This historical fiction written with dark comedy & satire, spy-thriller & war fiction that weaves a complex literary story about a communist mole in the South Vietnamese Army during & aftermath of the Vietnam War. Our unnamed protagonist is a spy colluding with the S. Vietnamese Army & backstabs them by sending secret information back to his handler & best-friend, Man. While in America, he often writes to Man to confess his guilt & confusion, his actions and inactions.

Nguyen shifts the view of how the world & Americans see the war to how it actually affected the country, Vietnam. Most American books & movies are written from American heroic standpoints despite losing & pulling out of the Vietnam War. VTN takes a satirical critical approach towards dominant American culture & how the Vietnamese were portrayed. While this novel’s narrator is a communist, it starts to unravel by the end as he doubts his socialist ideals. VTN criticizes the communist government who have taken the idea of “freedom & independence” to a level that disastrously harms itself.

“What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence & freedom take away the independence of others”

While none of the characters are honorable & moral, I did feel love for the 3 best-friends, (narrator, Bon, & Man) who saw each other as “blood brothers” & sought to protect each other in life & to death, despite one of them being completely unaware that the other two are communists. This seems to represent how North & South Vietnam are blood brothers that differ in sociopolitical ideologies but are tied together by their own history & trauma. Similarly, the narrator is of mixed race, French & Vietnamese, both countries rejecting him. People expect him to choose a side but that’s impossible as he is a man of two sides & both are a part of him.

I felt angry, deep sadness & significantly triggered by several scenes & rarely did I feel joy while reading this novel. This is to say that it made me pointedly uncomfortable to know that in war there are no true winners. No side can ultimately stay virtuous in times of war. VTN holds all sides accountable in this war that remains on the mind of those who still live in Vietnam & the refugees who’ve fled.

“Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to f*** us over. We can f*** ourselves just fine”.