e. not Sarkhan) as part of his Asian fact-finding mission, on which he will base his recommendations for the year’s overseas funding. Despite his determination to talk to ordinary people and low-ranking technicians and to bypass the bureaucrats to find out what is really going on, the embassy staff is ready for him, with an exhausting program of long walks and heavy dinners with plenty of wine to slow him down and dull his wits, as well as factual presentations prepared by the staff to misrepresent the actual situation, including photographs of Communist atrocities, and a translator who has been instructed by the ambassador to mistranslate hostile or inappropriate interviewees. All of this is designed to convince the well-meaning senator that the French are winning the war and therefore deserve more US aid.

      Other “good” Americans are actually fighting the Communists for Asian hearts and minds, although they too are not being heeded. Father John X. Finian, a Jesuit priest, becomes an anti-Communist missionary in Burma, where he cultivates a small group of nine men and manages to convince them, as he manipulates them, that they are making their own decisions in choosing American over Communist aid. The group’s main triumph is spreading misinformation on the radio after planting a spy at a meeting of the local Communists to discredit them in the eyes of the villagers.

      Another eager warrior, Major James (Tex) Wolchek, a veteran paratrooper of World War II and Korea, is ready to drop into Dien Bien Phu with a group of Legionnaires when the news arrives that it has fallen to the Vietminh. Tex accompanies the French on military operations and sees that although they are doing everything right according to the conventional rules of war, they are still losing. The Communists are “fighting by a different rule book,” he points out to the French commander, Major Monet, and this is not a mere metaphor, for the “book” is Mao’s manual on guerrilla warfare, which Tex has read. He acquires a clandestine copy, and he, Monet, and the American Ambassador MacWhite read it aloud together and work out a plan of operation for an attack on a village (although it is unlikely that the two officers would accept the civilian MacWhite on equal terms relating to a military op) in which they presumably turn Mao’s tactics against the Communists and defeat them.

      It is absurd to suggest that the French lost the war because they did not read Mao. In fact, they did read him, but, like the Americans who replaced them, they did not seem to realize that the Vietnamese Communists never stressed military action without political motivation, even to their soldiers. In any case, the confused narrative of the battle suggests that Mao´s tactics are hardly the issue, for the French soldiers achieve their victory from superior firepower and the element of surprise—hardly unconventional warfare. When Tex and Monet, based on this single success, try to sell the French and American higher commands on their method, the Eurocentric generals remain unconvinced, not from tactical but racist motives, refusing to accept that Asians could have changed the accepted ways that wars have always been fought. They are shown to be wrong when shortly afterwards the French have to evacuate Hanoi. That the military is blind to what is really happening is shown again in the episode where Homer Atkins informs an incredulous group of French generals of the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “Impossible!” they reply.

      The main example of how a “good” American can be discarded by the system is the story of the Honorable Gilbert MacWhite, who becomes US Ambassador to Sarkhan in 1954, a capable administrator and determined Cold Warrior, who “regarded his anticipated combat with the Communists as the capstone of his career” (81). MacWhite, however, makes several fatal mistakes. He is unable to fathom that the two elderly Chinese servants at the Embassy are Communist spies. When he reports that “the Vietnamese, both Communist and non-Communist, hated the French” as exploitative colonialists (hardly news to any outside observer, it would seem), the duped Senator Brown claims “from first-hand knowledge” that he must be in error.

      MacWhite receives a letter from the Secretary of State, who personally likes him, listing his diplomatic mistakes (i.e. everything, according to the authors, that he did right in Sarkhan) and hinting that he resign. MacWhite replies with a longer letter in which he informs the Secretary why the US is not winning hearts and minds in Asia:

      I do not think the Russians will ever resort to thermonuclear warfare. They won’t have to. They are winning much too easily to run the risk of annihilation by retaliation…the Russians will win the world by their successes in a multitude of tiny battles…[and] the sum of these battles will decide whether our way of life is to perish or to persist (225).

      This is an example of the sort of reasoning that ensured that Americans would take up the cudgel in Vietnam.

      In the authors’ view, the “ugly Americans” are those people who are totally unprepared for their mission abroad, unlike the Russians, as MacWhite points out in his letter, who are doing everything right. The Americans know nothing of the countries that they are sent to and, since they do not learn the native language, they are unable to read the local newspapers and can communicate only with the English-speaking elite. They isolate themselves in the “golden ghetto” of privilege, hang out at the “Press Club or the American Club or at the Officer’s Club” and in their ignorance of how people really think are incapable of representing the best interests of the United States—all valid criticisms.

      In an interview, a Burmese journalist who apparently represents the authors’ viewpoint succinctly defines the “ugly American” even while insisting that he admires the Americans he meets in the United States: “A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious” (123). The problem is shown to begin with the civilian personnel that the State Department recruits to work abroad. As MacWhite complains, the emphasis in recruiting people for the Foreign Service is on good salaries and favorable exchange rates, commissary privileges, free housing, government vehicles, and native servants. Rather, he thinks, candidates should show a willingness to face challenges, work long hours, make sacrifices, live in modest housing, eat native food, read Marx, Lenin, and Mao (i.e. the know-your-enemy strategy), give up private automobiles, and learn difficult languages. Is it any wonder, MacWhite asks, rather redundantly, that we attract only mediocrities?

      Such people include both MacWhite’s predecessor and his successor as ambassador to Sarkhan. Louis Sears, his predecessor, is a political party man and appointee who is just putting in time at the post until he can secure a tenured federal judgeship.