A Dangerous Friend - Softcover

Just, Ward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 061805670X ISBN 13: 9780618056705

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2000

Synopsis

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND THE LOS ANGELES TIMES • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“A literary triumph that transcends its war story. . . its greatness will stand the test of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“A master American novelist.” —Vanity Fair

A Dangerous Friend is a thrilling narrative roiling with intrigue, mayhem, and betrayal. Here is the story of conscience and its consequences among those for whom Vietnam was neither the right fight nor the wrong fight but the only fight. The exotic tropical surroundings, the coarsening and corrupting effects of a colonial regime, the visionary delusions of the American democratizers, all play their part.

A few civilians with bright minds and sunny intentions want to reform Vietnam—but the Vietnam they see isn't the Vietnam that is. Sydney Parade, a political scientist, has left home and family in an effort to become part of something larger than himself, a foreign-aid operation in Saigon. Even before he arrives, he encounters French and Americans who reveal to him the unsettling depths of a conflict he thought he understood—and in Saigon, the Vietnamese add yet another dimension. Before long, the rampant missteps and misplaced ideals trap Parade and others in a moral crossfire.

 

About this title

About the Author

WARD JUST (1935-2019) was the author of nineteen novels, including Exiles in the Garden, Forgetfulness, the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Dangerous Friend

By Ward Just

Mariner Books

Copyright ©2000 Ward Just
All right reserved.
ISBN: 061805670X

Chapter One

The Effort

* * *

I will insist at the beginning that this is not a war story.There have been plenty of those and will be many more, appallingstories of nineteen-year-olds breaking down, frightened outof their wits, or engaging in acts of unimaginable gallantry; andoften all three at the same time. The war stories were from adifferent period, later on, when the war became an epidemic,a plague like the Black Death. Society was paralyzed by fear.Order broke down. Duty and honor were forgotten in the rushto survive. Commanders deserted their units, friends turned theirbacks. Among the population, individual burials were replacedby burials en masse. The American morgue was expanded againand again. Aircraft that brought fresh troops returned with coffins.I remember watching a doctor perform an autopsy whilehumming through his teeth, the identical note repeated monotonously.His fingers were rigid as iron.

    When he saw me, he looked up and whispered, Bring out yourdead.

    But that time was not my time. That time was later on, whenthings went to hell generally, and the best of us lost all heart.My time was early days, when civilians still held a measure ofauthority. We were startled by the beauty of the country, andsurprised at its size. It looked so small on our world maps, notmuch larger than New England. We understood that in VietnamAmericans would add a dimension to their identity. Isn't identityalways altered by its surroundings and the task at hand? So thisis a different cut of history, a civilian cut, without feats of armsor battlefield chaos. If love depends on faith, think of my narrativeas a kind of romance, the story of one man with a badconscience and another with no conscience and the Frenchmanand his wife who lived in the parallel world, the one we thoughtwas a mirage from the century before, a bankrupt colonial milieuthat offered ? so many possibilities, as Dicky Rostok said.

We went to Vietnam because we wanted to. We were not drafted.We were encouraged to volunteer and if our applications weredenied, we applied again. We arrived jet-lagged at Tan Son Nhutairport where someone met us and hurried us off to wherever wewere billeted, usually a villa on one of the wide residential boulevardsthat reminded everyone of a French provincial city. Eventhe plane trees looked imported. And later that day we showedup for work at one of the agencies or the embassy or Lansdale'soutfit or the Llewellyn Group and briefed ? an exercise thathad much in common with initiation into a secret society, Skulland Bones or the Masons. We learned a new language, one thatexcluded outsiders. We lived with one eye on Washington andthe other on Hanoi, and the Washington eye was the good eye.The effort ? that was what we called the war, The Effort ? wasexistential, meaning in a steady state of becoming. War aimswere revised month to month and often week to week, to keepour adversary off balance.

    There were thousands of us recruited from all over the government,from foundations, think tanks, and universities, too;even police departments. Sydney Parade had worked for a foundationwhile Dicky Rostok was a foreign service officer, as was I.A few of us went at once to the countryside, where we administeredvarious aid programs in collaboration with our Vietnamesecounterparts. We worked harder than we had ever worked inour lives, or would ever work again. We were drunk on work.Work was passion. We were in it for the long haul, and from thebeginning we swam upstream.

    We reorganized their finances. We built roads, bridges, schools,and airstrips. We distributed medicine and arranged for armydoctors to vaccinate the children and conduct clinics for the sick.Our agronomists devised new ways to cultivate and harvest riceand then introduced a miracle strain that grew beautifully butdid not taste the way Vietnamese expected rice to taste; so it wasgrown and harvested and left to rot or exported to India. Weperformed these chores every day, all the while trying to discoverwhat it was that kept the war going, even accelerating, month tomonth. The success of the enemy seemed to defy logic. We had somuch and they had so little; our nineteen-year-olds were supportedby an arsenal beyond the imagination of the guerrillasfacing them. Or so we imagined, as we know next to nothing oftheir personalities, their biographies, where they had gone toschool, where they were born, whether they were married orsingle, what animated them beyond the struggle for unification,a political ideal that could not account for their tenacious will;think of Brady's photographs of the Union infantry. So we wroteletters home describing Buddha's face. We described Vietnam aswe would describe the character of a human being we had neverseen but was famous nonetheless, an introverted personality repletewith legend, rumor, and innuendo.

    After a few months, friends and family dropped their pretenseof polite curiosity. They had their own urgent inquiries. How arethings actually? The reports on the evening news are so confusing,we can't make head nor tail of them. Are we winning thiswar or losing it? Give us your opinion. Your letters are ambiguous!Please give us the straight story, what's happening out therereally? What's the story behind the scenes? And later still, Wehope you know how much everyone here is behind you boysand what you're doing in Vietnam. It sounds awful. We all appreciatethe effort. Is everything all right with you? Keep yourhead down. Hurry home.

    Of course there was no straight story in the sense of a narrativethat began in one place and ended in another. Nothing wasdeliberately withheld; very little was known. This was exhilarating,as if we were explorers in a land at the very margins of theknown world. We argued all the time, unraveling the legendfrom the rumor and the rumor from the innuendo; and it wasParade who suggested that we were imprisoned in our own language,tone deaf to possibility. Parade thought the VC led thecharmed life of the unicorn, the beast of myth that could beneither caught by man nor touched by a weapon. Rostok scoffedat that. There was no such thing as a charmed life. There wasnothing on this earth that could not be tamed, given moneyenough and time.

    We ventured far afield to discover the logic to events. Perhapsall occupation forces find themselves at odds with their hosts,knowing at once that they are but a veneer to another, morenatural life, a life in-country that goes on as it has gone on forcenturies, a life as teeming and fluid and uncontrolled as the lifebeneath the surface of the great oceans. We came to understandthat there was a uniform world parallel to the artificial world weinhabited. Ours was swarming with shadows, dancing and fluctuatingday to day while the parallel world was symmetrical andanchored, prophetic in a way that ours was not. It was this worldwe had to enter in order to discover the nature of the resistance,meaning a reliable estimate of the situation. We only wanted toknow where we stood, not so much to ask.

    In the meantime there was an infrastructure to be built and abureaucracy to be put in place. The first was impossible withoutthe second, and it was the second to which Rostok devoted hisenergies. He wanted his lines of authority to be unequivocal.Sooner or later, Llewellyn Group, generously funded, superblyorganized, and staffed with the best minds, would discover ameans to infiltrate the parallel world and decipher it ? so manypossibilities, as Rostok said.

He had a flattened nose, perhaps evidence of a youthful fistfight,and an unpleasant high-pitched laugh. He was always in motion,his hands describing arcs, his head turtling forward as he inquired,Huh? Huh? His memory was phenomenal, always anasset in management, but he seemed unaware that an overactivememory often blinded one to the circumstances of the present.Rostok was not at all bookish, but that's often the case with menof action. Those books he had read he invested with an almostmystical significance; probably he believed that the mere fact ofhis acquaintance gave them a kind of grandeur. Voodoo, SydneyParade said.

    One of his favorites was Joseph Conrad, not the Conrad of theAfrican jungles but the Conrad of the open Asian seas, the coming-of-ageConrad who was always conscious of the shadow linebetween youth and maturity. Rostok believed that Conrad had aparticular purchase on the delusions that attended men organizingthemselves in difficult or dangerous situations. He liked torecall Conrad's story of the marvelous sailing ship Tweed, avessel heavy and graceless to look at but of extraordinary speed.In the middle of the last century she bested the steam mailboatfrom Hong Kong to Singapore by an astounding day and a half.No one knew what there was about the Tweed that accountedfor her exceptional spank, perhaps the shape and weight of thekeel, perhaps the placement of the masts, perhaps the ratio of sailto the length and breadth of the hull. She was built somewhere inthe West Indies, teak throughout, the best of her breed and soonto be left behind by the iron steamers. Such was her fame, andsuch her mystery and allure, that officers of British men-of-warcame aboard to look at her whenever they shared a port. Theytook meticulous measurements, they interviewed all hands, butno one ever discovered her secret.

    The Tweed?s former skipper, Captain S? --, thought heknew. When Conrad met the captain he had transferred from theTweed to another ship, but his former command continued tohold his allegiance. Captain S ? -- told Conrad that she nevermade a decent passage after he left her helm. It was obvious thathis superb seamanship was the reason for her great success andwithout him the Tweed was just another lumbering coaster. Thiswas the mystical union between ship and skipper, each ennoblingthe other. Captain S ? -- looked on the sailing ship Tweed asRodin looked on a fat block of granite.

    Something pathetic in it, Conrad observed.

    And perhaps just the least bit dangerous.

    But Rostok held with the captain.

My first posting abroad was in the consular section, Saigon, andit was there that I met Dede Griffith, as she was known then.Dede was already seeing Claude Armand, in effect dividing hertime between the tiny USIA office on Nguyen Hue Street andPlantation Louver. When Claude was occupied I used to take herto dinner at Guillaume Tell or Ramuncho, and in due coursewe became good friends. Everyone liked Dede. When she andClaude were married, I gave her away ? and never was a womanhappier to replace one name with another. Thereafter she wasDede Armand and very quickly she dropped from sight, at leastfrom the sight of the American community, growing each day. Ofcourse I am the moron who failed to notify the lads upstairswhen Dede came to renew her passport.

    I knew the members of Llewellyn Group. It was hard to missthem, Rostok swaggering about the city like a Roman proconsul,though it was difficult to know exactly what he did, his specificbrief, his place in the bureaucratic scheme of things. I got toknow Sydney Parade very well because I was the one detailed todrive to Tay Thanh to tell him that his father had died. He wasterribly upset at the news, it was obvious they were very close.Sydney had his father's photograph in his desk next to the IN andOUT boxes. He invited me to stay for a drink and dinner and wespent the evening talking about his father and about the Armands.In the course of that evening and other evenings, I learned whathe and Rostok were up to. Sydney spoke openly with me, probablybecause I was a junior consular official with no friends inhigh places and no motive to tell tales; not that there were manyto tell. Also, Sydney was short. When his father died, he had onlyone month remaining in-country. Or, as he peevishly remindedme, twenty-eight days, seven hours, and umpty-ump minutes. Iwas short, too, but I wasn't counting the days.

    I returned to the State Department after three years in Saigon.And by 1974 I was back there, a little more seasoned now aftertours in Foggy Bottom, Morocco, and the Philippines. I wasassigned to the political section of Embassy Saigon ? a kind ofmorbid practical joke, since by 1974 there were no politics, onlythe promise of more war despite the secretary's personal assurance:"Peace is at hand." In a way he was right, but it wasn'tthe peace he had promised and it wasn't at hand. At last, withAmerican troops mostly withdrawn, the civilians were in chargeonce again. That meant we occupied the wheelhouse as the shipdrifted toward the shoals.

    It is the simple truth that I was one of the last Americans toleave from the roof of Embassy Saigon on April 30, 1975, ourday of dishonor and of rough justice, too. We had been at itfor so long, and when the end came it was almost with relief;we don't have to do this anymore. For as long as I live on thisearth I will remember the bitter odor of smoldering greenbacks. Ithought of burning fruit. I stood at the door of the strongroomwatching an overweight marine sergeant feed the stacks of currencyinto a makeshift fire, the smoke of thousands of dollarsfilling the corridor. He whistled while he worked. I hoped thestench would reach Washington, D.C., and remain there for ageneration. I remember the patience and courtesy of the staffcrowded on the narrow stairs leading to the roof, the dark jokesand hesitant laughter, everyone listening to the crash of explosivesadvancing from the northwest. We knew we were present atthe end of something momentous, and not only a lost war or lostinnocence, either. That's a European idea, and they're welcometo it. I believe we knew on that day that our choices had beenreduced to two: fear of the known or fear of the unknown, andfor the rest of our lives we would fear the known thing.

    Vietnam. You kept meeting the same people as you movedfrom post to post, diplomats you had served with, and of coursethe foreign correspondents. We were all connoisseurs of ThirdWorld adversity. I remember vividly a party I gave a few yearsago. We sat up very late, about a dozen of us, diplomats andjournalists; all of us had served in Vietnam during the early days.We made our bones in Vietnam, as American gangsters like tosay ? and none of us went home. It is equally true that none ofour careers suffered, far from it. Service in the war gave you a legup the ladder, even though, as seems so obvious now but wasn'tobvious then, we were searching in a dark room for a black hatthat wasn't there. And the same was true for the soldiers, at leastfor the officers. We survived and our reputations survived withus, and we, most of us, went on to succeed handsomely in thewider world. There is some irony here but no need to dwell uponit. The ironies of the effort are well known.

    Yet for some of us the episode was only that, a brief wrestle ina dark room, a distant memory, so distant that whatever pleasureor pain there was has been forgotten. The foreign correspondentswent on to other wars in other regions ? and we, too. Wewere there with them. Some of them and some of us finally gaveup on the Third World ? we had been at the roulette table fortoo long, unsuccessfully playing the same number ? and movedon to senior positions in London or Paris or Washington, or outof the business altogether, into banking or public relations, lobbying,consulting, where we could use the friendships we'd madeand the valuable knowledge we'd gathered. The wars and famineswere for younger men and women with faster feet and uncrowdedpersonal lives and a powerful appetite for the unknownthing.

    I was always surprised at those who were able to move oneasily from Vietnam, the war one more experience in a lifetimeof experiences, neither the worst nor the least. So vivid then, itreceded, leaving only fugitive souvenirs and a few friendships.This was evident that night in my villa when we fell to talking ofthe early days of the Effort, the mid-1960s, before things went tohell and the plague arrived. Naturally we reminisced about ourmany blunders and about personalities, both the living and thedead. Six of us in the room remembered everyone mentioned,looks, job, eccentricities. Anecdote followed anecdote. I openedanother bottle of cognac.

    When someone said, Whatever happened to Dicky Rostok?, Idid not reply. I wanted to hear what the others knew, becauseRostok had gone to considerable trouble not to make himself theblack hat in the dark room.

    One of the journalists laughed, not unkindly. He said thatRostok had stayed on in Vietnam until early 1968. Then, withhis usual exquisite sense of timing, he resigned from the foreignservice and went home. About two days before the Tet Offensive.Can you believe it?

    Yes, I said.

    You mean he knew?

    Rostok had a nose, I said.

    I saw him in Switzerland not long after the war, the journalistwent on. He was running some stock fund, living very well inZurich. He tried to get me into the fund but I didn't have anymoney and told him so. Mistake, he said. His fund was one ofthe most successful in Europe and friends always got a discount.He said he had turned down an ambassadorship because heneeded to make money. He had a new wife. And the new wifehad expensive tastes. Then he went into insurance, selling lifeinsurance to GIs, as I remember. But there was something notquite right about the way he went about it. There were complaintsand an investigation. A congressional committee heldhearings but nothing came of them.

    Funeral insurance, I said.

    Was it funeral?

    Black limousines, a bronze coffin, a gravesite in the cemeteryof your choice, a Spanish veil for your mother, and an entertainmentallowance for the party afterward. There were otherbenefits but I forget what they were. He made a lot of moneybefore the company folded, 1970 was a great year for him.

    I don't know anything about that, the journalist said. I neverknew him well in the war. But when anything hush-hush wasgoing on I'd pay him a call and he'd give me some help. Dickyliked ink. Dicky had time for you. And that paid off for him. Iwas thinking that we all learned a lot in Vietnam, especially atthe beginning when we pulled together, trying to find our way.No one wanted to be left behind. Rostok was good where itcounted. I can't remember the name of that outfit of his ?

    Llewellyn Group, I said.

    Yes, the Llewellyns. They were spooks, weren't they?

    They weren't spooks, I said.

    I thought they were spooks. They acted like spooks. Rostokhad a deputy, wouldn't give us dick when we came around forinformation. What was his name?

    Sydney Parade, I said.

    Yes, Parade. Whatever happened to him?

    One of the other journalists cleared his throat and said irritably,Who the hell was Sydney Parade?

    Friend of Dicky Rostok's, I said mischievously.

    I don't remember any Parade.

    He went into teaching, I said. But I did not add that he'dretired and now spent his days alone on an island off Cape Cod,reading his books, watching the evening news, and sketching thepier that adjoined his house, one line drawing after another.Sydney believed in repetition.

    The reporter shrugged; he had no interest in anyone who hadgone into teaching.

    Sydney was only there for a year, I said.

    Just a bit player in the war.

So the end of my narrative has come at the beginning, as ifyou are standing at a distance and hear the echo of the bells andcan only guess at their size and location. It is always necessaryto look forward and backward at the same time. Only in thatway can we preserve our identities and live truthfully. You knowthe end of things as well as I do. We cannot pretend not to knowthem or deny that they exist. When we relate events from thepast we know the results and must acknowledge them, whetheror not they bring us understanding, or consolation, or shame.

    The year is 1965, before the Effort, begun so modestly, turnedinto something monstrous. Take the measurements, interview allhands, and there's still a mystery at the heart of it. Sydney Paradetold me Rostok's version of Conrad's tale of the Tweed and herdangerous skipper, and some of the other stories that appear inthis book. Sydney was not always kind to himself, owning to hisbad conscience and, by his own admission, to his naïveté in thebeginning. Rostok was usually straight with the facts, though hisego got in the way of everything he did and didn't do. I havealways believed that a mountainous ego resulted from an absenceof conscience.

    I play no part in this narrative and will shortly disappear fromit. I would not be writing it now except for my position in themiddle of things. I was the only one in-country intimate with thefour principals, Rostok, Parade, the Frenchman, and the Frenchman'swife ? yes, and Gutterman, too. Do not forget for a momentthat I was also present in Vietnam years later, when thecountry was unified by force, and Rostok and Parade were longgone.

Continues...

Excerpted from A Dangerous Friendby Ward Just Copyright ©2000 by Ward Just. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 061805670X
• ISBN 13: 9780618056705
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256