Peter Lyderik
2nd January 2005, 08:30
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Once more into the quicksand
John Berthelsen
Weekend: December 24-26, 2004
That the universal cruelty and futility of war continues unchanged over generations is hardly a surprise, but a recently rediscovered 40-year-old book about the Indochina War nonetheless came as a striking but eloquent shock.
It is unfortunate that the neo-conservatives who surround United States President George W Bush hadn't read it before they decided to take democracy to the Middle East.
The book is The Quicksand War, written by Lucien Bodard, one of the foremost French foreign correspondents who covered Southeast Asia.
It was first published in English by Faber and Faber in 1963. The book went through several printings, including by Little, Brown in the US in 1967, before it slipped from view, although it is still available and relatively easy to find through used-book dealers on the Internet.
Translated and with a foreword by Patrick O'Brien, the author of the celebrated Aubrey-Maturin sea stories, it was condensed from two volumes of a four-volume set on the First Indochina War by Bodard. Regrettably, the other two volumes have never been translated.
Its language remains as fresh and as searing as yesterday's news about Baghdad. ``Monsieur, if we had had the sense to cut off a few dozen heads at the right moment,'' Bodard was told by innumerable colonials, ``there would still be a French Indochina.''
But they didn't cut off enough heads at the right time, although not for lack of trying. And before it was done, Indochina would be plunged into a seemingly endless and despairing cycle where ``in an area the size of France each side fought in the twilight, without seeing the other: Handfuls of men, lost in the enormous landscape, tried to creep up on one another through the darkness and the leaves, to kill at point-blank range. All the private enmities between the clans and tribes were exploited, and between the imperialists and the communists they exploded spontaneously.
``It was an inextricable tangle. Wars dating from every century were all going on at the same moment; the weapons ranged from blowpipes, spears and spells to machine guns and mortars.''
In this passage only the nationalities and locales need to be changed to reflect today's Middle Eastern violence, not only in Iraq but in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well: ``The Viets were carrying out a policy of atrocities; but this atmosphere of torture bore its own corruption and contagion with it. In the end, cruelty was practised on all sides. The Expeditionary Force's Asian partisans, continually threatened with a hideous death, killed the Vietminh with the most sophisticated torments - unless of course they came to an understanding with them.
``It was a pitiless war. Often it happened that even the French were caught up in this intoxication of torture and death. It was in the air one breathed, it arose from the country itself, forming part of its ways and customs: It emanated from the landscape, from weariness, over-excitement and example. Great strength of character was needed to keep it down.
``The Viets knowingly urged the French on to commit excesses, for they were well aware that as far as torture was concerned they were far beyond the French, both in efficiency and skill. For them, torture as a form of warfare finally became a technique that allowed them to gain an ascendancy over people and to win.''
Frustration would grow. ``For the French the whole question was where the Viets were going to strike; for the Viets it was to prevent it from being found out. The Expeditionary Force was like the blindfolded man in a game of blind-man's bluff, stretching out to catch hold of something, some hint of the truth. The Expeditionary Force was in the open, in the delta; its movements were thoroughly known and well in sight of the Viets all around, lying there hidden, unseen, elusive, on the edge of the jungle.''
Bodard was a close friend of the English writer Graham Greene, whose novel The Quiet American, set in the last years of the French occupation, describes the colossal misconceptions held by the Americans of life in a land they could not fathom.
It would be difficult not to find in Bodard's book the antecedents of Greene's Alden Pyle, the murdered American diplomat-spy killed for his interference in Franco-Vietnam affairs:
``All the Americans in Saigon, those in the embassy, those in the military mission and the special services and the USIS [US Information Service], to say nothing of the American journalists, were ill with Francophobia, virtually ill at the spectacle of the French setting up colonialism once more. They had such a wonderfully deep and sincere belief in the essential evil of it all. And they were so sure that America would do so much better than France and they themselves so much better than the French.''
In the same way that the Americans longed for a real Iraq until they got there, in Bodard's work they ``they longed for a real Vietnam, a friend of America, instead of this Vietnam given over as a prey to the French. In such a Vietnam they would be able to use all the `expansionist' theories they had learned at college and in the Protestant churches; expansion, that is, of the domain of the American spirit and the American way of life. It was more and more a Pilgrim's Progress crusade against French Machiavellianism, a crusade based on priggishness, schoolmarm's morality and frigid anger. More and more every day they behaved like frustrated righters of wrong.''
And here is Bodard describing a kind of tropical Green Zone: ``The Americans were shut away with their dollars, their luxury, their parties, their intrigues and their particular functions - for each of them had an exactly defined job. Their numbers continually grew; they were very rich and they were very bitter, and they bought the most splendid houses for their agencies and their dwellings, setting themselves up as little blocks of resistance, living apart, devoting themselves to work and taking such care of their health that they reached the point of eating and drinking nothing but what came from the States, including water.''
But the spirit of spin knows no nationality when in the service of military expediency: Commanding French General Marcel Carpentier's ``only positive measure was to set up an immense press section, for he did not like professional journalists; he was persuaded that newspapers would be delighted to print articles written by his own officers if they were provided free, and that they would therefore no longer send their own men - cynical, dubious characters.''
After the debacle at Dienbienphu in 1954, the French forces, including foreign legionnaires, had lost 94,000 lives. Some 300,000 Vietminh (the nationalist precursors to the Vietcong) are believed to have died, along with 250,000 civilians.
Soon, they would be followed by the Americans, who would lose another 58,000 before they called it quits and the communist flag was finally hoisted above a unified nation in 1975, leaving behind them 225,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, perhaps one million North Vietnamese and Vietcong, and as many as one million dead civilians.
Bodard describes the bewilderment of the French colonials - ``men of standing, respectable, worthy, jovial citizens with fat little bellies - the `colonial egg' - on spindly legs''. They described the old Indochina, the Indochina of the 60-year French protectorate, as an earthly paradise. `` `What didn't we do for the nha-ques (natives)?' they said to me. `We rescued them from abject poverty, we gave them schools, roads and hospitals and what is even more important, we brought them justice and security. But how can a country so overwhelmed with kindness possibly have blown up in our faces like this?'''
So far 1,303 American servicemen have died in Iraq. By some estimates, 100,000 Iraqi civilians have also perished.
Once more into the quicksand
John Berthelsen
Weekend: December 24-26, 2004
That the universal cruelty and futility of war continues unchanged over generations is hardly a surprise, but a recently rediscovered 40-year-old book about the Indochina War nonetheless came as a striking but eloquent shock.
It is unfortunate that the neo-conservatives who surround United States President George W Bush hadn't read it before they decided to take democracy to the Middle East.
The book is The Quicksand War, written by Lucien Bodard, one of the foremost French foreign correspondents who covered Southeast Asia.
It was first published in English by Faber and Faber in 1963. The book went through several printings, including by Little, Brown in the US in 1967, before it slipped from view, although it is still available and relatively easy to find through used-book dealers on the Internet.
Translated and with a foreword by Patrick O'Brien, the author of the celebrated Aubrey-Maturin sea stories, it was condensed from two volumes of a four-volume set on the First Indochina War by Bodard. Regrettably, the other two volumes have never been translated.
Its language remains as fresh and as searing as yesterday's news about Baghdad. ``Monsieur, if we had had the sense to cut off a few dozen heads at the right moment,'' Bodard was told by innumerable colonials, ``there would still be a French Indochina.''
But they didn't cut off enough heads at the right time, although not for lack of trying. And before it was done, Indochina would be plunged into a seemingly endless and despairing cycle where ``in an area the size of France each side fought in the twilight, without seeing the other: Handfuls of men, lost in the enormous landscape, tried to creep up on one another through the darkness and the leaves, to kill at point-blank range. All the private enmities between the clans and tribes were exploited, and between the imperialists and the communists they exploded spontaneously.
``It was an inextricable tangle. Wars dating from every century were all going on at the same moment; the weapons ranged from blowpipes, spears and spells to machine guns and mortars.''
In this passage only the nationalities and locales need to be changed to reflect today's Middle Eastern violence, not only in Iraq but in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well: ``The Viets were carrying out a policy of atrocities; but this atmosphere of torture bore its own corruption and contagion with it. In the end, cruelty was practised on all sides. The Expeditionary Force's Asian partisans, continually threatened with a hideous death, killed the Vietminh with the most sophisticated torments - unless of course they came to an understanding with them.
``It was a pitiless war. Often it happened that even the French were caught up in this intoxication of torture and death. It was in the air one breathed, it arose from the country itself, forming part of its ways and customs: It emanated from the landscape, from weariness, over-excitement and example. Great strength of character was needed to keep it down.
``The Viets knowingly urged the French on to commit excesses, for they were well aware that as far as torture was concerned they were far beyond the French, both in efficiency and skill. For them, torture as a form of warfare finally became a technique that allowed them to gain an ascendancy over people and to win.''
Frustration would grow. ``For the French the whole question was where the Viets were going to strike; for the Viets it was to prevent it from being found out. The Expeditionary Force was like the blindfolded man in a game of blind-man's bluff, stretching out to catch hold of something, some hint of the truth. The Expeditionary Force was in the open, in the delta; its movements were thoroughly known and well in sight of the Viets all around, lying there hidden, unseen, elusive, on the edge of the jungle.''
Bodard was a close friend of the English writer Graham Greene, whose novel The Quiet American, set in the last years of the French occupation, describes the colossal misconceptions held by the Americans of life in a land they could not fathom.
It would be difficult not to find in Bodard's book the antecedents of Greene's Alden Pyle, the murdered American diplomat-spy killed for his interference in Franco-Vietnam affairs:
``All the Americans in Saigon, those in the embassy, those in the military mission and the special services and the USIS [US Information Service], to say nothing of the American journalists, were ill with Francophobia, virtually ill at the spectacle of the French setting up colonialism once more. They had such a wonderfully deep and sincere belief in the essential evil of it all. And they were so sure that America would do so much better than France and they themselves so much better than the French.''
In the same way that the Americans longed for a real Iraq until they got there, in Bodard's work they ``they longed for a real Vietnam, a friend of America, instead of this Vietnam given over as a prey to the French. In such a Vietnam they would be able to use all the `expansionist' theories they had learned at college and in the Protestant churches; expansion, that is, of the domain of the American spirit and the American way of life. It was more and more a Pilgrim's Progress crusade against French Machiavellianism, a crusade based on priggishness, schoolmarm's morality and frigid anger. More and more every day they behaved like frustrated righters of wrong.''
And here is Bodard describing a kind of tropical Green Zone: ``The Americans were shut away with their dollars, their luxury, their parties, their intrigues and their particular functions - for each of them had an exactly defined job. Their numbers continually grew; they were very rich and they were very bitter, and they bought the most splendid houses for their agencies and their dwellings, setting themselves up as little blocks of resistance, living apart, devoting themselves to work and taking such care of their health that they reached the point of eating and drinking nothing but what came from the States, including water.''
But the spirit of spin knows no nationality when in the service of military expediency: Commanding French General Marcel Carpentier's ``only positive measure was to set up an immense press section, for he did not like professional journalists; he was persuaded that newspapers would be delighted to print articles written by his own officers if they were provided free, and that they would therefore no longer send their own men - cynical, dubious characters.''
After the debacle at Dienbienphu in 1954, the French forces, including foreign legionnaires, had lost 94,000 lives. Some 300,000 Vietminh (the nationalist precursors to the Vietcong) are believed to have died, along with 250,000 civilians.
Soon, they would be followed by the Americans, who would lose another 58,000 before they called it quits and the communist flag was finally hoisted above a unified nation in 1975, leaving behind them 225,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, perhaps one million North Vietnamese and Vietcong, and as many as one million dead civilians.
Bodard describes the bewilderment of the French colonials - ``men of standing, respectable, worthy, jovial citizens with fat little bellies - the `colonial egg' - on spindly legs''. They described the old Indochina, the Indochina of the 60-year French protectorate, as an earthly paradise. `` `What didn't we do for the nha-ques (natives)?' they said to me. `We rescued them from abject poverty, we gave them schools, roads and hospitals and what is even more important, we brought them justice and security. But how can a country so overwhelmed with kindness possibly have blown up in our faces like this?'''
So far 1,303 American servicemen have died in Iraq. By some estimates, 100,000 Iraqi civilians have also perished.