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

eclectic political and spiritual allegiances, which the author helpfully explains in a lengthy footnote (200-201).

The conflicts depicted in this second part are more complex, reflecting both the global conflict (France vs. US) and the local one (Diem’s government vs. the Sects). The sects are backed by the French, while the government, which has tolerated them as a bulwark against the Viet Minh guerrillas, is politically supported and bankrolled by the Americans and said to be headed by “a misfit who should have been a priest” (189), President Dinh-Tu (i.e. Diem). The French at this point want to avoid further military involvement but are also anxious to maintain political influence while retaining their economic interests.74 It is frankly admitted that the conflict is really about the survival of French capitalism and is being protracted by the French to gain more time, as a French leader explains it, “to enable the big French business concerns to withdraw to Africa or Metropolitan France” (223). The Americans, for their part, want a strong leader like Dinh in charge of the government to halt Communist incursions. The global and the local struggle are therefore interrelated.

      President Dinh’s American advisor, Teryman (i.e. Landsdale, from Fr. terre, land), is portrayed as a sly political manipulator, “a masterly stage manager,” and an uncouth, anti-French “new Lawrence of Arabia” (199). He pressures the president to attack the Binh Xuyen in order to gain international respect, but Dinh wavers, hesitant to make a commitment. What the country really needs, Teryman thinks, is a dictator, someone like the ruthless Trinh-Sat, whom Teryman is keeping in reserve as a stick, in case Dinh tries to make a deal with the French, the carrot being the large amount of American aid. Another player, the chief of military security, “Colonel” Houang, has his own reasons for wanting to get rid of Lê Do, namely, to manipulate a vast network of followers. He does not trust the president, but for the time being their “interests” coincide.

      The sects all seem to be awaiting a former French army major named Résengier to tell them what to do. Résengier is the heroic Frenchman who takes the place of Jerome in the second part. He is similarly portrayed as a legendary figure, an active soldier to Jerome’s pacific journalist, a man who also receives loyalty from everyone who knows him. He once belonged to a tightly-knit group of die-hard paratroopers evidently admired by the author, “the conquerors of virgin territories and the fighters for lost causes” (257), who become the liaison bureau with the sects. The group included two unsavory types, a former lieutenant called “Fatty,” Lê Do’s business advisor, who runs drugs and guns, and Dr. Souilhac, a libertine and opium addict.

Résengier needs the sects to force Dinh out of power, but he realizes the difficulty of fighting against Teryman’s promise of American money. The day he arrives the government troops begin firing on the Binh Xuyen,75 and he immediately rushes out to try to stop it. The tide of the street battle sways back and forth, resulting in a general conflagration for the poorer outlying sectors of the city with their thatch and bamboo huts. The French authorities are confident of victory but are concerned about keeping the battle out of the center of Saigon itself, the European quarter. When Résengier arrives at Lê Dao’s command post to offer his assistance, he finds the bandit leader uncharacteristically hesitant, unused to military command. Afraid to commit the four-thousand men he has in reserve, the base of his power, he flees, leaving Résengier in charge, only returning to retrieve his money. As the Frenchman observes, “the pirate in him was now asserting himself whereas the politician was collapsing with this pasteboard façade” (259).

      Teryman, worried that the president will give up and negotiate, decides to play his “last card,” Trinh-Sat. The two of them burst in upon the Dinh brothers to announce that Trinh-Sat is withdrawing from the Sects’ United Front, thus isolating the Binh Xuyen and giving the government forces an advantage. Teryman intends to manipulate Trinh-Sat by appealing to his dreams of power: he will be “the first to raise the standard of revolt against the French colonialists and their hired killers” (256). President Dinh, who has been summoned to Cannes by Bao Dai and is afraid to make a move, is silently overruled by his brother (i.e. the unnamed Ngo Dinh Nhu). The brothers decide that, even though they are worried about Trinh-Sat’s dangerous pretensions, the American colonel is backing him and they will therefore just have to renege on their promise to the French and continue the attack.

      For their part, the Viet Minh have not been idle in their struggle to unify north and south by finishing off “the remnants of colonialism in the south” (216). With their usual planning and efficiency, they have managed to infiltrate their agents into the rubber plantations as workers. Their plan is that the Central Committee of Cochin China (the south) will support the president, who will overthrow the emperor, at which point the Viet Minh will get control of the lower levels of the administration. Their agent is Major Co, a follower of Nguyen (General Phang has temporarily fallen into disgrace for having forgotten that the Viet Minh were now “a part of the international Communist movement”).

      General Delmond (i.e. General Collins), the US Ambassador, gives Teryman another week to “make the situation clear” or he will send him home (historically, Landsdale’s mandate was independent of the American embassy). Teryman and Trinh-Sat surprise President Dinh with a bogus “popular committee” that demands more power for the people, a rather distorted reflection of the American pressure exerted on Diem to make his administration more democratic. The committee, however, has been infiltrated by Co and Teryman realizes too late that he has been fooled. He abandons “the Trinh-Sat game” without warning Trinh-Sat that Houang will have him assassinated, an act that is brought off by a clever ruse and blamed on the Binh Xuyen. With both the Binh Xuyen and Cao Dai neutralized, the devious but efficient Houang is now totally in charge of security, both civilian and military.

      The fast-paced narrative shifts back and forth from Saigon to the country, where the heroic Résengier tries to salvage the French effort, even though his own countrymen are trying to expel him from Vietnam and he himself no longer knows why he fights. Another femme fatale, a red-headed “quadroon” (she had a Vietnamese grandmother) named Perle, makes an appearance as the love-interest of the second part. Like Saigon itself, an “attractive and heartless slut” (209) Perle has slept with and entranced all the men, just as Kieu had done in Hanoi. The author, like his male characters, seems to be obsessed with this type of femme fatale—the exotic beauty of mixed blood, capricious, sexually aggressive—and yet ultimately pliant for the masterful male, in this case, Résingier, an aging man with wife and children in France, but, like his fellow paratroopers, bored with bourgeois life and addicted to the noble but lost cause of colonial Vietnam. Her pre-feminist submission (“It’s he who decides and I who obey…a free woman is nonsense because by her very nature she enjoys being chained,” [340]) is perhaps the only aspect that dates the novel.

      Teryman and his opposite, Résingier, are the foreign adventurers of this novel. The Frenchman knows all the sect leaders personally, since he once saved them from the Viet Minh, he is clearly qualified to do “battle with the American Colonel Teryman” (224). As one character observes, both men have old-fashioned, flamboyant and unorthodox styles of action: “Do they believe in what they’re doing, or else are they merely technicians trained in a king-making school who are practicing the tricks they’ve been taught without really understanding them?” the narrator asks (270). Well-matched adversaries, they both lose to historical circumstances, but while Teryman is seen as a cold, manipulative agent in the limited possibilities of palatial politics, Résingier is fully humanized by action and emotion. The policeman Houang, not a sentimental character, for example, says that the Frenchman “had certain qualities that Teryman will never have; he understood us and I think he was even fond of us” (309), by which the author evidently means that the Americans will never understand the Vietnamese as well as their former colonizers.

      Résengier sets off for the Plain of Reeds, a vast marshy area infested with mosquitoes and leeches, in the hope of meeting up with the Cao Dai, and at the same time giving the slip to the French authorities, who are still anxious to deport him. He manages to make it, with Perle in tow, after a number of hazardous and exhausting adventures, to Lê Son, the tubercular Hoa Hao leader. As Résingier languishes, gravely