When the going was good
Jonathan Keates
WAR AND PEACE IN VIETNAM by Richard West Sinclair-Stevenson, £20, pp. 365 Somewhere between Billy Russell in a frock coat at Balaclava and Kate Adie in her flack jacket at Sarajevo an element of what-jolly-fun disappeared from the business of being a war correspondent. The conflict in South-East Asia was nasty, brutish and long, but the impression gained from reading Richard West's book is that certain marginal perspectives and danger, sleaze and surreal absurdity gave it an inextinguishable romance, still enthralling to a journalist after 20 years. Doubtless Kuwait, Port Stanley and Mogadishu will yield their anecdotage of bars, brothels, garrulous taxi drivers and mad photogra- phers, but I am prepared to believe that they have nothing to compare with the louche post-colonial allure of Vietnam in the early 1970s.
However hardened to his metier, West was thankfully nut yet cynical enough to resist this impacted Graham-Greenery. The native exotica of places like Phu Quoc, famous for its ridgeback dogs, its pepper plantations and the making of nuoc mam relish from vats of rotted anchovies, was offset by the glamour, tinged with an incon- gruous cosiness, of the Hotel Royale in Saigon, 'a corner of quiet and demureness among the surrounding bawdy houses'. There, accompanied by the clank of the ceiling fan and the shrill chirp of geckos, you could knock back iced Algerian wine and eat bifteck au riz in the dashing compa- ny of James Fenton, Murray Sayle or Max Hastings, and hobnob with the opium- addicted proprietor Jean Ottavj, terror of drunken GIs, who had once found a friend `clutching his tripes' in mortal agony after an apparently harmless visit to the hotel by a Vietnamese barber hired to shave his torso.
This sort of thing makes good copy, but West, between catching a form of elephan- tiasis while staying at a rival establishment and getting called 'very sexy senior citizen' by a Saigonese bar girl proud of having learned the words 'fornication', 'copula- tion' and 'castration', was after more seri- ous game. He never quite caught up with the elusive Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose falsetto fits of xenophobic ranting made him sound like 'a schoolgirl hockey player accusing another of "sticks" in a vital match', but became suitably impressed by Liz Thomas, the young nurse from East- bourne whom the reader is tempted to see as a kind of Mother Teresa avant la lettre, without the white-robed beatitude, solacing herself with a swig and a smoke before returning to work among the low-lifes of Cholon.
All the best writing on South-East Asia has been in some sense autobiographical. Perhaps this is a sine qua non of first-rate reportage, but Vietnam and Cambodia seem to have demanded a heightened degree of self-analysis among those present on the scene for more than a flying visit. West shows us the evolution of his view of America as fully justified in intervening and of South Vietnam as something more sophisticated than a fascist puppet state, opinions which increasingly alienated him from readers of the New Statesman, for whom his last pieces were written before Saigon's fall in 1975. The latter idea is scarcely contentious and the former, given the hollowness of Eisenhower's domino theory regarding the potential collapse of neighbouring states under a Communist tidal wave, now seems positively quaint.
Much more debatable is the notion, expressed with some vigour at various points in the book, that modern permis- siveness lost Americans the war. Granted that they imported their domestic social revolution to Vietnam and that drugs were in part to blame for the increased number of armed assaults among GIs, yet we have only to recall the drunken brutality of troops in other campaigns to savour the staleness of this blame-it-on-the-Sixties cliché. In the Peninsula War, for example, neither the British nor the French man-at- arms was distinguished for moderation when out of the firing line, yet both fought like tigers when occasion required.
There is something preposterous in the sound of a journalist, of all people, reading us a lecture in the virtues of abstinence, yet the ingenuousness with which West enforces his message somehow adds to the charm of this book. It is a tribute to his candour and simplicity to say that the polit- ical background, as he interprets it, might be understood by a schoolchild. A still stronger reason for reading War and Peace in Vietnam is the feeling we have that the place, the people and the moment will never entirely let his imagination go.
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