Tom Burns - There It Is - Narratives of the Vietnam War

Two of these novels about the fall of Diem were published two or three years after the actual coup and the other one (Vaughn’s) nearly a decade later. The events of the coup and probably even its motivations had by this time been established, but the novels have been discussed here in this particular order, not according to dates of publication but to the respective “distances” of their fictional protagonists from Diem’s person and destiny. In this perspective, the distance proportionally decreases, although even in the first two novels discussed (Hempstone and Vaughn), close ups of Saigon’s palatial politics are given whenever Diem himself appears as a character. The details of the execution, which took place inside an armored military vehicle, and the final thoughts and reactions of the victims had to be imagined by the novelists. In every case, what Diem and Nhu were actually thinking and planning must be deduced from the results in the historical accounts. In these novels, however, they are given voices and personal motives, which account for the differences in these works of political and moral emphases.

It has been argued that the first and best of the novels discussed, Smith Hempstone’s A Tract of Time , is furthest from the events leading up to the coup in Saigon, although those events will come to determine what happens in the highlands of central Vietnam, where most of the action takes place. Coltart, the CIA operative who works with the mountain tribes, is caught in a conflict of allegiance between these indigenous people, whose confidence he has gained, and the representatives of his own government, who have their own priorities. He discovers to his sorrow that Diem’s government has, historically and culturally, little sympathy for its montagnard allies, and even less so in the confusion generated by the president’s imminent fall.

The second novel, Robert Vaughn’s The Valkyrie Mandate , views the coup from closer up, through the eyes of an US Army officer who is directly involved as the liaison between the US mission and the rebel Vietnamese generals. There is here another conflict of loyalties. Like the protagonist of Hempstone’s novel, the conflict between the protagonist’s position as an American officer and his devotion, in this case, to Vietnamese culture and its people, proves fatal. If Hempstone seems to be saying that it is impossible to be a man of honor and serve the South Vietnamese government, Vaughn is saying that it is impossible to serve the Vietnamese people by serving its government.

The third novel, Morris West’s The Ambassador , gets even closer to the central crisis of the time by putting the reader inside the mind of the American ambassador who is directly involved in the coup that ousted Diem, showing the political crisis with more complexity and greater moral nuance than the other examples and creating various characters based on actual participants. The main problem with West’s version as historical fiction is the misrepresentation of his historical models. It has been shown here how Amberley is far less complicit in the coup than Lodge was, but Cung’s statesmanship is also exaggerated if it is meant to represent Diem’s. The ambassador recognizes Cung’s achievements in reconstructing his country, including agricultural reforms, expanded commerce and industry, and increased news communications; what is not admitted are the fear of nationwide elections, the rigged referendum, the fact that the vaunted agrarian programs were perceived as “unmitigated disasters,” 48or that the massive influx of American aid that maintained South Vietnam did not prepare it to be an independent nation of industry and commerce. 49

Nor can Cung’s achievements, modest as they are, outweigh his defects as a leader, all admitted by Amberley: he is an elitist, a Catholic who persecutes Buddhists in a largely Buddhist country, a president dependent on American aid but resentful of interference, a man who isolates himself from his people and delegates responsibility only to his family, and a politician singularly inept at handling crises. As for the prosecution of the war, the ambassador admits that “military operations were hampered by political considerations” (161): offensive operations did not take place because military commanders and provincial governors did not get along, and the president was more concerned with threats to his regime than fighting the Communists.

It is as if the insistence of all these authors to portray Diem as a flawed but well-intentioned leader was a means of upping the ante on the conspirators’ (and the ambassador’s) moral dilemma. In all three novels, Diem is represented as a sympathetic human being, even a strong leader, who has unfortunately clung to misguided political policies or undemocratic methods. By contrast, his ruthless and conniving brother Nhu becomes a sort of scapegoat for the regime. None of the novels voice any suspicion that Diem may have relegated the dirty work of his autocratic regime to his brother intentionally, that their collusion may have been their modus operandi , a union of divergent roles necessary for the project of sustaining their family in power.

In an interesting contrast to these fictional versions, important historical accounts of the war portray Diem as directly responsible for his own destruction and even cite a lack of personal qualities that partly explain his political failures. Stanley Karnow, for example, refers to Diem’s “inflexible pride” and his style of “ruling like an ancient emperor.” 50In a chapter devoted to Diem, Frances FitzGerald calls him “the sovereign of discord.” 51George C. Herring argues that Diem was an autocrat, who merely to please his American advisors “occasionally paid lip-service to democracy but in actual practice assumed actual powers.” 52Bernard Fall points out that Diem thought that political “compromise has no purpose and opposition of any kind must of necessity be subversive.” 53Robert D. Schulzinger notes Diem’s “inability to generate popularity in the countryside and his adamant refusal to delegate responsibility to anyone other than his brothers.” 54Finally, Marilyn B. Young sums up the relationship of the US government and the Diem regime in this way: “what the United States had labored mightily to produce was not a democratic, independent new nation-state but an autocratic ruling family held in place by a foreign power. 55Mutual dissatisfaction led inevitably to Diem’s fall.

1Short, Anthony, The Origins of the Vietnam War (London: Longman; 1989) p. 263.

2Bowman, John S. (ed.), The Vietnam War Day by Day (Hong Kong: Brompton Books Corporation, 1989), p. 14.

3Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 14.

4Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 193.

5Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 196.

6Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 16.

7See Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 203, for the confrontation with the sects, and p. 206, for the battle with the Binh Xuyen.

8Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p.16.

9Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 17.

10Boettcher, Thomas, Vietnam—the Valor and the Sorrow (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1985), pp. 149-150.

11Qtd. In Boettcher, Vietnam—the Valor and the Sorrow, pp. 407-408.

12Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 17.

13Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 18.

14Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 215.

15Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, pp. 18-19.

16Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day , p. 18.

17Young, Marilyn B., The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: Harper’s, 1991), p. 332.

18Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, p. 18.

19Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, pp. 19-20.

20Bowman, The Vietnam War Day by Day, pp. 20-21.