A Dangerous Friend

Ward Just

Description

Well-meaning American civilians make an attempt at nation-building during the Vietnam War, in this “powerful” novel by a National Book Award finalist (Newsweek).

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Time and the Los Angeles Times
 
In this “extraordinary,” beautifully constructed large-canvas novel of Saigon in 1965, Ward Just takes a penetrating look into America’s role in the world (The New York Times).
 
Sydney Parade, a political scientist, has left his home and family in an effort to become part of something larger than himself, a foreign aid operation in the South Vietnamese capital. Even before he arrives, he encounters French and Americans who reveal to him the unsettling depths of a conflict he thought he understood—and in Saigon, the Vietnamese add yet another dimension. Before long, the rampant missteps and misplaced ideals trap Parade and others in a moral crossfire.
 
“Emotionally wrenching and always beautifully observant,” this is a story of conscience and its consequences among those for whom Vietnam was neither the right fight nor the wrong fight but the only fight (Entertainment Weekly). The exotic tropical surroundings, coarsening and corrupting effects of a colonial regime, and visionary delusions of the American democratizers all play their part. “A literary triumph that transcends its war story” and a New York Times Notable Book, A Dangerous Friend can be justly compared to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo or Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—a thrilling narrative roiling with intrigue, mayhem, and betrayal (San Francisco Chronicle).
 
“Makes you want to run screaming into the street to protest retrospectively the war he has so movingly recreated.” —The New York Times

Sujets

• Political science
• Vietnam War
• Indochina
• Ho Chi Minh City
• Humanitarian aid
• Aid
• War novel

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 03 mai 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780547561424
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Effort
The Family Armand
A Child in Such a Milieu
Dacy
Getting Used to It
A Shooting in the Market
Assimilate or Disperse
Big Dumb Blond
Plantation Louvet
The Life of the Mind
Pablo’s Hat
The Arsenal of Democracy
About the Author
Copyright © 1999 by Ward Just All rights reserved
 
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
 
www.hmhco.com
 
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Just, Ward A dangerous friend / Ward Just. p. cm. “A Peter Davison book.” ISBN 978-0-618-05670-5 1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Fiction, 2. Vietnam—History—1945–1975—Fiction. I. Title. PS 3560. U 75 D 36 1999 813'.54—dc21 98-50728 CIP
 
e ISBN 978-0-547-56142-4 v2.0215
 
 
 
 
AS ALWAYS, FOR SARAH
 
And for David and JB Greenway, thanks for the use of the library
The Effort
I WILL INSIST at the beginning that this is not a war story. There have been plenty of those and will be many more, appalling stories of nineteen-year-olds breaking down, frightened out of their wits, or engaging in acts of unimaginable gallantry; and often all three at the same time. The war stories were from a different period, later on, when the war became an epidemic, a plague like the Black Death. Society was paralyzed by fear. Order broke down. Duty and honor were forgotten in the rush to survive. Commanders deserted their units, friends turned their backs. Among the population, individual burials were replaced by burials en masse. The American morgue was expanded again and again. Aircraft that brought fresh troops returned with coffins. I remember watching a doctor perform an autopsy while humming through his teeth, the identical note repeated monotonously. His fingers were rigid as iron.
When he saw me, he looked up and whispered, Bring out your dead.
But that time was not my time. That time was later on, when things went to hell generally, and the best of us lost all heart. My time was early days, when civilians still held a measure of authority. We were startled by the beauty of the country, and surprised at its size. It looked so small on our world maps, not much larger than New England. We understood that in Vietnam Americans would add a dimension to their identity. Isn’t identity always altered by its surroundings and the task at hand? So this is a different cut of history, a civilian cut, without feats of arms or battlefield chaos. If love depends on faith, think of my narrative as a kind of romance, the story of one man with a bad conscience and another with no conscience and the Frenchman and his wife who lived in the parallel world, the one we thought was a mirage from the century before, a bankrupt colonial milieu that offered—so many possibilities, as Dicky Rostok said.
 
We went to Vietnam because we wanted to. We were not drafted. We were encouraged to volunteer and if our applications were denied, we applied again. We arrived jet-lagged at Tan Son Nhut airport where someone met us and hurried us off to wherever we were billeted, usually a villa on one of the wide residential boulevards that reminded everyone of a French provincial city. Even the plane trees looked imported. And later that day we showed up for work at one of the agencies or the embassy or Lansdale’s outfit or the Llewellyn Group and briefed—an exercise that had much in common with initiation into a secret society, Skull and Bones or the Masons. We learned a new language, one that excluded outsiders. We lived with one eye on Washington and the other on Hanoi, and the Washington eye was the good eye. The effort—that was what we called the war, The Effort—was existential, meaning in a steady state of becoming. War aims were revised month to month and often week to week, to keep our adversary off balance.
There were thousands of us recruited from all over the government, from foundations, think tanks, and universities, too; even police departments. Sydney Parade had worked for a foundation while Dicky Rostok was a foreign service officer, as was I. A few of us went at once to the countryside, where we administered various aid programs in collaboration with our Vietnamese counterparts. We worked harder than we had ever worked in our lives, or would ever work again. We were drunk on work. Work was passion. We were in it for the long haul, and from the beginning we swam upstream.
We reorganized their finances. We built roads, bridges, schools, and airstrips. We distributed medicine and arranged for army doctors to vaccinate the children and conduct clinics for the sick. Our agronomists devised new ways to cultivate and harvest rice and then introduced a miracle strain that grew beautifully but did not taste the way Vietnamese expected rice to taste; so it was grown and harvested and left to rot or exported to India. We performed these chores every day, all the while trying to discover what it was that kept the war going, even accelerating, month to month. The success of the enemy seemed to defy logic. We had so much and they had so little; our nineteen-year-olds were supported by an arsenal beyond the imagination of the guerrillas facing them. Or so we imagined, as we knew next to nothing of their personalities, their biographies, where they had gone to school, where they were born, whether they were married or single, what animated them beyond the struggle for unification, a political ideal that could not account for their tenacious will; think of Brady’s photographs of the Union infantry. So we wrote letters home describing Buddha’s face. We described Vietnam as we would describe the character of a human being we had never seen but was famous nonetheless, an introverted personality replete with legend, rumor, and innuendo.
After a few months, friends and family dropped their pretense of polite curiosity. They had their own urgent inquiries. How are things actually? The reports on the evening news are so confusing, we can’t make head nor tail of them. Are we winning this war or losing it? Give us your opinion. Your letters are ambiguous! Please give us the straight story, what’s happening out there really? What’s the story behind the scenes? And later still, We hope you know how much everyone here is behind you boys and what you’re doing in Vietnam. It sounds awful. We all appreciate the effort. Is everything all right with you? Keep your head down. Hurry home.
Of course there was no straight story in the sense of a narrative that began in one place and ended in another. Nothing was deliberately withheld; very little was known. This was exhilarating, as if we were explorers in a land at the very margins of the known world. We argued all the time, unraveling the legend from the rumor and the rumor from the innuendo; and it was Parade who suggested that we were imprisoned in our own language, tone deaf to possibility. Parade thought the VC led the charmed life of the unicorn, the beast of myth that could be neither caught by man nor touched by a weapon. Rostok scoffed at that. There was no such thing as a charmed life. There was nothing on this earth that could not be tamed, given money enough and time.
We ventured far afield to discover the logic to events. Perhaps all occupation forces find themselves at odds with their hosts, knowing at once that they are but a veneer to another, more natural life, a life in-country that goes on as it has gone on for centuries, a life as teeming and fluid and uncontrolled as the life beneath the surface of the great oceans. We came to understand that there was a uniform world parallel to the artificial world we inhabited. Ours was swarming with shadows, dancing and fluctuating day to day while the parallel world was symmetrical and anchored, prophetic in a way that ours was not. It was this world we had to enter in order to discover the nature of the resistance, meaning a reliable estimate of the situation. We only wanted to know where we stood, not so much to ask.
In the meantime there was an infrastructure to be built and a bureaucracy to be put in place. The first was impossible without the second, and it was the second to which Rostok devoted his energies. He wanted his lines of authority to be unequivocal. Sooner or latere Llewellyn Group, generously funded, superbly organized, and staffed with the best minds, would discover a means to infiltrate the parallel world and decipher it—so many possibilities, as Rostok said.
 
He had a flattened nose, perhaps evidence of a youthful fistfight, and an unpleasant high-pitched laugh. He was always in motion, his hands describing arcs, his head turtling forward as he inquired, Huh? Huh? His memory was phenomenal, always an asset in management, but he seemed unaware that an overactive memory often blinded one to the circumstances of the present. Rostok was not at all bookish, but that’s often the case with men of action. Those books he had read he invested with an almost mystical significance; probably he believed that the mere fact of his acquaintance gave them a kind of grandeur. Voodoo, Sydney Parade said.
One of his favorites was Joseph Conrad, not the Conrad of the African jungles but the Conrad of the open Asian seas, the coming-of-age Conrad who was always conscious of the shadow line between youth and maturity. Rostok believed that Conrad had