Une si jolie petite guerre (v)

bande dessinée from Marcelino Truong

The heart and soul, the brow and poitrine, of Une si jolie petite guerre is the artist’s mother. See her at the center of these 2 pages.

On the right-hand page, top panel, just stage right of center, she has regained her figure weeks after giving birth to her fourth child. Yvette graces a reception with her beauty while needling her husband by asking him to dance.

She doesn’t want to be in the country. She doesn’t want to do the work of a wife at a diplomatic affair, chatting up everyone to share notes with her spouse when they undress at home.

While tormenting her husband she spots the head of the United Press International bureau coming and turns away. At far left of the center panel we see her harsh moue over her new-mother’s bosom,

thinking, “Oh no, another irritating guy.” Literally, shaver, working a long time to little effect: rebarbative. Good eye.

This was 25 years before Neil Sheehan won a Pulitzer prize for telling the war for Viet Nam as the life story of an American, a charismatic counter-insurgent. Yvette has directed her gaze

out of the scene where across the book’s gutter a shaven man cuts the head off a farmer in his field with a machine gun, the counter-insurgency that cost so many more lives on our ally’s

side than among the enemy. At the far right from Yvette, Neil is telling her husband Khanh that he heads out the next day to tramp the boondocks with Vietnamese paratroops, that is, the Saigon ones.

Ha Noi had no paratroops. Paras in the French sphere are troops who go out among the peasants and kill everyone they find at home. The point of a parachutist is that he will jump from an airplane into a battle.

That is so insanely dangerous that hardly anyone ever has done it. The point is that they will do what you tell them to do. For instance, kill a farmer not from a helicopter with a machine gun but standing right there,

for instance drowning you by hand as Neil witnesses in the following pages. Back at the diplomatic reception, just below Yvette in the bottom left panel above, her husband has told the bureau chief,

“Ah, don’t judge us too fast. Our cause is just but we don’t play a handsome role in this conflict.” That is my awkward, word-for-word translation. To catch the spirit of Marcelino’s father,

see David Homel’s version of the book in English. The page ends with an ambassador drawn in by Yvette’s tractor beam, asking Mrs. Khanh to dance. He has male pattern baldness as our ambassador to Saigon that year did not.

He swaps in an f for the French v in voulez-vous. German? Which one? Scandinavian? I am guessing one of those, somewhere proper, restrained, and sober. The spitting vixen, the distracted and hormonal young mother of four, the undiplomatic wife, the pissed-off heroine of her son’s tale takes the hand of this third wheel with a sober mien.

This was the fifth 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, the second on March 5, 2022, the third on March 26, 2022, and the fourth on April 25, 2022.

Then the sixth went out 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.