James Bond and the Vietnam War Protests?

Dragonpol

As some of you may know the film image of James Bond and his adventures was used in the mass protests in the United States (and no doubt other countries) against the continuation of the unpopular Vietnam War. In the excellent book James Bond: The Legacy (2002) by John Cork and Bruce Scivally for instance there is a picture of one such public protest in the United States against the war where the protesters held up a specially made banner showing the then President Lyndon B. Johnson in Goldfinger poster pose with a gun and with the title "BLOODFINGER" appended to the image. No doubt there were similar protests when President Richard Nixon extended the war into Cambodia and Laos.

Kingsley Amis also refers to the Vietnam War in his interesting essay 'A New James Bond' (1968) (which was reprinted with some additions in his essay collection What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions [1970]) and how his being associated with Ian Fleming and Bond meant that he was labelled by the Left as pro-American and by extension in favour of the Western imperialism that led to the unpopular Vietnam War.

There's also the fact the there was a plan to film TMWTGG in Cambodia with Roger Moore as Bond in 1968 but this had to be scrapped due to the civil unrest in that country and the wider context of the Vietnam War. Veteran Bond director Guy Hamilton also said in the SE/UE Making of TMWTGG extras that he wanted to have James Bond visit Saigon in Vietnam but he decided this wasn't a very bright place to send James Bond in light of the ongoing conflict there.

And finally, James Bond also accidentally strays into North Vietnamese waters in TND due to the off-centre GPS device.

The purpose of this thread is to collect together any other links with Bond and the Vietnam War and specifically these types of protests.

I'm looking forward to getting some interesting feedback from my fellow members, as always! :)

PropertyOfALady

Wow! I never knew this happened.

Thunderpussy

Interesting stuff, and new to me.

FLeiter

I think this may wind up a bit of a reach on your part to connect the dots. Ian Fleming passed away at least a year(1964) before any sizeable protests were staged in the U.S.. Yes, there were smaller(1,000-1,500) protests at a handful of college campuses but it wasn't until 1965 that saw thousands of protestors in numerous cities and colleges protesting the war. I can't say that I ever saw a Bondish banner or poster near any of them.

A more ripe film target was John Wayne who had the complete support of the U. S. govt. in the 'Green Berets'(1968) and was supplied equipment and use of a military training site as a location.

Just not buying the premise of taking an obscure banner and developing it into more than just that-an outlier.

Dragonpol

FLeiter wrote: »

I think this may wind up a bit of a reach on your part to connect the dots. Ian Fleming passed away at least a year(1964) before any sizeable protests were staged in the U.S.. Yes, there were smaller(1,000-1,500) protests at a handful of college campuses but it wasn't until 1965 that saw thousands of protestors in numerous cities and colleges protesting the war. I can't say that I ever saw a Bondish banner or poster near any of them.

A more ripe film target was John Wayne who had the complete support of the U. S. govt. in the 'Green Berets'(1968) and was supplied equipment and use of a military training site as a location.

Just not buying the premise of taking an obscure banner and developing it into more than just that-an outlier.

Thank you for your interest, @PropertyOfALady and @Thunderpussy!

Yes, I see your immediate point of course, @FLeiter but I have more evidence built up and am planning to do a write-up on it all when I get it collated as I find it a fascinating sort of footnote to the James Bond character of the 1960s and 1970s. I perhaps should have made more it a bit more clear that I was not including Ian Fleming or the original Bond novels that he penned in this thread as of course Fleming died in 1964 before the Vietnam War had escalated. As one can see I have placed this thread in the 'Bond Movies' sub-section of our community for just that reason. Perhaps it was my reference to Kingsley Amis' essay that served to muddy the waters on this issue?

By the way, I'm going to bulk out the OP to make it clearer that there are a few more connections between James Bond and the Vietnam War and that although an obscure Bondian topic it is still worthy of more study and research from serious-minded Bond fans.

Dragonpol

Does anyone else want to throw in their 2 pence on this thread?

As promised I've added some more details to the OP of this thread in order to expand the discussion somewhat.

I'd love to hear from you, as always! :)

Dragonpol

I'd love to get this thread started up again and get a bit more discussion going if at all possible? :)

I do find it a fascinating (and largely ignored) Bond topic. See the OP for the evidence I have collated so far.

TripAces

@Dragonpol:

Some time ago, I offered this, as you might remember:

http://www.mi6community.com/index.php?p=/discussion/14693/ohmss-and-the-60s

We should have merged the threads.

Dragonpol

TripAces wrote: »

@Dragonpol:

Some time ago, I offered this, as you might remember:

http://www.mi6community.com/index.php?p=/discussion/14693/ohmss-and-the-60s

We should have merged the threads.

Thanks for that link, @TripAces. I'll gratefully add that to my research reading list on this topic as I feel I need to explore it further in an upcoming blog article.

TripAces

@Dragonpol I think you're on to something. The effect of Vietnam (and the counterculture movement of the late 60s) on Bond and his iconic status is a fascinating study. Lazenby almost embodied the spirit of the times off screen. He showed up at the premiere of OHMSS looking more like Charles Manson than James Bond.

Dragonpol

Yes, the Hippy Revolution and George Lazenby leaving the Bond role behind after one film seem to be related (to me at least). Lazenby certainly said so himself on at least one occasion. I started a thread on that topic here and on AJB a few years ago but I suppose that the two topics could be quite easily merged in with the Vietnam War and its protests. As you say, a very interesting (and most unexplored) area for that inexact science called Bondology.

RichardTheBruce

Just a couple slivers of relation to the Vietnam War. Understandable since Bond films skirt politics, so the lack of a direct Vietnam or war mention is expected.

The Lost Adventures of James Bond: Timothy Dalton's Third and Fourth James Bond Films, James Bond Jr., & Other Unmade or Forgotten 007 Projects, Mark Edlitz, 2020.
Dalton's Unmade First Bond Film - James Bond's Origin Story

The following summary is comprised of Richard Maibaum and Michael Wilson's 35-page treatment that is dated November 8, 1985, whose working title was Bond XV. Their outline is preserved in the Special Collection Department of the University of Iowa Libraries with the papers of Richard Maibaum.

The film opens with a pre-title sequence set in Austria in 1972. James Bond, who is in his mid to late twenties, is naked in bed with a beautiful woman named Elsa...

Trevor tells Bond that their cover, Universal Exports has a "shady reputation" as a company that "flies anything for anyone anywhere, no questions asked." He tells Bond he will fly Trevor and the crates containing machine parts to General Kwang, who is the "top dog warlord" and "biggest heroin dealer" in the Golden Triangle, an area in Southeast Asia that comprises Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar.

That's the closest related item I found skimming the book after seeing the recent headline "A New Book Reveals James Bond’s Vietnam War-Era Origin Story" (below).

I also notice the described Universal Exports activity in Europe and elsewhere mirrors real world Air America (1946-1976) airline as the CIA's covert assistance during the Vietnam War to Asian players. Even allowing or assisting Laotian drug smugglers' activity.

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Air_America_(airline)

A New Book Reveals James Bond’s
Vietnam War-Era Origin Story
"The Lost Adventures of James Bond" explores the secret agent’s secret history

See the complete article here:

https://www.insidehook.com/article/books/james-bond-origin-story-lost-adventures-mark-edlitz

Timothy Dalton on the set of "The Living Daylights"
Sunset Boulevard/Corbis/Getty

By Tobias Carroll | March 8, 2021

If you’ve encountered any of James Bond’s adventures over the years, you’re already familiar with the basics: a license to kill, a car full of gadgets and a penchant for martinis. But let’s not forget some of the other elements of the James Bond mythos, like the Vietnam War-era origin story or the young relative getting into international misadventures of his own.

Right about here, your mind is probably doing a perfect needle-scratch, and that’s understandable. James Bond’s origin story was never filmed, and the adventures of, er, James Bond, Jr., aired on a short-lived animated series. But they’re only the tip of the iceberg — or, if you prefer, the villain’s base disguised as an iceberg — when it comes to James Bond’s less famous adventures.

Thankfully, a new book offers a deep dive into the permutations of 007 over the years, and, along the way, will likely make you wish Timothy Dalton had gotten another crack at the character. The book in question is Mark Edlitz’s The Lost Adventures of James Bond, and it’s the sort of book that even experts on the character might learn something from.

[MORE]

And my interest was piqued of course by the mention of protests directed at US President Lyndon Johnson and the Bloodfinger poster. Hadn't seen it so I searched it out to represent here as well. 00$ indeed.

RichardTheBruce

Likely you're aware of these items, @Dragonpol, thanks in advance for your patience with me. I realize I'm dredging the opposite (UK) side from the US war protests, but as they relate maybe something new will come up eventually. (And I started looking at political cartoons of the time, seeking any use of Bond. So far no examples.)

Interesting that at a time US public sentiment was going against the Vietnam War, it began to draw support from Kingsley Amis and his associates. Therefore the group letter in the Times, "US Policies in Vietnam."

Colonel Sun: is Kingsley Amis's Bond
novel the weirdest of all?

See the complete article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/mar/28/colonel-sun-kingsley-amis-james-bond-novel-ian-fleming

Fifty years ago, the literary giant wrote a James Bond novel under a
pseudonym. With all the shoddy spies and friendly Soviets, it is
staggeringly un-Fleming-like

Detail from the 1970 Pan Books cover of Colonel Sun.

John Dugdale | Wed 28 Mar 2018 06.42 EDT

The omens were good when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun, the first James Bond novel not written by Ian Fleming, 50 years ago today. The Lucky Jim author was already moonlighting in genre fiction and was such a Bond buff that he’d produced not one but two guides to him and his world. Amis was the obvious heir.

At first, Colonel Sun appears to be a super-faithful quasi-pastiche, opening (like Goldfinger) with 007 wielding a putter. But after that, everything gets very perplexing. Heading off post-golf to see his boss for supper, Bond fails to notice the foreign agents following his car, or that he’s leading them to the home counties mansion of M. It’s not only him; the whole of MI6 come across as such a hapless outfit that a carful of D-grade goons can easily kidnap its leader and nearly kill or capture its best agent; the setting in Berkshire, AKA Berks, may be a clue to Amis’s view of it. And when 007 heads to Greece, the agency doesn’t become any more impressive: our (MI6) Man in Athens is taken out, so Bond must enlist locals for sidekicks.

Kingsley Amis in 1965, three years before the publication of Colonel Sun.
Photograph: PA Wire

Colonel Sun constantly deviates from the Bond model. There’s a protracted, gruesome torture scene – but it ends unexpectedly. The novel’s eponymous villain is Chinese, like Dr No, but then Bond’s chief mission is revealed: prevent Sun from massacring a secret Soviet conference on the island of Vrakonisi. Yes, Bond, the arch-foe of SMERSH, is now aligned with the USSR. It’s all staggeringly un-Fleming-like.

Amis channelling Fleming – who died in 1964 – is a connoisseur of ethnicities, loftily informing us when sketching a woman (“a cocktail of heredities”) forced to sleep with Sun’s goons that Albanians “are much less a race than the end-product of successive admixtures with the native stock – Latin, Slavonic, Greek, Turco-Tatar”. On first sharing ouzo with the book’s female lead, Ariadne, “Bond watched her lovely profile, very Greek yet totally unlike the overrated, beaky, ‘classical’ look.” Of two men she introduces him to, “one was in his mid-30s, dark, good-looking, a little overweight: Greek … the other grey, dried-up, close-cropped: Russian”.

Sun is ostensibly the most repellent racial caricature of all, a descendant of Fu Manchu and other fiendish orientals. Amis’s introduction of Sun is not unlike a Crufts judge inspecting an intriguing breed: “He was tall for a Chinese … one of the northern types akin to the Thamba Tibetan, big-boned and long-headed. The skin colour was the familiar flat-light yellow, the hair blue-black and dead straight, the epicanthic eye-fold notably conspicuous.” Yet Sun’s central Asian heritage that make him “less than totally Chinese”, and European influences also compromise his purity, distinguishing him from 007’s usual megalomaniac antagonists. He’s arguably as much a critique of Fleming’s two-dimensional villains as a continuation of the pattern.

Daniel Craig in Spectre, one of the Bond film adaptations featuring details inspired by Colonel Sun.
Photograph: Allstar/United Artists

Ariadne similarly both conforms to the Fleming formula for Bond girls and deviates from it. In fighting alongside Bond against Sun, she’s not been previously seduced into betraying anyone, and at the end, Bond doesn’t ask her to become a British wife, or spy for the west – she remains on Vrakonisi, as a Russian agent. If you set aside the obligatory slavering passages about her erotic allure, you could just about see Ariadne as a forerunner of today’s female action hero (just).

The Pan Books cover of Colonel Sun, featuring Kingsley Amis’s pseudonym

So why is Colonel Sun so strange? Some context, personal and geopolitical, helps make sense of it. Amis, by March 1968, had already made public his Damascene conversion from left to right, and signed a group letter to the Times titled Backing for US Policies in Vietnam. In the novel, the Vietnam war is mentioned three times, and pointedly links the villain to the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh. Not content with fingering China as chief wager of a proxy war against the US in south-east Asia, Amis envisages China as battling covertly in Europe against the Nato nations and the USSR; bafflingly, as there’s precious little evidence of such operations.

Since 1965, the USSR had replaced China as North Vietnam’s main military backer. Three years later, it would invade Czechoslovakia to end the reformist “Prague spring”. So four years before Richard Nixon went to China, Amis has got his villain nation and his potentially amiable one the wrong way round – whether to get away from Fleming’s Manichaean cold war dualism, or just as a pretext for having a Chinese baddie.

The letter.

https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/keys-aylsham-salerooms/catalogue-id-srkey10009/lot-ed9233da-051f-4d38-97f9-a3f7015dcdd4#lotDetails

RichardTheBruce

A contrast between old (Amis, 1968) and new (Boyd, 2014) and their approach to Vietnam 1968-1969.


(Set in 1968)

Colonel Sun, Kingsley Amis, 1968.
Chapter 5 - Sun at Night

The men themselves (he had met none of their women) had often aroused his admiration. He had first encountered the British in September 1951, at a prisoner-of-war centre near Pyongyang in North Korea. There, as a twenty-one-year-old subaltern attached, in the capacity of Assistant Consultant on Interrogations, to Major Pak of the North Korean Army, he had had the opportunity of getting to know the British soldier intimately. After September 1953, when the last of them had been repatriated, his experience of Westerners had been confined almost entirely to Frenchmen, Australians, Americans: interesting types in many cases, but not up to the British – ‘his' British, as he mentally referred to them. He had to content himself with the odd spy captured inside China and the occasional US Army prisoner taken in South Vietnam who turned out to be a recent immigrant from the ‘Old Country’. Fortunately, his reputation as an expert on, and interrogator of, the British was well known to his Service superiors and had even reached the ears of the Central Committee, so it was rare indeed that any British captive was not passed over to him. But the last of these occasions had been nearly six months ago. The colonel could not repress a gentle thrill of anticipation at the thought of tonight's reunion with his British and of the seventy-two hours of uninterrupted contact which were to follow. In the darkness, the pewter-coloured eyes grew fixed.

There was a tentative knock at the door. Sun called amiably in English, ‘Yes, please come in.’

Chapter 10 - Dragon Island

‘One moment, James,’ Ariadne leaned forward earnestly. ‘I agree with all this, but I still don't see why you're so sure that the Chinese must be responsible. The Americans are quite capable of this sort of thing. Consider their behaviour about Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam; they don't hesitate to –’

Bond started to speak, but Litsas held up his hand. ‘Let me reply, James. Listen, young lady. At Pierce College in Athens the Americans educated you, taught you English, explained to you their way of life. Were you such a bad and lazy student that you're forgetting all that? Can you see no difference between fighting aggressive Communists and this caper, killing chaps in the public streets of a friendly and peaceful nation, taking a Security chief from England completely openly? Even the worst men in Washington would not advise that. I beg you, Ariadne, forget your Leninist Institute and start to think!’

‘And,’ said Bond, ‘if they're still telling you there that the United States is world enemy number one they need to catch up on their studies. The Kremlin knows perfectly well that the main threat isn't the West any more, but the East. Surely that's not news to you?’

Chapter 19 - The Theory and the Practice of Torture

‘Well, what have you in store for us, Sun?’ Von Richter drawled the question. ‘We expect great things of you, you know. Everybody tells me that Peking leads the world in this field.’

Sun tilted his head, pleased at the compliment, but anxious to be strictly fair. ‘Good work is also being done in Vietnam. Some of Ho Chi-minh's men have learnt their job with remarkable speed, considering the comparative backwardness of that part of the world. Very promising. Ah …’

He stepped over and lifted Bond's chin. The blue-grey eyes fluttered open, cleared and steadied. ‘Damn you, Sun,’ said a thin voice.

‘Excellent. We can proceed. I'm working on his head, Ludwig, as I described earlier. He's taken it well so far, but this is only the beginning. Eventually he'll scream when he merely sees me advancing on him to continue the treatment.

(Set in 1969)

Solo, William Boyd, 2013.
Chapter 1 - In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

The maître d’ offered Bond a copy of The Times to read. Bond glanced at the headline – ‘Viet Cong Offensive Checked With Many Casualties’ – and waved it away. Not today, thank you. That zip on the front of her outfit – her catsuit – was like a provocation, a challenge, crying out to be pulled down. Bond smiled to himself as he imagined doing precisely that and drank more coffee – there was life in the old dog yet.

RichardTheBruce

Nothing protest-related, but evidence of Bond conjoined with Vietnam (and Viet Nam) at different levels.



Semic Press, September 1987.

Flykten Från Vietnam (Escape From Vietnam)
https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1987.php3?s=comics&id=02315
Issue: #9 (1987 series)
Released: 15th September 1987
Format: 17cm x 26 cm
Pages: 68
Publisher: Semic Press AB
Cover Price: 8.50 SEK
Featured Story

"Escape From Vietnam" was the twenty-ninth original James Bond story produced by Semic. Running over 24 pages, it was drawn by Manuel Carmona and written by Bill Harrington. Characters included M; Jerry Hoyt [Nam Rang]; Ella Fields; Samua.

Non-Bond Additional Stories
Häxan (The Saint)
Miscellaneous
Readers letters on the subject of 007, one page pin-up photo of Timothy Dalton and Maryam d'Abo in "The Living Daylights", one page pin-up photo of Roger Moore in "Octopussy", one page pin-up photo of Sean Connery in "You Only Live Twice".

True: The Man's Magazine, April 1968.

RichardTheBruce

Jean-Luc Godard's French perspective through quick mentions of James Bond and Vietnam, addressed pretty separately though.

Masculin Féminin (1966), Jean-Luc Godard.
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060675/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_106
A romance between young Parisians, shown through a series of vignettes.

Trivia

Paul: Times had changed, It was the age of James Bond and Viet Nam. Hope swept the French left as the December elections loomed. I turned 21 two days before.

Trivia

Immediately before Paul first meets Elisabeth, he comments on how times have changed and it is now "... the age of James Bond and Vietnam." Elisabeth is played by Marlène Jobert, who gave birth to Eva Green in 1980, future star of the James Bond film Casino Royale (2006).

There are many instances where the hero talks about the Vietnam War. Chantal Goya, who plays Madeleine, was actually born in Vietnam; in the movie she shows no interest in the Vietnam War.

Far from Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch.
Anne Bellec, Karen Blanguernon, Bernard Fresson.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061913/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_99
In seven different segments, Godard, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais and Varda show their sympathy and support for the North Vietnamese army during the Vietnam war.

Trivia

Right-wing extremists destroyed part of the Kinopanorama Cinema, and assaulted the manager, at avenue La-Motte-Piquet, Paris, while screening Far From Vietnam: 19th September 1967.

Far From Vietnam Trailer (4:05)

Jean-Luc Godard: The Rolling Stone Interview

See the complete article here:

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/jean-luc-godard-the-rolling-stone-interview-183636/

A look behind the lens at the famed French new wave director of ‘Breathless’ and ‘Band of Outsiders’
By Jonathan Cott

Jean-Luc Godard filming scenes for 'Sympathy for the Devil' in 1968.
Andrew Maclear/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Godard’s new questioning of the relationship between art and politics reveals itself in recent personal confrontations such as when he asked the audience at last year’s London Film Festival to watch the uncut version of One Plus One outside the theater on a makeshift screen and return their tickets and send the refund to the Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund. Put to a vote, only twenty persons decided to walk out. Godard said: “You’re content to sit here like cretins in a church.” During the shouting that followed, he hit producer Ian Quarrier who later explained why he added to the end of Godard’s film a complete recorded version of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (“ten million teeny boppers in America alone.”)

One Plus One intersperses shots of the Stones creating Sympathy for the Devil (from a slow ballad to the final rhythmic holocaust) with scenes of Black Power militants in a Battersea automobile junkyard reciting texts by LeRoi Jones and Cleaver, shooting white night-gowned girls; an interview in lush green woods with Eve Democracy (Anne Wia-zemski) who replies yes or no to questions defining the liberal temperament; a pornographic bookstore where Mr. Quarrier reads out from Mein Kampf while customers give the Nazi salute then slap two bandaged young men who chant “Peace in Vietnam.”

Is it unfair to say that in Weekend, the sense of aggression that you feel towards the bourgeoisie might not in fact be an aggression against yourself?
True. Of course. If it would have been possible to have made the film dirtier pornography, then I would have.

Why did you have to kill those animals?
Well, why not? A lot of people are killed in Africa and Vietnam. Why shouldn’t I kill animals? It was not done because animals are animals compared with human beings; it’s just that if I had killed a human being I would have been put in jail.

But the killing of an animal is naturally and too easily shocking.
I think an audience will be much more shocked by the death of a pig than by the death of a human being, even if it were told that it was a real human being. One is not used to the idea of shooting animals just for a movie.

[discussion of Bond]

The film might not convince you that the revolutionary movement was correct.
The film doesn’t have to convince. You shouldn’t speak like that. It has to convince that there are better people than others. It’s as if in one or two hours of a picture or twenty pages of a book you-want the whole truth about the whole society, about everything, and it has to be right. It’s absolutely wrong. It’s impossible. It took Mao fifty years to write his little red book. Fifty years of fighting. And then it was very natural. It came from everything he had learned.

But the Rolling Stones’ song ["Sympathy for the Devil"] covers a lot of ground, it contains a lot of material.
No, that’s wrong. It has very little. That’s why I was so angry with that ending [of the film Gimme Shelter]. We should know only a little bit of it. We don’t know what kind of song it is. It’s just words, the beginning of words. It never goes to the end. Because the Rolling Stones are still at the very beginning.

But you hear what they’re singing about at the very beginning, about Satan, about the Kennedys, the Czar, about hippies getting killed before reaching Bombay. There’s a lot of content in that one song.
No, there’s very little. It’s just that you hear it twenty times.

You seem to have such a clear idea of what you’re doing, yet there are so many contradictions in the film.
Not in the film, but in the way you look at it. My films are much clearer than they were two or three years ago. They still might be very neophytic, because they’re very simple. When you go out of One Plus One— — ordinary people I mean, people who like James Bond— — you might say: This is very complicated, I don’t understand anything. But if you go out of the last James Bond film and I ask you, can you tell me what you’ve seen, you can’t No. There were 20,000 things in James Bond. The movie showed for two hours. I ask, was he in a car. Yes What colour was it? Do you remember the colour? He was with a girl. What was he saying to her? And just after he left the girl, what was he doing? He can’t remember. Maybe he could remember one or two moments. But he couldn’t remember or describe to me the sequence of the story. It’s like a mixed salad. You can’t describe a mixed salad. There are too many things in it.

And then I ask him, you have just seen One Plus One. Do you think it’s complicated. Well, let’s see if it’s complicated. Let’s remember what you’ve seen. People playing music. Yes, you remember that. What else? Well, there were Black people in a junkyard throwing guns and reading things. And there was a girl in the woods. And in four minutes he can remember everything there was in the movie. And there is no more. Yes, but why? he says. I didn’t understand why that girl was in the woods just before the sequence of the Black people.

And I ask him, what do you think? What’s she saying? She was only answering yes and no. Well, what kind of questions was she being asked? Do you remember any? And on and on like that. It’s a very simple thing, really very simple…. These people have been taught that a James Bond film is a simple movie, while in fact it’s really complicated and complicated in a dreadful, in a silly way because there was no need for complication.

I think you’re cheating now because a James Bond film is much simpler emotionally and intellectually than One Plus One.
Yes, maybe, in its reality. The world is more complicated, but not One Plus One.

What if a James Bond fan comes out of the movie and says, One Plus One bored me. You couldn’t really disagree with him if that was how he felt. One Plus One is a very intellectual film, it makes you think.

That’s because it’s the only film like that. If there were a hundred more, made by a hundred different people, it wouldn’t be like that. Forget about the film, just think about the Black people, think about the music people.

RichardTheBruce

The opposite of the war protest was the inevitable use of the Bond name in support of notable soldiers and intelligence operatives.

Notable example Major General Edward Lansdale as "The American James Bond". More detail in the complete article for the content of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, divergent perspectives of two film versions.

And still more in Max Boot's book The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.

Meet the Mild-Mannered Spy
Who Made Himself the
‘American James Bond’

See the complete article here:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/10/meet-the-mild-mannered-spy-who-made-himself-the-american-james-bond/

Edward Lansdale’s most successful covert operations may have been crafting his own reputation.
By Max Boot

Major General Edward Lansdale, 1963 (U.S. Air Force Photograph)

January 10, 2018, 4:22 PM

The legend of Lawrence of Arabia was concocted single-handedly by the American impresario Lowell Thomas, who in 1919 premiered a lecture and slide show on Col. T.E. Lawrence’s exploits that played to packed houses in New York and London and beyond. The legend of Edward Lansdale — the former ad man-turned-CIA officer who became known as the “American James Bond” and the “T.E. Lawrence of Asia” — had more authors, but perhaps the most important (and inadvertent) was the eminent English writer Graham Greene.

But Lansdale had a hand, too. In fact, one of Lansdale’s stealthiest and most successful covert ops would be to subvert Greene’s intent, turning his anti-American novel into a pro-American movie — and thereby securing his own reputation.

In December 1955, Greene published The Quiet American, a novel featuring a character named Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” of the title, who was an American intelligence operative, a supporter of Vietnamese warlord Trinh Minh The’s, the owner of a black dog, and an enthusiast for promoting a “third force” — that is, a democratic alternative to communism and colonialism.

It was an almost exact replica of Col. Lansdale, who since coming to Saigon in the summer of 1954, fresh off his success in masterminding the defeat of a communist insurgency (the Huk Rebellion) in the Philippines, had become the least secretive secret agent in town. He had become well known for championing newly appointed Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem as an alternative to both the French and the communist Vietminh and for working with Trinh Minh The, whom the French reviled as a terrorist for his attacks on French troops and civilians, to bring him over to Diem’s side. Lansdale even had a black poodle named Pierre who accompanied him everywhere, and he took a soft-spoken approach to dealing with Filipinos and Vietnamese — he preferred to listen rather than lecture. In other words, he really was the “quiet American.”

For understandable reasons, the widespread assumption, held not least by Lansdale himself, was that he was the model for the protagonist, who was hardly painted in flattering hues: Greene depicted Pyle as a naive young interloper who supplied Trinh Minh The with explosives that maimed innocent Vietnamese (something that neither Lansdale nor any other CIA officer did in real life). “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” sighs Thomas Fowler, the world-weary English correspondent who is the novel’s narrator. In retribution, he would arrange for Pyle to be murdered by the Vietminh.

Lansdale first heard of the new book at a diplomatic party early in 1956. As he reported to his wife, Helen, in a previously undisclosed letter:

At the reception, the Embassy staff were teasing me about my love life. Seems that Graham Greene has written a new novel, supposedly based upon me. Called the “Quiet Man” or maybe it’s the “Quiet American.” Anyhow, a naïve American, me, makes friends with a murderous Vietnamese called General The (Trinh Minh The, I suppose) who fools him and leads him astray, but the American finally wakes up and finds he has been sucked in by a very despicable guy. Meanwhile the story says he has had a wild love life, I presume due to General The. Sounds as though the French propagandists are really able to sell a bill of goods to the British, since the French peddled stories that I was very naïve and The sold me a bill.

By mid-February, Lansdale had managed to get his hands on a copy and decided that “the book has about everything wrong politically.” It was also wrong in details such as Greene’s inaccurate description of plastic explosives. “However,” he continued, “I like the way the fellow writes.… Trouble is, it will fill a lot of Americans with quite a false picture of things here, and follows the French propaganda line quite faithfully, despite its being critical of the French.”

MORE at

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/10/meet-the-mild-mannered-spy-who-made-himself-the-american-james-bond/

This excerpt is adapted from Max Boot’s new book The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.


Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His forthcoming book is The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam. Twitter: @MaxBoot

RichardTheBruce

Another example of James Bond used to promote support for South Vietnam, and by extension Western intervention.

South Vietnam fighter pilot and later activist Ly Tong, known as "The Vietnamese James Bond".

Ly Tong, the ‘Vietnamese James Bond’ and anti-
communist folk hero, nears death

See the complete article here:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-viet-pilot-hero-20190331-story.html

Former fighter pilot Ly Tong hijacked a plane flying from Thailand to Vietnam in 1992
to distribute thousands of leaflets calling for the overthrow of the communist government.
Above, Tong waves as he arrives at court in Bangkok in 2006.
(Pornchai Kittiwongsakul / AFP/Getty Images)

By Anh DoStaff Writer
March 31, 2019 3 AM PT

They called him the Vietnamese James Bond.

On a September day in 1992, Ly Tong hijacked an Airbus A310 on a charter flight for Vietnam Airlines, flew over Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, and dropped his munition: thousands of little paper bombs calling for the overthrow of the communist government.

After the rain of leaflets, he jumped from the aircraft, parachuting right into a swamp.

Today, hooked to tubes, the former South Vietnamese fighter pilot lies on a hospital bed and battles for consciousness as he nears his final descent, diagnosed with lung disease.

A longtime supporter, Thien Thanh Nguyen, leaned toward him. “If you can hear me, please let me know,” he said.

In a coma in San Diego since March 21, Tong turned his head slightly.

“He’s trying his best,” Nguyen said.

For many Vietnamese immigrants from the older generation — staunch Republicans and parents and grandparents who saw their progeny become increasingly liberal — Tong, 74, was an uncompromising enemy against communism. And that, in their eyes, made him a hero.

“Many Vietnamese in the community respect how he risked himself in the name of freedom for everyone,” said Hoa Thai Cu, president of the South Vietnamese Air Force Assn. of San Diego. Cu is coordinating Tong’s medical treatment and promises that the group will pay for his funeral.

But to many members of the younger generation, Tong is a relic of the past — if they think of him at all.

“I respect the beliefs of the older people, but they are not my beliefs,” said Jessie Nguyen, 21, of Los Angeles. The graphic designer said she would “protest against the same government by not buying any products made in Vietnam. But I would not line up for a demonstration.”

Sipping jasmine milk tea from 4 Seasons Tea in Westminster, Lili Bui, 25, said she grew up hearing about Tong’s escapades from her grandparents.

“Every generation has its heroes…. But people like my grandpa focus on the past because that’s what they understand best,” said Bui, who is studying to be a cosmetologist. “They grew up with an anti-communist philosophy that sometimes favor extreme situations. I don’t agree with that, but then I was raised in America.”

For a man like Tong, the Vietnam War never truly ended.

Tong joined the South Vietnamese Air Force and at 17 was assigned to the Black Eagle fighter squadron. In the 1970s, his A-37 jet was shot down, and at the end of the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese imprisoned him, sending him to reeducation camp outside the coastal city of Nha Trang.

He tried several times to escape, succeeding in 1980. On the loose, he would recall an 18-month adventure on foot, bicycling or riding buses through Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia — ultimately swimming across the Johore Strait to Singapore, where he strode into the U.S. Embassy to ask for asylum.

In 1984, he resettled in Louisiana, later enrolling in a political science graduate program at the University of New Orleans. After graduating, he moved to San Jose, where he got involved in community politics, joining protests and eventually writing books on Vietnamese history and culture.

Pilot Ly Tong gestures as he responds to a reporter after receiving medals from the
Brothers to the Rescue and the Cuban American Veterans Assn. in Miami in 2000.
(Alan Diaz / Associated Press)

What made Tong both famous and infamous among Vietnamese was the hijacking of the Airbus in 1992.

The passenger jet was flying from Bangkok to Vietnam. With the plane about 80 miles from the former Saigon, he brandished a plastic knife and coat hanger and claimed that he had a bomb, according to the Aviation Safety Network.

Tong ordered a flight attendant to take him to the cockpit, where he directed the Bulgarian captain, piloting 155 passengers, to fly low. Quickly, he released sacks with 50,000 fliers out of the cockpit window over Ho Chi Minh City.

The leaflets urged Vietnamese to “build an independent, free and prosperous Vietnam.” He signed it: “Commander of the Uprising Forces.”

He parachuted from an emergency exit into a swamp, where the Vietnamese government arrested him two hours later. No one aboard the aircraft was harmed.

His sentence of 20 years in prison was cut short after the U.S. and Vietnam normalized relations. Tong was granted amnesty in 1998.

The hijacking forged Tong’s reputation as a hero for many of the Vietnamese immigrants who fled their homeland and communism, prompting donations to his “freedom fighter” cause.

In January 2000, Tong rented a Cessna, flying from Florida to Cuba to distribute newspapers urging citizens to revolt against the government of Fidel Castro.

As punishment, he lost his pilot’s license, but later that year he offered a flight instructor $10,000 to depart Bangkok in a single-engine plane — again heading to Ho Chi Minh City to drop thousands more leaflets, demanding armed demonstrations against the communists.

Police took him into custody when he returned to Thailand, where he was convicted and imprisoned.

Tong was released and came back to California in 2006. Two years later, he rented a South Korean aircraft, intending to sprinkle leaflets over North Korea, but he was arrested before he took off. Online, fans lauded his anti-communism campaign “for the world — not just for Vietnam.”

In 2012, a judge sentenced Tong to jail after he disguised himself as a woman and pepper-sprayed a Vietnamese singer in Santa Clara whom he deemed sympathetic to the government of his homeland.

“A lot of people recognize that what he did, he did out of love for country,” said Chinh Nguyen, 47, who joined a chat about Tong from the steam room of a gym in Fountain Valley. “He did things no one else can do.”

But Nguyen said she would stop short of venerating Tong like older Vietnamese Americans do.

“I would not tell my children about him and call him a hero,” she said. “It’s OK to have motivation and passion. But you just cannot go and steal an airplane. Passion and reasoning are different.”

Huong Nguyen, 71, a San Diego resident and former communications officer in the South Vietnamese Armed Forces, said Tong was a complicated man.

He didn’t like that Tong used pepper spray to assault that singer, “but we cannot judge him. We are ordinary, while he is a hero.”

In past years, Nguyen said, he asked the man now languishing in an intensive care unit why he did the things he did, knowing he could land in jail.

“He told me, ‘If I push the people to overthrow the government, I need to be with them. Why would I run? I would never run. I am not afraid — even if I die.’”

For the last five years, Tong has lived in San Diego, where he has kept a lower profile, first renting a room in a Vietnamese veteran’s home, then applying for subsidized government housing. Newly retired, he cooked porridge, made appearances at community celebrations and, according to niece Xuan Loc Le, had plans to write a poetry dictionary.

Tong has three children but never married. Le remembers him as “always affectionate,” someone “who never forgot about his relatives, especially my sisters and I.”

Tong’s health has gradually worsened, and he has been at San Diego’s Sharp Memorial Hospital since early March.

“I look at my uncle now and I think this cannot be happening. Death faces him and he has eluded it,” Le said. “He may be lying there, but he’s still fighting.”

Supporters have kept vigil, with his older brother and niece visiting from Northern California.

Word of his failing health has prompted people from across the state to appear at his bedside, prepared to say goodbye.

Doctors waited for his family to arrive to make decisions about his medical care. On the day the fighter pilot slipped into a coma, his older brother, Nhuan Xuan Le, came to the hospital with a computer drive with Tong’s time of birth, day and year. He planned to consult a fortune teller to pick an auspicious moment to end life support.

But his research was interrupted. The information on the drive could not be read by several computers. “Nothing worked,” recalled Nguyen, a shuttle bus operator from Garden Grove. “It was as if some force was trying to give him a little more time on Earth.”

Ly Tong flips through a booklet describing his past exploits during a visit
to Little Saigon in Westminster in 2008.
(Marc Martin / Los Angeles Times)

Stuck, Nguyen sought advice from a visitor at the hospital room, who had been talking to a Buddhist nun who came to pray for Tong. After meeting with Nguyen and Le at the hospital, the nun returned to Quan The Am temple to examine documents that would help her determine a time to let Tong go.

The next day, Le and his daughter went to Tong’s room to see him one last time. Nguyen pulled out a camera to videotape when, suddenly, Tong made a swallowing movement in his throat, moving his tongue several times as if he were trying to speak.

Family members decided to keep him on life support.

Visitors streamed in and out — aging soldiers who trudged through Vietnam’s jungles, other pilots from the war, musicians, writers. There were too many, so Cu, Tong’s caregiver, moved him to another room to prevent disturbing other patients.

Still, people kept coming. More than 200 showed up last weekend, crying, bearing flowers. Some stood outside the room and peeked through a window in the door.

Late last week, Cu changed his room again, and — for the moment — the hallway is silent.

[email protected]
Twitter: @newsterrier

Dragonpol

@RichardTheBruce - I just want to say a big thank you to you for keeping this thread going in my absence. It's much appreciated. I'll digest this material and get back to you on it. I do still want to write an article on this subject matter as I don't think it's ever been covered before but am currently working on another article idea at the minute.

RichardTheBruce

Yes you see this piqued my interest @Dragonpol, thanks for taking my contributions that way. So where I'm coming up with pretty anecdotal examples, in the spirit of brainstorming maybe they'll reveal something of deeper content.

Not specific to Vietnam but over the years I've lived and worked in Korea and Japan. While in Korea in the 90s especially I took a bunch of Asian Studies courses, including some on Vietnam. My larger interest earlier was the Korean Conflict and Korean War movies, I must have read 40 or so books on the war. Then I eventually refocused on Vietnam almost as completely, maybe 25-30 non-fiction books and novels. And about 10 years ago, before departing Japan I visited Vietnam and Cambodia as a tourist with my family, had a very good experience there.

RichardTheBruce

As related, filming locations for Vietnam and Cambodia considered.


You Only Live Twice (1967)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071807/trivia/

According to the Inside 'The Man with the Golden Gun' (2000) documentary on the DVD, during production on the fifth James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (1967), Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had originally intended for this movie to be the sixth entry in the Bond film franchise. It was to be shot in Cambodia, and Sir Roger Moore was considered to fill Sir Sean Connery's shoes as the second James Bond. However, the Vietnam War caused the producers to change plans, and pick On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) as the sixth Bond movie instead.

Inside The Man with the Golden Gun Original 007 Documentary Behind the scenes (30:58)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6v0Tuji4BU

0:00 Patrick Macnee narrating:

In 1965, a year after Ian Fleming's death, his heirs published his final James Bond novel The Man With the Golden Gun. Immediately the book hit bestseller lists worldwide. Producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli considered the benefits of turning the latest 007 adventure into a film.

0:30

During the shooting of You Only Live Twice in 1966, the producers hinted their next film will be The Man With the Golden Gun to be shot in Cambodia. And they ask a familiar face to consider playing the role of James Bond.

0:45 Roger Moore:

There was one they were going to do and they were going to shoot in Cambodia.

0:49 Charles "Jerry" Juroe, former VP Marketing EON Productions:

Cambodia was considered, and of course we all know what happened there.
[Newsreel footage of Samlaut Uprising, rioting and unrest. Later, war between Vietnam and Cambodia.]

0:52 Roger Moore:

And so they had to change their plans, which was at the time I might have been able to do it. And so then I think they went with George. Lazenby.

1:04

In 1972 Roger Moore is finally signed as 007. His first film Live and Let Die establishes him in the role. Worldwide, audiences and critics alike respond enthusiastically to the new Bond. Anxious to capitalize on their success, the studio asks producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to immediately begin production of the next 007 epic, the long-delayed filming of The Man with the Golden Gun.
Fleming's original novel was set in Jamaica, which had been used as a location in the film Live and Let Die. Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli immediately begin looking for an alternate setting.

2:14 Guy Hamilton, Director

I'd always loved the Baie d'Ha Long, which is in Saigon and now Vietnam, and I thought that really wasn't a very bright place to take James Bond.

The Man with the Golden Gun (film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Golden_Gun_(film)

The novel is mostly set in Jamaica, a location which had been already used in the earlier films, Dr. No and Live and Let Die; The Man with the Golden Gun saw a change in location to put Bond in either the Far East or the Middle East for the second time.[19][23] After considering Beirut, where part of the film is set;[24] Israel; Iran, where the location scouting was done but eventually discarded because of the Yom Kippur War;[25] and the Hạ Long Bay in North Vietnam; the production team chose Thailand as a primary location, following a suggestion of production designer Peter Murton after he saw pictures of the Phuket bay in a magazine.[20] Saltzman was happy with the choice of the Far East for the setting as he had always wanted to go on location in Thailand and Hong Kong.[26] During the reconnaissance of locations in Hong Kong, Broccoli saw the wreckage of the former RMS Queen Elizabeth and came up with the idea of using it as the base for MI6's Far East operations.[24]

Kiernan, Ben, and, “The Samlaut rebellion, 1967-68.” In Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1945-1981, edited by Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua, 166-193. London: Zed Press; New York: M.E.Sharpe Inc., 1982.
19 - Kiernan, 1982, p.176
20 - Kiernan, 1982, p.177
23 - Kiernan, 1982, p.178




Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120347/trivia/?ref_=tt_ql_trv

Because the second half of this movie was set in Vietnam, the production negotiated for a while for permission to film there. Although it appeared close, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information eventually refused to allow it. The production decided to use Thailand as Vietnam, with Bangkok substituting for Saigon. At one point during filming, a helicopter mistakenly hovered over the American Embassy to Thailand, causing fears that it was spying.

THE WAR ON VIDEO
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1998-04-05-9804050081-story.html

Hanoi's most visible attack to date on the evil winds of Hollywood culture was the sudden decision early last year to expel the entire Hollywood movie company about to film the partially Vietnam-set James Bond film, "Tomorrow Never Dies" -- even though, earlier in this decade, the government had allowed two high-profile French films, "The Lover" and the Oscar-winning "Indochine," to be filmed in the country.

According to "Tomorrow Never Dies" director Roger Spottiswoode, "We actually prepared to shoot in Saigon and Hanoi, and also found locations on the Vietnamese border with China . . . wonderful and remarkable places. But after giving us permission to shoot . . . they withdrew it. They got scared of too much Western influence too quickly. So, just three weeks before shooting, we had to find a whole new set of locations, . . . which we did in Thailand."

RichardTheBruce

Another little sliver of Vietnam content.

Hongkong Standard, Saturday July 9, 1966.

Bombers
strike
again

SAIGON, Fri.
US fighter – bombers
blasted oil, rail and missile
sites in North Vietnam yes-
terday. They also dodged
Communist MIGs and mis-
siles and knocked out four
torpedo boats.

In a day of furious air ac-
tion, two American planes
were shot down. The pilot
of one was rescued; the other
is missing.

The four torpedo boats were
spotted by reconnaissance
planes near a coastal island
about 30 miles east of Hai-
phong.

The navy said the camou-
flaged boats opened fire on
the planes. Three attack
flights were launched from
the aircraft carriers Constel-
lation and Hancock.

They reported sinking two
of the torpedo boats, heavily
damaging another and leaving
the fourth beach and burn-
ing.

Major depot
The major navy attack of the
day, announced yesterday was
the return raid on the vital
oil storage complex two miles
northwest of Haiphong,
through which North Viet-
nam funneled 95 per cent of
its fuel.

The complex had been hit
June 29 when US planes also
bombed a major oil depot three
miles from Hanoi.

Pilots returning from the
latest Haiphong raid reported
70 per cent of the remaining
installation was destroyed.

Birdleson

I started going to see the Bond films at a very young age in the early '60s, here in the US, and continued to do so throughout my life (obviously). I was also fairly politically aware for a youngster, having parents who often talked about world events in front of me and my sister. Yet, not once do I recall drawing any mental connection between any aspect of the Vietnam War and James Bond. I don't believe it ever crossed my mind. Of course both were products of The Cold War, but I doubt I even put that much thought into it beyond any obvious surface recognition.

RichardTheBruce

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Transcript https://subslikescript.com/movie/Tomorrow_Never_Dies-120347

I just noticed something.

This is where the ship thought it was.
And this is where it really is.

But see that island there?
That means that where he's jumping,

between the British and Chinese fleets,
technically they're not Chinese waters.

- They belong to Vietnam.
- BOTH: Vietnam?

Does he have any US government
markings on him'?

The parachute, the wet suit, the fins...

If the Vietnamese catch him,
they're gonna go crazy.

He didn't even say goodbye.

Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defense and Subversion, Oliver Boyd Barrett, David Herrera, James A. Baumann, 2011.

In a carefully documented and collaborated account in his Operation Holly-
wood., Robb (2004) looks painstakingly at the history of Pentagon and armed
forces’ liaison personnel and their negotiations with Hollywood producers
where, in return for making military equipment and facilities available film
makers agree to changes of script that ensure that the military are presented in a
positive light. This is not simple public relations for the Pentagon, but has the
specific purpose of using Hollywood movies as tools for recruitment. Robb’s
examples include several espionage and CIA-related movies. In his analysis of
Martin’ Campbells’ GoldenEye (1995) and Roger Spottiswoode’s Tomorrow
Never Dies (1997), Robb chronicles how producers were required to adjust the
content of their scripts in order to receive military support. GoldenEye was
originally scheduled to portray an American admiral being seduced and killed by
Xenia Onatopp of a Russian crime syndicate, but the producers were required to
change the nationality of the Admiral to Canadian.

To gain the loan of military
equipment and personnel for Bond’s parachuting into Vietnamese waters in
Tomorrow Never Dies, the producers were asked to remove a line in which CIA
agent Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker) was to warn Bond (Pierce Brosnan) of the
ramifications if he is caught by stating, “You know what will happen, it will be
war, and maybe this time we’ll win” (Robb 2004: 30). The Pentagon’s film
liaison office considered the line was an embarrassment, given the recent estab-
lishment of diplomatic relations with Vietnam, such dialogue could induce inter-
national crisis. The line was removed.

Recalling dialog in

Rambo: First Blood Part II, George P. Cosmatos, 1985.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089880/quotes/?ref_=tt_trv_qu

Sir, do we get to win this time?

James Bond Couldn't Joke About The Vietnam War

https://www.cracked.com/blog/12-weird-changes-government-asked-famous-movies-to-make

Tomorrow Never Dies was the James Bond movie that opened the same weekend as Titanic, so real smart move on the producers' part right there. It was also the only Bond film with scenes that take place in Vietnam. In the original script, there's a line where a CIA agent warns Bond of the consequences if he is caught in Vietnamese waters: "You know what will happen. It will be war, and maybe this time we'll win."

The Pentagon ordered this line to be removed. We know what you're picturing, and we're picturing it too: Some furious general pounding his fist on the table, saying, "This time we'll win?! WHO THE HELL DOES REMINGTON STEELE THINK HE IS?" But the actual stated reason was just as dumb: America and Vietnam had restored diplomatic relations in 1995, and the Pentagon thought the line could lead to an international crisis. This was a severe overestimation of American paranoia, and an even more severe underestimation of a Vietnamese person's ability to take a joke.

RichardTheBruce

Chagrin
https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/Chagrin
Phan Sinh Quoc, known professionally Chagrin, is a
character in the 2008 James Bond Novel Devil May Care
by Sebastian Faulks.

[More]

Review

Devil May Care
by Sebastian Faulks
published by Penguin

https://www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/s2280594.htm
[More content at link]

Faulks has appeared to take a number of Fleming clichés and work them into a somewhat overly long Bond pastiche. Gorner is flanked by a psychopathic sidekick, Chagrin, a short Communist Vietnamese man in a French Legionnaire’s hat. That Bond's enemy should be aided by Communists is strongly reminiscent of Fleming's work. Hugo Drax's Moonraker rocket is created by East German scientists. Auric Goldfinger's factory is exclusively populated by North Koreans, the same nationality as his bodyguard, Oddjob. Bond engages Gorner in a tennis match at the beginning of the book. A game, for an outrageous sum of money, that Bond eventually wins, only after Gorner's method of cheating is discovered and foiled. Again, this is taken straight from the pages of Moonraker and Goldfinger, during Bond's card game against Drax and his round of golf against Goldfinger. As in most of the Bond novels, Devil May Care begins with Bond resting, convalescing, undergoing psychiatric rehabilitation or just generally considering his future within the service. All of these are recognisable techniques of the Ian Fleming James Bond novels, but when employed by Faulks, they smack more of a pastiche than a continuation of a style.

Now for the differences. Ian Fleming's James Bond, in addition to being well paced thriller, are indicative of a time and culture. The language and attitudes displayed in the texts is how one determines the period in which the action takes place. Bond is wholly uninterested in popular culture, and, aside from a few oblique references about Russia and Castro, is largely unconcerned about politics. Faulks' Bond is not entirely of this mould however. Politics is at the foreground for a good portion of the text, with America's desire for Britain to join the Vietnam War an incentive for one of the character's actions. This attempt to provide political context and incentives is largely unnecessary, and would be more at home in one of the stricter espionage texts, such the Bourne series, rather than the thriller type of world Bond inhabits. Bond, after arriving back in the country, asks his Scottish housekeeper, May, “tell me what's been happening while I've been away.” She replies with the return of Chichester from his solo sailing expedition and the arrest of “those pop singers” for drugs. Bond is aware of both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and while imagine it would have been nigh on impossible to inhabit 1960's London without being aware of them, it seems a clumsy attempt to establish time and context. Other elements in the novel seem to have arrived directly from the movies, with Bond's interaction with Moneypenny far more prevalent than in any of the previous novels. This was always more of a mainstay of the films, as was Bond's near obsession with medium dry vodka martinis, an indulgence allowed within Faulks' text. Fleming's Bond drinks heavily certainly, but rarely goes to such lengths as to have a cocktail made to his specifications.

Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks, 2008.

"I think it’s time you learned a little more about Chagrin,” said
Gorner. “His real name is Pham Sinh Quoc. He fought for the
Viet Minh. He was a dedicated Communist soldier against the
French. When the French colonized Indo-China they sent many
nuns and missionaries. Religion was not good enough for the
great lay Republic of France at home, where church and state
had been separate since 1789, but they always exported Catholi-
cism to the little coloured people whose land they stole. I sup-
pose it eased their conscience.”

The guard, accompanied by three others, had returned with a
gibbering workman in a grey uniform. The man tell to his knees,
clearly terrified of what lay in wait.

“When Chagrin and his comrades came to a village in the north
where the children had been listening to Bible classes, they used
to tear out the tongue of the preacher with a pair of pliers. Then
he couldn’t preach any more. That’s what we still do to people
who talk too much.”

Gorner nodded to Chagrin, who took a pair of chopsticks
from his pocket. Two guards held the workman’s arms rigid be-
Hind him Chagrin inserted a chopstick into each of the
man’s ears.

“And this is what Chagrin used to do to the children who had
listened to the Bible!”

Bracing his feet at either side of the man, Chagrin banged
the flat of his hands as hard as he could against the ends of
the chopsticks, drilling them into the man’s head. Blood spurted
from his ears as he screamed and fell forward on the floor.

“He won’t hear anything for a long while now,” said Gorner.
“Not till his eardrums frown back. Some of the children never
heard again.”

Two guards dragged the screaming man away while two re-
mained in the room.

“And I expect you’d like to know how Chagrin came by his
nickname. The word means both ‘pain’ and ‘grief’ in French.
Remarkable that a language should use the same word for both,
don’t you think? But there was something else about Chagrin
that made him a better, fiercer soldier than anyone else. When
the Russians liberated the Nazi concentration camps they took
the papers relating to the Nazi doctors’ experiments. A highly
secret section of the Soviet health ministry continued with
experiments along the same lines for many years afterwards.
Unlike the Nazis, they asked for volunteers. Travel costs and
a financial reward were guaranteed. Word reached Chagrin’s
Communist cell in North Vietnam and volunteered to go
to a clinic in Omsk. Russian military doctors were interested
in the neurological basis of psychopaths—by which we mean
men who lack the ability to imagine the feelings of other peo-
ple. They can’t project. They have no concept at all of ‘the
other.’ The doctors thought that such a capacity—or lack of
it—might be useful to the army and particularly to the KGB.
To cut a long story short, Chagrin was one of a dozen men
who underwent brain surgery. Post-mortems of the psychopaths
had shown some abnormalities in the temporal lobe. Are you
still with me, Bond?”

“Yes.”

“In Chagrin’s case the operation was a success. The cauter-
ized an area of his temporal lobe the size of a fingernail. I don’t
imagine Chagrin was exactly a bleeding heart before, but after-
wards his indifference to others has been total. It’s really quite
remarkable. Unfortunately, there was a small side-effect. The
surgeons damaged a small cluster of pain-sensing neurons in
his brain—quite close to the morphine receptors, as it happens.

The brain registers pain in some of the same areas that gov-
ern emotion. If you try to stop someone feeling compassion,
you may take away other feelings. As a result, Chagrin’s ability
to experience pain is uneven, sometimes barely existent. This
means he has to be careful. He might jump down twenty feet
and not even know he’s broken his ankle. At other times,
of course, it can be an advantage. In combat, he is a formidable
opponent.”

RichardTheBruce

Vietnam Combat Operations – 1966, A chronology of Allied combat operations in Vietnam, Stéphane Moutin-Luyat, 2009.
PDF https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjIy9CdpN74AhUZQjABHfH1BXEQFnoECAYQAQ&url=https://1-14th.com/Vietnam/Archives/MACV%20Reports/VietnamCombatOperations-1966%20d8562.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1iRNoZ8YoMC6O8bFVZaKn3

4 Jul. Operation: JAMES BOND
Location: Binh Dinh Province. Type: intelligence gathering.
Controlling headquarters: 2d Bde, 1st Cav Div

Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam, Gregory A. Daddis, 2017.
Chapter 3 – Pacification without Peace
The Travails of Nation Building

Even major combat units became intricately involved with pacification
efforts. Take, for instance, the 1st Cavalry Division, which won fame during
the late 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley. Nearly a year before CORDS took
shape, the division had launched Operation James Bond in early July 1966,
the unit’s planners clearly enamored with Sean Connery’s most recent perfor-
mance in Thunderball. While some troopers launched raids against suspected
insurgent, others engaged in civic action activities “to show the Vietnamese
people that the government of Vietnam, the US military forces, and the dis-
trict officials were interested in their overall welfare as well as their security.”
Hamlet chief concurrently distributed food to local farmers while emphasiz-
ing “the interest that the South Vietnamese government had in their welfare.”
A second James Bond operation, begun at the end of July, included counterin-
telligence raids, medical team assistance, and the dissemination of agricultural
pamphlets and toys. The division even helped organize a local Boy Scout troop.
If such efforts seem quaint in retrospect, they at least illustrate the willingness
of some commanders to incorporate pacification into their larger operational
concepts.

CORD: The Office of Civil Operations and Rural Support, organized 1967 under Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (COMUSMACV).

RichardTheBruce

007: License to Drive, Gamelion Studios, 2011.

https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/007:_Licence_to_Drive

Thierry Cogney

https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/Thierry_Cogney

Thierry Cogney
Character information
Title/rank - Colonel
Died - c.2011, Vietnam
Hair - Bald
Nationality - French/Vietnamese
Occupation - Entrepreneur, arms dealer; Military colonel (former)
Affiliation - Independent; French Foreign Legion (former)
Status - Deceased; killed in explosion

Behind the scenes
Role - Main Villain
First seen - 007: License to Drive
Last seen - 007: License to Drive

Thierry Cogney was a fictional French-Vietnamese entrepreneur, arms dealer and international terrorist. The character functioned as the primary antagonist of the 2011 mobile phone video game, 007: License to Drive.

Biography
Thierry Cogney was an ex-French foreign legion Colonel who served in the First Indochina War. Following its conclusion, Cogney remained in Vietnam and subsequently indulged in various business ventures - both legal and illegal. Among his licit holdings, the wealthy entrepreneur owned a farm in Vietnam and a crab processing plant in Alaska; which was in reality a munitions warehouse for his arms trading activities. To create a market for his weaponry, Cogney planned to ignite a war between Pakistan and India by assassinating the Indian Prime Minister at the La Flour Trinh hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. To this end, Cogney used a Manila terrorist organisation, with ties to the Pakistani ISI, to deliver a powerful explosive device. The organisation came to the attention of SIS, who dispatched James Bond to follow the evidence trail to its conclusion. After thwarting the terrorist attack, 007 drove the truck bomb intended for the Prime Minister to Cogney's Vietnamese farm - detonating it and "forcing his retirement".

Bombing Cogney - License to Drive

007 Licence to Drive Glu Mobile (Ho Chi Mihn Cty at 14:00)

RichardTheBruce

https://www.comicsroyale.com/foreign-reprints#/new-gallery-14/

Editorial Ferma Reprints
From 1965-66, Barcelona based publisher Editorial Ferma reprinted some of the Daily Express James Bond strips across 34 issues. Despite being featured on the cover, the Bond reprints only made up a small portion of these individual issues with the rest of the pages being dedicated to other action oriented heroes.

Some images are courtesy of the website Tebeosfera, so quality varies across images.

RichardTheBruce

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts, Scott Anderson, 1978.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n16/charles-glass/hush-hush-boom-boom

Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA.

Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’

As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy pages covering every aspect of a giant secret intelligence and secret operational organisation’. This, the CIA’s official history reports, was the genesis of ‘the nation’s first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’.

One From the Vault - 50 Years of Bond, James Bond, Alexander Cockburn, March 23, 2002.
See the complete article here:
https://www.unz.com/acockburn/50-years-of-bond-james-bond/

{MORE]

On 16 January, 1962, ten years to the day after Fleming had typed those first words of Casino Royale (‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning’) filming began on Dr No at Palisadoes airport in Jamaica, with the British Secret Service and the CIA duly represented by Sean Connery and Jack Lord. Fleming lived long enough to see only two of the Bond films, Dr No and From Russia With Love, before dying in August, 1964 of a heart attack helped along by his seventy or so Morland’s Specials

He has much to answer for. Without Fleming we would have had no OSS, hence no CIA. The cold war would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.

Let those dubious of such assertions study the evidence. It was Fleming, assistant to the director of British naval intelligence during the Second World War, who visited Washington DC in 1941 and wrote a long memo of advice for General ‘Will Bill’ Donovan, President Roosevelt’s Co-ordinator of Information, whose duties included the collection of intelligence and the planning of various covert offensive operations. According to Ivar Bryce, a lifelong friend of Fleming’s who was working at the time for Sir William Stephenson, the director of Britain’s intelligence operations in the Americas, ‘Ian wrote out the charter for the COI at General Donovan’s request … He wrote it as a sort of imaginary exercise describing in detail all the arrangements necessary for financing, paying, organizing, controlling, and training a secret service in a country which had never had one before.’

[MORE]

A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture. Alexander Cockburn, 2013.
Part 2 - 2002
https://books.google.com/books?id=m7lvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA222&lp

May 15
THE ROOTS OF WAR RHETORIC

Dear Sir,

I was amused to learn from Alexander Cockburn that the Vietnam
War was caused by Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. It is
tempting to classify this as a fine example of the Mendocino School
of deductive logic. In fact, Mr. Cockburn joins a respected group of
American social critics with his claim.

In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain suggests that Sir Walter Scott
caused the American Civil War. It seem that the romantic tales of
chivalry so imbued the antebellum Southern culture that military
conflict was widely supported throughout years of unbelievable
destruction. There is a modicum of truth in each claim.

I would suggest a more likely literary trigger to the Vietnam War
is Profiles in Courage. The author of that work, John F. Kennedy, was
certain to believe in the ideals he portrayed, and in fact lived. Sadly,
he was also in a position to act on those beliefs.

Sincerely,

Edwin Shelby, Fountain Hills, Arizona

Alexander Cockburn replies:

Of all rhetorical modes, irony and hyberbole are the most perilous.
There were people who believed Swift’s Modest Proposal was for real.
Shelby among them no doubt.

RichardTheBruce

Not specifically Bond, but a sort of companion piece to Bond's use in the war protest poster.

Spoof poster 1968
https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/lpj6zm/vietnam_antiwar_parody_movie_poster_1968/



And also in the war protest lane.

Challenge and Change: Right-Wing Women, Grassroots Activism, and the Baby Boom Generation, June Melby Benowitz, 2015.
https://academic.oup.com/florida-scholarship-online/book/19589/chapter-abstract/178326793?redirectedFrom=fulltext
5 The Vietnam War and Student Rebellion

As leaders described the organization, it was made up of mothers, wives, other relatives and friends of servicemen, who supported American service personnel “in all parts of the world.” Because of the major fight in Vietnam, their focus was on that conflict, and they encouraged their members to visit the Vietnam wounded. In their flyer, “This Nation Under God,” they not only offered suggestions for visiting and helping those who were hospitalized, but recommended that people who shared their rightist opinions on the war involve themselves in “spontaneous letter writing.” They gave the following example: “The government sends up a trial balloon concerning a future truce in Viet Nam. When this appears in the news … Spontaneously, from all over the country, letters protesting the truce should pour into Washington, D.C.” The Mothers pointed out that servicemen, too, appreciated letters, and suggested that potential correspondents send the usual types of packages to service personnel—various foods, Bibles, “magazines, hometown newspapers, church bulletins and any other publications that will help the serviceman keep in touch.” At the same time, they sought to censor reading materials, asking people to not send the popular James Bond books, for the reason that the soldiers had seen enough fighting.30 While showing support for the young American military personnel, through the reading material, the women were subtly attempting to influence their thinking.

30. Carleton, Red Scare: Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas, 132. [2014]

RichardTheBruce

US Army helicopter
names in Vietnam -
Hellgate Press

See the complete article here:

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/13386287/us-army-helicopter-names-in-vietnam-hellgate-press

ARMY HELICOPTER NAMES

A - Z

Copter Name
| Unit | Unit #1 | Aircraft | Circa | Function | Serial # | Config | Location |

Artist | Crew Contributors

007

| 240 AHC | | UH-1H | 1970 | C+C | 66-16007 | NAA | nose | |

Richard Tierney AC, Bob Cooper CP | 340, 1748, 2009, 8625

007 *

| 498 Med Co | | UH-1H | 1968 | dustoff | 66-17007 | v-nn | | |

Pappy Richardson CE | 1974, |

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