Posting #28: The Story about The French and American Wars in Vietnam

The story:  If Americans are told anything about the French war in Vietnam preceding the American war there, we are told they are unrelated.  Following Vietnam’s occupation by the Japanese during World War II, the story goes, the French tried to recolonize Vietnam.  When they failed and Vietnam was partitioned into North and South, the story continues, the United States generously began to train the new South Vietnamese military with American military advisors.  Escalation into hostilities between the (generous) United States and (antagonistic) North Vietnam occurred only in 1964, when the North Vietnamese are said to have provoked the American military with attacks on US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.  These attacks led the United States to having to protect itself and, in March of 1965, the replacement of advisors with full American combat units.

My take on the story:  This happy story of innocence, nobility, and generosity has grave repercussions for all Americans because it makes us ignorant about American responsibility for wars.

The details below illustrate how the United States was culpable during the French war in Vietnam and how we might have become involved in combat there.  

·      First, as I have written in my book American War Stories, these details date at least to the 1920s, when Hollywood films depicted the Vietnamese as primitive children needing rescue (19).  This representation prejudiced American attitudes about Vietnam’s ability to govern itself.  (See also my chapter, “Naturalizing War: The Stories We Tell about the Vietnam War” in Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-first Century Perspectives.)

·      Second, during World War II, the United States armed the local nationalist insurgents, the Viet Minh, to resist their Japanese occupiers.  That support ended after the Japanese surrender in 1945.  Though the resisting-recolonization Viet Minh (in the North) and Viet Cong (in the South) became distinct groups once partitioning happened in 1954, by supporting the Viet Minh against the Japanese, the US had a meaningful part in establishing the baseline for resistance.     

·      Third, the Americans did nothing to prevent the French from trying to recolonize, even though President Roosevelt was opposed to the recolonization before his death in 1945.  Although under President Truman the US remained neutral for the first four years of the French war, in 1950 it became alarmed that the Vietnamese resisters—the nationalist Viet Minh, whom the US had armed during World War II—were winning.  Therefore, beginning in 1950 and ending with France’s defeat in 1954, the United States funded 80% of its ally’s war, to the tune of $2.6B.  It also deployed to Vietnam during those four years military advisors and warmaking machinery: tanks, ships, planes, and artillery. 

·      Fourth, despite the substantial US investment in France’s war, France was defeated in 1954. At that point, the country was partitioned via the Geneva Accords into North and South, with a promise that the country would hold elections in 1956.  Under President Eisenhower, the United States was opposed to the elections, fearing that they would favor Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of North Vietnam.  Consequently, the US continued sending military advisors to South Vietnam, but instead of supporting the French, the American advisors supported the fledgling South Vietnamese military.

·      Fifth, one could conclude that the United States became militarily involved in Vietnam during the French war.

American war stories can reveal American history. My PhD scholarship began with analysis of American fiction and film about the Vietnam War.  I was compelled to study this field because, first, my father had spent two, yearlong tours there when I was an impressionable age, and second, while I was on active duty a good decade later, most of the people I served with had been deployed to Vietnam. 

Among the many patterns I discovered in my study, I found that stories published and produced in the United States and elsewhere before and during the American war featured evidence of the French war, but after the American war had concluded, that evidence just, poof, disappeared.  

The before and during period stories suggest strongly that the Americans are fated to fail in Vietnam, just as the French did. Those published after the American war erase that history as they mostly lament the injury done to individual American troops—without any reference to the French or their failure.  These stark differences can tell us a lot about the American war in Vietnam, a war that divided the country, that cost the United States lives and treasure, that produced hundreds of thousands of morally and mentally traumatized veterans, that is still—if what my college students have told me for thirty years—too sore a subject to encounter truthfully in American high school history classes.

Here are some illustrations of my findings.

Before 1965: Fiction and Non-fiction

British author Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American (1955), and American authors William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s novel, The Ugly American (1958), both predict that further American involvement in Vietnam is doomed to fail, just as the French failed.  Greene’s novel features the arrogant American, Pyle, who naively believes that because he is an American, he can succeed where the French failed.  Instead, he suffers a grisly death and accomplishes nothing. Lederer and Burdick’s novel critiques the greedy motivations of many Americans in Vietnam as they conspire with French colonizers to enhance their wealth.  “The Ugly American,” Homer Atkins, however, is one of the very few good guys whose aim is to help Asians improve their everyday lives.  Film versions of both—1958 and 2002 for The Quiet American, 1962 for The Ugly American—sanitize the novels’ critiques of Americans. 

Examples of non-fiction stories featuring the French in Vietnam and implicating the Americans include French journalist Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (1961) and Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (1966), the latter a history of the siege that led to France’s 1954 downfall in Vietnam.  In the 1961 text, when only American military advisors were in Vietnam, Fall predicts that the Americans, too, will experience a “debacle.”  American journalist, David Halberstam, published The Making of a Quagmire in 1965, well before the United States had become bogged down in its own Vietnam war. He concludes his study by saying “In writing this book I became more and more haunted by the historical implications of the French Indochina war and the warped legacy it left us.”  In Our Vietnam Nightmare (1965), American journalist Marguerite Higgins blames the aftereffects of French colonialism for the orientalizing she finds among the Americans in Vietnam, orientalizing that led to the assassination of South Vietnam’s Prime Minister Diem in 1963 but could also be traced to the early, prejudicing Hollywood films I cited above.

After 1965: Non-fiction and Fiction

Two non-fiction books published during the American war (1972) but contemplate the early days of the war conclude, as did Greene, Lederer and Burdick, Fall, Halberstam, and Higgins, that the Americans are doomed to failure.  Jeffrey Race’s War Comes to Long An determines that as early as 1965, the war against the Americans already had been won in the province outside of Saigon, South Vietnam.  Journalist Frances Fitzgerald’s much-heralded book, Fire in the Lake, argues that the United States intervened at a chaotic, transitional moment in Vietnam’s history, fating the Americans to disaster.

Very little prose fiction was published during the war, but all of it refers pessimistically to the French war and the current American war.  Robin Moore’s The Green Berets (1965) frequently mentions in a casual way the French, as though an American reader would be familiar with the French war in Vietnam: a unit escapes “out of that old French camp just in time”; it is better to speak the old occupier’s language, French, than that of the new occupier, American English; people of mixed French and Vietnamese heritage still appear on the scene. (Its 1968 film version featuring John Wayne obliterates any references to the French war.  In fact, Roger Ebert calls the film “propaganda,” and writes in his 1968 review, “The military adventures we see could be from any war.”)  Other prose fiction published during the war includes William Wilson’s novel, The LBJ Brigade (1966), David Halberstam’s novel, One Very Hot Day (1967), and a short-story collection, The Weary Falcon (1971), by Tom Mayer.  All three emphasize the French-war context for the American war. 

For instance, Wilson’s novel features a sergeant who had served with the French, then as a military advisor, and now with the US Army.  His long experience in Vietnam makes him cynical about the American war there: “There ain’t no right or wrong out here.  Livin is the only thing that counts.  We’re white men fightin colored men.” 

Halberstam’s novel is set before 1965, so the two featured Americans are military advisors.  The South Vietnamese lieutenant they advise, Thuong, had believed “the myth of the Americans…that they could change what no one else could.”  But after having worked with many American military advisors, he no longer believes the myth.  He finds them as ignorant about the Vietnamese condition and as ineffective as the French, with whom he also worked.  Moreover, to the Vietnamese, all black Americans are “Senegalese” (the Africans who fought for the French), a Vietnamese prisoner disavows belonging to the French nemesis, the Viet Minh, and another old man swears to the Americans that he had never done anything to help the long-gone French.  To the Vietnamese, including Thuong, the French and American wars are indistinguishable.

Tom Mayer’s short story collection also features evidence of the French war.  In the collection’s title story, “The Weary Falcon,” the central character says, “you could learn everything you needed to know from studying the French,” especially that “the roadsides were littered with fire-gutted French vehicles.”  He says in an audiotape to his wife “We were making many of the same mistakes the French made,” an irony given that he dies when his helicopter crashes into a French cemetery.

Another novel published during the war but about the military advisor period is Daniel Ford’s Incident at Muc Wa (1967).  It is especially significant because it was made into a post-war film, Go Tell the Spartans (1978), featuring an aging Hollywood star, Burt Lancaster.  The story offers, then, some comparison between the two periods, especially because the film is hailed by film critic Jeremy M. Devine as one of the “four notable Vietnam War films that appeared in 1978” (Vietnam at 24 Frames A Second, 1999). 

Ford’s during-war novel is laden with references to the French: Vietnamese people speak French, bombed-out French armored cars serve as landmarks, the French who were overrun by the Viet Minh haunt the Muc Wa outpost the American advisors are trying to restore, the South Vietnamese wear “Frenchified” camouflage fatigues, and a French word, “esprit,” is used to describe morale.  The outpost also includes a French headstone, which the American major, Barkley, tries to ignore in his plans to revive the former French outpost.  But like all the texts I already have discussed, with its frequent references to the French, the novel warns that the US venture in Vietnam is likely to end as the French venture did: in failure.   

The post-war Go Tell the Spartans film version, however, minimizes its references to the French and their war, making it seem unrelated to the American venture there. In effect, the film erases the book’s historical references to the French, something I have found most post-war stories do. With its opening lines, the film tells the story of brave and valiant and generous Americans, unlike the French:

In 1954, the French lost their war to keep Indo-China colonies and those colonies became North and South Vietnam.

Then the North aided a rebellion in the South and the United States sent in “Military Advisors” to help South Vietnam fight the Communists.

In 1964, the war in Vietnam was still a little one—confused and far away.

These lines establish the film’s outcome: that this combat just happened, it came out of the blue with little warning, and the stalwart, benevolent, exceptional Americans are the victims of their generosity to help the South Vietnamese.  Contrary to history, they did not support the Viet Minh during World War II, they did not support the French war to re-colonize the Vietnamese, and they did not impose their own war on Vietnam. 

Not only does the film tell a very different story from the novel (omitting, for instance, an American soldier’s rape of a Vietnamese girl), the closest it comes to drawing a connection between the French and the American wars is at the end.  Instead of the novel’s single French headstone at Muc Wa, the film’s outpost has a cemetery with three hundred French graves.  Hanging above its entrance is a sign in French, which the young American college-boy character, Courcey, translates as “When you find us lying here, go tell the Spartans we obeyed our orders.”  This quote is from the ancient Greek historian Herodotus’s story of Thermopylae, a story that signals the victimhood and self-sacrifice of a small group of Spartans ordered to defend against Persian invaders.  (See my chapter, “Hooah!  We…Are…Sparta!” in Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Films, 2013). At the film’s end, the Viet Cong have overrun Muc Wa and killed the Burt Lancaster character, and the young man, Courcey, stumbles through the cemetery, saying “I’m going home…if they’ll let me.”  While the cemetery serves as a warning to the US venture in Vietnam, the Americans in the post-war film are depicted more as victims of their hapless generosity and not as the invading aggressors in this conflict.

But what is most revealing about the stories of the de-historicizing post-war period is the tale of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film about the American war in Vietnam and its re-release in 2001 as Apocalypse Now Redux.  

Both versions are loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness, which condemns European imperialism in Africa and features a trader named “Kurtz” who is said to have “gone native.”  Both versions of Coppola’s film also have Captain Willard going up the river to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, who, like the Kurtz in the novel, has “gone native.”  The 1979 film version, however, does not make any attempt to historicize why the Americans are warring in Vietnam.  Instead, it makes the war seem psychedelic and the Americans driven insane by it. 

In 2001’s Apocalypse Now Redux, however, not only does the re-edited version include scenes that were cut from the 1979 theatrical release, an entire, 25-minute scene set on a French rubber plantation is included.  In that Redux addition, Willard encounters a French family that refuses the failures of the French to recolonize and the American war there currently. During the dinner table conversation, the patriarch of the French family tells Willard, “You Americans, you are fighting for the biggest nothing in history.” 

In a 2019 Vanity Fair interview with Coppola, he explains his aim to historicize the film by reinserting the scene.  What the patriarch says “is absolutely true,” Coppola says. “Even our president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, wanted, if Ho Chi Minh agreed, to help resist the Japanese and defeat the Japanese. He intended Vietnam to be given back to the Vietnamese. …Essentially, the Vietnamese war was basically fought for nothing. All it did was bring misery both to the Vietnamese and the Americans.... It was absolutely pointless...a war fought for no reason.”

However, because the filmmaking had immense cost overruns—budgeted for $12 million but costing over $30 million—Coppola had to ensure viewers would want to spend their money to see it in theaters.  Consequently, the film was shaped “for the ‘mainstream audience of its day'.”  This meant excluding any mention of the French, let alone a 25-minute scene that ridiculed the Americans for their war there.

So what?

The post-Vietnam-War Burt Lancaster vehicle, Go Tell the Spartans, told a completely different story from the during-Vietnam-War novel, Incident at Muc Wa, as the film erased the French war to recolonize in Vietnam.  The 1979 version of Apocalypse Now did the same as it tried to appeal to a “mainstream audience.”  Both films were produced in the late-1970s, when Jan Scruggs began raising money for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Ronald Reagan recast the war from an utterly shameful failure to a “noble cause.” This restitution of the war and its veterans explains why a mainstream audience would not want to view the shame and would instead want the story of nobility.

My example of how the French war has appeared—or not—in US stories illustrates that historically accurate war stories aren’t uniformly published or produced in the United States.  Instead, a novel is published or a film is produced depending on the audience’s readiness to pay for a story.  And this is hazardous, since what little my students of the last thirty years tell me they know about American wars comes from films and novels.  During the American war in Vietnam, Americans were ready for stories that said the American war was as futile as the French one; after the war, apparently, they were not.  This post-war story-telling impacts what we know about the wars fought in our name and with our tax dollars. 

Our war stories reflect more feel-good profit-making than intellectual and historical accuracy.  Is this a valid way to approach and wage war?