The Sympathizer

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  Nothing was so true, and yet nothing was so mysterious, for the questions of who the people were and what they might want remained unanswered. The lack of an answer mattered not; indeed, the lack of an answer was part of the power in the idea of the people that brought the men to their feet and the tears to their eyes as they shouted, Down with communism! Like salmon that instinctively knew when to swim upstream, we all knew who the people were and who were not the people. Anyone who had to be told who the people were probably was not part of the people, or so I soon wrote to my Parisian aunt. I also sent her photos of the cheering men in uniform, along with others showing them exercising and engaging in maneuvers the rest of that weekend. Perhaps these men looked silly or foolish, doing push-ups while the grizzled captain yelled at them, or crouching behind trees aiming vintage rifles under the command of the affectless lieutenant, or conducting a mock patrol with Bon amid the brush where Indians once hunted. But don’t be fooled, I warned Man in my coded notes. Revolutions begin this way, with men willing to fight no matter what the odds, volunteering to give up everything because they had nothing. This was an apt description of the grizzled captain, the former guerrilla hunter who was now a short-order cook, and the affectless lieutenant, sole survivor of an ambushed company who made his living as a deliveryman. Like Bon, they were certifiably insane men who had volunteered for the reconnaissance mission to Thailand. They had decided that death was just as good as life, which was fine for them but was worrisome for me if I was to go along with them.

  What about your wives and kids? I said. The four of us sat under an oak tree, sleeves rolled up past our elbows, eating a midday meal of army surplus C rations, which looked almost exactly the same entering the human body as they did exiting it. The grizzled captain rattled his spoon in his can and said, We got separated during the whole mess at Da Nang. They didn’t make it out. Last I heard the VC sent them to clear swampland for the crime of being related to me. Guess I can either wait for them to get out or I can go get them myself. He had the habit of speaking with his teeth clenched, gnawing at his words like bones. As for the affectless lieutenant, his emotional strings had been cut. He had the semblance of a human being, but while his body moved, his face and voice moved not at all. Thus, when he said, They’re dead, the toneless announcement was more forbidding than if he had wailed or cursed. I was afraid to ask him what had happened. Instead I said, You guys don’t plan on coming back, do you? The affectless lieutenant rotated the turret of his head a few degrees and aimed his eyes at me. Come back to what? The grizzled captain chuckled. Don’t be shocked, kid. I’ve ordered more than a few men to certain death. Now maybe it’s my turn. Not that I want to sound all emotional. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m looking forward to it. War may be hell, but you know what? Hell’s better than this shithole. With that, the affectless lieutenant and the grizzled captain departed to take a piss.

  I didn’t need to write in my letter to Paris that these men were not fools, at least not yet. The minutemen were not fools in believing they could defeat the British Redcoats, any more than the first armed propaganda platoon of our revolution was foolish as it drilled with a motley assembly of primitive weapons. From that militia eventually arose an army of a million men. Who was to say the same fate did not await this company? Dear Aunt, I wrote in visible ink, These men are not to be underestimated. Napoleon said men will die for bits of ribbon pinned to their chests, but the General understands that even more men will die for a man who remembered their names, as he does theirs. When he inspects them, he walks among them, eats with them, calls them by their names and asks about wives, children, girlfriends, hometowns. All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered. Neither is possible without the other. This desire drives these busboys, waiters, janitors, gardeners, mechanics, night guards, and welfare beneficiaries to save enough money to buy themselves uniforms, boots, and guns, to want to be men again. They want their country back, dear Aunt, but they also yearn for recognition and remembrance from that country that no longer exists, from wives and children, from future descendants, from the men they used to be. If they fail, call them fools. But if they do not fail, they are heroes and visionaries, whether alive or dead. Perhaps I shall return with them to our country, regardless of what the General has to say.

  Even as I was planning for the possibility of returning, I also did my best to dissuade Bon of doing the same. We were smoking a final cigarette under the oak tree, our last gesture before embarking on a ten-mile hike. We watched as the men commanded by the grizzled captain and the affectless lieutenant rose and stretched, scratching at various parts of their lumpy bodies. Those guys have death wishes, I said. Don’t you get it? They’ve got no intention of coming back. They know it’s a suicide mission.

  Life’s a suicide mission.

  That’s very philosophical of you, I said. It doesn’t change the fact that you’re crazy.

  He laughed with genuine humor, such a rare occasion ever since Saigon I was taken aback. For only the second time since I had known him, he embarked on a speech that was, for him, an epic. What’s crazy is living when there’s no reason to live, he said. What am I living for? A life in our apartment? That’s not a home. It’s a jail cell without bars. All of us—we’re all in jail cells without bars. We’re not men anymore. Not after the Americans fucked us twice and made our wives and kids watch. First the Americans said we’ll save your yellow skins. Just do what we say. Fight our way, take our money, give us your women, then you’ll be free. Things didn’t work out that way, did they? Then, after fucking us, they rescued us. They just didn’t tell us they’d cut off our balls and cut out our tongues along the way. But you know what? If we were real men, we wouldn’t have let them do that.

  Usually Bon used words like a sniper, but this was a spray of machine-gun fire that silenced me for several moments. Then I said, You don’t give these guys enough credit for what they did, for what they faced. Though they were my enemies, I understood their soldiers’ hearts, beating with the belief that they had fought bravely. You’re being too hard on them.

  He laughed again, this time without humor. I’m hard on myself. Don’t call me a man or a soldier, either. Call the guys who stayed behind men and soldiers. The men in my company. Man. All dead or in prison, but at least they know they’re men. They’re so dangerous it takes other men with guns to keep them locked up. Here, no one’s frightened of us. The only people we scare are our wives and kids. And ourselves. I know these guys. I sell them liquor. I hear their stories. They come home from work, yell at their wives and kids, beat them once in a while just to show that they’re men. Only they’re not. A man protects his wife and children. A man isn’t afraid to die for them, his country, his buddies. He doesn’t live to see them all die before him. But that’s what I’ve done.

  You retreated, that’s all, I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. I had never seen him speak about his pain so bluntly before. I wanted to comfort him and it hurt me that he would not let me. You had to save your family. That doesn’t make you less of a man or a soldier. You are a soldier, so think like one. Is it better to go on this suicide mission and not come back, or is it better to go with the next wave that’s actually got a chance?

  He spat and ground out his cigarette against the heel of his boot, then buried it under a mound of dirt. That’s what most of these guys are saying. They’re losers and losers always have excuses. They dress up, talk tough, play soldier. But how many are really going back home to fight? The General asked for volunteers. He got three. The rest of them hide behind their wives and kids, the same wives and kids they beat because they can’t stand hiding behind them. Give a coward a second chance, he’ll just run again. So it is with most of these guys. They’re bluffing.

  You cynical bastard, I cried. What are you dying for then?

  What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If somet
hing is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

  And to this, I had nothing to say. It was true, even for this small detachment of heroes or perhaps fools. Whatever they were, they now had something to live for if not die for. They had eagerly shed the funereal clothes of their mediocre civilian lives, understanding the allure of tailored tiger stripe fatigues with dashing scarves of yellow, white, or red around their necks, a military splendor akin to the costumes of superheroes. But, like superheroes, they would not want to keep themselves a secret for long. How could you be a superhero if no one knew you existed?

  Rumors had already spread about them. Even before the desert assembly, during that night when Sonny had admitted his failure and yet still won, he had asked me about these mysterious men. The wheels of our conversation had stopped spinning, the black cat was gloating over my defeat, and in the vodka-infused silence Sonny raised the reports of a secret army preparing for a secret invasion. I replied that I had not heard of any such thing, to which he said, Don’t play the innocent. You’re the General’s man.

  If I were his man, I said, more reason not to tell a communist.

  Who said I’m a communist?

  I pretended to be surprised. You’re not a communist?

  If I were, would I tell you?

  That was the subversive’s dilemma. Rather than flaunt ourselves in the sexually dubious costumes of superheroes, we hid beneath cloaks of invisibility, here just as in Saigon. There, when I attended clandestine meetings with other subversives, conducted in the fusty cellars of safe houses, sitting on crates of black market hand grenades manufactured in the USA, I donned a clammy cotton hood that revealed only my eyes. Lit by candlelight or oil lamp, we knew one another only by the peculiarity of our aliases, by the shape of our bodies, by the sound of our voices, by the whites of our eyes. Now, watching Ms. Mori recline under Sonny’s arm, I was sure my ever-absorbent eyes were no longer white but bloodshot from the wine, vodka, and tobacco. Our lungs had achieved smoky equilibrium with the stale air, while on the coffee table the ashtray silently suffered its usual indignity, mouth crammed full of butts and bitter ash. I dropped what remained of my cigarette into the well of the wine bottle, where it drowned in the remaining liquid with a faint, reproachful hiss. The war’s over, Ms. Mori said. Don’t they know that? I wanted to say something profound as I stood up to say good night. I wanted to impress Ms. Mori with the intellect she could never have again. Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.

  Is that true for old soldiers, too? she asked, not looking impressed. Of course it’s true, Sonny said. If they didn’t go to sleep, how else would they dream? I almost answered before I realized it was a rhetorical question.

  Ms. Mori offered me her cheek to kiss and Sonny offered me his hand to shake. He showed me the door and I slid home through the cool sheets of night and into my own bed, Bon asleep and hovering above me in his rack. I closed my eyes and, after a spell of darkness, floated on my mattress across a black river to the foreign country that needed no passport to visit. Of its many gnomic features and shady denizens I now recall only one, my mind wiped clean except for this fatal fingerprint, an ancient kapok tree that was my final resting place and on whose arthritic bark I laid my cheek. I was almost asleep within my sleep when I gradually understood that the knot of gnarled wood on which my ear rested was actually an ear itself, curled and stiff, the wax of its auditory history encrusted in the green moss of its twisted canal. Half of the kapok tree towered above me, half was invisible below me in the rooted earth, and when I looked up I saw not just one ear but many ears swelling from the bark of its thick trunk, hundreds of ears listening and having listened to things I could not hear, the sight of those ears so horrible it hurled me back into the black river. I woke drenched and gasping, clutching the sides of my head. Only after I kicked off the damp sheets and looked under the pillow could I lie down again, trembling. My heart still beat with the force of a savage drummer, but at least my bed was not littered with amputated ears.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sometimes the work of a subversive is purposeful, but sometimes, I confess, it is accidental. In retrospect, perhaps my questioning of Sonny’s courage pushed him to write the headline that I saw two weeks after the field maneuvers, “Move On, War Over.” I saw it on the General’s desk in his war room at the liquor store, fixed squarely on the writing pad and weighed down by a stapler. The sentiments of the headline might be hailed by some, but certainly not by the General. Beneath that headline was a photograph of a rally staged by the Fraternity at a Westminster park, with ranks and files of grim veterans in paramilitary uniforms of brown shirts and red berets. In another photo, civilians in the cast-off couture of refugees waved signs and clutched banners with the telegraphic messages of political protests. HO CHI MINH = HITLER! FREEDOM FOR OUR PEOPLE! THANK YOU, AMERICA! To the degree that the article might sow doubt in the hearts of exiles about continuing the war, and create divisions among exile factions, I knew that my provocation of Sonny had had an unintentional, but desirable, effect.

  I photographed the article with the Minox mini-camera that was finally finding some use. For the last few weeks, I had been photographing the General’s files, all of which I had access to as his aide-de-camp. Ever since my return from the Philippines, I had been unemployed except for this considerable pro bono work done for the General, the Fraternity, and the Movement. Even secret armies and political fronts needed clerks. Memos must be written; documents filed; meetings called; flyers designed, printed, and distributed; photos taken; interviews scheduled; donors found; and, most important for my purposes, correspondence taken and mailed, then received and read before it was handed over to the General. I had photographed the General’s complete order of battle, from the company here to the battalion in Thailand, from the Fraternity’s public parades to the Movement’s private maneuvers, as well as the communiqués between the General and his officers in the Thai refugee camps, led by a landlocked admiral. Not least, I photographed the statements of the bank accounts where the General stashed the modest funds for the Movement, raised in small donations from the refugee community, the revenues of Madame’s restaurant, and a handful of respectable charitable organizations that had donated to the Fraternity for the relief of sad refugees and sadder veterans.

  All this information had been packaged into a parcel dispatched to my Parisian aunt. The parcel’s contents were a letter and a chintzy souvenir, an automatically rotating snowball featuring the Hollywood sign. This gift required nine-volt batteries, which I included and which I had hollowed out. Into each I inserted a cartridge of Minox film, a more sophisticated method than how my courier in Saigon traded information with me. When Man first told me of my courier, I had immediately conjured up one of those supple beauty queens for which our country was deservedly famous, white as refined sugar on the outside, scarlet as sunrise on the inside, a Cochin-Chinese Mata Hari. What showed up at my door every morning was an aging auntie, the lines on her face promising more secrets than the lines on her palms, hawking gobs of betel juice as well as her specialty, sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves. I bought a packet for breakfast every morning, and in it there might or might not be a message, rolled and wrapped in plastic. Likewise, in the small wad of folded piastres I paid her with, there might or might not be a cartridge of film or a message of my own, written invisibly with rice water on cement paper. The only flaw in this method was that auntie was a terrible cook, her sticky rice a ball of glue that I had to swallow, lest the maid find it in my garbage and wonder why I was buying what I would not eat. I complained to auntie once, but she cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary. Even the cyclo drivers hanging around the General’s villa for fares were impressed. You better marry that one, Captain, a driver missing a left arm called out. She won’t be single for long!

  I winced at the memory and poured myself a drink from the bottle of fifteen-yea
r-old scotch the General kept in his drawer. Given that I was not being paid, the General kept me happy, and admittedly dependent, with generous gifts of fine and not-so-fine liquor from his ample supply. I needed it. Written invisibly in the letter were the dates and details of Bon’s itinerary and those of the grizzled captain and affectless lieutenant, from their airplane tickets to the location of the training camp. The information was no different in substance from what I had dispatched through auntie, the classified logistics of operations that would inevitably lead to devastating ambushes. Newspaper articles would report the number of American or republican soldiers dead or wounded, but they were as abstract as the faceless dead in history books. I could write these dispatches with ease, but the one about Bon had taken me all night, not because of the amount of words, but because he was my friend. I’m coming back, too, I wrote, even though I had not yet figured out how I would do that. The better to report on the movement of the enemy, I wrote, even though what I really intended was to save Bon’s life. This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before.

  With no idea how I would manage to betray Bon and save him at the same time, I searched for inspiration in the bottom of a bottle. I was sipping from my second tumbler of scotch when the General entered. It was a little past three, the routine time of his return from Madame’s restaurant after its midday rush. He was, as usual, irritated from his hours manning the cash register. Former soldiers would salute him, a sign of respect that nevertheless reminded him of the stars he was not wearing, while the occasional snide civilian, always a woman, would say, Weren’t you that general? If she was very snide, she would leave him the tip, the typically grand sum of one dollar, our nod to what we considered a ludicrous American practice. Thus the General would arrive in the afternoons at the liquor store, as he did today, throw a handful of crumpled dollar bills on his desk, and wait for me to pour him a double. Reclining in his chair, he would sip the scotch with closed eyes and sigh dramatically. But today, instead of reclining, he leaned forward at his desk, tapped the newspaper, and said, Did you read this?