Viet Nguyen - The Sympathizer

Sir—

You should have known better, Captain. You are a soldier. Everything and everyone belongs in his proper place. How could you ever believe we would allow our daughter to be with someone of your kind?

My kind? I said. What do you mean by my kind?

Oh, Captain, said the General. You are a fine young man, but you are also, in case you have not noticed, a bastard. They waited for me to say something, but the General had stuffed the one word in my mouth that could silence me. Seeing that I had nothing to say, they shook their heads in anger, sorrow, and recrimination, leaving me at the gate with my bottle of whiskey. I wanted to crack it open then and there, for the whiskey might have helped me spit that word out. It was stuck in my throat and had the taste of a woolen sock sodden with our homeland’s rich mud, the kind of meal I had forgotten was reserved for those who ranked among the meanest.

We arose before the sun to a dark morning. After a breakfast where no one uttered more than a grunt, Claude drove from Bangkok to the camp, a day’s journey that ended near the border with Laos. By the time he swerved onto an unpaved side road and into a white-barked cajeput forest, dodging craters and dips, the sun was rolling on its downward slope behind us. A kilometer into the twilight forest we reached a military checkpoint consisting of a jeep and two young soldiers in olive-green battle dress, each with a protective amulet of the Buddha around his neck and an M16 in his lap. I smelled the unmistakable funk of marijuana. Without bothering either to rise from the jeep or to raise their half-lidded eyes, the soldiers waved us through. We continued on the rutted road, plunging even deeper into a forest where the skeletal hands of tall trees with their thin branches loomed over us, until we emerged into a clearing of small, square huts on stilts, the scene saved from total rusticity by the electric light illuminating the windows. Wigs of palm leaves thatched the roofs, and wooden planks led from elevated doors to the earth. Barking dogs had brought shadows to the mouths of the doorways, and by the time we clambered out a squad of those shadows was approaching. There they are, said Claude. The last men standing of the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam.

Perhaps the pictures of them that I had seen in the General’s office were taken in better times, but those stern freedom fighters bore little resemblance to these haggard irregulars. In the pictures, those clean-shaven men with red scarves cinched around their necks had been clad in jungle camouflage, combat boots, and berets, standing at attention under the forest’s filtered sunlight. But instead of boots and camouflage, these men wore rubber sandals with black blouses and pants. Instead of red scarves, the Rangers’ legendary emblem, they wore the checkered scarves of peasants. Instead of berets, they wore wide-brimmed bushwacker hats. Instead of clean cheeks, they were unshaven, their hair matted and untrimmed. Their eyes, once hot and bright, were dull as coal. Each carried an AK-47 with its distinctive banana clip, and the presence of this icon, combined with all the other features, led to an unusual visual effect.

Why do they look like Viet Cong? said the grizzled captain.

It was not only the guerrillas who resembled their old enemies, as we discovered when a dozen of them led us to the hut of their commander. On this hut’s thin lip of a porch stood a slim man backlit by a bare electric lightbulb. Isn’t that— said Bon, before stopping at asking the absurd. Everybody says so, said Claude. The admiral raised his hand in greeting and smiled a familiar, avuncular smile. His face was angular, gaunt, and almost handsome, the classic noble visage of a scholar or mandarin. The hair was gray but not white, thinning a little on top, and trimmed short. A goatee was his most distinctive feature, a neatly sculpted affair for the man of middle age, rather than the scraggle of youth or the long, flowing tuft of the elder. Welcome, men, the admiral said, and even in the gentle intonation of his voice I heard echoes of the newsreel on which Ho Chi Minh’s cultivated and calm voice was recorded. You have traveled a great distance, and you must be tired. Please, come in and join me.

Like Ho Chi Minh, the admiral referred to himself as uncle. Like Ho Chi Minh, he also dressed with simplicity, his black blouse and pants matching the garb of his guerrillas. And, like Ho Chi Minh, he furnished his quarters in a sparse and scholarly fashion. We sat barefoot on reed mats in the hut’s one plain room, us newcomers uneasy in the presence of this uncanny look-alike. Our apparition must have slept on the plank floor, for there was no sign of a bed. Bamboo bookshelves lined one wall, and a simple bamboo desk and chair occupied another. Over the course of dinner, as we drank the General’s whiskey, the admiral quizzed us on our years in America and we quizzed him in turn on how he had come to be shipwrecked in the forest. He smiled and tapped his ashes into an ashtray made of half a coconut shell. On the last day of the war, I was in command of a transport ship full of marines, soldiers, policemen, and civilians rescued from the piers. I could have sailed to the Seventh Fleet, like many of my fellow captains. But the Americans had betrayed us before, and there was no hope of fighting again if I fled to them. The Americans were finished. Now that their white race had failed, they were leaving Asia to the yellow race. So I sailed toward Thailand. I had Thai friends and I knew the Thai would give us asylum. They had nowhere to go, unlike the Americans. The Thai would fight communism because it was pressing up against their border with Cambodia. Laos, too, was going to fall soon. You see, I was not interested in being saved, unlike so many of our countrymen. He paused here and smiled once more, and none of us needed to be reminded that we were some of those countrymen. God had already saved me, the admiral went on. I did not need to be saved by Americans. I swore on my ship in front of my men that we would continue our fight for months, years, even decades if necessary. If we looked at our struggle from God’s eyes, this was no time at all.

So, Bon said, you think we really have a chance, Uncle? The admiral stroked his goatee before answering. My child, he said, still stroking the goatee, remember Jesus and how Christianity began with just him, his apostles, their faith, and the Word of God. We are like those true believers. We have two hundred apostles in this camp, a radio station broadcasting the word of freedom into our enslaved homeland, and guns. We have things Jesus and his apostles never had, but we have their faith, too, and not least — furthest from least — God is on our side.

Bon lit another cigarette. Jesus died, he said. So did the apostles.

So we’re going to die, said the affectless lieutenant. Despite the meaning of his words, or perhaps because of them, his manner and pronouncement remained unemotional. Not that that’s a bad thing, he said.

I am not saying you will die on this mission, the admiral said. Just eventually. But if you do die on this mission, know that those you save will be grateful to you, as those the apostles saved were grateful to them.

A lot of the people they went to save didn’t want to be saved, Uncle, Bon said. That’s why they ended up dead.

My son, the admiral said, no longer smiling, it does not sound like you are a believer.

If by that you mean a believer in religion or anticommunism or freedom or anything with a big word like that, no, I’m not. I used to believe, but not anymore. I don’t give a damn about saving anybody, including myself. I just want to kill communists. That’s why I’m the man you want.

I can live with that, the admiral said.