On the cover it's a memoir, the foreword says the book is indebted to its main subject and the copyright page claims it's a work of fiction. The Tiger General is certainly too accurate in its historical, cultural and espionage details for the characters to be entirely invented, and with a complete absorption in time and place difficult to pull off with such precision in fiction.
The 20th century saw probably the most extreme and varied applications of political systems in human history, with Vietnam seeing more than its fair share of colonialist oppression, landlordism, communist upheavals, foreign-backed strongmen and civil and international war.
Against this backdrop is the story of Hai, illegitimate son of a powerful womanising mandarin of the Hue court (who is the subject of a prequel to this book, Mandarin: A Novel of Viet Nam) and a poor village girl. They escape to the capital, where his mother's resourcefulness helps them find sanctuary first in a convent; then in a French family's home, where Hai learns the occupiers' language; and later under a Hanoi bridge, where Hai meets Helene, a mixed-race prostitute with a harelip who becomes his soulmate.
An astrologer warns his mother early on that the boy has three unlucky stars, each responsible for 12 years of Hai's life _ if he can get past the first 36 years of discontent he will start to shine.
So through the French occupation, World War I and World War II, the Japanese occupation and the French and American wars, Hai goes from being a beggar and pickpocket to a member of the communist underground resistance to smuggler to French police informer to Japanese police analyst to French intelligence agent. His skills and intelligence see him rise quickly in every hierarchy he enters _ though always stopping short of the top. He seems a natural second-in-command, influencing events from just beyond the spotlight. Although there are many pages of discourse on politics, his ideology seems considered and calculated but nevertheless confused.
He initially works for the communists "because I needed a job", as he explains to Papa, a French intelligence officer who once adopted him and his mother. He is a nationalist but becomes disillusioned with the Viet Minh, so he switches sides and works for the French, which somehow makes sense in his scheme of things.
"A good cause can turn bad if its policies do not change with the times," he explains, "and a bad one at the start can become good if its policies adapt to the times."
THE TIGER GENERAL: THE MEMOIRS OF A VIETNAMESE INTELLIGENCE CHIEF: By John Havan, 394pp, 2011 Orchid Press paperback. Available at leading bookshops for 595 baht.
The ambiguities of the time certainly play their part. In every organisation or gang Hai fights in, changes in politics see the political landscape change completely around him. The Japanese take over during World War II ("Absolute discipline, readily enforced by the sword, allowed a handful of Japanese to dominate millions of Vietnamese and thousands of French still in Viet Nam.") so he has no choice but to work for them. Or he has choices but often takes the one of least resistance and most gain _ again calculated, even unimpassioned.
As he points out, "The best of causes had been used throughout history to mask the worst of policies. France's democratic liberte-egalite-fraternite at home had turned into colonisation abroad; the Soviet Union Party's dream of a socialist paradise had turned into a reign of mass mobilisation and terror."
Although a nationalist, he couldn't condone mass executions by the North. "Millions of landless peasants watched in open-mouthed horror as thin, emaciated peasants like themselves were labelled landlords and beaten to death in public in the village square."
At 36, as predicted, his rise is steep. Hai is recruited by the local version of the CIA, decorated as a police general, and cuts through his enemies after the Tet Offensive.
As an intelligence officer, "He lied to them about his motives, and they lied to him about what they knew, and in the middle of all this deliberate but acceptable deception and subterfuge lay a kernel of truth."
When he works for the CIO (Central Intelligence Organisation, a clone of the CIA set up in south Vietnam by the CIA) the narration is full of astute observations on why the US approach is destined to fail: "It was a very American plan; simple, practical and expedient, a plan for people who were in a hurry to get things done. Like most American plans, it didn't take into consideration the social and cultural issues involved."
During and after the war, Hai gives nothing away, carefully shielding himself from being influenced too much by any of the factions he works for or against. He is ruthless, determined, unlikeable even. "It built up his mystique as conspiracy theorists tried to work out why he was still being kept on if her were really a traitor, a double agent, a spy and a plant."
He ends his career with the US State Department.
There are some slight style and timeline inconsistencies and typographical errors in Tiger General that could be smoothed out in future editions, and the flurry of Vietnamese and intelligence terms and acronyms can be slightly overwhelming for the uninitiated. Sometimes dialogue can be a little stilted in order to set the scene and describe the characters' motivations. Nevertheless, these are small points in a wholly convincing narrative, written with much heart and precision and so much detail and setting of the scene that we're enveloped in Hai's story, from newborn cub to Tiger General.
GENERATION IN HAND: John Havan at home with his great-grandson. Much of the basis for Havan’s ‘The Tiger General’ came from his experiences in Vietnam before, during and after the war.
AUTHOR JOHN HAVAN ON 'HISTORICAL FACTION'
Why did you choose the Philippines as the place to retire and write?
When my first wife passed away in January, 1994, in Singapore, both my daughters insisted I come and live with them. One lived in Hong Kong and one in the Philippines. My wife and I had lived in HK for years, so I opted for Manila. I lived on my own, rebuilt my life, remarried in 1998, bought a lot and built a house where we now live. I am still here because the cost of living can be covered by my income (I teach English literature at an International Baccalaureate school) and pension. If my income were twice the present size, I would move to Chiang Mai. I like Thailand. I am a closet Buddhist. If it were three times bigger, I would move to southern France, where the people are friendly, the sun shines every day, wine is good and food excellent.
Is the book a novel, memoir or work of historical non-fiction?
Historical faction. Hai is a composite character. His early days are based on what I learned from talking to Viet Minh and Viet Cong prisoners and/or converts to the VM or VC, most of whom led hard lives before they joined up. The main part is based on the most famous communist Vietnamese spy, Pham Xuan An. We were friends for many years because he raised German shepherds and so did I. We never talked politics until 1980, when I returned to Vietnam as a tourist and visited him. We talked a lot thereafter and my horizons widened. Some of Hai is what I personally know about what happened in the disaster called the 'Vietnam War' _ the total confusion on the American side, both in Washington and in Saigon; the apathy and venality in Saigon at government level; the grim, termite-like focus in Hanoi. My dad was finance minister in the Diem government, I was trilingual at a time when Vietnam was moving away from France and sidling up to America. I hobnobbed with the Diplomatic Corps in Saigon, made friends in high places and saw what was really going on behind the scenes. My work also put me into contact with key US and Vietnamese military figures. I travelled a lot, mostly by helicopter, and had a first-hand view of why, with time, it was inevitable we had to lose what was a just war.
Hai is the name of my second cousin, who started out as an infantry lieutenant and ended up as a police colonel in the CIO. He is a paraplegic now. He was caught in 1975 and spent some 14 years in rehabilitation camps in north and south VN, released under the Orderly Departure Programme in 1990. He was in bad shape. We picked him up in Hanoi, took him to Thailand and eventually sent him to the States, where his family had escaped to in 1976.[The prequel] Mandarin is essentially about my grandfather, who spent decades in Japan and Siam and China looking for political support for the nationalist fight against French colonialism; he failed and returned to look after his family. Another man who also exiled himself in order to look for help against France was HC Minh, who ended up in Russia for some 30 years. You know the rest.
Your father was born in Vietnam, your mother in the UK, you in France, and you worked for the US as a defence contractor and now live in the Philippines. Where do you consider home _ or the place that most shaped the way you think?
Vietnam taught me an excellent lesson _ pragmatism. Focus on what can be done; forget what ought to be done. Live for now; tomorrow will take of itself. Home is where I happen to be living. There is good and bad everywhere; in fact, if your stomach can take it, living in Third World countries has many advantages.
The detail in the book is extraordinary _ a story of a nation in the 20th century as well as a personal narrative ...
I have always been a reader and a note-taker, and I have a photographic memory. And a very strong imagination. Together, once I was out of the war (1955-1972) and out of my second career, I sat down and began putting it all together around 1998.
The results were Mandarin, then Tiger, and now (tentatively) Kaleidoscope of War, some 40 short stories told in the first person by VM, VC, GVN and US personnel who played a role in the VN War. I also have a spy story coming up.
In the 21st-century political landscape, what is one danger the world has to remain vigilant against?
The rise of a superpower. Now that colonialism, fascism and communism are dead but not quite buried, we [the UN] should ensure that neither the US, or Russia, or China can develop an overwhelming military capability through controlling the manufacture of everyday weapons. Best approach _ globalising trade to put money in everyone's pocket, and developing maximum student exchanges to broaden young minds.
