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

peasant to the highest official. Barclay has been in Vietnam for ten years; he first came to the country with the Army Security Agency. He regards Saigon as his home town, and usually prefers the company of Vietnamese to that of his own colleagues, ugly-American types who understand so little of the culture that they employ Vietnamese translators who systematically mistranslate their propaganda. He himself, however, is playing a dangerous game as the lover of Lé, Colonel Duong’s beautiful wife. Their passionate affair constitutes a large part of the story.

      Ambassador Lodge barely makes an appearance in this novel except at the beginning and end, but Diem’s arrogant brother Nhu has equal billing with Diem as a character. Nhu believes that the Americans are ignorant and will be powerless to interfere in the current crisis. He himself will handle the Buddhist question in his own way, i.e. with brutal repression, through his Can Dao, or secret police. His right-hand man, Duoung, is keen on this work, as shown by his men’s destruction of the village of Hoa Ginh. Earlier, Lé, who runs an orphanage there, was showing Barclay around when it was suddenly attacked by the NLF. After the couple escapes with the aid of the villagers, the village is attacked again, this time by Duong’s goons, who wear army uniforms to put the blame for the massacre on military leaders, many of whom are constantly plotting against the regime. Duong is so excited by the killing that he rapes his wife that same night, an act that turns his already odious character into a caricature, but at the same time allows his wife’s betrayal of him to be seen as morally acceptable and gives Barclay a personal motive for wishing Nhu and his man Duong removed from power.

      Nhu is specifically mentioned in the state department cable sent to Lodge and his military aide, General McKenzie, Colonel Barlay’s Commanding Officer. The cable informs them that they are to apply more pressure on Diem to reverse his present policies and, in the absence of an appropriate response, to look into “alternative leadership.” In the novel, therefore, it is the military commander, not the CIA chief, who plots the coup with the Vietnamese generals, taking the cable as a go-ahead without even consulting the ambassador. It is also McKenzie who dubs the project “Operation Valkyrie,” selecting the name from a codebook for its dramatic sound. According to the general’s dictionary, the Valkyrie are Odin’s handmaidens who conduct the souls of fallen warriors to Valhalla, but, more to the point, it was also the code-name of the operation in which the German generals planned to assassinate Hitler. General Mackenzie, however, is foolish enough to let himself be manipulated into volunteering information to Antoine Mouchette, a Vietnam-born Frenchman who is known as the “master pimp of the Orient.” Mouchette is a shrewd survivor of previous regimes, including the Japanese occupation, and is determined to survive the demise of the present one as well, mainly through supplying his high-level clients with desirable women.

      The Ngo brothers, with the help of the secret police and a network of informers planted in civil and military organizations, are aware of the plots against them, one of which has been devised by Nhu himself, a fake preemptive coup called Bravo One, an elaborate “smoke screen” designed to identify the disloyal army elements that are plotting the real coup against the regime. Nhu’s plan is to be carried out by the loyal General Tran, but the plot remains unknown to Diem himself, who is portrayed in the novel as more conciliatory to the Americans than he really was. Nhu’s coup is a phony one to mislead the Americans, who, Nhu hopes (in Henry James’ expression) “shall be hoist with their own petard” and fail to support the real, anti-Diem coup.

      Barclay, who was appointed liaison officer between the Americans and the Vietnamese plotters, objects to the plot because he knows that Tran does not have the support of the other generals to bring off a successful coup, but MacKenzie takes Tran at his word and, dazzled by a beautiful prostitute, is also misled by Mouchette, who instructs him not to be receptive to other coup proposals, including the true one. Mouchette is anxious to stay on the good side of Tran and the present regime until circumstances dictate otherwise, when it becomes “time to shift his loyalties once again, so that he would land on his feet when the government toppled,” as he always manages to do (185).

      With such inept Americans in the saddle, the phony coup does not come off because the junta led by “Big Linh” (i.e. the historical “Big Minh,” or Duong Van Minh) has been plotting the action that will in fact topple Diem. Barclay uncovers the phony plot through an old friend, Colonel Ling, who tells him that Tran must be bluffing since he has not actually recruited any army units. US intelligence, for its part, has learned of Diem’s attempt to propose a separate arrangement with the Communists, which in the novel is seen as his attempt to gain a cease-fire merely to deal with the plots against him. Barclay, frustrated in his attempts to inform MacKenzie about what is really going on, only succeeds in persuading Tran to postpone his phony coup in order to coincide with the real one.

The generals have to decide if they are to simply assassinate Nhu and thus make Diem more pliant (which might, however, have the opposite effect), to encircle Saigon and force a surrender, which would probably take too long, or to attack the forces loyal to Diem and risk provoking civil war, which they decide on as the swiftest and most decisive course of action. These are historically the three choices the plotting generals faced.42 To get the forces loyal to Diem out of the city, Colonel Linh asks Barclay to help by threatening to withhold US aid unless these forces are sent to the field, a power that Barclay, a lieutenant colonel, would be unlikely to have. Barclay learns, however, about an assassination list that has the names of both Doung and his wife Lé on it, and Duong tells Barclay at this point that he knows about his affair with his wife but has done nothing about it because he might need “insurance” against a coup. This restraint is plausible, but Duong’s death strikes a peculiarly false note, perhaps the weakest part of the novel. The reader is asked to believe that a scheming, sadistic murderer like Duong would seek his final peace in a Buddhist monastery, even being granted a glimpse of nirvana before he is gunned down.

      The details of the last hours of Diem and Nhu conform to the historical record—Diem’s phone call to Lodge, their escape to a house in Cholon, their taking refuge in the church, and the assassination of both men in an armored personnel carrier (a fictional addition is the cruel officer who kills the Ngo brothers and is also the murderer of Lé in the end). Diem is given some dignity by quietly and courageously facing his death while Nhu constantly frets for his life, unwilling to face the inevitable. Barclay, who has already escaped an attempted assassination on the street by Tran’s men, is finally killed by his old friend Linh, with the lame explanation that Barclay’s name was the last on the list. The reader has to ask the obvious question: could not Linh, the new head of state, simply erase it?

      Vaughn’s novel is a “thriller” that successfully mixes historical and fictional characters and events but leaves several questions related to the politics of the coup unanswered. Is Barclay’s assassination meant to show Linh’s ingratitude toward the man who once saved his life and therefore Linh’s unworthiness to lead the nation? General Minh, in fact, would last only three months in power, and was toppled by General Kanh in January 1964. Or is the reader meant to reflect on the fact that in violent reversals of the status quo the wrong people often get hurt? Or does the narrative simply need to avoid the reunion of the two adulterous lovers? Barclay’s death does not make sense in the terms established by the novel because he has been the only American to cooperate with the plotting generals, unless it is meant to be a critique of the American support of the coup. The only explicit indictment of that support is an observation by a French priest that “Diem was a symbol” of Vietnam’s independence, which the Americans will destroy by ousting him, but the novel is also critical of Diem’s regime as authoritarian and anti-democratic. The elections, for example, are shown to be rigged (“a burlesque,” as Barclay observes) with a numerical victory no one believed in but that MACV accepted “as evidence of the success of the democratic process” (176).

      Finally, author Vaughn, a former US Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam, seems to believe that nobody in Vietnam would willingly be a Communist; those who have chosen that side must have done so for lack of a viable alternative. General Linh mentions a former comrade who is not a Communist but has managed to become the senior Vietcong commander in the Saigon area (an unlikely promotion). This worthy commander is ideologically opposed to the VC but does not go over to Diem’s army for fear that he will