Une si jolie petite guerre (vi)

bande dessinée from Marcelino Truong

Cherchez la femme.

Phạm Phú Quốc and Nguyễn Văn Cử, two men, bombed the palace in Saigon on February 27, 1962. Marcelino Truong put their Skyraiders on the cover of his Une si jolie petite guerre.

Inside he tells the story twice. First, as his brothers and sister and mother witnessed the raid from nearby. Then again as a re-enactment from histories and photographs.

I suggest reading all about it. David Homel, American exile in Quebec, has translated Marcelino’s whole book into English.

In brief, the pilots aimed to kill the president, his older brother the bishop, and his younger brother who ran internal security, but they hit the wrong wing of the palace. What? Marcelino put it on the cover of his book. Why?

Makes sense to me. Men from that army have often made grand gestures, as individuals, whose general import has puzzled observers. I notice that one attacker’s personal name could mean rich country. The other has something to do with destiny.

The pilots did not oppose the president’s cause but felt he did not lead his government aggressively enough. There also may have been bad blood between families.

Perhaps the Americans played a hand, as we did in the next year’s attack. Toute une histoire. Marcelino goes as far into the plot as I ever want to. I am entranced here rather by what he reports about two women involved.

First comes his mother, Yvette, the pissed-off Breton who is my hero of her son’s story. She never wanted to raise her family in that war. Je me faisais un sang d’encre, she tells her husband about the air raid. My blood went ink.

En tout cas ça m’a fichu une crise de foie carabinée. That hit my liver hard, she says. She evokes her bodily experience of these politics in terms from Galenic, humoral medicine which persist in spoken French. In the adjacent panel two small sons discuss instead electrical torture.

Recovered from her crisis, Yvette sits erect at her escritoire to write to her schoolteacher parents about the episode. She tells of the recent festival and march in honor of the two Trung sisters, women who defended Viet Nam against invaders, to their death.

Behind the war elephants of the Trung marched a column of the Young Republicans, the Women’s Solidarity Movement, armed, vibrant in new uniforms. Did Quốc and Cử strike back at these women when they bombed the palace?

Yvette thinks that is possible. In her letter she evokes the shame these women provoke in cowardly, lazy men. That was, by the way, the battle tactic of the Trung. They did it by showing their breasts.

Certainly the pilots were shooting for the founder and leader of the women’s brigade, Madame Nhu, wife of the younger brother who ran security, along with her whole family. They missed, the lazy cowards.

Marcelino steps in to explain that his mother suffered from the disease known at that time as manic-depressive, now called bipolar. She had no such diagnosis or therapy at the time but the swing of mood and extreme behaviors fit the bill.

She was also as she noted then a Frenchwoman with blood of ink and a crisis of the liver. They still have those. She was as well a wife and mother in a war she didn’t want. Yet she admired the women with guns.

She had a lot going in on her mania and depression, in her liver, in her ink and blood. As you read Une si jolie petite guerre, cherchez cette femme and all the others her son presents.

Marcelino likes women. The book-cover shows boys and Skyraiders and anti-aircraft and a machine gun. The back and front of the cover itself show women in arms, lilies rising from shit.

This was the sixth 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, the fourth on April 25, 2022, and the fifth on May 28, 2022.

Then the seventh went out 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.