The Sympathizer

Always, sir. This was how I found myself in uniform again, although my task for the day was to be documentarian rather than foot soldier. The two hundred or so men sat Indian style on the earth, legs crossed, while the General stood before them and I stood behind them, camera in hand. Like his men, the General was uniformed in battle camouflage, purchased at an army surplus store and tailored by the Madame to fit. In his uniform, the General was no longer the morose proprietor of a liquor store and a restaurant, a petty bourgeois who counted his hopes as he did the change in his register. His uniform, his red beret, his polished field boots, the stars on his collar, and the Airborne patch on his sleeve had restored to him the nobility he had once possessed in our homeland. As for my uniform, it was a suit of armor cut from cloth. Though a bullet or knife would have sliced through the uniform with ease, I felt less vulnerable than in my everyday civilian clothes. If I was not bulletproof, I was at least charmed, as all the men were.

I photographed them from several different angles, these men who had been humbled by what they had been turned into here in exile. In their working outfits as busboys, waiters, gardeners, field hands, fishermen, manual laborers, custodians, or simply the un-and underemployed, these shabby examples of the lumpen blended into the background wherever they happened to be, always seen as a mass, never noticed as individuals. But now, in uniform and with their raggedy haircuts hidden by field caps and berets, they were impossible to miss. Their renewed manhood was manifest in the way their backs were stiff and straight, rather than slouched in the refugee slump, and in the way they marched proudly across the earth, rather than shuffling as they usually did in cheap shoes with worn-down soles. They were men again, and that was how the General addressed them. Men, he called out. Men! The people need us. Even from where I was, I heard him clearly, though he seemed to exert no effort in projecting his voice. They need hope and leaders, the General said. You are those leaders. You will show the people what can happen if they have the courage to rise up, to take arms, and to sacrifice themselves. I watched the men to see if they would flinch at the idea of sacrificing themselves, but they did not. This was the occult power of the uniform, of the mass, that men who would never dream of sacrificing themselves in the course of their everyday lives waiting on tables would agree to do so while waiting under a hot sun. Men, the General said. Men! The people cry out for freedom! The communists promise freedom and independence, but deliver only poverty and enslavement. They have betrayed the Vietnamese people, and revolutions don’t betray the people. Even here we remain with the people, and we will return to liberate the people who have been denied the freedom given to us. Revolutions are for the people, from the people, by the people. That is our revolution!