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

from Haiphong to Saigon on an American ship; iv) the arrival in Saigon and his adventures there. The departure from Nam’s Catholic village, Ba Lang, is precipitated by the success of the Viet Minh in the war. The son of a mandarin landowner, Nam is literate and knows French. With his older brother in the priesthood, the family’s ten hectares of rice land would fall to him, an inheritance that would ensure his future as a farmer and the respect accorded him within the village. Nam is not a dreamer; he is content to follow traditional patterns of living, but when these patterns are radically disrupted by the war, he resigns himself to what life offers at the moment and tries not to regret things that he cannot control. Despite setbacks and losses that would drive many to despair, he never looks back.

      How life is to be different under the Viet Minh is shown when his group enters the village. Political harangues, called “the Lesson,” are obligatory, and new taxes are levied, which the villagers do not understand: “unity contributions, and public subscriptions, and taxes for a thing called future development” (18). To undermine the power of the village priest, Nam’s brother, the time for hearing Mass is changed to coincide with the Lesson, by which the local Commissar means to suggest that the village church is no longer needed. The priest’s defiance brings on a threat to his life, symbolically in the form of a single chopstick—to be jabbed into his ear if he does not submit. He warns his brother Nam that his resistance will be paid not only by himself but by his whole family: “I am dead, I know that…And if you stay, you too are dead” (25). Nam must leave immediately; he is given money, a jade crucifix, and a piece of paper with instructions for the journey, which he is to memorize and then destroy. With great regret at leaving behind “the real wealth he had,” the family rice fields, Nam sets out on a journey that will take him first east, then north to Haiphong.

      Immediately, he runs into trouble, in the form of a guard who demands le passeport, a document demanded of every traveler who strays far from his village. When the guard threatens to take him back, Nam reacts instinctively by killing the man with a knife. By this act, he is fatally committed to the journey south, like it or not: “Why would so many people have reason to go to Haiphong? He had none, not really, until he had killed the guard” (35). Many of the people who share Nam’s journey from north to south are Catholics who were urged by their priests to leave, who were even told that Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary had “gone south” (as one of Landsdale’s rumor campaigns actually put it). These people feared mistreatment or reprisals by the Viet Minh as well as by those people who remained, a well-founded fear on the evidence of the novel.

      The second phase of the narrative begins with Nam on the road, a long journey on foot, and, in the later stages, by bus and boat (his progress can be followed on a map on the inside cover of the first edition, marked off by the names of the villages he reaches). There are frequent checkpoints, which show how completely the Viet Minh control the northern countryside. At the first, he has to lie about his origins to conceal his real identity, but the soldier does not believe him: “You smell only of manure, not fish, and your tongue is sharper than any fisherman’s” (43). Nam bribes the man; the Viet Minh soldiers encountered along the way are usually peasants, who are often corrupt and cruel, but rarely stupid.

      At Vinh, the local people are hostile toward the refugees, calling them “traitors,” and the newcomers are herded into a compound, where pressure is brought to bear to make them give up and go home. A rousing patriotic rally is held in the square in front of the compound. The refugees are given no food and an offer of a water buffalo is made to anyone who goes back to his native village. A former tradesman, who explains that he is going south, “where the piastres are,” because the north is no longer “the weather for a merchant” (50), tells Nam that this offer is a ruse—it is always the same men who take up the offer. The narrative has a number of episodes that mean to show the continuous attempts of the Viet Minh to secure the people on the land, discouraging the exodus by patriotic appeals as well as deceit and outright force.

      The refugees are made to convert their money to the new Viet Minh currency, stamped with the image of Ho Chi Minh. Nam feels satisfied that he gets back almost twice the amount in the exchange, but the merchant laughs at him: “The Vietminh will send money they got from you south and buy goods in Saigon. What you gave up was better money” (64). On a bus, the driver and guard stop at regular intervals to shake down the passengers, who must pay for the handfuls of rice they eat as well as so many piastres per kilometer traveled; those without money have to get off the bus. Nam’s book, one of his few possessions (a classic given him by his father) arouses suspicion in these illiterate peasants. They confiscate his jade crucifix as well as the book, and try to extort more money, but he has slyly distributed his money on different parts of his person to avoid losing it all. He does not waste time lamenting his losses: the “book had lost him a ride and a costly crucifix. He was well rid of the book” (90).

      As he pursues his journey, “The sign of war was everywhere, and it was a negative sound: a lack of sound…no yapping or clucking or trumpeting” (91). When a group he travels with arrives at Than Hoa, they listen to a speech that will be heard repeatedly along the road. Refugees do not reach Saigon as the French promise, they are told, but are shipped to Africa, “a land of savages where men are strangled when too old for work. Americans, who have developed a great bomb, need more victims for testing: “that was why American ships were at Haiphong—to buy Viet slaves from the French” (105). These stories have an impact on the ignorant refugees, as do the myriad rumors that pop up whenever a new place is reached or new event takes place. In their insecurity and fear, these people are always prepared to believe the worst, and rumor campaigns prove to be an effective way to make them give up their plans to migrate south. Remembering the stories of old men in his home village, however, Nam is always skeptical: “Words but no medicine: that was what Nam was learning to expect from commissars. Words but no food. Words and detours, words and robbery, words and the vanity of peasants” (110). He thinks that the Commissars are no different from the priests: “Have faith...that’s what the le Commissaire says” (113).

      The father of Lia, a woman he loves, dies. “To Nam that was a truth easier to grasp than the truth of seers, and of priests. Here was death. He had seen it before…There was solace for him in this lack of mystery” (116). He buries the old man and on the same night Lia gives herself to him and it is understood they will be man and wife. He accepts the gift of her father’s Japanese knife: “Think of it as the gift I would bring you from my father” (118), but he loses her in the confusion resulting from a botched escape by boat. “How foolish to accept a plan which so obviously had been devised blindly, out of greed not sense” (135), he chides himself. At Ninh Binh, further up the coast, he seeks out a man, Ton, who had known his father. The house is ramshackle from the outside, which turns out to be a clever disguise: “That a life of such luxurious calm lay behind the shabby façade of this house was a source of great wonder to Nam.” (144). The cunning, widely traveled Ton has achieved a separate peace with the enemy. “This too Nam admired: old Ton could hate the Vietminh and still live comfortably with them” (145). As Ton explains, “A man who feeds his enemies has no worry.”

      Nam befriends a young man named Hai, a small-time thief and confidence-man with his own methods of survival. The two men become involved in another escape operation, but once again the operation is betrayed and soldiers appear on the beach just as the party is ready to sail. The boat takes a few hits but manages to pull away while Hai runs into the fishing-village, making a lot of noise to draw off the soldiers. With luck, the boat reaches the islands at the mouth of the Red River a few kilometers from Haiphong and is picked up by a French patrol boat. In fact, the refugees have made it to the port of North Vietnam right before the Viet Minh takeover. Nam realizes that now that he is out of their zone he can use his family name again, which is all that he has left in the world now that he has lost his land, family, woman, and friend.

      In Haiphong, Nam is reminded of how far he has come in both distance and experience: “When a man left a place, all he could keep of it was a vague memory. Even if it had been the source of his life, now, away from it, it was only a detail or two—perhaps the image of a cedar in a field” (185). Memories are also insufficient to sustain a difficult present life and uncertain future. To buy food, the always pragmatic Namnamn decides to sell the Japanese knife that Lia had given him: “He would sell it because