NMT : Do characters in your works May Bao (Storm Clouds), Bong Dem (Darkness of Night), Gio Mua (Seasonal Wind), and Vong Dai Xanh (The Green Belt) bear a slight resemblance to the real person and the real life of their author?  In The Green Belt for example, one finds abundantly projected events and social reality as they existed around the time you wrote it.  In light of that, what's the ratio of fictional elements in your works?

NTV : You are correct in saying that the then current affairs and reality make their appearance very frequently in my fiction, typical of which is The Green Belt.  But that's not a reportage as is commonly known in journalism.  Indeed, The Green Belt embodies many details drawn from real life, but in the process of creation these were sifted and selected by the author's perception so that their overall interconnections can be seen, leading to a reality in fiction.

Looking back, I remember that at that time there was no shortage of news articles dealing with upheavals in the Central Highlands.  In fact, the magazine Tinh Thuong ran the reports I then wrote on this problem area.  I was deeply moved by the tragic conflict between Kinh and Thuong peoples, but at the same time I also thought that it was a big issue on the national scale.  Thereupon, instead of writing a reportage, I projected the collected data as literary images in a novel which I thought would have a more lasting impact on the reading public.

I began writing the novel right from the time when, as a special reporter for Tinh Thuong, I had many occasions to go to the Central Highlands and witnessed bloody uprisings associated with the FULRO movement.  That conflict was devastatingly complicated, bordering on illogicality, which involved Vietnamese of different ethnic groups in both lowlands and highlands, the Americans, the communists, and also the French.  Tinh Thuong devoted a few special issues to this subject, following and analyzing the events by subsuming them under a thematic slogan: "Central Highlands: a Horse Cart with Three Drivers upon it".  The Green Belt, in truth, depicts a no-less-tragic war that was forgotten within the Vietnam War, the latter most intensely discussed in the history of the American press.

I still remember one detail in connection with the theme of the novel.  Through the courtesy of Tap San Su Dia (Journal of History and Geography) in Saigon, I received a long letter from Professor Hoang Xuan Han, a respected Vietnamese scholar living in France.  He shared my concern with the ethnic issue in Vietnam and expressed an attitude quite distinct from that of the American researchers who had visited and consulted with him.  To me, the matter of ethnicity and regionalism in Vietnam is not a thing in the past.  It's still a painful wound which needs to be healed by a far-reaching vision, by adequate concern and attention from future leaders of Vietnam.

Coming back to The Green Belt, I was able to complete it during the time I served as Chief Surgeon of the 81^st Airborne Ranger Group.  The work was published in 1971, a significant portion of it having been deleted partially by myself and partially by the Bureau of Literature and the Arts in the Ministry of Information.  Regrettably, after 1975 the complete original version of the manuscript was lost.

The novel takes the form of a first-person narrative.  As you know, even though the narrator speaks as "I", this "I" does not stand for the author.  The protagonist is a talented painter who very much resembles artist Nghieu De, a good friend of mine.  The only difference is he gives up painting and switches to journalism where he finds himself drawn deeply into the tragedy that befalls the Promised Land in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.  Readers often tend to identify the "I" in fiction with the author.  Recently, I received a letter from a former student now living in Australia who had just read The Green Belt for the first time.  He expressed surprise at having discovered through the novel that I'm also a painter.  As you see, I like painting very much, having painters for friends, but I've never learned how to paint.  The female character named Nhu Nguyen, whose presence though not prominent is felt throughout the entire book, can be considered the truly fictional part of it. 

NMT : Suppose someone were to put together a collection of short stories dealing with the Vietnam War from different perspectives, do you think you would contribute your work to it if invited?  Will you decline or accept the invitation?  Please give us the reasons for your preferred decision. 

NTV : Your question brings to mind the book The Other Side of Heaven which recently came out.  It is indeed a publication of literary works about the Vietnam War seen from many angles – American, North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese – thus including "the third tear drop", to use author Nguyen Mong Giac's words, a reference to a number of stories by writers of former South Vietnam.  To be absent from such a collection would mean to have no voice and hence to be forgotten.

In fact, there have been many authors writing about the Vietnam War: American, communist North Vietnamese, and naturally South Vietnamese.  It has been observed that the voice from former South Vietnam has produced little echo within the international literary forum, chiefly because of a shortage of translations into English, and even works originally written in English have not achieved noticeable success.

In my opinion, the American publishing industry is regulated by the market economy.  Owners and directors of American publishing houses are very sharp in detecting what investment will bring them maximum profit.  Given the communist bamboo curtain that blocked the truth in favor of propaganda for so many years, the image of the North Vietnamese soldier, supposedly symbolizing the army of the people, was previously regarded mythical by many Americans.  The American reading public have the need to know the portrait of the North Vietnamese enemy who was capable of defeating great America.  In the meantime, they don't care to learn about the ARVN soldier who was described by the American press throughout the Vietnam War with a full range of negative attributions – to a certain level such a view seems to have served as a justification for their inability to win the war.  Generally speaking, literary products and art works coming from North Vietnam, including poetry, painting, and sculpture, will not necessarily have real value, but they certainly will maintain some power of attraction responding to the taste of the American public for some time to come.

I don't mean to say that the American reading public do not know how to appraise literary works of value produced from the previous South Vietnam.  Only, it's obvious that there are hindrances related to marketing, which prevent those works from reaching them.  I strongly believe that when the post-Vietnam syndrome is gone for the American public, a work of literature of value, no matter which side of the Vietnam conflict it comes from, will have the proper place it deserves. 

NMT : What impact did the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in 1975 have on your real life and on your literary life, respectively?

NTV : Ever since the 1960s, I had no illusion of an end to the war with South Vietnam coming out as the winner.  My judgment was not based on the thought that the enemy side was very strong; rather it had to do with weakness and decline of the South through a process of self-destruction.  Right on the first page of The Green Belt, I put forward an evaluation of the Vietnam War at that point in time, by saying: "When the Americans had moved beyond the advisory stage, everyone knew this was their war – a  war that had developed and was dealt with in the interests of the United States."  In spite of that realization, I could not help being stunned by the speedy collapse of the whole of South Vietnam while there were still a million well-armed ARVN men in place.

I chose to stay, not to run away to another shore, only to witness the last days of ARVN soldiers.  Their traumatic experience did not lie in the last battle that they lost.  It was rather the humiliation and the overwhelming despair they felt in face of the cowardice displayed by their commanding officers and the military leadership as a whole.  It was somewhat fortunate that the war ended then.  Had it been prolonged, had there been more deaths and destruction, the end result wouldn't have been any different, given the low quality of leadership.

Through sharing hardship with soldiers in battle, witnessing their shame and humiliation afterwards amidst a group of winners untidy and in not-much-better condition, I perceived it was a tragedy shared by both parts of the country.  Riding out such an earth-shaking event, how could I not feel a deep impact on my real life and my literary life? 

NMT : You're a soldier who writes literature.  Some people have observed that you did not simply depict military life but used that environment as an excuse to embark on addressing other issues more complicated and more of a strategic nature.  Do you consider that observation correct?

NTV : I've never written in the name of a soldier.  Army life to me can be viewed as an aggregate of circumstances.  Even when I wrote about those circumstances, I didn't stop with simply depicting army life through fragments of experience as undergone by soldiers.  It's not that those fragments were not rich.  Rather, as you've noticed, they formed only a starting point from which I could generate an integrated view of other complex issues.  At times it would appear as though those issues were disconnected and spontaneous, but in fact they were connected in the context of causality within an evolving process, one being both regulatory and strategic. 

NMT : During the war you underwent much hardship, moving from one battlefield to another.  However, the element of anger can hardly be detected in your work, not even in the newspaper piece you wrote about inmost feelings of a combat soldier lost in the city amidst political turmoil.  Can you explain that?

NTV : When choosing to work on battlefields, I did not view my engagement as hard and miserable.  If there was any hardship or misery, it was nothing in comparison to that suffered by soldiers during the war and in its aftermath, not to mention the tragic consequences that befell their families.  Having to live for a considerable length of time with adverse circumstances in the war, including sacrifices and deaths, only to witness a society filled with injustices, who would not feel anger and indignation?  Only, the manner of expressing it varies.  The day a soldier spends in the city away from his familiar combat environment seems to have been described rather frequently in literature of the former South Vietnam: in a tea house cum night club, or in a theatre, there often occurs a scene where a male singer or an actor is dragged away from the stage and attacked by some soldiers because he wears combat fatigues and sings a soldier's song while he himself is a draft dodger, so on and so forth.  I can understand and appreciate the anger of those soldiers, but in my view that singer or actor is also a victim.  The furious reaction by those soldiers is called, in psychological terminology, "displacement", or displaced response.  Angry with a slippery fish, the soldiers whack the cutting board, as a proverbial saying goes.  I'm not defending the soldiers' action, but at the same time I'm not a moralist to condemn it either.  As a writer, I want to explore hidden reasons rather than overtly expressed feelings.  You say the element of anger is rarely seen in my writings, but actually it's there.  Only, it takes a different form, and as always I'm situated at neither one or the other extreme.  Even at a young age, when trying my hand at writing through working as a student reporter, I kept a proper balance in what I wrote.

NMT : Some time before 1975, you were summoned to court because of a publication.  How did that happen?  Can you relate it to the readers?

NTV : As you know, our 81^st Airborne Ranger Group was a general reserve unit whose area of operation embraced the mountains and forests of the Central Highlands.  But members of the Group also proved to be excellent in battles that were waged in the city, an example of which was our wiping out concentrations of enemy troops at Cay Thi and Cay Queo in Saigon during the Tet Offensive of 1968.  Perhaps because of that, in 1971 the central government recalled this battle-tested group from the highlands to Saigon for the purpose of suppressing the series of demonstrations that had gone on for a long while in that city.

As I remember it, it was also the time when reconnaissance teams of Airborne Ranger Groups discovered that the Ho Chi Minh Trail had become as broad as a superhighway on which supplies were being transported day and night all the way to the Tri-Border Area.  The trail was like a knife stabbing into the throat of that strategic border area in the highlands at that time.  From the President's Palace down to the General Staff office, no one could have been uninformed about this.

Let me digress here.  Up to this day, I cannot understand why at that point in time there was no effort whatsoever, not even by the Americans with their surplus of B-52s, to eliminate that strategic target.

Against that back drop, the 81^st Airborne Ranger Group was recalled to Saigon, as I have mentioned.  Instead of being surrounded by green forests, the courageous soldiers of the Group were confined to Tao Dan Park behind the Presidential Palace and adjacent to Hoi Ky Ma, the Equestrian Club.  They found themselves bewildered and lost, like wild animals deposited in the city.  They were given gas masks and bayonets and ordered to break up and disperse demonstrations.  But who were among the demonstrators?  They might be youths and students enthused with idealism; they might be hungry orphans and widows; or they might very well be war invalids – those disabled fellows who, at one time or another, had wielded their weapons and fought alongside these soldiers.

Indeed, the soldiers found themselves posted in the heart of Saigon, surrounded by high-rise buildings bustling with prostitutes, next to the Equestrian Club where constantly were seen plenty of stud horses with their glossy rumps.  Those combat soldiers could not help but realize that in this life, not only the sorrowful war afflicted them; but more than that, in this motherland of theirs, no farther than on the other side of the fence, there existed a separate high society, magnificent and gloriously bright, wrapped in its detached happiness.  That separate society was a world alien to the soldiers, drenched with a pervasive fragrance and excessive consumption.  It was the world of those people who clamored for war while managing to stay above the fighting or to remain outside of it.

"The Battle of Saigon" is the title of a short story written against that background, which ends with a moment of awakening for the soldiers who realize that besides the battlefield familiar to them, they have to face a more depressing frontline – which is defined by corruption and injustice in society.  That their foremost struggle is not in the border area of the highlands, but on the more challenging battleground right in the heart of Saigon.

That story was published in the journal Trinh Bay (Exposition), number 34, in 1971.  And as expected, that issue of the journal was confiscated.  Both the author and the director of the journal were summoned to court for the crime of militating against the morale of the army and thereby benefiting the communists.  At that time I was with my unit on a military operation back in the Central Highlands.  Receiving the summons to Saigon, I appeared in a court of law as the accused in full military uniform.  Even though the whole affair evolved with all court rituals observed, I had the impression that I was in a play in which all actors, from the judge to the public prosecutor, no longer believed in the roles they played.  The press, including the military paper, followed the trial and published updates on developments as well as their comments.  All this led to a reversal of the normal situation, wherein the Ministry of the Interior found itself shifted in the view of the public from the position of prosecutor to that of defendant.  The authorities then seemingly realized that it was not to their advantage to prolong the game of mimicking democratic legal impartiality, and thereupon the trial was quickly concluded with a suspended sentence for the author and a large fine for the magazine. MORE

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