Cochin, Tonkin, Annam, Vietnam

The image of soldiers receiving Communion at Mass in Vietnam is not the image the war usually summons, but it does fit the spiritual war perspective of In a Green Tree. War is central to Lafferty’s major projects, the Argo Legend, Coscuin, and In a Green Tree. For Lafferty, Vietnam was not merely a war. Vietnam was a just, moral, and necessary war. He wanted his readers to understand this fact, so Indochina has a vital role as part of the masterplot of Green and Red Revolution that runs through Lafferty’s imagination.

The point is that the Vietnam War is not just one heated political thing Lafferty had a “conservative” view about. It drove him back to the 1840s to write his sprawling alternative political history of the 19th-century. It became a key to how he understood Western history, his century, and American decay; and its place as a major factor in his peak writing years is a brute fact that shaped his whole writing project and his self-understanding. One didactic aim of Green Tree is simply to have the reader see Vietnam as Lafferty came to see it. Not many will.

Not long ago, someone on East of Laughter posted a version of the June Vietnam War ads, in which two opposing lists of SF writers appeared side by side. You probably know them. One statement said that the United States must remain in Vietnam. It was signed by writers including the moth-eaten magician Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, John W. Campbell, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Jack Vance, and Lafferty.

The other side opposed the participation of the United States in the war in Vietnam, and was signed by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, and many others. The anti-war ad was organized by Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm, and the resulting hawk counter-ad turned the page into a compact snapshot of the SF field’s Vietnam-era political divide.

One old Lafferty hand on Facebook replied to the post by saying that Lafferty’s conservatism was old news. The old news:

Now, here is some news about the Vietnam War that might really surprise you: the United States won the Vietnam War. That is, the U.S. wins the war within the universe of In a Green Tree, and presumably on Prime as well, if one accepts Lafferty’s version of events in 1973 and 1975. That extrapolation can be argued with. One might say that reading the work this way naïvely confuses the narrator with the author.

Lafferty’s account does not read to me as satire, total fantasy, or code. He uses allegory to talk about history, then he just talks history. It does not look as though he is playing a historical game, as he often does with his pseudo-authorities. He has a view. Thus, I do, I suppose, naïvely take the novel’s historical explanation of Vietnam as documenting Lafferty’s own views about Vietnam. The same goes for Lafferty's on communism, Senator McCarthy, JFK, the rollout of Vatican II, and much else in the work. You can be more sophisticated.

This is how it happens:

The complication comes next, after we won the Vietnam War. The Prince of This World brings about the betrayals that culminate in the otherwise inexplicable throwing away of victory. Then something happens that will be very familiar to readers of Lafferty: amnesia sets in. Americans forget that they won the Vietnam War. They fail to see that ascendant liberal traitors threw it away. You, too, might just be an amnesiac.

This is spelled out at the novel’s mythic level, and there is no way to not make this sound strange. The liberal traitors are used by Strategos, the novel’s name for the Prince of This World, who is freed in the Green Tree universe during the Spanish Civil War. It is another version of the liberation of Satan that happens in the Argo Legend at Yalta. All three of Lafferty’s thousand-page works treat communism as a mythic evil in league with Hell and Lafferty’s family line of devils. For the most part, Green Tree is low mimetic, but he builds this mythic level into it. It is not unrelated to the techniques of historical allegory Lafferty developed in the first two Coscuin Chronicles. Think, for instance, of the way he uses Ashley’s spiders in The Flame Is Green to summarize European geopolitics on the eve of the revolutions of 1848.

On Green Tree’s mythic level, related to us by the narrator, the devil, called Strategos, is angered that none of his Democratic presidential candidates won the presidency in 1968. Instead, the Roadblock won, setting back Satan’s plans, much as the devil’s timeline is delayed in Dark Shine. The legions of Strategos then set out to make the Roadblock the most hated man on earth. In frustrated fury, the Prince of This World issues a directive:

Yes, the Roadblock is Richard Nixon. In Green Tree, he is an obstructive providential figure in a spiritual war.

The vast majority of Green Tree is not written in a this heroic or mythic mode, obviously, but one of its wonderful idiosyncrasies is that it launches off into it, and some of its most apocalyptic passages are centered on the Vietnam War. I’m not going to say much more about how the mythic side of this works in the novel, but I do want to go through its non-mythic/historical argument about Vietnam.

Not only was the Vietnam War won by the U.S.; there was not really a South Vietnam or a North Vietnam at all in the way amnesiacs misremember, for “Vietnam” was just as much of an exonym as the old French colonial names were, but at least the people in the old days had seen themselves in those old exonyms. “Vietnam” is what happened because New York and London papers “had begun to write about two imaginary countries named North Viet Nam and South Viet Nam.” That loops into Lafferty’s larger view of post-WWII conspiracy, but suffice it to say Laffery says, remember Tonkin, Cochin, and Annam. Annam has disappeared from memory, and in its place there is an imaginary thing called “Vietnam,” split into halves:

Lafferty uses an analogy, illustrating the absurdity of the geopolitical narrative the American public swallowed:

In the novel, nine of the inner-neighborhood Tulsa kids enlist, hoping to help Cochin; six others enlist to bring the Army to total paralysis. On the mythic level, they’re out to fight the timetable of old Strategos.

Every Lafferty reader is going to quickly learn why Lafferty is anti-Communist. But why this emphasis on Cochinchina, especially? The novel does not get into this aspect in any detail, but Lafferty was certainly aware of the Catholic history in South Vietnam, which gained real political prominence amongst Catholics following the 1954 partition of the country. Hundreds of thousands of Northern Catholic refugees fled south during Operation Passage to Freedom, and it was those Catholics who formed a staunchly anti-Communist political base for President Ngo Dinh Diem.

Here it is worth getting into what might be somewhat unfamiliar history. Read any mainstream history of Vietnam, and you will very quickly come across a common criticism of Diem’s regime, which is that it favored Catholics in civil service, land distribution, and military appointments. This has been seen as a sectarian bias tied to Diem’s prominent Catholic family and deeply intertwined with the influence of his elder brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, the Archbishop of Hue. All this, along with other sectarian issues, alienated the country's Buddhist plurality, culminating in the 1963 Buddhist Crisis. That, in turn, led to the November 1963 military coup and the assassination of Diem. Post-coup, South Vietnamese Catholics lost their guaranteed state patronage, but they stayed hardline anti-Communists. This Catholic context, which was being covered in The National Review that Lafferty read, is one reason the Catholic neighborhood in Green Tree is so pro-Cochinchina, and it is part of why Lafferty rejects the idea of a South Vietnam that was somehow half of an atheistic and Communist north.

After the fall of the Proud Peasant and the assassination of the Cardboard Man in 1963, In a Green Tree turns to its Barry Lyndon allegory. Lafferty treats the 1964 election as a staging of Thackeray’s 1844 novel, just played out across television screens and town halls as an American schizo-gash. He writes:

Now skip forward to how Lafferty says America won the Vietnam War. In May 1972, the United States mined Haiphong Harbor under Operation Pocket Money. The mines interdicted Soviet, Red Chinese, and English supplies, and, as Lafferty tells it, communist aggression began to smother to death. A cease-fire was obtained from the invaders. The means of enforcing it were still at hand: the mines could be reactivated within hours, so for the communist forces to resume their assault would be to resume their own strangulation.

What happened next is part of what Strategos means by “ten thousand good traitors.” The mines were removed from Haiphong, and the cease-fire could no longer be enforced. Congress then passed the Case-Church Amendment, prohibiting any further American military action, and Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate by 1975. Lafferty scorches the American government:

The invaders predictably invade again, now with the backing of the whole communist world. In April 1975, the war ended in total defeat. From within the Whole Lafferty, the Vietnam War is a mythically charged spiritual battle against demonic communist forces, just as one would expect from The Flame Is Green and the Argo Legend. That story runs, in In a Green Tree, into 1978, then into the unfinished fifth part. Its version of the Vietnam War is the story of a noble, hard-won moral victory deliberately betrayed and thrown away by a complicit American media, a complicit Congress, and the American public itself.

So, yes, we find Lafferty on the Right, where we already knew him to be. But, as always, the matter is stranger than that, given his view of infernal powers in history. In many ways, it is recognizably Augustinian. In The City of God, Augustine treats Roman ideology and imperial history as, in effect, a demonic psy-op. Lafferty’s novels return to that pattern of devils in history again and again. In Green Tree, he does something he very rarely does, though. At one point, he imitates the sound of scripture, as if he were the voice of inerrancy, to make the point.

This is rich territory. I hope that others will start thinking more about what Vietnam meant to Lafferty and how it shapes the work, rather noting that he was a hawk on the war or that it is old news that he was a hawk. That is a dead end. We need to be many steps beyond it.