Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63 by Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel (Arsenal Pulp)

It was a normal 1960’s childhood in a Washington DC suburb, one filled with hula hoops, Play-Doh, and winter sledding “like a Peanuts cartoon…something that Norman Rockwell might imagine.” Suddenly this all changed and the Truong children were on their way back to Vietnam. Their father, a diplomat serving in the Vietnamese Embassy, was needed by President Diem, a career swerve that took his family from the land of “cherry pie, a corner store, and Coca-Cola” to Saigon, a city filled with soldiers and Skyraider warplanes, with a naval destroyer moored in the river.

Now the children eat pho at street stalls with the family’s driver, Chu Ba, while their French mother struggles to make her housemaid realize that fish sauce isn’t an ingredient in boeuf bourguignon. Their father becomes part of what American journalists call the Diemocracy, serving as the English translator for President Diem and becoming the director of Agence Vietnam-Presse. His children go swimming at the pool in the exclusive Cercle Sportif de Saigon, learn to live without glass in the windows of their modern apartment, and enact spirited battles with their captured crickets and Siamese fighting fish.

Western journalists come to report on the “lovely little war, with just enough adrenaline,” flying to battlegrounds for the day and returning to the peace of Saigon in time for dinner. Then an unsuccessful coup attempt by two Vietnamese fighter pilots brings the war to the capital and grenades become a routine danger. Caught in a traffic jam, the children and their mother smell “something charred” and learn later that it came from a monk who set himself on fire to protest what is now being called “the dirty war.”

This is too much for Madame Truong. Her nerves shatter, she becomes prey to manic depression, and the war enters the Truong home. The children overhear the parents’ bitter fights. Their driver is forced to sell his blood to cope with the rising inflation caused by the advent of U.S. troops. Soon he‘s drafted to serve as a soldier, one who rides at the front of an armored train.

Interspersed with this child’s view of the war is a concise history, much of it based on his father’s memories and excerpts from his mother’s letters to relatives in France. This provides a brief but detailed summary of the Diem regime, the machinations of Madame Nhu, the role of Catholicism in Vietnam, and the symbolism of the legendary Trung sisters. “We should have done it on our own, with American weapons but without their soldiers, the way the Communists did,” the father concludes years later.

The “graphic novel” format of this mingled memoir and history gives it a vivid depth that makes it emotionally wrenching, while the frequent use of Vietnamese sprinkled throughout the book gives it the feeling of watching a film with subtitles. Like Maus and Persepolis before it, Such a Lovely Little War takes what once were “comic books” into a whole new realm of literature, blending art and text to create another world of creative possibility and a work of art that should become a classic.~Janet Brown