The Best and the Brightest

Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”--American fiction writers have conjured up powerful portraits of war, largely from the foot soldier’s chaotic point of view. But war as experienced by the policy makers, the civilian shapers, the power holders and the bureaucrats has not been a subject of American fiction. In fact, power generally has not much been favored by fiction writers. Ward Just has been the exception. Since the 1970s, he has brought us rare tales from the back rooms, bedrooms and corridors of influence and power in Washington. It is typical of him that in “A Dangerous Friend,” his fierce new book about the Vietnam War, there are no soldiers, no bloody battles and only one dead body. Its pages are filled with civilians--bored, ambitious or idealistic volunteers, low-level officials in flight from the blandness of a vast provincial empire and launched happily on a “nation building” adventure in a distant land.

His is not the Vietnam we think of--not after more than two decades in which that war has been reduced, on page and screen, to the time of full-scale American military build-up and battle seen mainly through the eyes of beleaguered “grunts.” For 18 months, from December 1965 to May 1967, Just covered the war for the Washington Post, was wounded and reported on it memorably in “To What End,” a wartime book now out of print. In “A Dangerous Friend,” however, he turns to the year that just preceded his arrival in Vietnam, when it seemed as if the enemy might be on the verge of victory but when civilians still felt that control over the war was in their hands.

Indeed, a model for such a novel already existed, just not an American one. In 1955, the year after the first Vietnam War--between the French and the Vietnamese--ended, British novelist Graham Greene published “The Quiet American,” a prescient fable about blind imperial power. Its narrator, an English reporter pursuing life with his Vietnamese mistress at the margins of a colonial war, meets a young American official named Pyle with an “unmistakably young and unused face,” an enthusiast determined to “do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” A provincial armed with the teachings of one anti-communist scholar, Pyle arrives in Saigon cloaked in an unbreachable American “innocence” and with a Vietnam of his creation already etched in his mind.

In his novel, Greene took a cherished American self-image--of purity in the face of a corrupt world--and gave it a malign twist. The imperial innocence of a global power that doesn’t know itself or its limits had to have, in his view, a killing edge. If other worlds existed only to the extent that you invented them, then there would be worlds you would destroy exactly because you had never even noticed them. Pyle’s inability to take in a Vietnamese landscape that lies before him but hopelessly beyond his grasp leads inexorably to the unnecessary deaths of at least 50 people (a modest enough body count, given what was to come). Greene’s book began at the end with news of Pyle’s murder, and ended at the beginning, with the British narrator, any illusion of neutrality stripped away, watching American bombers being unloaded, gifts to the gods who would soon preside over a new, bloodier, ever more “innocent” version of the war just ending.

It was a novel that reporters like Just would carry to Vietnam in their minds a decade later--and that Just evidently still carries with him. He picks up on Greene’s deadly innocence, boldly builds “A Dangerous Friend” on it and takes it to a new place. He begins, as Greene did, with the fate (though not the death) of one American innocent, Sydney Parade, a 29-year-old political scientist in 1965, given to long hair and jeans, working at an unnamed foundation, bored with his adventure-free life, his Czech emigre wife and their small child. One day he meets a loose cannon of a bureaucrat, Dicky Rostok, a “menacing figure,” who receives Ho Chi Minh in his dreams, can run a dinner table conversation “like a college professor turned talk-show host” and is already taking notes for the book on the war he will someday write. Rostok runs the Vietnam office of Llewellyn Group, a melange of scholars, analysts and aid workers, “men who are eager to understand our Asian Antietam, and master it.” Their main task is to collect the necessary information to assess the nature of “progress” in “the effort” and to “report directly to the office of the secretary of defense.” Rostok’s “nation-building” appeal inspires Parade, who volunteers for a year’s tour of duty even though his wife threatens divorce.

Just ends his book as Greene did, with American goods being unloaded (“ . . . account ledgers, file folders, coffee mugs, paperweights and insect repellent and scissors and picture frames and desk lamps. Television sets were followed by transistor radios, then telephones, movie projectors, intercom systems, lecterns with microphones attached, and case after case of plastic rulers.”) It is a bureaucrat’s vision of the horn of plenty, a whole way of life inundating a small land.

In between, in the fashion of Greene, a Vietnamese village is needlessly bombed off the face of the Earth and various lives heedlessly ruined. In between, Just also enters new fictional territory. For Sydney Parade, though a “dangerous friend,” is no Pyle. The imperial innocence that Greene in 1955 located in a single low-level official Just relocates in the bloated bureaucratic but communal process of gathering informers, information and data. “Llewellyn Group,” he writes, “lived in flux, the days changing and dissolving, marked only by the accumulation of facts, data assembled from a thousand collection points. . . . They tried to build a narrative from the numbers, numbers doing the work of verbs and predicates, numbers supported by instinct, instinct supported by numbers.” This is original writing and typical of the deep core he drills into the place where the true American war lay. It is from the absurd process of constructing a Vietnam from “the numbers,” a place where hearts and minds could be won (and Rostok might win influence in Washington), that these Americans drew their energy in a war that, as Rostok tells Parade, “doesn’t take. It gives and gives and then it gives again. It’s like being plugged into an iron lung.”

This is exactly the war that came down from a numbers-crunching Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” in Washington, and it was a vision of war that would be returned to Washington, on the basis of which endless destruction would be planned. So if you want to know what it must have felt like in 1965 to sit around a table in a suburb of Saigon, burning with energy and weighing the reams of facts that should have but never did tell Americans what was happening in Vietnam, this is the book to come to. It is amazing how much emotion Just can pack into the least novelistic of passages--into lists of projects and products and creature comforts, even of American visitors who paraded through the country (“ . . . assistant secretaries of this and that, congressional delegations, think-tank bigwigs, industry supremos, and the academic specialists, linguists, economists, sociologists, military historians, agronomists, nutritionists, and newspaper publishers eager to see things themselves, first-hand”).

And it is cumulatively a brutal portrait of Americans living in a country they are incapable of seeing; most of Llewellyn Group, in fact, can hardly take the time to look out the window. Yet the essential horror of “A Dangerous Friend” lies not in this blindness to an alien world around them but in the fact that it doesn’t for a second stop them, armored as they are in imperial innocence, from running roughshod over unknown lives and destroying a country.

There are no significant Vietnamese characters in the novel. The Llewellyns have no time for them. They can’t imagine them. The novel’s eeriest scene follows Rostok and Parade on a post-dinner stroll to the edge of town. Rostok is lecturing as always. (“It’s information we’re after and I’m not even certain what information. I don’t even know what I don’t know.”) Suddenly, he falls silent. Passing them in the night are black figures on bikes. “When they came out of the mist they were elevated and as clumsy as camels, their heads forward, bodies swaying, humpbacked, moving in a single-file caravan.” They are Viet Cong, and Rostok is terrified. He trembles in the darkness. For one second he is on the verge of meeting Vietnam. An enemy soldier looks at the very spot where they are standing, half-concealed by a sandalwood tree. But with his glasses jarred loose, “[i]n his exhaustion and myopia he saw nothing.” Moments later they’re gone, and Rostok is again lecturing Parade, “Nothing to fear from them. . . . Knowledge is power and they’re ignorant, so in the last analysis they’re powerless.” This is fabulous, tense and dramatic, for these protagonists, though quite capable of killing each other, cannot see each other. They inhabit parallel but hardly touching, hardly imaginable universes.

Unfortunately, Just shies away from the more radical implications of a novel in which the central character is not a human being but a human construct, an absurd, invented land meant for war managers back home. Amid much that is new and fascinating, “A Dangerous Friend” is a civil war of a book, for Just intersperses his modernist creation with bits of a traditional narrative involving Parade, Claude and Dede Armand, a French plantation owner and his American wife (who like Greene’s British journalist live in a shrinking no-man’s-land between the protagonists) and an American infantry captain captured by the guerrillas. Just’s novelistic heart, however, lies elsewhere, so this aspect of his book is never sustained or convincing. Perhaps the power of official innocence simply outgrew realism in Vietnam and so can no longer be encompassed in a normal narrative. In such a world, as writers like Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo have recognized, it is the twisted statistics, not the twists in plot, that animate the action.

The parade that passes Sydney by is, of course, that parade of grunts heading in-country just as he heads out. And Parade, if he had offered them any advice at all, would undoubtedly have said, “Stop; turn back,” because as the book’s anonymous narrator comments, “[y]ou know the end of things as well as I do.” The dirtiest little secret of that war--the thing that still makes books like Just’s mid-war reportage so readable, that drove the antiwar movement to distraction, that perhaps drives Parade himself out of all “adventure” and to an island off Cape Cod to pass his days retired and evidently alone sketching the pier beside his house--was that from Greene’s time on, this was a war whose end was always strangely in sight. Only the application of ever more force and more money and newer technology and more lives and deaths could stave off accountability and postpone this knowledge. It was, you might say, the blissful logic of empire, the fierce imperial innocence that Ward Just so passionately unearths.