If

by Christopher Benfey

  Harkins’s warning, borrowed from Kipling, fell on deaf ears. President Kennedy and his advisers agreed not to thwart the coup, a reassurance duly conveyed to the conspirators. On November 1, news reached Washington of the success of the coup, although Kennedy was alarmed to learn that Diem had been murdered rather than escorted abroad. Deceived by the generals with the promise of safe passage, he had been summarily shot in the head instead. Lodge congratulated the generals in his office and triumphantly cabled President Kennedy: “The prospects now are for a shorter war.”

  Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated. Despite his ongoing friction with Ambassador Lodge, General Harkins remained in charge of military operations for another year. He continued to claim, against the skepticism of some American reporters on the scene, that progress was being made on the battlefield. For his tendency to inflate body counts of killed Vietcong, Harkins came to be known by members of the press as “General Blimp” (after the cartoon character Colonel Blimp). Looking for fresh leadership, President Johnson, in 1964, appointed William Westmoreland, Harkins’s second-in-command, to replace him as head of combat troops in Vietnam. Dean Rusk, Johnson’s secretary of state, emphasized the urgent need to “change the pace at which these [Vietnamese] people move.” Harkins duly warned Westmoreland against undue haste, misquoting Kipling yet again about the danger of hurrying the East. But hurry remained, for the moment, the first order of business, as Westmoreland expanded—or “escalated”—the war. Westmoreland followed Harkins’s lead in reporting progress, as defined by body counts and “kill ratios.” On a visit to the home front in November 1967, Westmoreland reported confidently that “the end begins to come into view.”

  And then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the stunning Tet Offensive, beginning the night of January 30, 1968, when Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops launched a massive and coordinated attack on many cities in the South, and stormed the American embassy in Saigon. The attack caught the American leadership by surprise, and inspired a good deal of second-guessing of Westmoreland’s blithe assurances. Had he merely underestimated the troop strength of the opposition? Or had he, as some CIA insiders and journalists claimed, deliberately manipulated the numbers? Was the U.S. leadership the victim of an intelligence failure, or was it the perpetrator of a hoax? Had Westmoreland been guilty of undue hurry in bragging about the impending end of the war, or was he guilty, instead, of deliberately hustling the American people, as a controversial CBS documentary called The Vietnam Deception claimed?

  5.

  During the military escalation in Vietnam, someone had taken the trouble to look up the original wording of Kipling’s poem, with the word “hustle” replacing the word “hurry.” A reporter for Time, in an article dated May 24, 1964, reported that the Kipling poem was “much quoted in Vietnam by Americans who are desperately trying to hustle Premier Nguyen Khanh’s regime into stepped-up action against the ever more aggressive Red guerrillas.” Three years later, Robert Sherrod wrote in Life, “To change any Oriental’s way of thinking—or, as Kipling put it, to hustle the East—is a major undertaking.” But the work that most firmly conjoined the Kipling passage with the Vietnamese “quagmire”—the word that Mark Twain had first given its modern military meaning, in a remark about the American occupation of the Philippines—was again Caputo’s A Rumor of War.

  Caputo had been in Vietnam long enough to experience the decisive shift from low-key American military “assistance,” which he had likened to Kipling’s romantic colonial wars, to arduous engagement in combat operations, where he found resonances elsewhere in Kipling’s work. Caputo describes a scene in which a fellow soldier creates an unwelcome distraction. “I am trying to read the paperback Kipling which lies open in my lap,” he writes, “but I cannot concentrate because Gordon is talking and because an invincible weariness prevents me from reading more than a few lines at a time.” Caputo intuits a connection here between Kipling’s work and Vietnam, but he can’t quite grasp it, can’t quite make it out. The print is smudged with his own sweat; Gordon’s chatter distracts him from the meaning of the words on the page. Exasperated, Caputo interrupts Gordon’s monologue by reading aloud from a poem that has caught his eye:

  And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,

  And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

  Gordon, he notes, “misses the irony.”

  6.

  But how exactly did Rudyard Kipling intend the irony? Did he mean “hurry” when he wrote “hustle”? For a passage that has so thoroughly worked its way into the fabric of recent American history, it is worth returning to the original source, and recalling that Kipling, too, was thinking about the problematic role of the United States in world affairs when he first wrote his little poem about hustling the East. During the winter of 1892, Kipling had just lost his best friend, Wolcott Balestier, and had almost immediately married Balestier’s sister. He was aboard the Teutonic as it made its way across the bleak and frigid North Atlantic, on the first leg of his honeymoon. Henry Adams—the American historian, Washington insider, and enthusiast of American empire—was also aboard, and joined the Kipling wedding party for dinner each evening in the stateroom.

  To while away the time, Kipling composed verses to serve as chapter headings for The Naulahka, the boisterous “Story of East and West” on which he and Wolcott Balestier had collaborated. The novel was built on the sort of plot—combining romance, the trade in valuable antiquities, and international intrigue—that was hugely popular during the 1890s, as the United States began to exert a role in international affairs. The American hero of The Naulahka, the mining engineer Nicholas Tarvin from the small town of Topaz, Colorado, arrives in India at the start of Chapter 5, and is immediately baffled by primitive travel arrangements, dubious telegraph connections, and government bureaucracy. He must learn to be patient if he is to achieve his objectives. It was for this chapter that Kipling wrote his four-line epigraph, using the same rollicking rhythm of his “Ballad of East and West” of 1889, with its famous opening, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”:

  Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,

  For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;

  And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,

  And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

  The reader can easily discern the immediate referents of the poem. Tarvin is the Christian. His shifty hosts are the Aryans. He had better be patient and watch his step.

  Tarvin is in India to hustle the local Maharaja out of his valuable necklace. He is also eager to hustle Kate, the Topaz woman he hopes to marry, out of her determination to have a life of her own. While Kate toils in a local hospital, with unspeakable sanitary conditions and a woeful lack of medical supplies, Tarvin proposes the construction of a new dam for the Maharaja, which will divert water from supposedly gold-rich sands. Kate and Tarvin seem to embody (at least for Kipling) the best tendencies of the White Man’s Burden: promotion of public health and aid in the exploitation, through modern technology, of natural resources.

  But the dam project is a ruse, a hustle, to beguile and distract the Maharaja. Tarvin knows perfectly well that there is no local gold to be found. What he wants is access to the Maharaja and, through him, to the necklace. Complications ensue. The Maharaja has taken a new wife, the seductive Sitabhai, who wants, in turn, to have her nine-year-old stepson killed so that her own child will be heir to the throne. When Tarvin tries to foil her murderous scheme, she lies about the location of the Naulakha necklace, directing him to an abandoned temple equipped with a sandstone trapdoor and a crocodile—details later adopted by the Indiana Jones movie franchise. Armed with the knowledge that Sitabhai is gradually poisoning he
r stepson, Tarvin proposes a deal: he won’t expose her to the Maharaja if she gives him the valuable necklace. Appalled at such an underhanded deal, Kate insists that Tarvin return his ill-gotten gain. But such is the chaos at the hospital, where local religious extremists have accused Kate of poisoning their children, that Kate agrees to return to Topaz, where Tarvin’s mines have recently—oh, happy day!—struck it rich. He has his fortune, and his bride, after all.

  So, what about that dire warning concerning the tombstone white with its epitaph drear? Tarvin certainly did try to “hustle the East.” There can be no doubt about that. Did he learn his lesson in the nick of time? Did Kate save the day? And finally, did Kipling mean “hurry” when he wrote “hustle”? There are many references in The Naulahka to the slowness of the East, beginning with Tarvin’s frustrated efforts to reach the remote Indian state where his two prizes, Kate and the priceless necklace, are to be found. “In an hour the bullock-cart went two and a half miles. Fortunes had been made and lost in Topaz—happy Topaz!—while the cart ploughed its way across a red-hot river bed.” And a few pages later: “This was plainly not a country in which business could be done at red heat.” Tarvin learns that the best way to strike a good deal on travel arrangements is to claim, deadpan, “I’m in no hurry.” In India, if you’re in a hurry you need to pretend that you’re not. In other words, you need to hustle a little.

  The notion of hustling as involving deception is present at the origin of the English word, derived from a Dutch verb for shaking coins or lots in a hat. By 1800, “hustle” was already used for thieves jostling a mark, and later, by extension, for pool sharks, as in Paul Newman’s 1971 movie The Hustler. The alternative meaning of pushing or hurrying is a later, and subsidiary, usage. And why wouldn’t Kipling have used the word “hurry” if he meant hurry? When Paul Harkins quoted Kipling as saying you can’t hurry the East, he was interpreting the word “hustle” in a plausible but not necessarily accurate way. It is more likely—and in fact, given the context in The Naulahka, fairly certain—that Kipling actually meant that you cannot cheat or deceive the East. Since Harkins himself was accused of deception in his optimistic body counts and sunny outlook on American progress during the Vietnam War, his suppression of the word has an unintended irony.

  7.

  By the mid-1970s, when the United States had finally unshackled itself from the conflict in Vietnam, the notion of American deception in the war had taken a firm grip on the country’s imagination. Kipling is invoked in several Vietnam-related films. In the final segment of Apocalypse Now (1979), Dennis Hopper plays a fast-talking photojournalist who leads Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) to meet the unhinged imperialist Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Amid a manic flood of praise, Hopper calls Kurtz “a poet-warrior in the classic sense,” adding, by way of illustration:

  And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you . . .’”

  Kurtz, in director Coppola’s (and screenwriter Michael Herr’s) view, is yet another fool who tried to hustle the East.

  John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King is a more explicit engagement with imperial overreach and folly. The film appeared in 1975, the year of the fall of Saigon, and Huston let it be known that it had “contemporary significance.” He had planned to film Kipling’s dark tale for a long time; the ragged end of the American adventure in Vietnam added poignancy, and urgency, to the project. It is the story of two former British soldiers in India, Dravot and Carnehan, played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Dissatisfied with their military service in the Raj, which they consider unfit for lusty adventurers like themselves, they have become cynical con men instead. The devious pair make money by impersonating journalists and blackmailing Indian royalty with threats of embarrassing revelations in the press. Aiming higher, they come to grief in their scheme to hustle the kingdom of Kafiristan—across the Khyber Pass in what is now Afghanistan—of its treasure dating back to the time of Alexander the Great.

  The film opens amid the chaos of a bazaar in northern India, as the camera roams from a blacksmith to vendors, blind beggars, snake charmers, and magicians. Then, as night falls, we are standing outside the lamplit windows of the Northern Star newspaper, as a stranger limps toward the door. Inside is Kipling himself, played by Christopher Plummer, writing a poem in blue ink. We can see that he is writing the opening lines of “The Ballad of Boh Da Thone” from Barrack-Room Ballads: “Boh Da Thone was a warrior bold: / His sword and his rifle were bossed with gold, // And the Peacock Banner his henchmen bore / As still with bullion, but stiffer with gore.” A gruesome episode of guerrilla warfare in Burma, told with an unsettling humor, the poem ends with the severed head of the terrorist leader delivered to a retired British officer.

  “I read so much Kipling, it’s in my unconscious,” John Huston once remarked. “You start a verse, I’ll finish it.” Huston expects us to know that “The Ballad of Boh Da Thone,” with its jungle setting more closely matching Vietnam than the mountains of Afghanistan, has several elements in common with “The Man Who Would Be King,” including a crucifixion, a severed head (the only “loot” brought back from these dismal wars), comic brio, and the presence of antiwar journalists (“While over the water the papers cried, / ‘The patriot fights for his countryside!’”). Philip Caputo quotes a passage from the same Kipling ballad as an epigraph to one of the later chapters in A Rumor of War: “The worn white soldiers in Khaki dress, / Who tramped through the jungle and camped in the byre, / Who died in the swamp and were tombed in the mire.”

  In Huston’s film, the battered man opens the office door and interrupts Kipling’s work. “I’ve come back,” he says. “Give me a drink, Rudyard Kipling. Don’t you know me?” Kipling remembers, in a flashback, how he first met Carnehan, who stole his watch at a railroad station only to return it when, a Mason himself, he discovered a Masonic charm hanging from its gold chain. He asks Kipling, as a fellow Mason, to convey a message to Dravot, concerning their plans for an empire of their own in Kafiristan. Later, Carnehan and Dravot blithely explain their scheme to Kipling: they will help a local king defeat his enemies, take over his kingdom themselves, then take the loot and leave in triumph. When “Peachy” Carnehan returns from his ordeal, he has been reduced to a human shadow—crawling, starving, demented—and, evidently, tortured. (He has, in fact, suffered crucifixion, and carries Dravot’s severed head in a bag.) He recounts a ghastly tale of the rise and fall of two fools who tried to hustle the East.

  What gives the film its unsettling resonance with Vietnam—and with later American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—is how breezily confident these confidence men are in their prospects for success. After all, they have modern weaponry (twenty Martini rifles); the natives have bows and arrows. When Dravot, protected by a concealed amulet, survives an arrow aimed at his heart, the natives take him for a god; when the Masonic emblem on the amulet matches their own age-old symbols, they take him for the divine son of Alexander himself. But when a bite from his reluctant child bride draws blood, revealing that he is human after all, the natives exact a horrifying price. The two would-be imperialists’ facile scheme and grisly fate recall a line from Michael Herr’s Dispatches: “There is a point of view that says that the United States got involved in the Vietnam War, commitments and interests aside, simply because we thought it would be easy.”

  Many scenes from the film and many individual lines, have a resonance beyond their ostensible narrative purposes. When Dravot tells a local leader, with broad irony, that he and Carnehan are “bringing enlightenment to the darker regions of the earth,” it’s a laugh line. In the extended scenes of military drill, the two ex-soldiers, resembling American advisers in Vietnam, train local men to fight like a modern army. “We’re going to teach you soldiering,” Dra
vot assures them, so they can “slaughter . . . enemies like civilized men.” When a battle is interrupted by a procession of holy men dressed in white, we almost expect them to set themselves on fire, like Buddhist monks in Saigon. Dravot and Carnehan manipulate their puppet ruler as cynically as the United States shuffled its designated leaders in Saigon, and suffer as ignominious a final defeat.

  Among the many ironies of The Man Who Would Be King for American viewers today is its setting in Afghanistan, where American soldiers continue to die in the longest war in American history. The so-called “lesson of Vietnam,” often invoked in relation to later American military excursions, apparently remains unlearned—indeed, not even fully formulated. “The war is over,” Caputo writes in the prologue to A Rumor of War. “We lost it, and no amount of objecting will resurrect the men who died, without redeeming anything, on calvaries like Hamburger Hill and the Rockpile.” He adds, “It might, perhaps, prevent the next generation from being crucified in the next war. But I don’t think so.”

  What does it mean to say that Kipling has mapped out this territory already? Why do his poems and stories, written so long ago, seem so accurately to capture the experience of soldiers and officers in these dismal wars? Is it the tragedy that each period must make its own mistakes, even if they are the same age-old mistakes? Does the United States in Vietnam (or Iraq or Afghanistan) simply repeat the British mistake in India, or South Africa? Is this “the horror” that Kipling and Conrad so deftly discerned amid all the patriotic bluster, the sheer extremity of folly far from home? Emerson said that our moods do not know one another. Do our historical periods not know one another either? Now that the crucifixion Caputo feared has occurred, and not once but multiple times, is the unlearned lesson the same old banal one—that history repeats itself? Or is there some specific illness—call it imperialism—that Kipling had his finger on? What note did he hit, exactly?