Correspondent Visions of Vietnam by Mark A

Correspondent Visions of Vietnam by Mark A. Heberle Jonathan Schell has noted recently that "More than a decade after its end, the Vietnam war refuses to lie quiet in its historical grave'' (3). Adducing fundamental questions that remain unanswered, he goes on to address one in detail - why did the U.S. effort fail? - and focuses upon the inevitable political impotence of the South Vietnamese government to provide an answer. His own title, The Real War, implies a correction of previous definitions of the war's meaning, too narrowly centered on Americans in combat. Schell's essay implies that discovering and defining the truth about Vietnam remains an unresolved problem. Nowhere is the problem of revealing the "real war" more tellingly dramatized than in a small but extremely significant body of semi- fictional works that combine journalism with storytelling. Each is the product of a writer who spent his time in Vietnam observing and reporting the war but later composed a fiction told from the viewpoint of a protagonist who is a reporter. In each, the central character is more or less identical with the author, and the work as a whole presents a picture of the war that not only attempts to reveal the truth about Vietnam but also contains within itself a paradigm of truth- gathering in the protagonist's own actions and thoughts. This radical focus upon defining the reality of the war by mimicking yet going beyond journalism enables each writer to combine objective reporting with subjective judgment and evaluation of the war itself, as well as flawed or inadequate understanding of its significance. These works include Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Robin Moore's The Green Berets, Takeshi Kaiko's Into a Black Sun, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and Gustav Hasford's The Short- Timers. The first two are foundation texts for all subsequent Vietnam literature, and the others consciously or unconsciously acknowledge their influence. But all of them blend fact with fiction in what we may call a correspondent vision, a work that attempts to correct mistaken reports about the war with a revelation of the truth. The Quiet American transcribes Greene's own experiences as a correspondent in 195 1-52 and 1954-55 for Paris Match, The Sunday Times, Le Figaro, and The New Republic. Fowler, Greene's protagonist, is an English reporter whose judgments recreate Greene's, but whose character transcends his creator's, just as Greene's novel transcends his journalism. Nevertheless, the formal organization of The Quiet American reflects the situation of the news report. Framed by the beginning and end of an official police inquiry that will discover nothing, Fowler's own investigation of the death of the American secret agent Alden Pyle takes the form of an imaginatively reconstructed journal of all his encounters with his friend and rival. In the process, he truthfully reports all the causes of I Pyle's death, including his own culpability, but his is a story that can never be filed publicly: "It wouldn't have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths, for it would have damaged Anglo-American relations, the Minister would have been upset" (21). In recreating what he knows about Pyle's life and death, Fowler presents the author's own political viewpoint, so that Greene's novel is also a correspondent's analysis of the war. Until his betrayal of Pyle to the Viet Minh, Fowler is ethically detached from the war that he is reporting and that he understands so well. Such detachment arises from his own nihilistic existentialism, but it also characterizes his professional identity: he insists to Inspector Vigot that he is "not involved" enough in the war to care who is responsible for Pyle's death: Not involved, I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action - even an opinion is a kind of action. (28) Fowler realizes that there is no "third force" in the war, that one must choose between Pyle or Mr. Heng and his Viet Minh associates, but he has no more faith in either side than he has in God, and his situation in the middle is paradigmatic of the Western reporter's curious position: he tries hard to fully understand both sides, and just as hard not to judge between them. He must remain a noncombatant even while knowing what motivates the combatants. Fowler thus declines a French lieutenant's offer of his helmet during a patrol in Phat Diem (3, an offer that Pyle accepts (56); similarly, he refuses to take a rifle when he and Pyle abandon the government watch tower on the road from Tay Ninh (107), as well as his friend's subsequent offer of a sten gun which the American has ironically and ominously taken away from their South Vietnamese defenders. Although Fowler's delivery of Pyle to the Viet Minh is a climactic moral choice, it leaves him wholly unsatisfied, because he has no positive faith himself in the political cause that he assists. Trying to remain a noncombatant technically, he leaves the ultimate outcome to a God that does not exist for him, lets others decide the best way of "stopping" Pyle, and is ultimately dissatisfied with his loss of reportorial objectivity and detachment in reacting so forcefully to Pyle's mismanaged massacre of civilians: "I had judged like a journalist in terms of qpantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decisions would ever be simple again" (183). Fowler's scorn for "journalists" might seem puzzling, but it follows from his earlier definition of himself as a "reporter," simply recording observations, in contrast to other Western journalists with the pretensions of being "correspondents." Fowler's view of Indochina journalism is low through the novel, reflecting Greene's own: the French newsmen are propagandists, the Americans officious louts like Granger, who patriotically cites Stephen Crane as his model for making up imaginary accounts of the war (35-36). Military briefings and tours, which extend only to so-called victories, are a waste of time except for incidental amenities like the "best barman in Indo-China" (35). Military censorship or the Western reading public's own low tolerance for unfamiliar, complex, or disturbing news further limits the amount of truth that one may expect from journalism, as the fate of Fowler's accurate dispatch on "Operation Bicyclette" illustrates: " 'Bicycle Bombs' made a good headline. All of them blamed the Communists. I was the only one to,write that the bombs were a demonstration on the part of General The, and my account was altered at the office. The General wasn't news. You couldn't waste space by identifying him" (142). The Quiet American is thus a satire on Vietnam journalism as well as a true reporting of the real situation, and Fowler is Greene's agent in fulfilling both purposes. His own definitive judgments about the war are fully revealed only to Pyle, as a corrective to the younger man's faith in the Cold War demonology of York Harding. Ironically, however, the mentor gains more wisdom than his student, directly opposing Pyle's futile terrorism yet gracefully yielding his mistress Phuong to the American after coming to respect her best interests through his conversations with his romantic rival. Fowler tries to educate Pyle through arguments that often reproduce Greene's own Vietnam journalism, ?nd his utter failure to dissuade his friend from the obsession with The's chimerical third force may suggest the limits of war correspondence at its best as well as the strength of American cold war ideology. Fowler is perhaps the most important target in Greene's critique of the correspondent vision. His refusal to go beyond mere "reporting" stems from a cynical repudiation of personal moral involvement in the war that belies his deepest instincts. "I hate war," he thinks to himself as he observes the slaughter of civilians at Phat Diem and the Red River (53, 148), but he never makes his protest effective either by leaving Vietnam or by incarnating his own judgment in his writing while moving from "reporter" to "correspondent": after all, the very critiques of the war that Fowler will only reflect to himself or reveal to Pyle were published by Greene, who must have had faith beyond his realistic expectations that they might help to bring peace to Indochina. Like many of Greene's protagonists, however, Fowler not only lacks faith in anything beyond himself but would feel threatened by it: "I had never desired faith. The job of a reporter is to expose and record. I had never in my career discovered the inexplicable" (88). Greene's novel, set in 1951-52 before and after the death of France's best military commander, General de Lattre, has been the fundamental Anglo-American representation of the Vietnam war not only because of its priority and formal excellence, but also because of its visionary prescience: the opening scene, reporting the disembarking of "new American planes" (1 I), anticipates and identifies the U.S. role as merely supplanting the French as agents of futile Western interference in Vietnam; Pyle's misguided view of the Vietnam conflict as simply the local installment of a universal, Manichean struggle between Communism and the Free World anticipates the New Frontier justification for such intervention; his hope of finding a "third force" that would somehow be both independent of and dependent upon American support embodies the fatal contradiction of all the successive Saigon regimes after the American-supported downfall of the doomed Diem; and in Pyle's own ignominious death we may see the final outcome of American Vietnam policy.

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