University of Florida History of Vietnam Essay There are no prompts for any of the papers. A significant portion of the intellectual work comes in formulat

University of Florida History of Vietnam Essay There are no prompts for any of the papers. A significant portion of the intellectual work comes in formulating the question. Consequently, I don’t provide prompts. You should read the texts and examine them in terms of their historical significance — after all, this is not an literature class. What can we learn about the periods considered in the text? What were the author’s concerns? How do these books illuminate larger trends/meanings from the period? Why might they be worth reading in a history class?Further, the lack of prompt allows each of you to pursue the topics/themes/arguments that strike you as most compelling. There are dozens of possible papers from each of the texts. What interests you in the assigned reading? THE
SYMPATHIZER
THE
SYMPATHIZER
VIET THANH NGUYEN
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2015 by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Jacket art and design by Christopher Moisan
Author photography © BeBe Jacobs
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For Lan and Ellison
Let us not become gloomy as soon as we hear the word “torture”:
in this particular case there is plenty to offset and
mitigate that word—even something to laugh at.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
THE
SYMPATHIZER
CHAPTER 1
I
a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I
am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a
comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am
simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that
this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is
perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how
I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I
have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use,
not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that
possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this
confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue
than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.
The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in
which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is
the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in
our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the
world. It was a month that was both an end of a war and the beginning of . .
. well, “peace” is not the right word, is it, my dear Commandant? It was a
month when I awaited the end behind the walls of a villa where I had lived
for the previous five years, the villa’s walls glittering with broken brown
glass and crowned with rusted barbed wire. I had my own room at the villa,
much like I have my own room in your camp, Commandant. Of course, the
proper term for my room is an “isolation cell,” and instead of a housekeeper
who comes to clean every day, you have provided me with a baby-faced
guard who does not clean at all. But I am not complaining. Privacy, not
cleanliness, is my only prerequisite for writing this confession.
While I had sufficient privacy in the General’s villa at night, I had little
during the day. I was the only one of the General’s officers to live in his
home, the sole bachelor on his staff and his most reliable aide. In the
mornings, before I chauffeured him the short distance to his office, we
would breakfast together, parsing dispatches at one end of the teak dining
table while his wife oversaw a well-disciplined quartet of children at the
other, ages eighteen, sixteen, fourteen, and twelve, with one seat empty for
AM A SPY,
the daughter studying in America. Not everyone may have feared the end,
but the General sensibly did. A thin man of excellent posture, he was a
veteran campaigner whose many medals had been, in his case, genuinely
earned. Although he possessed but nine fingers and eight toes, having lost
three digits to bullets and shrapnel, only his family and confidants knew
about the condition of his left foot. His ambitions had hardly ever been
thwarted, except in his desire to procure an excellent bottle of Bourgogne
and to drink it with companions who knew better than to put ice cubes in
their wine. He was an epicurean and a Christian, in that order, a man of
faith who believed in gastronomy and God; his wife and his children; and
the French and the Americans. In his view, they offered us far better
tutelage than those other foreign Svengalis who had hypnotized our
northern brethren and some of our southern ones: Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin,
and Chairman Mao. Not that he ever read any of those sages! That was my
job as his aide-de-camp and junior officer of intelligence, to provide him
with cribbed notes on, say, The Communist Manifesto or Mao’s Little Red
Book. It was up to him to find occasions to demonstrate his knowledge of
the enemy’s thinking, his favorite being Lenin’s question, plagiarized
whenever the need arose: Gentlemen, he would say, rapping the relevant
table with adamantine knuckles, what is to be done? To tell the General that
Nikolay Chernyshevsky actually came up with the question in his novel of
the same title seemed irrelevant. How many remember Chernyshevsky
now? It was Lenin who counted, the man of action who took the question
and made it his own.
In this gloomiest of Aprils, faced with this question of what should be
done, the general who always found something to do could no longer do so.
A man who had faith in the mission civilisatrice and the American Way was
at last bitten by the bug of disbelief. Suddenly insomniac, he took to
wandering his villa with the greenish pallor of a malarial patient. Ever since
our northern front had collapsed a few weeks before in March, he would
materialize at my office door or at my room in the villa to hand off a snatch
of news, always gloomy. Can you believe it? he would demand, to which I
said one of two things: No, sir! or Unbelievable! We could not believe that
the pleasant, scenic coffee town of Ban Me Thuot, my Highlands
hometown, had been sacked in early March. We could not believe that our
president, Thieu, whose name begged to be spit out of the mouth, had
inexplicably ordered our forces defending the Highlands to retreat. We
could not believe that Da Nang and Nha Trang had fallen, or that our troops
had shot civilians in the back as they all fought madly to escape on barges
and boats, the death toll running to the thousands. In the secret privacy of
my office, I dutifully snapped pictures of these reports, which would please
Man, my handler. While they pleased me, too, as signs of the regime’s
inevitable erosion, I could not help but feel moved by the plight of these
poor people. Perhaps it was not correct, politically speaking, for me to feel
sympathy for them, but my mother would have been one of them if she
were alive. She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks
poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if
they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they
wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers. If those thousands still
lived, they would not have believed how they had died, just as we could not
believe that the Americans—our friends, our benefactors, our protectors—
had spurned our request to send more money. And what would we have
done with that money? Buy the ammunition, gas, and spare parts for the
weapons, planes, and tanks the same Americans had bestowed on us for
free. Having given us the needles, they now perversely no longer supplied
the dope. (Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is
offered for free.)
At the end of our discussions and meals, I lit the General’s cigarette and
he stared into space, forgetting to smoke the Lucky Strike as it slowly
consumed itself in his fingers. In the middle of April, when the ash stung
him awake from his reverie and he uttered a word he should not have,
Madame silenced the tittering children and said, If you wait much longer,
we won’t be able to get out. You should ask Claude for a plane now. The
General pretended not to hear Madame. She had a mind like an abacus, the
spine of a drill instructor, and the body of a virgin even after five children.
All of this was wrapped up in one of those exteriors that inspired our Beaux
Arts–trained painters to use the most pastel of watercolors and the fuzziest
of brushstrokes. She was, in short, the ideal Vietnamese woman. For this
good fortune, the General was eternally grateful and terrified. Kneading the
tip of his scorched finger, he looked at me and said, I think it’s time to ask
Claude for a plane. Only when he resumed studying his damaged finger did
I glance at Madame, who merely raised an eyebrow. Good idea, sir, I said.
Claude was our most trusted American friend, our relationship so
intimate he once confided in me to being one-sixteenth Negro. Ah, I had
said, equally smashed on Tennessee bourbon, that explains why your hair is
black, and why you tan well, and why you can dance the cha-cha like one of
us. Beethoven, he said, was likewise of hexadecimal descent. Then, I said,
that explains why you can carry the tune of “Happy Birthday” like no one’s
business. We had known each other for more than two decades, ever since
he had spotted me on a refugee barge in ’54 and recognized my talents. I
was a precocious nine-year-old who had already learned a decent amount of
English, taught to me by a pioneering American missionary. Claude
supposedly worked in refugee relief. Now his desk was in the American
embassy, his assignment ostensibly to promote the development of tourism
in our war-stricken country. This, as you might imagine, required every
drop he could squeeze from a handkerchief soaked with the sweat of the
can-do American spirit. In reality, Claude was a CIA man whose time in
this country dated back to the days when the French still ruled an empire. In
those days, when the CIA was the OSS, Ho Chi Minh looked to them for
help in fighting the French. He even quoted America’s Founding Fathers in
his declaration of our country’s independence. Uncle Ho’s enemies say he
spoke out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, but Claude believed
he saw both sides at once. I rang Claude from my office, down the hall from
the General’s study, and informed him in English that the General had lost
all hope. Claude’s Vietnamese was bad and his French worse, but his
English was excellent. I point this out only because the same thing could
not be said of all his countrymen.
It’s over, I said, and when I said it to Claude it finally seemed real. I
thought Claude might protest and argue that American bombers might yet
fill our skies, or that American air cavalry might soon ride on gunships to
our rescue, but Claude did not disappoint. I’ll see what I can arrange, he
said, a murmur of voices audible in the background. I imagined the
embassy in disarray, teletypes overheating, urgent cables crisscrossing
between Saigon and Washington, the staff working without respite, and the
funk of defeat so pungent it overwhelmed the air conditioners. Amid short
tempers, Claude stayed cool, having lived here so long he barely perspired
in the tropical humidity. He could sneak up on you in the dark, but he could
never be invisible in our country. Although an intellectual, he was of a
peculiarly American breed, the muscular kind who rowed crew and who
flexed substantial biceps. Whereas our scholarly types tended to be pale,
myopic, and stunted, Claude was six-two, had perfect vision, and kept
himself in shape by performing two hundred push-ups each morning, his
Nung houseboy squatting on his back. During his free time, he read, and
whenever he visited the villa, a book was tucked under his arm. When he
arrived a few days later, Richard Hedd’s Asian Communism and the
Oriental Mode of Destruction was the paperback he carried.
The book was for me, while the General received a bottle of Jack
Daniel’s—a gift I would have preferred if given the choice. Nevertheless, I
took care to peruse the book’s cover, crowded with blurbs so breathless they
might have been lifted from the transcript of a teenage girls’ fan club,
except that the excited giggling came from a pair of secretaries of defense, a
senator who had visited our country for two weeks to find facts, and a
renowned television anchor who modeled his enunciation on Moses, as
played by Charlton Heston. The reason for their excitement was found in
the significant type of the subtitle, On Understanding and Defeating the
Marxist Threat to Asia. When Claude said everyone was reading this howto manual, I said I would read it as well. The General, who had cracked
open the bottle, was in no mood to discuss books or chitchat, not with
eighteen enemy divisions encircling the capital. He wanted to discuss the
plane, and Claude, rolling his glass of whiskey between his palms, said the
best he could do was a black flight, off the books, on a C-130. It could hold
ninety-two paratroopers and their gear, as the General well knew, having
served in the Airborne before being called on by the president himself to
lead the National Police. The problem, as he explained to Claude, was that
his extended family alone amounted to fifty-eight. While he did not like
some of them, and in fact despised a few, Madame would never forgive him
if he did not rescue all of her relations.
And my staff, Claude? The General spoke in his precise, formal English.
What of them? Both the General and Claude glanced at me. I tried to look
brave. I was not the senior officer on the staff, but as the aide-de-camp and
the officer most fluent in American culture, I attended all the General’s
meetings with Americans. Some of my countrymen spoke English as well
as I, although most had a tinge of an accent. But almost none could discuss,
like I, baseball standings, the awfulness of Jane Fonda, or the merits of the
Rolling Stones versus the Beatles. If an American closed his eyes to hear
me speak, he would think I was one of his kind. Indeed, on the phone, I was
easily mistaken for an American. On meeting in person, my interlocutor
was invariably astonished at my appearance and would almost always
inquire as to how I had learned to speak English so well. In this jackfruit
republic that served as a franchise of the United States, Americans expected
me to be like those millions who spoke no English, pidgin English, or
accented English. I resented their expectation. That was why I was always
eager to demonstrate, in both spoken and written word, my mastery of their
language. My vocabulary was broader, my grammar more precise than the
average educated American. I could hit the high notes as well as the low,
and thus had no difficulty in understanding Claude’s characterization of the
ambassador as a “putz,” a “jerkoff” with “his head up his ass” who was in
denial about the city’s imminent fall. Officially, there’s no evacuation, said
Claude, because we’re not pulling out any time soon.
The General, who hardly ever raised his voice, now did. Unofficially, you
are abandoning us, he shouted. All day and night planes depart from the
airport. Everyone who works with Americans wants an exit visa. They go to
your embassy for these visas. You have evacuated your own women. You
have evacuated babies and orphans. Why is it that the only people who do
not know the Americans are pulling out are the Americans? Claude had the
decency to look embarrassed as he explained how the city would erupt in
riots if an evacuation was declared, and perhaps then turn against the
Americans who remained. This had happened in Da Nang and Nha Trang,
where the Americans had fled for their lives and left the residents to turn on
one another. But despite this precedent, the atmosphere was strangely quiet
in Saigon, most of the Saigonese citizenry behaving like people in a
scuppered marriage, willing to cling gamely to each other and drown so
long as nobody declared the adulterous truth. The truth, in this case, was
that at least a million people were working or had worked for the
Americans in one capacity or another, from shining their shoes to running
the army designed by the Americans in their own image to performing
fellatio on them for the price, in Peoria or Poughkeepsie, of a hamburger. A
good portion of these people believed that if the communists won—which
they refused to believe would happen—what awaited them was prison or a
garrote, and, for the virgins, forced marriage with the barbarians. Why
wouldn’t they? These were the rumors the CIA was propagating.
So— the General began, only to have Claude interrupt him. You have
one plane and you should consider yourself lucky, sir. The General was not
one to beg. He finished his whiskey, as did Claude, then shook Claude’s
hand and bid him good-bye, never once letting his gaze fall away from
Claude’s own. Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had
once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind. This was not
how Claude saw the situation. Other generals were only getting seats for
their immediate families, Claude said to us in parting. Even God and Noah
couldn’t save everyone. Or wouldn’t, anyway.
Could they not? What would my father say? He had been a Catholic
priest, but I could not remember this poor man of the cloth ever
sermonizing about Noah, although admittedly I went to Mass only to
daydream. But regardless of what God or Noah could do, there was little
doubt that every man on the General’s staff, if given the chance, would
rescue a hundred blood relatives as well as any paper ones who could afford
the bribe. Vietnamese families were complicated, delicate affairs, and while
sometimes I longed for one, being the only son of an ostracized mother,
now was not one of those times.
Later that day, the president resigned. I had expected the president to
abandon the country weeks ago in the manner befitting a dictator, and I
spared him barely a thought as I worked on the list of evacuees. The
General was fastidious and detail-oriented, habituated to making quick,
hard decisions, but this was one task that he deferred to me. He was
preoccupied with the matters of his office: reading the morning’s
interrogation reports, attending meetings at the Joint General Staff
compound, phoning his confidants as they discussed how to hold the city
and yet be ready to abandon it at the same time, a maneuver as tricky as
playing musical chairs to the tune of one’s most beloved song. Music was
on my mind, for as I worked on the list in the nocturnal hours, I listened to
American Radio Service on a Sony in my room at the villa. The songs of
the Temptations and Janis Joplin and Marvin Gaye usually always made
bad things bearable and good things wonderful, but not in times like these.
Every stroke of my pen through a name felt like a death sentence. All of our
names, from the lowest officer to the General, had been found on a list
being crammed into its owner’s mouth as we broke down her door three
years ago. The warning I had sent to Man had not gotten to her in time. As
the policemen wrestled her to the ground, I had no choice but to reach into
this communist agent’s mouth and pull from it that saliva-soaked list. Its
papier-mâché existence proved that members of the Special Branch,
accustomed to watching, were ourselves watched. Even had I a moment
alone with her, I could not have risked my cover by telling he…
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