Who was the military mastermind who squeezed out Frequent Wind from between his tightly clenched buttocks?” Coming as it does, soon after an almost physically painful description of battlefield casualties during the evacuation – “the fuel tanks… incinerated the three dozen occupants, their teeth exposed in a permanent, simian rictus the flesh of their lips and faces burned off the skin a finely charred obsidian, smooth and alien, all the hair converted to ash, no longer recognisable as my countrymen or as human beings” – the flippancy feels strained, almost jarring. At one point in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, the narrator, recalling the fall of Saigon, falls to reflecting upon the American-christened name of the evacuation operation, Frequent Wind: “I had brooded on it for a year, wondering if I could sue the US government for malpractice, or at least a criminal failure of the literary imagination.
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