Vietnam Allegory

...Perhaps for this reason Kolpacoff's publishers conclude their note by declaring, almost happily it seems Mr Kolpacoff has never been to Vietnam, the setting for this novel" He is unfettered by demands of historical accuracy and must care only for psychological probability, for the unwinding of motive and consequence within an hypothesis The Prisoners of Quai...

...We are disoriented not only by considerations of motive and consequence but also of fact...

...Dong makes the reader experience what some of us (who have never been there either) believe of Vietnam, it turns Vietnam into a metaphor of our own unrestrained willfulness and luxurious cruelty Our cruelties are most likely committed in the heart or with the tongue, never mind, Kolpacoff has enlarged our understanding of them, and his book will survive the war...

...If I read the book right, it partakes more of the concision and generality of classical drama than anything else It is remarkably suited for the stage We have access to the thoughts of Kreuger, but of no one else Gesture and speech tell us all we need to know of Lieutenant Buckley (in charge of the interrogation), Sergeant Nguyen (who conducts it in Vietnamese) and the prisoner (who says almost nothing, but whose presence motivates and controls the novel's energies) The story Kreuger has been sentenced to hard labor for refusing to obey an order He was to fire upon a small group of Vietcong surrounded in a valley He and his men were the stopper m a bottle, had he opened fire the Vietcong would have been decimated For the first time m combat he saw the faces of the enemy, he withdrew his men, the Vietcong escaped, and he was court-martialed Working on a prison detail the day the novel begins, he notices a jeep approaching from afar, in a mirage-like vision The jeep brings the boy, picked up trying to make his way through American lines bearing Chinese hand grenades and medicine...

...Kreuger is summoned to the questioning because he knows Vietnamese and Buckley doesn't trust his interpreter By the time he arrives the boy has already been beaten up by Sergeant McGruder, a generalized caricature of a professional Army killer Throughout the book McGruder wants to take over the interrogation He will beat the boy till he talks or dies If the boy talks it will mean nothing because McGruder is ignorant of his language, no matter, the point is to make him talk McGruder, in keeping with Kolpacof Fs resolute refusal to assign personal rather than collective guilt, is an archetype instead of an aberration, his brutality is impersonal, not sadistic The title of the book, of course, carries a plural noun The boy is a prisoner in fact, as are Kreuger and Cowley, a young enlisted man m the stockade who is sent to the interrogation by mistake But everyone m that corrugated metal shack, surrounded by barbed wire, guarded by sentries, is a prisoner What traps the boy traps them all For The Prisoners of Quai Dong is allegorical in intention It presents us with an ethical dilemma, a moral conundrum...

...Vietnam Allegory By Geoffrey A Wolff Albert Camus wrote in his journal "Hatetul the writer who talks about and exploits what he has never experienced It was early 1942 L'Etianger was soon to be published and was at the front of his mind, he had surely written about an act he had never experienced Camus' declaration was provisional, though, and he quickly modified it "But be careful, a murderer is not the best man to talk of crime (But isn't he the best man to talk of his crime7 Even that is not certain )" One is reminded of this while reading Victor Kolpa-coff's first novel, about the interrogation of a boy suspected of being a Vietcong by a clutch of American officers and soldiers, who finally drive the boy to suicide Kolpacoff, now 28, wrote The Prisoners of Quai Dong (New American Library, 214 pp , $4 95) while a graduate student at San Francisco State, his publishers do not say whether he was ever m the Army, but they do point out that he has never been to Vietnam Camus knew, of course, that very little fiction, and still less enduring fiction, is in the strictest sense autobiographical What he seemed to find hateful was the writer who invented not only places never seen and actions never committed, but also the internal, metaphorical experience of such places and events To know murder one must have practiced it m the heart, if not with the hand Yet the Vietnam war is a special case It invites exploitation and its direct experience is accessible to the would-be exploiter So uncertain are we of its realities that our first reaction to news from Saigon is to question the truth of the report rather than judge it Do American soliders systematically, or occasionally, or never, torture prisoners7 Are innocent villages destroyed for vengeance or purpose or by accident7 Are there such things as innocent villages...

...If The Prinsoneis of Quai Dong is to be construed as an allegory, its intention must be seen as something more general than a polemic against American involvement in Vietnam or even against war Like Catch-22 it is about the crime of letting compassion be trapped by external systems of logic and illogic that teed upon themselves and generate their own insane energies The oppressive madness of the room is more important to Kolpacoff's book than what happens in it...

...Finally, to save the boy, Kreuger lies to Buckley He tells him that the boy mentioned his home village Buckley rushes to tell his major, who calls in an air strike Kreuger is pleased with his lie "All I had left was revenge " But against whom7 The village is completely destroyed, the boy kills himself Kreuger, with the best intentions, he thinks, has caused the destructions He was trapped by limited options He ends the book a lieutenant again...

...Kreuger suffers from no such madness Three years in the Army have taught him one thing "I learned to keep my head down " He does not care about the information and knows Buckley cares only because it will gild his efficiency report But as an outsider and a witness to the crime, Kreuger s complicity is required to legitimize it If he plays ball, Buckley tells him, he will be restored to his lieutenancy In the beginning he scorns the bribe, by the second day he accedes Not for himself, for the boy To save him And the boy hates Kreuger more than anyone in the room Kreuger begins by repeating the questions Nguyen had asked, a "simple repetition of a liturgy which, if repeated often enough, would suddenly explain everything to us...

...The Prisoners of Quai Dong poses this hypothesis Put half a dozen or so men who don't care for one another m a hot, windowless, dirty, metal shack, deprive them of sleep for a couple of days, anger and frustrate them, confuse them, give some of them the power to take life from others, and the result will approximate corporate insanity Everything that happens in that dangerous room answers our expectations There is, to be sure, suspense and one dramatic reversal of fourtune, but it does not come from anything so quirky and erratic as personality...

...It should not be classed with such inclusive panoramas of Army life and violent death as From Here to Eternity, The Young Lions, The Naked and the Dead, All Quiet on the Western Front or A Farewell to Arms The characters are few, their histories nonexistent and irrelevant The action transpires in one place, the supposedly secure coastal garrison at Quai Dong (a fictional location) We see no battles, save one skirmish revealed in flashback by the narrator, ex-Lieutenant Kreuger, a prisoner of his own army m the Quai Dong stockade The rest of the action passes in the present Of Kreuger's past, then, we are told very little We don't know why he joined the Army, what training he had, what his education was, what his politics are Is he married7 We don't know The novel is situational rather than personal, the emblematic main action??the brutal interrogation of a young Vietnamese??shapes character rather than the reverse...

...Others share in the torture "I looked at Buckley, hardly able to believe that I had seen him use the knife, for its use had unnerved him in the beginning as much as it had me " Yet letting go has its own logic, and its own poignance The Americans inflict pain on the boy till he passes out, he is then revived gently and carefully Bombs destroy, hospitals resurrect, engineers rebuild Kreuger, too, will use the knife to save the boy from death And all the boy wants is to die, probably in some mad rite of loyalty or defiance...

...When Kreuger enters the room for the first time and notices a soldier guarding the prisoner Russell "looked frightened and dangerous, as if he might squeeze the trigger and shoot through the ceiling Not that he wanted to hurt anyone For the time being, I didn't think that any of them wanted that They only seemed frightened or unaccountably angry" Nguyen begins to question the boy The purpose of the interrogation is to find a nearby Vietcong supply base While the questions seem pertinent, they are asked for their own sake, over and over, m precisely the same order, using the same words They could be any questions The answers are always the same, probably lies The object is to exhaust the prisoner But the strategern does not work, the boy exhausts the Americans, who lose their patience Nguyen begins to use the point of a knife, jabbing it into the boy's skin at the groin, belly and back with each question He does this in response to a taunt from Buckley " 'He's afraid to hurt him Nguyen denied it??he seemed to fear that accusation above all others " Nguyen's anti-Communist bona fides are in order, his village was destroyed by the VC ?but he is a Vietnamese surrounded by Americans??He is in their power, they are in his " 'You're torturing him,' Finley [a medic] whispered 'Only when it is necessary,' Nguyen said " This moral rationalization is immediately followed by a moral oxymoron "He is beginning to weaken It is for his own good " So tight is the dilemma that Nguyen's seemingly mad assessment is in fact rational If he doesn't wound with the knife, McGruder will kill with it The options are exclusive Indeed often the sole point of the action is to save the boy from McGruder (though he is outranked), not to get information...