Manga review: Dien Bien Phu (Volume 1-3)

A manga that succeeds where American Vietnam films fail

Content Warning: This manga is set during the Vietnam War and contains disturbing imagery, including sexual violence. Minor spoilers.

„Consider the feelings of the killer. Why do you think we take the trouble to blindfold criminals before shooting them?“

„So that they don’t have to fear death?!“

„No, idiot. It’s because that way it’s easier to kill them!“

Điện Biên Phủ (from now on Dien Bien Phu) by Nishijima Daisuke is a manga that has caught my attention the first time I saw it almost 10 years ago in Village Vanguard (a Japanese bookstore chain with a large selection of subculture manga). I hadn’t seen a Vietnamese title on a manga before. I was intrigued and repelled at the same time by the stark contrast between the subject matter, the Vietnam war, and the cute art style that I can best describe as a mix of Ueda Hajime’s highly stylised artwork and the minimalist moe of manga like Girl’s Last Tour.

It’s January 1965 when Hikaru Minami, a 19-year old American of Japanese descent, arrives in Saigon. He works as a photographer for Stars and Stripes, the independent news organization of the US military. When he takes a photo of a wounded alleged Viet Cong spy (=National Liberation Front of South Vietnam), he gets scolded by his superior for provoking the locals. Soon after, a US military sergeant appears and praises Hikaru for same photograph. He talks about the madness of the war and that no one knows what the right answer to end the conflict is. He explains people would resort to alcohol, narcotics, violence and sex to stay sane, adding that „unfortunately aclohol and marijuana“ wouldn’t work for him, while cheekily sticking his tongue out. This was the exact moment, less than 40 pages into the story, when I realised that this manga will lead me straight to hell and won’t give any additional warnings.

The second protagonist is the Viet Cong “Princesse” (using the French pronunciation), a girl that is feared by the US military as a ruthless but elegant killer. She severs heads with ease like a superhuman Viet Cong version of Hit-Girl. On their first encounter, Princesse saves Hikaru, only to throw a knife at his heart a few moments later. He manages to take a picture of her with his Leica camera, which is then pierced by her knife instead. Hikaru becomes obsessed with the girl on the picture and wants to meet her again. On sick bay Hikaru says he masturbated every single day for three weeks. She was born, as we later find out, right after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a decisive victory for Vietnam against France which ended the First Indochina War. Wait, this manga starts in 1965, so when he took the photo, Princess was 11. And wasn’t she naked when he took her picture? Good thing I put content warnings at the beginning…

Various circumstances lead Hikaru to join a group of military drop-outs, the Stray Dogs, who fight their own war in the jungle of Vietnam. Their leader, Tim Lawrence, is a 15-year old British boy with a mysterious past. Some of the other members include a sleepless sniper who wanted to become a photographer, a masochist North Korean defector, and a bloodthirsty butcher who covers his face with a white triangular cloth.

The narrative builds up to Hikaru meeting Princesse again. Every chapter ends with the exact same line: “The two don’t know each other yet.” It becomes clear early on that the only reason carefree Hikaru is still alive is because the Princesse continues to protect him from afar for some unknown reason. On the other hand, many of the characters introduced die as soon as we start to learn more about them (I was surprised to find a character overview at the beginning of each volume, which somehow made me think all these characters would be around for a little longer). It is a war after all. Whenever Nishijima Daisuke implies something harrowing might happen, it is extremely likely that it will just a few pages later.

Dien Bien Phu is a battle manga set during the Vietnam war, rather than being a historical manga about the Vietnam war. The same aesthetics and tropes you find in countless other battle manga can be found in this manga as well. In volume 3 there is, for example, a scene in which a chocolate loving US colonel, who is scared of air travel, has his big entrance by jumping out of a military helicopter to fight a North Vietnamese general with a giant hatchet. The colonel stops his enemy’s weapon with his bare hands and then throws him into the rotor of a helicopter, all the while North Vietnamese children are watching. Beyond the sheer ridiculousness, there is some truth behind exaggerated fights like these in the way there is truth behind David vs. Goliath. This manga is at its best when it manages to work both as battle manga and as allegory.

After the fight, there is this exchange between the “Chocolate Colonel” and the Princesse’s grandmother, a veteran Viet Kong:

„Do you seriously think Vietnam can win against America?“

„America is a young empire. There is not a single thing we can learn from you. Listen carefully, boy. We have been at war long before your country even existed. Vietnam fought for thousand years against China and for hundred years against France. There is no reason I can think of why we would lose this war.“

The grandmother’s declaration reads like a badass monologue from a battle manga, while at the same time presenting a historical perspective to the war. It also shows there is more than one side to the conflict.

After I started working on this review, I watched Apocalypse Now for the first time. What strikes me about this film is that Vietnamese people only appear as backdrop, there is nothing we learn about them or their perspective, culture or history. Japan has a tendency to show every issue from both sides, which can be problematic when it leads to the relativisation, especially of its own crimes. But at least it tends to show more than one side. I know it is the point of American Vietnam films to tell the war from the perspective of more or less clueless American soldiers. But there is a way to at least hint at the fact that the “enemy” is a human being as well. At the end of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, the protagonists confronts an enemy sniper who turns out to be a young girl. When another US soldier shots her down, the girl is shown in an uncomfortably long scene catching for breath as she is suffering and begging to be shot. Even though she remains an enigma to the soldiers, she is shown as a breathing, suffering human being with dignity instead of a mere backdrop. That is why is respect Kubrick infinitely more than Coppola, who himself admits his film „glorifies war … arguably“.

I’m sure American Vietnam films influenced Dien Bien Phu: the Green Berets, the Star & Stripes photographer protagonist. The diverse group of people who meet and fight in the war. The camera thief. The Viet Kong sniper girl from Full Metal Jacket, who single handedly takes out several American soldiers. Nishijima doesn’t mention any of these films, at least I haven’t read any film titles in the first three volumes. But there are short mang pages at the end of each volume densely filled with handwritten text. In the first one, the manga artist claims he’s never been to Vietnam and just used a random book he found as a reference. However, it’s obvious that he has done a lot of reading. There are more references in the first three volumes than I can open tabs in my browser. Further there is a detailed timeline of historical events at the end of every volume.

Nishijima regularly inverts black and white

Despite the abundance of information, Dien Bien Phu is a quick read. It’s art is addictive as is its storytelling. It’s a manga you can flip through in less than an hour per volume, but it’s also a manga that you can spend months on, reading and rereading while learning more about the historical, political and cultural background of the events depicted. I started reading the series during my Kindle Unlimited trial (on the Japanese site), but it’s definitely a series I want to have on my bookshelf, because there is so much to unpack.

„For those who do the killing, there is nothing worse than their dying victims staring back at them. Humans are not meant to kill each other so easily.”