A bloviating Hollywood director summons him to discuss the script for “The Hamlet,” a movie in which a clichéd bunch of mostly doomed Green Berets saves, if that is the right word, a Vietnamese village from the Vietcong. In America, he’s in demand for his sophistication and fluent English. Working as an aide and sometime hit man for the general, now a California liquor-store owner, the captain applies himself to his real job: spying on the general, and other members of the Vietnamese diaspora, for the Communists who seized power back home. The captain has secured the bloody, terrifying extraction of his boss, a pro-American general, on one of the last flights out (were there any other kind of flights in Saigon in 1975?). There’s a great comic interlude in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer” when the unnamed narrator, a Vietnamese Army captain exiled in Los Angeles, critiques the screenplay of a gung-ho Hollywood movie about America’s heroism in the Vietnam War.īy this time, a lot of things have already happened.
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