Red Plateau: Memoir of a North Vietnamese Soldier (review)

The author records the memories of his friend and former enemy, a Vietnamese named Nguyen Van Tuan, who served as a soldier of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) throughout what they called the "American War." Delezen and Tuan fought over the same ground in 1967 and 1968 in the northern half of the I Corps sector, in that epochal period climaxing in the battles of Tet. Long after the guns were silent, Delezen began to travel to Vietnam and there met Tuan. Later the author was introduced to several other Vietnamese veterans, and still later Tuan, dying of tuberculosis, asked Delezen to write his story. Interpreted through his own extensive combat experience, the author's source material includes interviews, letters, and diaries. We learn these things in the opening chapters; then the reader hears not Delezen's voice, but Tuan's speaking in the first person, present tense. If the reader is not already struck by writing more lyrical than that usually reviewed on these pages, this transition will surely gain attention. However, as Tuan's narrative grows in intensity, the author's unorthodox style seems to enhance rather than distract.

Tuan was a school teacher in a small town in North Vietnam when he was drafted in 1965. He would not see his home again for nine years. Recruit training took young men to the limits of their physical endurance, a level of effort often required of them in the combat ahead. They slogged through the Mu Gia pass, the "Door of Death," down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, joining "the endless streams of heavily burdened trucks, bicycles, elephants, and people on foot, a procession of marching ants with no purpose except to move south." Tuan describes the universal experiences of soldiers: the quirkiness of the supply system; the precious value of a letter from home; leeches, mosquitoes, and snakes; foul, wet trenches; hunger and thirst; heat and cold; constant fatigue; debilitating disease; and terror.

Tuan and his comrades also experienced the constant harassment of parasitical political officers, who attempted, futilely and unnecessarily, to motivate by using the words of Lenin and Mao. It was the words of Sun Tzu, however, they "contemplated and discussed," and their simple tactics were to strike "as a cobra" and to disappear; to dig, to shoot, to run, and to dig again. But as Clausewitz reminds us, friction in war makes the simplest thing difficult, and for the PAVN, the friction was the jungle. Under the triple canopy, Tuan's world was "a perpetual state of humid darkness [where] . . . the sun . . . teases with an infrequent lone shard." With more light, he would discover everything was covered with "layers of green and black mold."

The PAVN had to be constantly vigilant for the "lightning speed " of a strike by helicopter-borne troops, "capable of arriving from many different directions." Americans mordantly referred to high explosive and napalm aircraft ordnance as "shake and bake." Tuan takes us to the other side to describe "demon napalm and the countless suffocating strings of liquid flame that seek out each fissure in the forest canopy . . . the screams that come before the fire engulfs." And under B-52 attack, Tuan found it "difficult to stand as the earth tries to cast us away in the manner of a buffalo [shaking] mud from its back."

Tuan remembered when he and his mates clutched fistfuls of the red earth of their homeland and held it "above our heads, [and] the mud runs down our arms as we swear fresh allegiance." Tuan recognized it was total war, which must be won no "matter the price, no matter the sacrifice." Through it all these soldiers endured and were, as they proved, indomitable.

By his recording of the stark difference between the experience of the soldier of the PAVN and his American counterpart, Delezen deepens our understanding of why the former was victorious.