War and Remembrance: A Vietnam Recalled With Sweetness, Sadness

“Lost Soldiers” is a strong and unusual novel. On its face, it is a standard tale of intrigue, adventure and mystery. James Webb has written a well-plotted story about Americans and Vietnamese in Vietnam more than a quarter-century after the war’s end. You want to know what will happen next: You will not be disappointed.

Yet, in retrospect, the plot fades away, and what the reader remembers most is the deep pull of affection the Americans feel for Vietnam and the Vietnamese. It’s not just that love that comes through; there is also powerful nostalgia for lost youth, friends dead, forever-missed possibilities of life.

“Lost Soldiers,” then, turns out to be a war story and a love story in which the dominant tones are sweetness and sadness. Webb, a decorated Marine in the war and the author of “Fields of Fire,” is a former secretary of the Navy and assistant secretary of defense. He knows what he writes about. His American characters are well-drawn, if on occasion exaggerated for novelistic effect. There is a slightly comic anthropologist who examines the bones of missing soldiers and airmen turned over to the Americans long after the war. There is a smart, tough and authentic Marine general.

And there is the hero, Brandon Condley, first a Marine in Vietnam, then a CIA agent there, then, after the war, unwilling to go home, he becomes a knockabout in Southeast Asia, doing security work for private firms. Now, 30 years after the fall of Saigon ( Webb, authentically, writes it as Sai Gon, and he calls the country Viet Nam), he is again working for the CIA--the “Agency”--helping with the bones. Before long, it is not just bones he is looking for, but living Americans, especially a deserter who went over to the Communist side and is still living.

That is the plot. Webb sets it in motion, moves it along and wraps it up in a satisfactory way. Yet it is the atmosphere, the enveloping scene of Vietnamese people and places, at which Webb excels. His rendering of Americans in modern Asia is reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s portraits of Westerners in the East a century ago, attracted, mystified, affected by--yet not wholly understanding--this strange world in which they moved.

Webb’s Condley had, years ago, tragically loved a Vietnamese woman and, more recently, another one.

“But no woman could ever fully own his heart,” Webb writes. “Because he would always be in love with Viet Nam.

” ... It dangled its mysteries before him, puzzles that only deepened every time he tried to solve them. It embraced him so tightly that in a way he had become it, looking out at the rest of the world from inside its eyes....”

“Brandon Condley loved Sai Gon,” Webb writes. “It was the museum of his own heart”--a city of crumbling yellow French buildings, beggars, food cooked on the streets, crowded markets, swank automobiles, old Asia and new Asia tumbled together.

It is not, of course, just the picturesque sights of Asia that enchant Condley, but the people who inhabit them. Webb’s Vietnamese elders, men and women, are convincing. His portrait of a Vietnamese colonel who was on the other--victorious--side is quite plausible.

Webb’s most ambitious Vietnamese character is Dzung, once an airborne soldier for the Republic of Vietnam and the son of one of its generals. After re-education by the Communists, he is now merely the driver of a cyclo, a bicycle that carries a passenger for hire. Lovingly drawn, Dzung is Condley’s Vietnamese alter ego, perhaps his better half, because Dzung has a wife, children and the responsibility of providing for them, and Condley is alone. If the reader has any reservations about the wholly admirable Dzung, it may be because he stands very much in relation to Condley as, in the American sense, Little Brother to Big Brother.

But, in the end, that was the limitation to the American-Vietnamese relationship throughout the war, wasn’t it? America was Big Brother to South Vietnam’s Little Brother, and we knew that we knew best. The delicacy of Webb’s portrayal of Dzung conveys the suggestion, without ever saying so, that perhaps we didn’t. “Lost Soldiers” pays homage to the Vietnamese and to the Americans whose lives were entangled and, so often, lost in that long ago and far away war.