A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin)

Sydney Parade comes to Saigon in 1965 as a civilian, believing that foreign aid is a form of nation building, and holding a devout faith in the domino theory. He’s employed by the Llewellyn Group, an organization formed by and connected to the U.S.government, existing outside of any chain of command. The Group is in Vietnam to facilitate the distribution of rice, the providing of vaccinations, the repairing of dikes, the building of roads and bridges and schools. Parade is told their victories will be reflected in the hearts and minds that their work will win, not in body counts, and he believes that. The man who tells him that does not.

Dicky Rostok is an ambitious cynic. His invisible agenda is based upon the principle that knowledge will give him mastery and power. His instrument in gaining this is Parade, whose family is loosely connected to Claude Armand, an owner of a rubber tree rubber plantation that’s close to enemy territory. 

“We’ve got to know things that the rest of them don’t know from a source of information they can’t figure out,” Rostock tells Parade, “And then Llewellyn Group will count for something. Not before.” Armand and his American wife are the ones whom Rostok is certain will give him the information that nobody else will have and it’s Parade’s job to get it.

The Armands live “between the lines.” To them the war is a nuisance that they would be able to ignore, if the American forces would only stop bombing their rubber trees. But the lines blur for them when an American plane is shot down near their home and a young American with political connections is captured. To deflect the glare of attention that this brings them, they give Parade information that will provide Rostok with his power while destroying lives, including their own.

“I will insist at the beginning that this is not a war story,” is the opening sentence of A Dangerous Friend, and the war remains peripheral throughout the novel. Instead it’s the story of people who give their hearts and lives to places they don’t understand, expatriates who believe that “when you have lived in a place and loved it that you belong to it.” But as Parade says to Madame Armand, “I’m thinking we live in different countries. I’ve invented one and you’ve invented another, and somewhere there’s a third that’s undiscovered.” Neither of them yet know what Parade’s father told him years earlier, “Thing about a foreign country, you never know what you don’t know.” They haven’t learned that acquiring this knowledge can be dangerous.

“There were many things that could be taken from you that were more precious than life.”  Rostok gets what he wants while other people lose their innocence, their homes, their faith.

Ward Just has written a companion novel to Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American. While both books show the destruction caused by ignorance mingled with power, Just’s novel is suffused with a love for Vietnam and for the people who believe it’s their home. It too deserves to be a classic.~Janet Brown