Chumming the Waters
Vietnam and The Implication
Hello, I’m Tim. I’m new to Substack and still figuring this whole deal out.
In the meantime, please read and enjoy an essay I wrote in college about the Vietnam/American War. In it, I make (milquetoast) critiques of Bảo Ninh and his sentiments towards violence, the way the war was viewed by Americans, and on Ninh’s book, The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. Afterwards, I reflect on this essay and the eternal question of what is to be done. Pictures added for this post.
The Worth of War
Images of violence and depravity that constitute the reality of war are often obscured or sometimes even left out entirely by the media (particularly the United States), especially those of the opposing side in our long history with international violence. While morality has often been ascribed to said acts of violence by humans onto humans, Hoàng Ấu Phương, more commonly referred to by his pen name, Bảo Ninh, disagrees. In his deeply unsettling and haunting work of fiction The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam, Ninh lays out the traumatic visions of the Vietnam War, or as it is referred to in Vietnam, the American War. An excerpt from the first chapter of the novel follows a young man by the name of Kien, a soldier in the American War who fights for the North Vietnamese Army. Although Ninh himself denies the comparison between himself and Kien, it is hard to avoid speculation as to how much of Nihn is reflected in Kien himself. Ninh served in the North Vietnamese Army at the age of seventeen, fueled by a vengeance for the destruction he witnessed in his hometown of Hanoi. Though this version of Ninh is not as apparent in Kien, it can be derived that Ninh became Kien through his experience with war.
Ninh states in an interview with Ken Burns for his documentary The Vietnam War that Ninh’s parents believed that the United States’ military was just the next version of Vietnam’s previous oppressors, the French. He grew up with his parents’ ideologies and held them with him as he fought for the NVA. After witnessing the destruction of his village, who could blame him for wanting to end the bombing? Ninh says, “People were killed. Their houses were destroyed. My school was evacuated to a rural area. Our lives were turned upside down. I was fourteen. I wasn't scared. I was angry.” In The Sorrow of War, the traumatic imagery that Ninh describes is told in a tired, almost defeated tone. His actual experience with the war changed his outlook on fighting and his writing suggests it. In the same documentary, Ninh says, “They were Vietnamese. That's the tragedy. The tragedy of the war is that Vietnamese killed each other. American firepower, Vietnamese flesh and blood.” Ninh clearly hated fighting, a fact that was made apparent throughout his writing and a stark contrast from where he began as a teenager just trying to stop the bombs from dropping. The experiences in the American War that fueled the tragic and violent stories told throughout The Sorrow of War are not his alone, though. Ninh was one of many Vietnamese soldiers who put their lives on the line to defend his country from yet another invading force.
Despite what Americans may think, Ninh and his Vietnamese compatriots are still painfully human, something which he reminds everyone in an interview he participated in with Bunkong Tuon, a professor from Union College. Ninh says “If you were a guy and other guys had already gone to fight, the female students looked down at you and thought of you as a coward. So you went to war. As young men, we believed that we were invincible. We could never imagine that any of us could be killed.” The tragic parallel between American and Vietnamese soldiers is apparent, something that Ninh later came to realize as he wrote his book. The Sorrow of War uses graphic and violent imagery to convince the reader that there are people in Vietnam who are just like people in the United States of America. People that had witnessed the physical destruction of their home, experienced an onslaught of emotional sabotage, and took on the spiritual debt that was pushed onto them by the United States of America. This was a total disaster for all parties involved. Violence, though seen as necessary by the leaders of North Vietnam and the United States of America, is and was absolutely detestable for all parties concerned with war and causes an untold amount of trauma and grief that have a hold on all participants for the rest of their lives.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for twelve hours...and when it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of them, not one stinking dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill- smelled like- victory.” These immortal words, spoken by Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore played by Robert Duval in Francis Ford Coppola’s landmark film Apocalypse Now, are often parodied in a multitude of other media and, indeed, are memorable as a quote in and of itself, even by those who have not seen the actual film. Although the Vietnam War had officially concluded four years prior to the release of Apocalypse Now, the movie itself and those like it were a catalyst for a major shift in overall public opinion on the war and U.S. foreign policy altogether for years to come. However, this adjusted attitude towards the Vietnam War, at least, among the general public, was one of handwringing regret at a missed opportunity.
The war in Vietnam was a tragic miscalculation and misallocation of troops and soldiers at best and an example of the U.S. not putting its best foot forward on the global stage at worst. Even in movies highly critical of the U.S. government and its war like Apocalypse Now, one can’t help but feel as though Americans, if not the entire country, including its government, were tricked into this war with no way out. A mixture of shooting and crying permeates most American media about the Vietnam War with little to no heed paid to the Vietnamese, the actual victims of the war. Using logic gratuitously provided by American media, the Vietnamese were savage and barbaric in their efforts to repel the Americans and thus not worthy of cameras, printing presses, or television screens due to said barbarity.
Vietnam was not alone in its struggle for independence and the right to self-determination, however. After dealing with colonization from France, Japan, France again, and then the United States, the Vietnamese people were tired and beaten from this onslaught; and war, while horrible, was seen as necessary by leaders like Hồ Chí Minh. In his book The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins points out that the Third World collectivized amongst themselves to insist that they had a place on the world stage. A quote from the book reads:
In 1950, more than two-thirds of the world’s population lived in the Third World, and with few exceptions, these peoples had lived under the control of European colonialism. Some of these countries had managed to break free of imperial rule in the nineteenth century; some earned their independence when fascist forces retreated at the end of World War II; some attempted to do so in 1945, only to be re-invaded by the First World armies; and for many others, the war had changed little, and they were still unfree. (Bevins 13)
Vietnam was one of these countries, trying to declare independence from France with the United States eventually intervening on France’s behalf. While Ninh may not have seen the bigger picture when he was only seventeen years old, it was clear that war was the only option left at the people of Vietnam’s discretion. While the Vietnamese were fighting for their independence, or in Ninh’s case, trying to navigate what it means to be a man while going through a crucial moment in your country’s history, the American soldiers themselves did not have a clear idea of what they were doing there.
In the same documentary that Bảo Ninh was interviewed in, Tim O’Brien, a veteran of the Vietnam War and author, gave his thoughts about it. He asks, “Do you go off and kill people if you're not pretty sure it's right? And if your nation isn't pretty sure it's right?” There was a lot of confusion amongst the lower-ranking, individual, soldiers putting their lives on the line for their country. As it turns out, this was not a problem for the top brass in the military or even other soldiers fighting in the war. In Peter Davis’ sobering documentary about the terror and strife the United States inflicted upon Vietnam, Hearts and Minds, General William Westmoreland, a general in the United States Army, stated “Well the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient and as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” This clearly contradicts the images shown throughout the documentary and indeed the very words written by Ninh. Life was not cheap to the Vietnamese. War was just as much a hell for them as it was for the United States. This dehumanization was prevalent throughout the war and made it quite easy for Americans to allow wanton destruction to commence on their behalf without much thought beyond the vague notion that they might be helping out the Vietnamese people in the long run.
Destruction was a key part of the United States’ plan to defeat the country of Vietnam and weaken their spirit. Even if they would never admit it, the point of the war was to punish the Vietnamese for standing their ground and not falling in line. In the introduction to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s seminal book Manufacturing Consent, they write:
According to Vietnamese estimates, the war had cost them 3 million killed, 300,000 missing, 4.4 million wounded, and 2 million harmed by toxic chemicals; and its land was left ravaged by bombs and Rome plows as well as chemical weapons. With 58,000 killed, the U.S. death toll from the war was under one-tenth of 1 percent of its population; Vietnam’s people were attacked by chemical warfare and had their countryside devastated. (Herman and Chomsky xxx)
This destruction employed by the United States was all-encompassing, making sure that it was felt through all echelons of society, from Hồ Chí Minh to Bảo Ninh. They felt it deeply and it led to books like The Sorrow of War being written to accurately reflect just how deeply they had been wounded.
THE ARTIST’S WORK
In 1991, Bảo Ninh released a book that is based on his time serving in the North Vietnamese Army during the American War called The Sorrow of War. Ninh writes of his experiences with war and witnessing the bloodshed and destruction of his countrymen and home in the book with his story woven throughout the fictional events of The Sorrow of War. Ninh writes of Kien, a protagonist in the story, saying, “[Kien] was unconcerned and coldly indifferent, showing no fear, no anger. Just lethargy and depression.” If one is to assume that Kien represents Ninh's experiences throughout the war, then the reader can see that Ninh clearly abhors violence and that it stripped him of any feelings whatsoever. It can also be argued that Kien, or Ninh, has forced himself to not feel anything in order to proceed with living. To choose to live in this situation is to choose to kill. This sort of paradox permeates the story and forces Kien into a state of apathy to cope with living throughout the war. Mentally, this has to take a toll on the average person and that is to not even mention that many of the people fighting on both sides of the war could still be considered children. Ninh was seventeen when he enlisted and many other people who were drafted or enlisted in the war were under twenty-five. How could anyone live with themselves after what they witnessed had they not made a decisive and immediate cutoff to most emotions?
What can you do when you feel such hopelessness in a seemingly unending struggle for your freedom? What Kien, and perhaps Ninh, did was to escape into phantasmagoria using hallucinogens like the flower of the canina rosa, a substance similar to the cannabis smoked by American soldiers. It was no secret that drugs were a large problem for both United States military command and the NVA, and Kien was no exception. Ninh states, “Smoking rosa canina Kien would immerse himself in a world of mythical and wonderful dreams which in ordinary moments his soul could never penetrate.” Kien’s melancholy did not come from any lack of trying on his part, though. Ninh writes, “To buoy himself up, Kien sometimes tried to concentrate on uplifting memories. But no matter how hard he tried to revive the scenes, they wouldn’t stay. It was hopeless.” Kien, having no other way to escape the harsh realities of war, turned to the canina rosa. As Ninh wrote earlier, Kien would often dream of fantastical settings and anything was better than the dense jungles that claimed him during his waking hours. Describing these dreams, Ninh writes, “In these luxurious dreams the imagined air was so clean, the sky so high, the clouds and sunshine so beautiful, approaching the perfection of his childhood dreams.” Eventually, the NVA caught wind that the soldiers are smoking the hallucinogen and orders them to stop, burning the vines on which the flowers grow. This, along with many other things that happen throughout the story, does not seem to phase Kien. Instead, Kien goes on to describe the depressing gloom of the rain and the unforgiving countryside which continued to torment himself and his fellow soldiers. As Kien struggles with trying to feel anything, Ninh continues to write of other soldiers and their methods of coping, one of which was turning inward and focusing on the spirit.
Ninh writes of parallels between war and religion in the first chapter of The Sorrow of War. Although there can be certain moralities tied to religion in general, it seems that soldiers in the war used it as a method of coping and healing. That much was true for both sides. Majority of Vietnam were Buddhist and thus took their religious beliefs with them into times of strife, sorrow, and violence, the same as the Americans had. The Americans brought their rosaries, Bibles, and crucifixes and the Vietnamese set up shrines for their dead to ensure that they would move on from their final resting place. Although Ninh does not write of Kien being particularly spiritual, he still believes in the lingering effect of death. Death stalks the Vietnamese as it seemed to the Americans. Ninh writes, “The sobbing whispers were heard deep in the jungle at night, the howls carried on the wind. Perhaps they really were the voices of the wandering souls of dead soldiers.” Spirituality is often associated with some sort of hope or safe passage in times of war in the west, but for the Vietnamese, who had to live with the consequences of the war for the rest of their lives, this spirituality was different. The Vietnamese did what they could to move on, even when it seemed impossible. This responsibility to move on and keep on trudging was not reserved for the living. Ninh writes out one of these prayers for peace, which reads when translated, “Suffering in life, pain in death, the common fate of us soldiers. We pray the sacred souls will bless us, that we may overcome enemy fire and avenge our lost comrades…” Visions of death and destruction filled the eyes, ears, and dreams of everyone fighting. Kien can hardly deny that there was something surreal about occupying a space in which many before him had died, maybe weeks, days, or even hours before he himself had been there.
The violence that took place during the war cannot be overstated. Every day, soldiers from everywhere took part in the slaughter. Violence, seen as senseless from soldiers like Ninh (and thus reflected in Kien), was a useful tool for the leaders of both governments. The horrifying and shocking effects of seeing violence kept each soldier on their toes. In a quite shocking description of the hunting of an orangutan, Ninh writes “[Thinh] called in three others to help him drag [the orangutan] back to the squad huts. But, oh God, when it was killed and skinned the animal looked like a fat woman with ulcerous skin, the eyes, half-white, half-grey, still rolling.” Ninh is particularly good at describing acts of violence and bloodshed in a banal way that makes you wonder if Kien, and by extension Ninh, are not sociopaths. As described earlier, this complete emotional shutoff was a necessity to surviving war and violence, especially the violence inflicted by the United States. Events like the My Lai Massacre on the American side and the Tet Offensive on the Vietnamese side were common throughout the war. Ninh proposes that not even the dead are protected from violence. Despite many efforts to move the deceased on, they too are subject to the subsumption into the Vietnamese landscape. In the second chapter of the book, Ninh writes of the tasks of a scout, saying, “Now they were merely names and remains. For some of the other dead, not even that. Some had been totally vaporized, or blasted into such small pieces that their remains had long since been liquidized into mud.” Such violence and depravity were common in the witnessing of war, but that did not mean that it got any easier with each passing event. War in and of itself is violent. Though many may claim that war is necessary and therefore good, Ninh does not make this claim and that is apparent throughout The Sorrow of War.
Bảo Ninh is a product of his environment, and it is very unfortunate that he had to engage in the violence and bloodshed that led to the deaths of so many Americans and his fellow countrymen during what could have been some of the best years of his life. Ninh makes it very clear that he was affected deeply by the war, even if the story is not technically about him. War is the act of destruction of your enemies. Destruction that goes beyond the physical, but also making sure to leave nothing untouched. The mental state of Kien is dilapidated at best and downright sociopathic at worst, many times displaying these tendencies through complete apathy towards anything and anyone around him. Efforts were made to spiritually reconcile with the horrifying scenes on display throughout the war, but Kien’s tone and disregard for this spirituality probably means that he does not think it is worth the effort. Physically, we can see the agonizing treks and constant use of hallucinogens would affect the performance of the soldiers and not let them have a moment of rest. While these tolls are taken on their persons, violence is woven throughout and absolute, touching every part of the soldiers lives. While looking into the effects of war and witnessing it, questions are then posed. Why would people fight for a country that did not care about them beyond how many enemies they could kill? Who would fill in the gaps left by the dead? Why are such acts of depravity allowed and even lauded in broader society? What is the worth of war to the living? Ninh seems to say: absolutely nothing.
Reading this again gives me pause. A lot of the more awkwardly worded parts were so because of a commitment to answer a specific prompt and an ideological commitment to accept what’s taught in class as true. No outside sources are provided to you. No larger discussion of what the Vietnam War was. Just read the material and answer the prompt.
Ninh is a famous writer in the West, probably one of if not the most famous Vietnamese writer in the West who fought for the NVA, as far as I know. He captured the West with his aforementioned book, but his insight into the Vietnam/American War is that of a general sentiment that “War and violence are bad. Full stop.” Of course, if you were an undergraduate that has been informed about the Vietnam War by popular media and little else besides the shoot-and-cry propaganda that exists outside of visual media that we were required to read for this class, you’d be inclined to agree. Violence is a tool, often used against the working class and the disadvantaged across the entire world. But to dismiss violence, especially when it is in defense of your national sovereignty, as was the case in Vietnam, as equal to (or sometimes in the perspectives of many Americans, greater than) an invader or aggressor, something is missing. A perspective is being hidden and Ninh was used as a useful idiot for America’s legacy in Vietnam, and Indochina more broadly, to say “This man fought for both sides and even he thinks that both sides are at fault.” This is a tiny, little thing that, if you’re not trained to see it, would go straight into your subconscious, filed away in a mental cabinet labeled “Vietnam War Stuff.”
I wrote this paper with a little more knowledge than most of the people in that class (I assume), but some of my preconceived notions about what the Vietnam War seem to slip through the wide cracks of my unknowing in parts. I enjoyed this particular class and the professor was very kind and helpful in honing my writing skills, but while I was taking this class, and indeed, throughout my entire time at my JC, I was beginning to undertake a serious responsibility and commitment I made to myself to try and understand the world from a left-leaning, material perspective. I tried to do so independently from what little I was taught in the public education system and what highly refined propaganda that passed as education was taught to me in college. It’s going to be a life-long journey and it was quite an effort to dispel my suburbanite egoisms and generally American brain in the beginning years, but I digress. I began to notice The Implication (no relation to FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia); a schema built into public discourse and our systems of education that implies certain narratives about historical events to be true without any sort of discussion about the event itself. Heavily American-leaning narratives and omission of critical details and events are meant to imply that the former is true and there is no use in seeking out the latter. In the case of writing the above essay, I was not allowed to disagree with Ninh that violence on all sides was bad. I was not allowed to question the narrative that the United States of America is ultimately a global force for good. Try as I might to point out some of the more disturbing facts about what America did during the war, what good it does for even a single class of people is moot since this was an essay, not a discussion.
When you are as bombarded with propaganda through childhood to adulthood, the entire world is easy to understand, and to rip yourself away from that understanding takes effort and principle. It takes a schema of your own making if there isn’t an institution to put one there for you, and if you live in the U.S. and have no useful or truthful inherited knowledge of the world from your parents or a mentor of some sort, there just isn’t one. The problem then lies in finding “the truth,” whatever that means. In the U.S., what follows is a race to find one’s own truth while justifying your own wealth or pursuit of it. The United States’ government doesn’t need every single person to believe its overt narratives. The Implication forms the boundaries of what Noam Chomsky commonly refers to as the “spectrum of acceptable opinion.” To the United States’ government, 340 million people with 600 million different, acceptable ideas is preferable to 340 million people with one idea. Trying to get Americans out of the mental funk that they’ve been encased in over their entire lifetimes is a Sisyphean task. Many Americans are self-absorbed and self-righteous no matter what. I’ve seen the people flip the switch into defense mode in real time in many conversations I’ve had. A determination enters their eyes and the spirit of William Kilgore overtakes them. People who are otherwise kind and wise will defend empire, cruelty, bloodshed, and war-crimes in defense of America as an idea once they feel that they are on the back foot, and it is usually because of a defense of an American future. They dream of the McMansion, they dream of two Audis, they dream to travel and provide a lion’s share to their children and they are not very kind to those who try to disturb their peaceful slumber. The truth is that their opinions on U.S. interventionism are about as useful as yours. We have to meet these people where they stand, because they are certainly not moving towards us. To split hairs with them is useless. They have wants and needs that extend beyond what the Democratic or Republican party are prepared to offer and it is up to people who can navigate this world uprightly to see those needs and speak to them.
Many Americans are clamoring for a change. Any change. It’s why Donald Trump became the second president ever to win two non-consecutive terms. It’s why Ukraine nominated the Eastern-European equivalent of Steve Carell as their president in 2019. As the functions of the state that are in charge of keeping people safe, healthy, and fed continue to fail globally, people are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what’ll stick and they’re pretty much split between whether it’s helping or not. It’s not, but most can’t see that. Some can, some can’t, some won’t, and some are very invested in people not seeing anything while they pick their pocket. There’s a common hatred for that last group of people, though. It’s the most natural feeling in the world.
It’s all love, though.
“War is Bad Full Stop” I like this very much Tim!
Whoah, this is something else 🔥🔥🔥 Goodness Timmsan you wrote that like you were in the middle war. I feel like I was immersed into the experiences of third world fighters their struggles as well as the Americans. Love it ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️