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

state, “not yet Vietminh but…no longer French.”72 The bourgeoisie are selling off their non-portable goods, and the foreigners and the prostitutes are heading south in advance of the rigorously nationalistic and puritanical Viet Minh.

      The center of the group at the Press Camp is Jerome, the character with whom the author seems most to identify, a highly respected but poorly paid journalist who speaks Vietnamese and knows everybody who is anybody on both sides of the ideological divide. As a journalist, he is always one step ahead of the others because of his inside sources and wide contacts. As he never betrays his sources, everyone is willing to talk to him. Superficially, Jerome resembles Greene’s British correspondent, Thomas Fowler. Both are aging, tolerant, world-weary but worldly wise. Unlike Fowler, however, Jerome is drawn in heroic proportions: an open, honest, and disinterested man who seems to represent what Lartéguy believes is great in French culture, the true inheritance of the French Revolution. Typically, Jerome is critical of his own reputation: “his own past sickened him with its facile generosity of spirit, its false tolerance which merely concealed indifference and superficial humanism” (95).

      Another locale frequented by many important local people as well as the journalists is Ma Lien’s brothel and opium-den. The once-beautiful proprietress (called a “procuress” even though her customers procure her), has slept with most of the important men in Hanoi. Ideally situated for occasional work as a police informer, she is now in full decadence, a heavy opium-smoker whose profession is doomed to disappear under Communism. The only other important female character in the novel is Kieu, who sometimes goes by her French name, Claire: a beautiful, desirable, haughty “half-caste,” a Eurasian sexpot with whom all of the men, including Jerome, are in love. Kieu once worked for Ma Lien, who sold her, when she was a thirteen year old virgin, to a French minister and taught her how to extract money and favors from men. Kieu is currently the mistress of General de Langles, the commander of the French forces in Vietnam. She is told by everyone that she has to leave town, since it is obvious that the new regime will not tolerate sexual parasites like her, but she feels a conflict of identity because Hanoi, like herself, is a city “made up of a mixture of blood.”

      In this mood, she picks up a melancholy French paratrooper, Lieutenant Kervallé, who had escaped from the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, where all his friends died—and where, he tells Jerome, “I died with them” (39). Kieu convinces herself that she is in love with this morose, hulking young officer, even though he is indifferent to her beauty, regarding her merely as a half-caste whore. None of the other men can understand why Kieu has chosen this “big lout” of a lieutenant, and Ma Lien more pragmatically warns her that he will not be able to keep her on his pay, that older men of superior rank are more her style. Jerome explains her choice of the lieutenant by his romantic melancholy in the face of loss and defeat. As he tells Julien, Kervallé “wears the tortured expression of our misfortune” (112). Kervallé abandons her, as does “her general,” who had so doted on her earlier when he even dared to take her to an official reception. He is told that such an act was inappropriate for a man of his rank, and he also realizes that he could not take Kieu back to France, where he has a wife (in a revealing passage, the general is shown walking with his wife at Versailles, noting that the Americans now have to contribute to its upkeep, a metaphor for the American aid to maintain France fighting in the colonial war). Ever resourceful, Kieu settles on Rovignon, one of the journalists from a poor suburb in Paris, who needs “an apartment that is not in a slum district” and “a woman who’s beautiful, elegant and expensive and dazzles everyone with her glamour” (179). They go to South Vietnam together.

Kervallé represents the French officer-class after Dien Bien Phu. As a professional soldier, he is a man who prefers the fraternity of the barracks to family life, and he sets out for another colonial war in Algeria or Morocco, even knowing that it too will be “lost” in Paris by the generals and politicians—by a France, he thinks, that is no longer concerned with greatness but soft and content with middle-class comfort and mediocrity. These thoughts on the loss of French greatness through an unwillingness to make sacrifices are shared by his commander-in-chief, General de Langles, who, as he leaves Hanoi, ponders the “dotage of a great nation” (137), echoing the historical remarks of the arch-conservative Admiral Thierry d’ Argenlieu about “fighting for the reestablishment of French greatness.” French High Commissioner after the war, Argenlieu had urged his compatriots to throw over the agreement of 1946 that established peaceful co-existence.73

      The author evidently shares these sentiments. Even the civilian Rovignon joins in a patriotic tirade directed at his American and British colleagues. “We had such a nostalgic memory of being a great nation” (141). As if the reaction of these French characters to the loss of Vietnam prefigures the American loss twenty years later, an American journalist’s reply to Rovignon becomes prophetic: “We’ll reinforce South Vietnam and, since you’ve gone bankrupt, we’ll take your place” (141). The author seems to be nostalgic about the good old days in Indochina, brooding on the decadence of the end of an era but also fondly recalling the cultural interrelationships of colonial rule, while significantly omitting any mention of its long history of social and economic exploitation of the native population. The nostalgia may explain why the author is less than enthusiastic about the Viet Minh, who are to replace his compatriots in North Vietnam.

      The two most important Communist characters are shown as intelligent and sophisticated but also, in their private conversations, ruthless and calculating. The problems that they confront in the formation of a new nation are enormous: masses of people unused to discipline, a shortage of rice, a distrusted currency. For the time being, the two leaders decide to blame the French: “I don’t like exploiting hatred,” one of them confesses, “but sometimes it’s necessary, like herbs in rice” (148). Colonel Phang, who will be promoted to general when he enters Hanoi in triumph at the head the Viet Minh 308th Division, is handsome, cultured, and possesses a winning smile. He has risen in the People’s Army through his political skills and ruthlessness, but he is haunted by his past life as Ké, the nephew of the procuress Ma Lien. In his youth, he went as a seminarian to Paris, where he soon abandoned his religious studies to join the budding Vietnamese anti-colonial nationalist movement. There, he printed leaflets, distributed clandestine newspapers, and befriended both Jerome and the leader of another political group working along similar lines—the Indochinese Nationalist Front—the man called Nguyen-Ai-Quoc, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh.

      Puzzled by Jerome’s friendship with so many revolutionaries sworn to evict the French from Vietnam, Ké is told by Ho that Jerome “represents a certain French tradition of friendship and therefore fellow-feeling for all those who revolt against an established order, even if this order has been established by his country” (56). Jerome even supported Ké (Phang) economically for a while in the Paris days, but Phang, now an important man in the Party, is concerned, Jerome thinks, “to wipe out his past completely, maybe because it was still alive within him” (67). While Phang still respects Jerome personally, he distrusts journalists generally because “their freedom of speech and behavior could only jeopardize the delicate balance of military or political hierarchies” (61). The novel is consistently critical of the Communists, not as in Bosse’s novel, because of their failure to live up to the ideals of the leaders, but for the ideological rigidity of the leaders themselves. While listening to his old friend speak, for example, Jerome “wondered why the word ‘people’ suddenly sounded hollow. Ké was not fond of the people. What about Nguyen? In his eyes, the people had to be transformed into ciphers who allowed themselves to be added or subtracted from without anyone offering any resistance” (66).

      The Nguyen referred to here is not Ho Chi Minh (who does not figure as a character in the novel) but Phang’s colleague in the Party, the head of Viet Minh security. Nguyen is described by Jerome as being “like the Beria of the regime” (129), a reference to Stalin’s notorious executioner. Jerome argues with Nguyen about the new man that the Communists are trying to construct, the “Vietminh man,” whom Jerome sees as too rigid a type. Nguyen replies, quite plausibly, that revolutionary discipline is essential for success in establishing a coherent society. The Viet Minh, he explains, were once a “hotchpotch” of diverse