This brutally beautiful book is difficult to remember, to
integrate, and therefore to review or discuss.
Traumatic memories have been described as being recovered like paint
splotches – as bits and pieces without a narrative whole that links them together. The narrative that forms the skeleton of this
story is not revealed until page 308.
And it is also at page 308 that we plunge from the ordinary every
day trauma of the aftermath of war and its remembrance into
the heart – and this is a pun – of darkness.
I will tell the story in reverse order because I think that
it will help organize what has happened – and will allow me to clarify how this
traumatic book resembles psychoanalysis (and in the process perhaps send every
potential analysand among the readership running to the hills). This will, however, likely take away some of
the delicious pleasure of reading this book for those who have not yet done
so. The author of the manuscript, who
never identifies himself by name – he is simply the Captain, his title in the
South Vietnamese army, is clear throughout that he is writing a confession at
the command of another. Why and for what
purpose is unclear, and this question nags at us we move more and more deeply
into who it is that the Captain is and what he has done.
The Captain was born in North Vietnam. His father was French – the village Catholic
priest – and his mother was his maid, until she became pregnant. His father disavowed him, though also
preached to him and taught him. His
mother, who loved him dearly and sacrificed greatly for him, remained a
committed Catholic believer, but the (future) Captain was credulous about his
father. The Captain has two blood
brother friends – Man, who is a communist agent of the north and a true
believer in the communist way, and Bon, who leaves the North with the captain
and becomes a South Vietnamese patriot.
The Captain – the sympathizer of the title – travels to the US to be
educated, returns to South Vietnam and serves as an aide-de-camp to a South
Vietnamese General charged with Military Intelligence and torture of captured North Vietnamese and is in
regular contact with Bon. Unbeknownst to
Bon, he also stays in contact with Man and serves as a conduit of information
about the functioning of the South to the communists – the Captain is a mole.
The novel/confession begins with the evacuation of Saigon
and the captain leaving the country with the General and with Bon – Bon’s wife
and child die in Bon's arms on the tarmac as they dash for what seems like the
last plane to leave the country. The Captain, ordered by Man to America to spy on the Vietnamese who congregate there,
carries with him a text by Richard Hedd (Dickhead is the Bevis and Butthead level
translation of this man’s name), an American who purports to explain in it the
Vietnamese culture. The book is used to
send coded messages back and forth between Man and the Captain while the Captain
is in America – they write, in invisible ink. the page, paragraph, sentence and
word number of each word in their messages as letters to and from the Captain's "Aunt" in Paris.
I have told this in a straightforward and simple fashion
that drains all of the poetry, mystery and beauty out of a story told by a
true poet who is writing so solidly in the American vernacular that you would
swear he was Jack Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson, both because of the cultural
references and because of the stream of consciousness style with minimal
punctuation. But I think that the style
serves a very different (though also parallel) function than for the Euro-Americans
who use it. What we discover on page 308
– or thereabouts – is that the first 307 pages have been written while the
Captain has been in solitary confinement in a re-education camp in North
Vietnam. Even more disorienting, the
ultimate reader of the manuscript, unbeknownst to the Captain, is Man, who has
orchestrated becoming the commandant of the prisoner camp to which the Captain is taken
in order to oversee the Captain’s necessary torture, re-education, and release
as a means of preserving his (and Bon’s) life.
The stream of consciousness style, then, or, as we
psychoanalysts would say – his attempts to freely associate – is adopted in
order to help his captors know who he is – and ultimately that he is
innocent. But of course he is not. None of us are. In his description of the capture of a North
Vietnamese operative whom he tortured, the captain describes a dialogue with
this man, whom he describes as a philosopher, who points out the fundamental contradiction
of the western world. In the court of
law, a person is assumed to be innocent until proven guilty, but in the
foundational cultural and religious beliefs, that self-same person is guilty of
original sin. The point of the torture
that the Captain himself undergoes (and, even though he has read the pamphlets
that are the basis for the tortures that he endures, they effectively erode his
identity as surely as the Napalm that Man ran through erased the features of
his face) is that the Captain is not, as he would portray himself by completely
and totally confessing his sins, innocent, but guilty.
The next bit is something that I think bears saying because
I think it helps us make sense of the text, but I think it will ring hollow to
those who read it without having read the text: the Captain is guilty of
nothing. In the context of the story, he
is guilty of having done nothing – both of his sins are errors of omission – he
did not prevent a horrible crime against a communist woman (whose name was Viet
Nam) and he did not follow the order to stay away from a return to Vietnam,
which he felt was justified because he was protecting Bon by coming with him. He is also guilty of murder – a murder he
committed in order to be able to return to Vietnam, but this is a crime only to himself – he is
haunted by the ghosts – but not a crime in the eyes of those to whom he is
confessing because the murdered man was a Vietnamese man hostile to the
communist cause.
The text is told with the authority of someone who believes
he did no wrong. We live inside our own
heads and I think it is possible to believe that all that we have done has been
done for a reason. I remember when my
grandfather died – I was about six years old – he was a very upright, but also judgmental
man. I assumed that he had access to my
thoughts because he was dead and the dead can see such things (this
somewhat crazy thought stuck with me longer than I care to admit – in fact, it
is there, or vestiges of it, to this day).
In any case, as he served as a very real representative of my
conscience, I was able to avoid his harshest criticism because, after all, he
was privy to everything and thus could see – even better than I could – that I
was acting in the best way possible given the circumstances. How could I not ogle that woman? I was an adolescent male, after all – and he
would know that. I think it takes this
kind of confidence – the confidence that the captain had that he was working on
behalf of the revolution – that he was doing what the communists wanted – that allowed
him to freely and openly confess to all sorts of sins – in part because he saw
them as justified, but also because he saw his actions as justified through the
eyes that he imagined to be reading his confession.
I think it is this kind of freedom – the freedom to believe
that what we are doing is right – that it is justified – that this author is
really trying to get at and to undermine.
He wants us to know that American exceptionalism – our ability to
overlook our own failures to implement the values that we believe in so
strongly when applied to ourselves when we apply them to others – is something
that he wants us to wrestle with – the idea that, even though the courts may
take the position that we are innocent until proven guilty – he knows otherwise
– is an important lesson for us to learn from this text. But he teaches us this not by preaching (as
Brad Pitt does in War Machine – where Pitt nicely demonstrates that the
counterinsurgency tactics first articulated in Vietnam inevitably lead to
failure), but by applying this to himself.
Actually, I think, the three split selves in the text are all guilty. Man, the representative of
North Vietnam, tortures his closest friend and most reliable ally because this
friend has betrayed him by returning to Vietnam. When Man is feeling the pain of having his
family look with horror at him after his disfiguration, his only solace is that
his friend the Captain has it worse than him because he has to live in America. By returning, the Captain robs Man of his
only pleasure. But, I think more primally,
by embracing American culture, as he so thoroughly does in his use of the
American vernacular and his American imbued understanding of himself, the Captain
has betrayed his heritage. Finally, Bon,
by allying himself with Americans and with the South Vietnamese government has
betrayed the ideals of the country that are espoused by Ho Chi Minh, and he feels the guilt of having been responsible for the death of his wife and daughter - something that effectively paralyzes him.
My rather dry exposition of this somewhat philosophical
position takes away the visceral experience of the terror this novel visits on
the reader. In the same way, any
description of a psychoanalysis reduces the terror that is at the heart of
opening yourself to yourself and to another in the ways that the method invites
you to do. To know what you are capable
of – and to accept that, to the extent that you are able to do that not by the
exceptional justification of getting a pass from the internal benign
grandfather, but by sitting with it – perhaps not in a white room with bright
lights on 24/7 while being shocked each time you nod off to sleep – is a deep
and terrible revelation.
Ho Chi Minh’s slogan “Nothing is more precious than
independence and liberty” is the graduation bar that the Captain must cross in
his re-education. His ultimate
realization, and there is a Zen beauty to this, is that he – as nothing – as he
has lost all that he is and was – is more precious than independence and
liberty. The Captain is released from
the camp, Man assures that he and Bon will have perilous passage “home” (to the
US), and the book ends with the Captain’s asserting his will to live.
I think this is a profound book about the complicated nature
of identity. We are not unitary
beings. We are complex, convoluted,
internally contradictory people who are guilty.
I think that the author is proposing that the acknowledgement of our
guilt brings independence and liberty.
We are free to acknowledge who it is that we are and what we have done –
the good, the bad, and the ugly. The
author of this book is a proud citizen of the USA – and an angry one. We can learn a lot from him – especially if
we allow ourselves to realize that he is encouraging us to recognize ourselves
in him – not to turn away. In doing so,
we will see our divided selves (I think it is his own divided self that is so
nakedly on display in this tremendous novel).
And, if we honestly do that, if we acknowledge our contradictoriness,
this will lead us not into a feared shameful position, but will be a process that,
though painful, will position us to move forward – to live – more fully aware
of the complicated and messy ways that we do that.
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