Michael G. Vann, California State University, Sacramento
As with his two-volume graphic memoir, Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon, 1961-63 and Saigon Calling: London 1963-75, Marcelino Truong’s graphic novel 40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina, 1954 is a stunningly beautiful yet problematic work.[1] Truong is an exceptional artist and gifted storyteller. The book is captivating. Unfortunately, the author is prone to snide ideological insults that can be heavy-handed at times and which hint at the author’s potentially disturbing reactionary politics. Indeed, Truong recently illustrated far-right publications. Yet in the end, 40 Men and 12 Rifles’ strengths outweigh its weaknesses. The 288 beautifully illustrated and deeply researched pages of 40 Men and 12 Rifles have much to offer beyond mere entertainment. With its careful attention to historical authenticity and accuracy, impressive research, and expertly rendered art, which vividly recreates late-colonial Vietnam, many may want to teach this graphic novel. However, they should only do so with an informed discussion of the author’s political biases.
The son of a French ex-pat and a high-ranking diplomat to the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), Truong led a privileged and cosmopolitan life. His father was in the inner circles of power, with close ties to President Ngo Dinh Diem, the brutal and corrupt anti-Communist dictator who was eventually kidnapped and murdered by his own officers in 1963. The artist was born in the Philippines in 1957, but his father’s peripatetic career took the young Marcelino and his family to Washington D. C. and then to Saigon at the outset of the war. Later he attended the French Lycée in London before earning degrees in law at Sciences Po and English literature at the Sorbonne. He currently resides in St-Malo, France, where he works as an illustrator.
The vast majority of Truong’s extensive oeuvre is fairly pedestrian, the product of a competent journeyman working under contract for an author or publishing house. Since the 1990s, he has collaborated on graphic histories and graphic historical fictions that are, in general, aimed at youth readership. Many are unremarkable, ranging in topic from Egyptian mythology, Bible stories, and Sinbad the Sailor to ancient Rome, Winston Churchill, and the world wars. Some include very conservative Catholic themes.
In 2021, for example, Truong illustrated Marie-Christine Vidal’s hagiography of Raoul and Madeleine Follereau, part of a major Catholic publisher’s “Les chercheurs de Dieu en BD” series.[2] One might be taken aback by the graphic history’s white savior narrative of the couple’s humanitarian fight against leprosy in Africa, but the omission of Raoul’s enthusiasm for Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, praise of Francisco Franco, and commitment to Pétain’s National Revolution is truly appalling. To take but one example, Raoul et Madeleine Follereau makes no mention of Raoul’s 1936 speech in which, as President of the Unions Latines de France, he referred to Léon Blum as a “dirty Jew.” A police report from the event, one of scores of documents that attest to Follereau’s ideology, indicates that the audience included members of Action Française and other far-right activists.[3]
While Follereau died in 1977, the Fondation Raoul Follereau continued his fight against leprosy even as it became embroiled in scandal. In 2002 the muck-raking Canard Enchaîné accused the foundation of homophobia, intensifying the HIV/AIDS crisis by condemning the use of condoms, aligning with reactionary elements in the Catholic church, and rejecting financial transparency.[4] To rehabilitate the reputations of foundation and founder, Xavier Petitjean, a senior executive in an insurance company who volunteered for the group, was tasked with organizing a musical show about the life of Raoul Follereau in 2008. When research uncovered evidence of the Catholic icon’s unsavory past, the project was scuttled. Disturbed by what he found, Petitjean published an exposé in 2012 under a pen name and started a blog devoted to exposing Follereau’s far-right history.[5] In 2015 the Foundation sued for defamation.[6] Supported by the foundation, Marcelino Truong’s 2021 graphic biography appears to be part of a renewed public relations campaign to paint a literal fascist in a more saintly light.[7] This book resonates with the right-wing post-colonial BD that Mark McKinney studied, a disturbing but vibrant underground sub-genre that blends French reactionary politics, anti-Semitism, and racist anti-immigrant xenophobia.[8]
Despite such disturbing commitments, Truong has also produced some more admirable work in the past decade. The most commercially and critically successful of them is his two-part graphic memoir about his childhood during the Second Indochina War (1955-1975). Such a Lovely Little War and Saigon Calling were truly breakout works, displaying his impressive talent. With clear, crisp illustrations, the author recalls his family’s complicated emotions as the corrupt, South Vietnamese regime collapsed around them. It is telling that the books present the presumed threat of the Communist North as more serious than the human rights abuses of the Republic of Vietnam. Truong rationalizes the anti-Communist regime’s violence as the natural if unfortunate product of the brutal realities of an anti-insurgency campaign. The often-vilified Madame Nhu, who once mocked a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation as a “bonze barbeque” and quipped “let them burn and we shall clap our hands”, comes off sympathetically.[9] Truong paints the martyrs as duped by duplicitous Communists pursuing their own political agenda and Madame Nhu as a misunderstood Catholic feminist whose authoritarian militarism had progressive elements. Diem the dictator also comes off as a sympathetic figure struggling with a complicated situation. In the second volume, Truong is disdainful of Western peace activists.
Some might be concerned with Truong’s right-leaning politics, but Such a Lovely Little War and Saigon Calling resonate with recent trends in the literature and historiography of the Republic of Vietnam, which have witnessed re-assessments of the regime and revisions of previously dismissive analyses.[10] While the historians (several of whose families became refugees after the American War) are not to be interpreted as apologists for the South Vietnamese regime, they have persuasively shown that South Vietnamese civil society exercised an agency and dynamism of its own that is worthy of serious study. Truong’s two volumes are also part of a small wave of graphic memoirs of Viet Kieu (diasporic Vietnamese in France, Canada, and the United States of America) and, as such, should be read alongside the spectacular Vietnamerica by GB Tran and Thi Bui’s emotionally powerful and commercially successful The Best We Could Do.[11] Of course, we also must mention Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, its 2021 sequel The Committed—which is set in Paris—and a promised third and final installment.[12] The original novel was so successful that it was adapted into an HBO mini-series produced by and starring Robert Downey, Jr. As the series is mostly in Vietnamese, it is a historic moment in on-screen representation for this diasporic community. Hopefully, there will be another season based on the second novel. Placed within the context of this increasingly robust body of literature, Truong’s graphic memoirs add an important and often previously dismissed perspective to our understanding of anti-Communist southerners during the Second Indochina War.
40 Men and 12 Rifles, in particular, must be seen both in light of the wave of diasporic Vietnamese writers and Truong’s association with French right-wing Catholicism. Set in late-colonial Vietnam, the graphic novel opens on an expertly rendered recreation of 1953 Hanoi. As the author of a graphic history of this city, I appreciate the artist’s commitment to capturing historically specific details with painstaking accuracy. While this is a graphic novel and thus a work of fiction, it is based on significant research. Unfortunately, Truong is not a historian and does not follow any useful citation practice. He lists a number of individuals and vaguely references veterans’ personal accounts but fails to cite his sources. That said, scholars of the era will not find glaring inaccuracies. On the contrary, the meticulous attention to things such as the proper firearms and artillery, type of trucks, and various uniforms will impress military history buffs as well as a more general audience.
40 Men and 12 Rifles tells the story of Minh, the son of a wealthy northern Vietnamese bureaucrat with substantial landholdings, who gets drawn into the war for national liberation from France, the First Indochina War (1946-1954). Minh is a young painter who spends his time working in his studio or enjoying the city, all while dreaming of life as an artist in Paris. His mother dotes on him, and his father is disgusted by his Bohemian ways. Minh’s life is shattered when he receives a draft notice for the anti-Communist collaborationist National Army. He is completely apolitical, showing no understanding of how his father’s collaboration with the French puts him in a position of substantial privilege in a country wrestling with dire poverty. To save Minh from military service, his father begrudgingly arranges for him to go to the countryside with forged papers. Upon leaving the safety of French-controlled Hanoi, however, Minh is caught by the Vietminh and risks being executed as a class enemy.
Luckily a friend recognizes him, lies about his background, and has him drafted into the People’s Liberation Army, where he eventually lands in the Armed Propaganda Unit. After being marched to the Chinese borderlands for guerilla bootcamp and political indoctrination, Minh puts his drawing skills to use for the revolution. The Party assigns him to create propaganda that will motivate the Vietnamese people in their fight against the French. Minh’s journey takes him through several Vietminh bases in the mountainous north, where his artistic talent is greatly appreciated by his superiors. He is billeted in tribal minority villages whose inhabitants seem strange and exotic to him. Eventually, he is pressed into combat at Dien Bien Phu where he fights bravely but is gravely wounded. After the French defeat and a lengthy recovery, the now-disabled Minh makes his way back to Hanoi and discovers that his girlfriend has borne their child. Reunited, the couple marry and form a happy family but soon decide to flee the Communist-controlled North for the South.
Considering the political tone of his other work, it should come as no surprise that 40 Men and 12 Rifles is stridently anti-Communist. Truong never misses an opportunity to disparage the Party and Marxism. While there are a few cadres who show some independence and autonomy, such as Comrade Son, the intelligence officer who loves French novels, the rest are authoritarian bullies or mindless bureaucrats. Truong depicts his initial encounter with desperately poor villagers outside of Hanoi as a meeting with a mob turned murderous by Communist indoctrination. Characters whisper about the violence of land reform campaigns. Vietminh officials are cynical and seemingly motivated by their quest for power, rather than sincere moral commitment to revolutionary social justice. Chinese political advisors come off worst, as brutal, dishonest Maoist cadres. At several points, Truong accuses Vietnamese Maoists who adopted Chinese ways of betraying ordinary people who believe in the revolution. Rank-and-file soldiers are generally honest and brave peasant boys brainwashed by the mythology of Uncle Ho Chi Minh. Phu Long, the nom de guerre of a Vietnamese-speaking French Communist secret agent, is a stereotypical Stalinist apparatchik. Presenting him as a traitor, the text dismisses this white man’s commitment to international revolutionary solidarity.
The graphic novel’s sexual politics range from embarrassing to offensive. Minh’s wartime adventure is framed by his seduction of and reunification with his girlfriend Lan. In Hanoi, he repeatedly badgers her to pose nude. When Lan resists, Minh insults her family for instilling in her a bourgeois modesty. Before he flees to the countryside as a draft dodger, Minh irresponsibly initiates sex with Lan, leaving her with a child. When they meet again after the war, she has their son, but her reputation has been shattered by pregnancy out of wedlock. Truong does not give this aspect of the plot much reflection but offers it as evidence of the charming irresistibility of his jocular hero. Truong presents the women from the ethnic minorities in the mountains as alluring and exotic creatures. Minh the artist takes the opportunity to sketch them as they bathe in a mountain stream, finally realizing his dream of nude models. Wherever he goes, women swoon for Minh’s good looks. As the author clearly sees himself in his hero, these scenes are cringe-inducing. To mock the propaganda unit, Truong traffics in unnecessary homophobic tropes by depicting effeminate male characters lusting after Minh. Such immature jibes risk disqualifying the book.
Of course, we all know that you can’t judge a book by its cover but this BD’s problematic cover merits some critical remarks too. The French and English editions of 40 Men and 12 Rifles inexplicably feature Minh in uniform staring at a bare-breasted woman. That this vignette has relatively little to do with the graphic novel’s plot makes the image a curious choice. That it features a man from a dominant ethnic, political, and social group objectifying a woman from a marginalized and oppressed minority community raises serious concerns. It does not take much to imagine the reaction if Minh were replaced by a white soldier. And those familiar with the difficult history between lowland ethnic Vietnamese and highland tribal groups will immediately grasp the power dynamics at play here.[13] I teach at a university with a significant Hmong community and will not, out of respect for my students, assign this book. Truong’s fetishization of the women from the highlands’ ethnic minority groups is equally embarrassing and offensive.
And yet, despite all of Truong’s problematic decisions, 40 Men and 12 Rifles is an impressive achievement. The art is nothing short of gorgeous. In addition to meticulous and informative detail, Truong’s judicious use of color is brilliant. Most pages are black, grey, and white with a rust-tinted background, but some details—like a Communist cadre’s insignia—jump off the page with bright red. Other pages, including a few two-page spreads, are in stunningly beautiful color. These include both depictions of the vibrant urban bustle of 1950s Hanoi and the captivating green rainforests in the mountains. Even with its snide politics and immature sexuality, 40 Men and 12 Rifles is an impressive achievement in comic storytelling. Students would learn much from the well-researched depictions of battlefields, revolutionary base camps, and daily life at the end of French rule in Vietnam. However, it would only be appropriate for classroom use if it was very carefully taught with an informed and critical eye. Rather than assigning the entire volume, selecting passages of 5 to 10 pages might be the best strategy. This would allow one to steer clear of the book’s various shortcomings.
[1] Une si jolie petite guerre: Saigon, 1961-63 (Paris: Denoël, 2012)/Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon, 1961-63, trans. David Homel (Vancouver, BC, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016); Give Peace a Chance: London, 1963-75 (Paris: Denoël, 2015)/Saigon Calling: London 1963-75, trans. David Homel (Vancouver, BC, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017); 40 hommes et 12 fusils: (Paris: Denoël, 2022)/40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina, 1954, trans. David Homel (Vancouver, BC, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023)
[2] Marie-Christine Vidal and Marcelino Truong, Raoul et Madeleine Follereau (Paris: Bayard, 2021).
[3] “Rapport du commissariat de police de Mascara”, June 26, 1936, https://www.calameo.com/read/0006650042783bd8b278a
[4] “France: La Fondation Raoul Follereau accusée de financement abusif de l’Eglise en Afrique”, Cath.ch, January 3, 2002, https://www.cath.ch/newsf/france-la-fondation-raoul-follereau-accusee-de-financement-abusif-de-l-eglise-en-afrique/
[5] Romain Gallaud, Fondation Raoul Follereau – La contre enquête (Golias éditions, 2012).
[6] “La face cachée de Raoul Follereau”, Radio France, January 30, 2015, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/dans-le-pretoire/la-face-cachee-de-raoul-follereau-6583483
[7] Yann de Rauglaudre, “BD Raoul et Madeleine Follereau”, November 5, 2021, https://www.raoul-follereau.org/bd-raoul-et-madeleine-follereau/
[8] Mark McKinney, Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics (Leuven University Press, 2020). Enjoy our New Books Network conversation about race and racism in French comics: https://newbooksnetwork.com/postcolonialism-and-migration-in-french-comics
[9] Joseph R. Gregory, “Madame Nhu, Vietnam War Lightning Rod, Dies”, New York Times, April 26, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/world/asia/27nhu.html. Hear her speak in her own words: https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_66E58DF84ED74CF588E38C0E71BAE5B3.
[10] Jessica M. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013); Trinh M. Luu and Tuong Vu, eds., Republican Vietnam, 1963-1975: War, Society, Diaspora (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2023); Edward Garvey Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013); Van Nguyen-Marshall, Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954-1975 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023); Heather Marie Stur, Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Nu-Anh Tran, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2022); Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, eds., Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920-1963 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2023); Tuong Vu and Sean Fear, eds., The Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020).
[11] GB Tran, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (New York: Random House, 2011) and Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2018).
[12] Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove Press, 2017).
[13] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2011).