Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

changed: Marxism is a tool to help us free our country. Do you understand?’ (HW, 326).
Koch’s presentation of the NVA constantly underscores their simple, pragmatic and
honourable humanity, and by association that of other communist nations, as in the following
description of the quality of their equipment and sympathy of their men and women:
… a North Vietnamese convoy; a row of four military trucks, Soviet-built,
solid and old-fashioned, with bicycles tied to their radiators. They were filled
with NVA troops in their baggy green cotton uniforms and sun helmets—at
least a third were young women. (HW, 330)
The North Vietnamese seem more like innocent and inquisitive new kids on the block than
some forbidding enemy when the Soldiers Three see ‘the young male and female soldiers
staring at us curiously as they went. One or two women smiled, and a group of young men
waved to us’ (HW, 331). In the most defining scene of NVA sense of discipline and purpose,
Captain Danh’s tired and hungry troops take two live chickens from a village which had
refused to offer them food. Danh orders them to return them:
We do not come to rob them; we come to free them.
The two men turned away without a word, and trudged off into the
darkness. I waited for some mutter of protest from around the fire; even
perhaps some anger. But there was none; only silence.
Feng realises then, he says ‘that the North would win the war’ (HW, 332). It is not a question
of might, but of righteousness.
This is not to say that Koch is absolving communism, but that he is relying again on the
themes of the Bhagavad Gita and the wayang kulit, namely that good and evil are qualities of
cosmic order, and that when men tend to their duties within that order the illusory masks of the
personality can be removed. The morning after the maddening American evacuation, the
symbols of evil—whirling fans, the colour yellow, expressionless Chinese waiters in starched
white jackets—quietly create a false air of normality. Feng notices unusual swarms of
insects—symbols of the soulless—at the Palace grounds, ‘hovering and shimmering’, and in
the extremely still and hot air ‘the whirring of the insects began to sound to me like some
mechanical alarm system, warning us of what was to come’ (HW, 417-18). Langford and Feng
are waiting at the Presidential Palace when the first North Vietnamese Army soldier arrives.
- 252 -