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COMMENTARY
The Quiet American: Painful
lessons
By James Borton
Last
year, I strolled around Hoan Kiem Lake during the
Christmas holidays, observing first-hand the New
Vietnam. Nearby on Ta Hien Street in the heart of
Hanoi's oldest quarter, shops, restaurants and galleries
were all bustling with locals and expats. A familiar
sight on busy street corners were young Vietnamese,
peddling cigarettes and postcards and flogging copies of
that poignant and prophetic Graham Greene classic,
The Quiet American.
There are more than
600 novels written about Vietnam and scores of memoirs
penned by seasoned journalists, all attempting to make
sense of their Indochina experience. Some of these once
flowers of new journalism are now in recovery from
hearts of episodic darkness. These young and restless
print and broadcast reporters bravely attempted to tell
America something about ourselves. A few of these
veteran reporters still regard their dog-eared copy of
The Quiet American as the best book about America
in Vietnam.
This past week Miramax Films
released the movie version of Greene's richly
intelligent 1955 novel, The Quiet American, about
terrorism, conflict, and the abuses and the use of US
power. The film was originally scheduled for release
last year, and there was a test screening in New York.
The date: September 10, 2001.
After the events
of the following morning, the film was postponed for
fear that its theme would be deemed by Americans as
unpatriotic. It now debuts not a day too soon as US war
drums beat loudly once again from the Oval Office on
Pennsylvania Avenue.
Few of the American
journalists who reported on the Vietnam War have been
weighing in on the patriotism issue, nor plaintively
writing about whether this newly released film imparts
anything resembling a deeply disturbing anti-American
message. It seems this stream of criticism has largely
been reserved for only those inside the White House and
senior Republican leadership.
This righteous
sermonizing plays into the hands and voice of the film's
American character, the fatally idealistic intelligence
officer, a role well suited for the actor, Brendan
Fraser. Alden Pyle's dedication to principles of freedom
and justice are never questioned, but his good
intentions and ignorance implicate him in acts of
terrorism that result in the deaths of innocent
Vietnamese. Greene's novel still serves as a prescient
parable about American innocence and destructiveness.
Is it anti-American film? No, not by any
measure. It is a film deftly directed by the Australian
Philip Noyce, who examines the US role in Vietnam's
civil war and also calls into question America's larger
and deeply evolving tragic position in vainly attempting
to shape policy in Southeast Asia and change a communist
regime. The film sadly reinforces what Americans later
discovered about their experiment in Vietnam. All the
bombs, troops, and pacification programs could not
impose any enduring change upon the indomitable
Vietnamese spirit.
Hanoi's muted colors are
subtly captured by Christopher Doyle's cinematography.
Greene's cynicism is reflected in Michael Caine's
character, Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist, as
he comments on the young American: "I never knew a man
who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
To Noyce's credit, he presents us with a neutral
adaptation of Greene's oeuvre on the Vietnamese, the
French and the American drama being played out. It is
ironic in examining the formal dispatches in Washington
from 1955 that many pundits were convinced that the
French had lost their fight at Dien Bien Phu simply
because they were not Americans. This hubris led to the
development of new US policies toward Indochina, and new
definitions of US interests.
It does not take a
military historian to recall that the so-called 1950s
Cold Warrior Washington voices were invoking "national
security interests" to destroy the Vietminh forces and
take control of North Vietnam.
Only a few years
later, senator John F Kennedy remarked, "The United
States must never abandon little Vietnam - it's a test
of American responsibility and determination in Asia."
Never mind that American elan proved to be
unsatisfactory.
It is this weight of US history
and its relationship with Vietnam that come barreling
down toward those of us who were in Vietnam years later.
Another new memoir has been added to the existing canon.
At a time when the United States is gearing up its
troops and military machine toward an Iraqi invasion,
some kind of refresher course on the wages of war seems
timely.
This fall, while teaching a course in
international reporting at the New School University in
New York, I invited two correspondents who had covered
the Vietnam War. Jurate Kazickas and Edith Lederer both
contributed chapters in the newly published book War
Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who
Covered Vietnam.
In the chapter titled "My
First War", Lederer relates a recurring dream. The dream
ends when "an explosion that sounds like a bomb going
through the roof sends me bolting from bed, and that's
how the dream usually ends, because the noise wakes me
up". For her, and many other female journalists such as
Anne Morrissy Merrick, Denby Fawcett, Laura Palmer and
Kate Webb, their experiences in Vietnam shaped their
lives forever.
Kazickas shared with these
graduate students - all aspiring foreign correspondents
- the carnage she witnessed at Con Thien in July 1967.
She vividly described marching on a long-range patrol in
the hills controlled by the North Vietnamese and her
first encounter up close and personal with death. "What
shook me to the core was the devastating sight of so
many dead marines who had been lying in the sun for
three days, their bodies bloated, their faces black as
charred by fire."
The thoughtful and searing
book authored by these female correspondents was brought
together at a reunion seminar organized by Christine
Martin, the dean of the Perley Isaac Reed School of
Journalism at West Virginia University. Of course, it
was both a glorious and a hellish time for all
international reporters, and this book is deeply
personal and raw with emotions and with lessons learned.
Yet as journalist Gloria Emerson wrote, "to have been in
a war does not mean you understand the memories of it".
Just as the United States is addressing the
terrorism campaign, and all the logic and emotionalism
associated with its advance, some of us are pausing to
reflect once again about Vietnam. I thought of this and
more after reading only a few days ago in the New York
Times the obituary of Lynda Van Devanter, an army nurse
who served courageously in Vietnam, now dead at the age
of 55, after focusing national attention on the burdens
of the servicewomen in the war. Her own memoir, Home
Before Morning, inspired the popular television
series China Beach.
What is it that
drives Americans to war and casts the US in such an
imperialist role rather than in that of
democratic-building nation? How and why is America's
power used to explain, to justify more sacrifices? Is it
not curious that today the United States possesses the
unenviable status of the world's superpower and is hated
by more countries than ever before? In the early 1960s,
the US also had an unrivaled level of prestige and a
broad national consensus bolstered by World War II and
strengthened by the Cold War before ultimately getting
bogged down in Vietnam.
Conventional wisdom
about the course of US actions arises for many reasons
and meets many diverse needs. However, US foreign policy
surely must be tempered to match unshakable facts. The
press and the public demand that accountability no
matter what the concerns of national security. The US
experience in Southeast Asia, the war, horrible and
tragic as it was, has seemingly retreated into the
background for most Americans. Perhaps, sooner rather
than later, America's imminent role in Iraq might be
more loudly debated and examined after viewing The
Quiet American.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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