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

and, unable to recognize a dedicated American, believes in the set-up that the Communists arranged for John Colvin and has him sent home. His successor is Joe Bing, the Ugly American made visible: a fat, brassy, glad-handing public-relations type who “knows everybody”—except the nationals.

      Not only are civilians members of the wrong type. Captain Boning (sic) of the US Navy, is another example. He is part of the American Delegation to an Asian conference on arms, which will decide which American arms should be distributed and to whom. The conference leader Solomon Asch has experience as a tough labor-negotiator, but even he cannot prevent Boning, their technical expert, from dozing off at meetings and not being sufficiently prepared to come up with fast, accurate answers for the Asian delegates. Boning has also been set up, going out with an attractive Chinese doctor every night, a lapse that causes the conference to flounder. This is meant to be an example of the lack of professionalism that the Russians, far more serious and effective in their diplomacy, successfully avoid.

      Colonel Hillandale (based on Landsdale) is one of the “good” Americans in the novel, but also a fantastic caricature of Landsdale in the Philippines. Hillandale is a palm-reading “six-foot Swami from Savannah,” and a harmonica-playing “Ragtime Kid,” “one of those happy, uninhibited people who can dance and drink all night and then show up at eight fresh and rested” (92). He can “jam” with an orchestra on his harmonica, “improvising Satchmo himself” (sic) and shows his democratic spirit by eating in little Filipino restaurants. He also studies Tagalog at the university in his spare time, and is popular with politicians, including soon-to-be President Magsaysay, as well as taxi-drivers and bandleaders. Only the counselor at the American Embassy refuses to be overwhelmed by his talents and charm.

John Clark Pratt, taking note of Lederer and Burdick’s caricature-like portrait, believes that Hillendale is “one of the inept, short-sighted Americans” in the novel, which may suggest that he is one of the “Ugly Americans” that I have described above.66 From the point of view of Lederer and Burdick, however, Hillendale shares more features with the other so-called “good” Americans of the novel: he is sympathetic to the natives, antipathetic to the bureaucrats, and generally effective in handling difficult situations. Internal evidence in fact shows that he is supposed to be one of the good guys: MacWhite’s letter to the Secretary of State lists only five men out of the “three hundred” Americans who have passed through the Embassy in some capacity: “One of them was a Catholic priest, one was an engineer, one an Air Force Colonel, one a Major from Texas, and one a private citizen who manufactures powdered milk,” namely, Father Finian, Homer Atkins, Colonel Hillendale, Major Kolchek, and John Colvin, respectively.

      To ensure support for Magsaysay in the upcoming election, Hillandale goes alone on a motorcycle to a province where “the Communist propagandists had done too good a job” (93). By playing favorite Filipino tunes on his harmonica, he attracts a crowd that he encourages to “sing along,” and talks about the cost of living in America, managing to convince this potentially hostile crowd that not all Americans are rich. The reader is asked to believe that in a single afternoon, this simpático American is so successful at overriding Communist propaganda that 95% of the people of the province turn out to vote for Magsaysay and his pro-American platform.

      In the second episode in which Hillandale is involved, he is equally imaginative but less successful. On loan from the Filipinos to Sarkhan, he is invited to the Philippine Ambassador’s dinner party in “Haidho,” the Sarkhanese capital, where he is asked by the ambassador to entertain the guests by reading their palms while the chef makes his final preparations. George Swift, the American chargé d’affairs, is contemptuous and sarcastic about “vaudeville tricks” (he means parlor tricks) at a diplomatic reception, but Hillandale shuts him up by revealing some embarrassing things about his past. The Prime Minister, impressed by this exhibition, asks to have his own palm read in private, which is to be done a day or two after the proper protocol has been observed. Swift, who is responsible for this contact, simply ignores it and thereby insults the Filipinos and causes Hillandale to lose an opportunity to tell the King that the “stars” (Hillandale can also do astrological charts) have advised troops be sent on maneuvers to the northern border, where Chinese Communist troops have massed.

      Earlier, on a walk through the streets of Haidho, Hillandale had astutely noted that astrologers and palmists in Sarkhan had offices that resembled those of fashionable doctors in the US and that their shingles outside these offices “all indicated that these practitioners had doctors’ degrees” (148), which reminds the Colonel that he has had the foresight to get his own diploma from the “Chungking School of Occult Sciences.” The opportunity for American mystical influence has been lost, however, for Swift, one of the “Ugly Americans,” has undone the efforts of someone who understands the Asian mind enough to use astrology for his purposes.

As Landsdale’s pupil and admirer, John Vann said, with unconscious racism: “Landsdale understood that Asians were people, that you could discern their desires and play upon those desires to your advantage.”67 Whether Landsdale had actually studied astrology is unclear, but like Hillandale he did make opportunistic use of it in his misinformation campaign in North Vietnam. One of Landsdale’s clandestine tactics for harassing the Hanoi government and encouraging emigration to the south was bribing astrologers to make the desired predictions. In the words of The Pentagon Papers: “In the South, the team hired Vietnamese astrologers—in whose art many Asians place great trust—to compile almanacs bearing dire predictions for the Vietminh and good omens for the new Government of Premier Diem.”68

iv. M. J. Bosse, The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959)

      Bosse’s novel, which deserves to be better known, has its starting point with the partition of Vietnam in 1954 into North and South Vietnam in accordance with the Geneva agreements. The novel shows how the division affected the lives of rural people from the north, leaving aside Euro-American viewpoints to give a sympathetic portrayal of Vietnamese characters caught in a social upheaval that they hardly understand but that profoundly disrupts their lives. Here, for example, is the protagonist, Nam, right after his arrival in Haiphong, from which he will embark southward. He is amazed that there are no sentries or barbed-wire in the city, and he wanders around town gawking at the buildings and well-dressed women:

He stared at passing soldiers. They had the long noses, indeterminable ages, indistinguishable faces of white men, and they talked the way they walked—briskly…Nam stopped in front of one house, pink and colonnaded, a Western house undoubtedly because it was four stories high. Fronting it was grass, a whole plot of earth wasted on unimportant grass. Here was land enough to provide for a family of ten.69

      With this technique of estrangement, the reader here becomes the foreigner, the other, seeing what would be a familiar kind of people, building, and yard through the protagonist’s eyes.

      The narrative follows the classic pattern of the picaresque journey. The traveler is a resourceful young man, the eponymous hero known simply as “Nam,” as if he were representative of his country. It is also to the point that Nam often has to go by different names and play different roles, be now strong and decisive, now hesitant and deferential. The novel seems to be saying that bending to circumstance and improvising a proper role is necessary for these people struggling to survive under a succession of masters: French, Viet Minh, American, and South Vietnamese. The journey is hazardous, replete with material want, physical hardship, and psychological anxiety. Nam makes the classic metaphorical equation of a journey with life itself: “Nam gradually learns that the world was not a circle of peaceful days and nights, but it was more like the road itself, moving into the unknown” (225).

      His journey consists of several stages: i) Nam’s departure from his native village and his murder of a guard; ii) the rigorous overland journey, punctuated by stops at villages along the way and marked by