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empty, yellow-and-green dish of land, under these towering clouds, was the axis of that
vagueness, hiding the black-clad Others’ (HW, 225). There are the ever-present
‘contemptuous; even malevolent’ onlookers, the cyclo drivers and the ‘Unsmiling Chinese
waiters in white shirts and black trousers’ who are also present in the Wayang Bar in The Year
of Living Dangerously, and who ‘stand like sentinels around the walls, watching us’ (HW,
234). Koch repeatedly gives us Westerners watching Asians watching Westerners, and it is to
emphasise the ambiguities in determining which are agents of good and which of evil, and to
remind the reader of the interrelation in the identity of self and other.
10.4.2.3. The Ogres
The Americans are recognised more as victims of the war of adharma than forces for it,
yet their bombs clearly serve the demons’ purpose of bringing unnatural terror to the world.
Captain Danh compares the Americans to demons by trying to be gods and upsetting dharma,
though the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong have learned through their righteousness to avoid
the bombs which the Americans believe will win the war.
So the Americans are deluded. They sit in the sky like gods pressing buttons.
But when we shoot them down over Hanoi, they don’t look like gods. Wars
are won on the earth, in the end—and this is our earth. (HW, 415)
The Americans come closest to the ranks of demons with the fall of Saigon, amidst a scene
dominated by madness and darkness. Jim Feng remembers how ‘Thousands of people were
hammering at the closed gates and on the walls with their fists, demanding, pleading,
weeping’. The city had lost its power supply and was bearing the collapse under the dark and
rain. The American helicopters come in, Koch’s soulless insects, to evacuate a lucky few and
thoughtlessly abandon the rest to the descending wheel of fate:
the whirring and beating of twin rotors filled the blackness, and the choppers
hovered and tilted, the glaring white lights in their noses guiding them down.
Young Vietnamese climbed the walls and made it to the top, but the big
Marine guards kicked and fought them off. Other Marines lobbed tear gas
canisters into the crowd. What are you doing? I thought. You came here long
ago to help them against their enemies; how can you do this to them now?
(HW, 415)
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