Image Suckers!

[news photo of Điện Biên Phủ on 5/7/24]

For the 70th anniversary of its victory at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam staged a military parade with 12,000 participants. What caused the biggest buzz was the appearance of a four-year-old girl. Hoisted by a soldier, Trần Vy Trâm smiled and raised both arms. In one hand was a bouquet. Half Vietnamese, half Tai, she was dressed in colorful Tai clothing, an exotic touch.

This climatic scene mirrored a huge and clunky sculpture by Nguyễn Hải. Visiting Dien Bien Phu in 2020, I was content to admire it from very far away. Of Socialist Realism, I’ve endured more than my share in Serbia, Albania, Germany, Ukraine, Laos, Cambodia and the rest of Vietnam.

Eighty seven percent of Dien Bien Phu’s 14,000 defender were actually not French, but Germans, Italians, Belgians, Moroccans, Algerians, Congolese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laos, Hmong and, yes, Tai. The Communist Viet Minh also had Tai soldiers.

Then as now, there were Tai who saw Vietnamese as a bigger threat than the French. Others just thought France would win. Historical accounts, though, are always reductive. Often, they’re just lies. What the Viet Minh achieved in 1954, though, was unquestionably spectacular. On 2/13/20, I wrote:

Each 105mm howitzer had to be taken apart, then lugged up in pieces by porters, to be reassembled, emplaced, fortified and camouflaged. Roads and bridges had to be immediately repaired after each French bombing run. Many miles of trenches were dug.

Marveling at all these coordinated activities, the French brigadier general Pierre Langlais remarked, “This efficiency was not doubted by those who knew the Tonkin delta and its giant dikes—the mechanical marvels of another age; and as for being courageous, one certainly had to be in order to work under threat of delayed-action bombs that were dropped in each attack.”

A 90-year-old veteran of this 56-day siege told me a Viet Minh soldier survived on just two cold balls of rice a day, “We couldn’t cook. If the French saw smoke, they’d bomb us.”

Handsome and heroic seeming, soldiers on parade aren’t anything like those in battle, but this is just the gap between image and reality. Image suckers, we avert naked truths. Our lust for sexed up or comforting mirages is relentless.

Since we dress up even the most banal or inconsequential, of course we would mythologize war. Since its abject terrors are incomprehensible, we need war to be glamorous, entertaining and sexy. Since the state can’t survive without war or war readiness, it stokes then satisfies this desire. No one does it better than the USA. The world has never seen a more sexed up purveyor of carnage and mass misery. You can even masturbate to American anti-war movies!

Though a lesser authority on war than Katy Perry, Paul Fussell still has something to say. In Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, he cites a revealing questionnaire:

Over one-quarter of the soldiers in one division admitted that they’d been so scared they vomited, and almost a quarter said that at terrifying moments they’d lost control of their bowels. Ten percent had urinated in their pants […] The fear of this fear augments as the rank rises: for a colonel to piss his pants under shellfire is much worse than for a PFC. Landing at Peleliu, U. S. Marine E. B. Sledge confesses, “I felt nauseated and feared that my bladder would surely empty itself and reveal me to be the coward I was.” […] During the Normandy invasion, a group of American soldiers came upon a paratroop sergeant caught by his chute in a tree. He had broken his leg, and shit and pissed himself as well. He was so ashamed that he begged the soldiers not to come near him, despite his need to be cut down and taken care of.

No one wants to hear that shit, man. Let’s watch Apocalypse Now again! How can anyone not like its surfing scene? “It’s not about Vietnam. It’s Vietnam.” Coppola has never been anywhere near Vietnam or a war.

By comparison, Communist propaganda is goofier, uglier and touchingly innocent. Bombastically masculine, it doesn’t know how to deploy sex, unlike Uncle Sam, that ultimate pimp.

The inclusion of Trần Vy Trâm, though, added not just a female spirit but childish innocence to a martial display. She softened and sweetened it. Ring girls do the same between boxing rounds. Naked outbursts of male sexuality must be balanced.

Just before Tet of 2021, the American ambassador to Vietnam released a music video with a local rapper. Though professionally filmed at multiple locations in two cities, it comes off as lighthearted and casual, as if spontaneously done. In one scene, tallish Daniel Kritenbrink is seated on a low plastic stool, with his coffee on another. Westerners are almost never seen this way in Vietnam. They prefer swanky, air conditioned joints. That Kritenbrink is in a suit and tie adds to the incongruity. As intended, Vietnamese were charmed and seduced by such a down-to-earth big shot, so unlike their own.

Americans, too, are often suckered. Millions swooned over Obama playing basketball or slow jamming. He’s one of us! Trump’s very crassness snares a different crowd.

Though newspapers have been around for centuries, most people couldn’t read them. Mass media, then, is just the broadcasting of bullshit to those who can barely read. Willing fools, we can’t get enough of illusions and lies. Right at the start of his 1928 book, Propaganda, Edward Bernays maps this out:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Living with constant lies destroys mind and soul, at best. Often enough, it kills.

[Apocalypse Now]

[US Ambassador Daniel Kritenbrink rapping with Wowy in Hanoi just before Tet in 2021]

[victim of Agent Orange]