Une si jolie petite guerre (iii)

bande dessinée from Marcelino Truong

Marcelino Truong’s father took a job a friend of mine turned down, public relations for Ngo Dinh Diem, president of the Republic of Viet Nam.

On the left you can see the end of the first chapter where Marco, his older brother and sister, listen to their mother shout at their father that Diem was “a load.”

Not 5 years later I was in a bunk bed just like that and my friend was throwing away his television set after seeing the Marines land at Da Nang. Such were the public relations set in motion by American advisers like Edward Lansdale,

who had intimidated such as my friend from any disagreement. After the fall of Saigon my friend set to work to translate Vietnamese poetry, relating to the English-speaking public such as the children of the refugees.

Marcelino’s comic book is another effort like that, flinty, true, telling the Republic as it was. The only source he shows in a chapter dense with what you must know about the war for his country is Denis Warner, a hard-nosed Australian, interviewing Diem.

The chapter begins on the right, at the artist’s mother’s homeland, not France but the port of St. Malo, on the beach where the tides would sweep away the children without the guidance of their grandfather.

Americans had destroyed St. Malo in order to save it just fifteen years before, as they had Le Havre, where the family arrived by boat from New York.

After visiting they fly from Paris to Saigon. That last leg from Bangkok was especially rough.

While his kindergartener self pukes in a bag, the author tells of liberation won from France, cruel land reform under the Party in the north, and the Diem brothers fighting revolution in the south.

This was the third Viet Nam letter of 7 so far addressed to Une si jolie petite guerre by Marcelino Truong. We had sent the first on February 28, 2022 and the second on March 5, 2022.

Then the fourth went out on April 25, 2022, the fifth on May 28, 2022, the sixth on July 9, 2022, and the seventh on May 22, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.