There is a certain romance to being in Saigon. Reading Graham Greene's The Quiet American while drinking the best coffee I've ever had, surrounded by the grand colonial architecture of the rue Catinat, I could almost believe I was in the era of the novel, that hey day of the war correspondent armed with his portable typewriter on his exotic, noble mission. But only almost; Saigon is, of course, now Ho Chi Minh City, the rue Catinat is Dong Khoi, and "the girls in white silk trousers bicycl[ing] home" have been replaced by ladies in high heels buzzing along on their scooters. Today, Ho Chi Minh is hectic, noisy, traffic-consumed, and very fun. A few months in Asia has quashed the underlying feeling of being slightly overwhelmed that accompanied me in the first cities I visited, so I spent my time there indulging in two of the great joys of Asian travel: street food and zooming around on the back of a motorbike (all on an organised tour, I'm not that brave).
Meeting people at the airport may be even better than being met yourself. All of the joy, none of the travel. Hannah and Lucy arrived from London to spend two weeks travelling from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi with me. Travelling solo is great, but you can't beat being ridiculously profound and profoundly ridiculous with good friends on long bus journeys and over cheap cocktails.
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Our whistle stop journey north began with visits to the War Remnants Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels, major tourist attractions educating visitors on the "American War". Before I came to Vietnam, I'd assumed that I had a fairly neutral view on the war. It was only when I was faced with naively unexpected, gut-wrenching photographs of American war crimes, and when I watched in horror as the Cu Chi guide proudly demonstrated the grizzly booby traps used on the "enemy" by the Viet Cong, that I realised how subconsciously and strongly influenced by the American narrative I've been.
Matterhorn by Karl Malantes offered a perspective on the war more familiar to me. While the conflict whispers at the edges of The Quiet American, the heart of this novel, written by a former Marine, is the war of "jungle and mountain and marsh". Both novels give an entirely Western viewpoint, and the Vietnamese remain strange and unknowable. In The Quiet American, Phuong, the woman fought over by the two male protagonists, could stand for Vietnam itself; batted between Westerners who see her as "wonderfully ignorant" of events going on around her and in need of defence, she remains inscrutable to those who claim to love her. In Matterhorn, the Vietnamese are the shadows in the jungle, the faceless "enemy" whose rare appearance is both desired and feared. The only close encounter between Lieutenant Mellas, the main character, and an NVA soldier emphasises the impossibility of communication between them:
"the kid must have guessed that if he didn't throw the grenade Mellas wasn't going to shoot. But he threw the grenade anyway, his lips curling back from his teeth. Fuck you then, Mellas thought bitterly."
This gulf between the Westerners and the Vietnamese in the novels, even those on the same 'side' of the fighting, illustrates the glaring questions posed by the war "attractions"; if the French, then American forces didn't know the Vietnamese, didn't know what they wanted, or really what they themselves wanted to achieve, what was the point of it all? What were they doing there in the first place?
War, always awful in reality, is a good subject for writers. As Marlantes points out in his author's note, "novels need heroes and villains". Then, when these roles get blurred in the mess of war, the author can get to the real stuff of being human. Pyle, the "quiet American", sees himself as a hero, "determined... to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world". Yet his destructive actions force Fowler, the narrator, who prides himself on his detachment, to stop being a simple "reporter" and step in. And Fowler is no hero either, with his unclear and unclean motives. At first, Matterhorn seems more straightforward. Mellas arrives in Vietnam with a clear mission: kill enough of the enemy, and look brave enough doing it, to get a medal and swift promotion. But as war "break[s] life apart and splinter[s] it", and his friends die around him, he becomes desperate for "meaning". Knowledge of the author's own experience of Vietnam adds a terrible pathos to Mellas' attempts to figure it out:
"it occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good and evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself to the pain of watching it get blown away... he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil was a result of being human. Being human was the best he could do."
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After over a month in Cambodia and Vietnam, I got tired of reading about conflict. So I decided to put down the books for a while, and focus on Vietnam as it is today. So much misery seemed impossible in such a beautiful country. It is a visual feast, a photographer's dream. It seemed that every time I turned my head, a picture perfect composition arranged itself for me: boats like giant coconut shells bobbing on the turquoise waters of An Bang beach; jewel-toned lanterns glowing through the twilight in Hoi An; incense smoke clouding the damp air at Thien Mu Pagoda; women in conical hats walking flower-laden bicycles down the heaving streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter. It's too bad I'm a terrible photographer. I'd better go back to the books.
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Greene, Graham, The Quiet American (1955)
Marlantes, Karl, Matterhorn, (2010)
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