HOWARD SIMPSON, a former war correspondent and American consul general, lives in Cork. He covered eight major operations in the Franco Vietnam War and visited Dien Bien Phu during the battle. His book Dien Bien Phu - The Epic Battle America Forgot, ranks with Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place as two of the best books in English on that bloody clash of mutual courage and determination.
His novel is set during the American period of the war and in the complex intelligence struggle which paralleled the fighting. Fraser, a CIA agent, gets the task of eliminating an old friend who has turned double agent.
Simpson takes us through the corruption of Saigon and the minds of the double agent and his Nemesis. In the background is the coming Tet offensive of 1968, a tactical defeat for North Vietnam, but a strategic success against America's "centre of gravity" - public opinion and political leadership.
Modern war has its shadowy side of double agents, dirty tricks and betrayals. Those fatal motivators, ideology and money, find their marks in men with troubled consciences - or none. Simpson conveys all this well. Fraser's struggle was not just against those "who sell what men will strive for, fight for, dream for, die", but against ideas - and he knew it.
The sense of place seems authentic; Fraser is, perhaps, an American version of a le Carre doubting hero.
Vietnam was a very dirty war, fought for what now seems a great illusion. In his memoirs, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, wrote: "Although we sought to do the right thing - and believed we were doing the right thing - in my judgment, hindsight proves us wrong." There is more to his arguments than this; but the cost in human lives of that mistake was terrible. One would like him to have said something about the Vietnamese dead and maimed, as he has about the American ones.
Howard Simpson writes as an American, but he does remember the price paid by the Vietnamese of both sides: "Each family in Vietnam had experienced ... twenty eight years of war: the Japanese occupation, the return of the French, the French Indochina War - and now we were there with our contingency plans, our supersonic aircraft, and our statistics to evaluate hamlet security . .. Beyond the city limits there was the continual nightmare of nap alm and mortaring, slit throats and disembowellings, gunships spraying death, and mine explosions ripping open civilian buses."
The other part of the background is well sketched in bars, French food, hard drinking, tribal peoples, loyalty, betrayal, and stunning landscapes. It is hard to blame those Vietnamese who considered the fighting as "someone else's war", the results of which they would have to live with when the foreigners left. President Johnson, Henry Kissinger and the dilemmas and agitations in Washington are far away from this story of secret war at its grassroots.
Through all this the struggle to eliminate the enemy agent continues to its climax in a bloody shoot out.
The characters are human beings the Viet Cong's agent changed sides through conviction. His doomed love for his Vietnamese wife and children is quietly indicated. The childless narrator who is to kill him knows and likes the wife and children.
The plot is well developed, though perhaps the shoot out is a little contrived. The final meeting between Fraser and the agent's widow is dramatic, satisfying - and very unlikely. But then, Robert McNamara visited General Giap last year. {CORRECTION} 97032200042
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