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

minorities and his incompetent ARVN commanders, however, often resulted in the unwillingness of the CIDGs to fight for the government, a situation that is reflected in Hempstone’s novel.40

      Politically, the author is skeptical about any successful outcome for the war at the same time that he seems to uphold his protagonist’s anti-Communist ideals. When a correspondent asks an American captain in the field, an advisor to an ARVN artillery battery, if the war is being won, the man replies, “Wouldn’t say that. But we sure aren’t winning” (141). Diem’s betrayal of the montagnards, one of the reasons why he is portrayed in the novel as a leader who does not deserve to survive, is shown in two narratives that run parallel to the public narrative of the Saigon coup outlined above. These three narrative strands are alternated in small clusters of chapters.

      In the Diem narrative, the Ngo brothers reveal themselves through their private dialogues, in which they are mainly concerned with staying in power by dealing with the multiplying crises in an ad hoc manner. For example, they install General Trang, a man entirely moved by greed, into the lucrative Saigon command in order to control the local situation more easily: corruption is thus institutionalized for the continuance of political survival. Their conversations also make it clear that any requests from the montagnards and other ethnic groups will have to wait until the current crisis is resolved. “The main thing is the Buddhist plot” (81), they conclude. The cynical pragmatism of the government is reflected in similar attitudes expressed by the leader of the CIA operation intended to support the regime.

      In the novel, it is Diem who suggests raiding the Xa Loi pagoda and arresting the dissidents and Nhu who worries about the political repercussions of the wholesale arrests: “The army, if it could not defeat the Vietcong, at least could handle street mobs. But the riots forced him to make arrests and he knew that this antagonized the army. Each of the arrested demonstrators, bonze or student or coolie, had relatives in the army” (173). Nhu’s plan is to uncover the ringleaders through torture applied by a Chinese sadist named Mong Le. Nhu regards torture as a distasteful but necessary method of extracting information, with a fastidiousness that makes him doubly repugnant. He also resents “his role of eminence gris to the regime” (180) because he considers himself the stronger of the two brothers.

      The various motives of the plotters against the regime are plausibly summed up by General Trang: Nhu’s secret police, the regime’s unwise persecution of the Buddhists, Diem’s lack of leadership, the military’s resentment of counselor Nhu, and the constant change of military commands. Trang shares these sentiments but has survived so far by being shrewd and cautious: “He had won his general’s stars not by achieving great victories but by avoiding terrible defeats” (191), an admission that reveals the impossibility of waging a successful war. Victory or defeat is not uppermost in the minds of the generals, who have more to gain by maintaining “a permanent stalemate”:

      As long as the war lasted, the power and the prestige of the generals would remain high, more American money and U.S. equipment would continue to flow into the country, there would be countless opportunities for a clever officer to make himself a wealthy one (191-192).

      The main narrative concerns the protagonist Harry Coltart and his efforts to maintain the montagnards as a strong partisan group in the fight against the Vietcong. A CIA operative, his political and military mission becomes complicated by his personal involvement with the Koho tribe. He forms a blood-brother relationship with the Koho chief, Yé, who gives him his teenage daughter, Ilouha, as a wife. Coltart constantly tries to convince Yé that the Vietcong are his people’s enemies. When Yé demands to know why this is so, Coltart replies: “Because they are Communists. Because they will enslave you. Because they will steal your land and make cattle of you” (21). Yé is understandably more concerned with his people’s welfare than questions of ideology, and he also knows that his people’s traditional enemies have been the Annamese (Vietnamese) of the plains. To the Annamese, “the montagnards were moi, savages, animals to be shot on sight” (24).

      For this tribal people, stories are often the best argument. Coltart tells about the T’ai people from the north, who have felt the negative Communist influence on their lives. “You know they are taxed, that their young hunters are taken for the militia, that their chiefs are voiceless and cast aside like broken gourds?” (32). The patjao, or priest, points out, however, that such a situation may prevail in the north, but in these lands the Vietcong pay for food, news, and scouts, and they leave the montagnard women alone, in blatant contrast to the Annamese, who (the chief adds), “take our food, even when our granaries are almost empty. They break our laws. They use our women. They take our young men for the army, when they can catch them’” (33). These cogent arguments cannot be refuted by Coltart, a circumstance that would seem to be a critical objection to his presence, but he is liked personally by the chief and the tribe, and personal acceptance counts for much in their culture. He has, for example, mastered the local customs as well as the language, as he demonstrates in a ceremony of tribal chiefs by slaying a water buffalo with a single blow, which is considered a good omen, but despite his pleading Coltart cannot change the historical reality of hostility to the Vietnamese. He decides he can only get the allegiance of the tribe by means of a promise from Diem himself to respect the montagnard lands, which would in turn be respected as law by the tribe. As it is nearly a foregone conclusion that Coltart will fail, the attempt makes him the tribe’s doomed champion, a man who becomes disillusioned by his experience with the CIA and the American policy of backing Diem in any situation.

      Coltart even suspects that an American victory in Vietnam is an elusive, probably unrealistic goal, but from a sense of duty he persists in trying to keep the montagnards in the fight. Yé demands of him the formal promise that “the Annamese soldiers will stay out of these hills, that no roads will be cut, that we shall be left to rule ourselves according to our own” (36). Coltart goes to Saigon in the hope of extracting this promise through his CIA boss, Englehardt, a man he trusts. He knows that Englehardt has always protected his operatives in difficult circumstances, but the CIA has its own political priorities. Diem is under pressure from reporters and the US embassy, the strategic hamlet program is not working, the Buddhist crisis is approaching, and a troublesome reporter named McWhorter is calling for the end of the Diem regime. As Englehardt tells Coltart, it is not the right time to rock the boat with ethnic minority questions. As for American strategy, Diem is their only hope: “He’s tough, intelligent, and has the will to fight. Finally, I know, if John McWhorter doesn’t, that there’s no alternative to Diem” (55). As a clincher, he invokes the domino theory. “We could lose this war…And if we lose it, we’ve lost all Southeast Asia, from Cambodia to Indonesia” (56). Eventually, Englehardt lies to Coltart about Diem’s assurances to keep him and the montagnards holding the line until troops can be sent into the mountains.

      Although the correspondent McWhorter is portrayed unsympathetically (he finds it exciting to go on missions where men will kill, about which he can write “a very nice little story”), he is independent of the American mission and more perceptive about the war than is Coltart, who should have taken him more seriously. On Diem, who would cancel the troublesome correspondent’s visa if it were not a public admission to the Americans of his repression of the press, McWhorter’s remarks are perceptive: “We can’t win with this Catholic mandarin, Harry. He’s nothing but a yellow Frenchman…We need Asian leadership here” (89). It is through McWhorter’s eager eyes that the reader sees the shelling and looting of the presidential place, the failure of Nhu’s false coup, and the end of the regime, although to McWhorter’s great disappointment, Diem and Nhu have already fled. He has failed to get his scoop, the final interview with the toppled president, but he will still be rewarded with an editorship for his reporting.

      While McWhorter serves as a political guide, a Frenchman named Michaud, who was born and lived much of his life in Vietnam, serves as his (a)moral guide. Frenchmen often serve in novels about the war as cynical but truthful observers of the situation, in contrast to disillusioned American idealists (cf. Greene’s The Quiet American and Just’s A Dangerous Friend). Michaud functions in just this way as a kind of foil to Coltart, his scarred face a sign of the price of knowledge and experience. He tries to convince Coltart that his