Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction

Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction is first presented as an American anti-communist manual, but its lasting importance lies in the work its pages perform as a cipher and in the journeys it survives. Given to the unnamed narrator by Claude, it becomes an instrument of the secret connection with Man, a carefully packed possession in exile, and finally one of the few objects returned when the narrator leaves the reeducation camp. Its changing condition traces a passage from intelligence work to separation and, at the end, a possibility of renewed communication.

Origin and Public Face

Claude arrives at the General’s villa carrying a paperback copy of Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction, by Richard Hedd. The book is a gift for the unnamed narrator; the General receives a bottle of Jack Daniel’s instead. Its cover is crowded with extravagant endorsements attributed to prominent American figures, including secretaries of defense, a senator who had visited Vietnam, and a television anchor. The subtitle, On Understanding and Defeating the Marxist Threat to Asia, makes its political purpose explicit. Claude says that everyone is reading the book as a how-to manual, and the narrator agrees to read it too.

The scene places the book within the American ideological framing of the conflict, even as the narrator’s later use of it turns that framing toward an entirely different purpose. The General, facing eighteen enemy divisions around the capital, is focused not on the book’s argument but on securing an aircraft for escape. The manual enters the story during an evacuation crisis, yet it will outlast the immediate political and military order that brought it into the villa.

A Cipher Shared with Man

In exile, the book becomes the key to a concealed correspondence. The narrator receives a letter from his aunt whose ordinary account of weather and daily concerns carries a signal from Man in invisible ink made from rice starch. When the narrator brushes the letter with iodine in water, purple numbers appear. They refer to a page, line, and word in Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction, allowing the book’s printed text to serve as the cipher.

The method depends on the difference between the book’s visible public identity and its private use. To an outside reader, it is a popular manual on defeating Marxism; to the narrator and Man, its pages provide an agreed system for sending hidden messages. The narrator has learned from Man’s notes that people’s morale is high, reconstruction is proceeding slowly but steadily, and Man’s superiors are pleased with his reports. Meanwhile, the narrator considers the exiles’ lives largely uneventful as intelligence material. The book thus makes communication possible across a separation that otherwise leaves the narrator with little meaningful news to transmit.

Packed Through Exile

The book is among the objects the narrator chooses to take when the evacuation from Saigon becomes imminent. He packs it in a rucksack with toiletries, clothes, photographs of his mother and of Vietnam and America, and a Kodak camera. The bag itself has a false bottom, where the narrator hides a Minox mini-camera given to him by Man. That camera has been used to photograph classified documents, so the rucksack brings together a concealed means of gathering information and the book used to encode messages. The narrator does not state that the book is hidden in the false bottom; rather, it travels among the bag’s ordinary contents while the compartment conceals the camera.

Later, during the expedition into Laos, the same rucksack holds the narrator’s rations and the book tucked into its false bottom. The narrator’s description makes the book a practical possession carried on a dangerous journey, not merely a remnant of the earlier correspondence. Its pages remain available for the cipher if needed. By then, the book has crossed from Claude’s gift into the narrator’s private intelligence work and accompanies him into a landscape marked by bomb craters left by American attacks.

Damage, Return, and Significance

At the end of the narrator’s confinement, the book returns in visibly damaged form. The commissar retrieves the narrator’s battered rucksack and copy of Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction from beneath his desk. The binding has torn apart; a rubber band holds the two halves together. The narrator and Man had last seen it nearly falling apart, its spine deeply creased. The book’s wear records repeated use and travel, while its damaged binding makes its material vulnerability unmistakable.

The commissar presses the book into the rucksack despite the narrator’s attempt to refuse it. He explains that the narrator can use it to send him a message, or receive one in return, and says that he still has his own copy. The book’s original cipher function is therefore restored at the moment of departure: what began as a gift from Claude has become a shared channel between the narrator and Man, surviving their separation and the narrator’s interrogation.

The commissar also returns the narrator’s confession manuscript, identifying what happened in the examination room as something that belongs between them. The book and manuscript are carried together, but they serve different purposes: one can sustain future coded contact, while the other preserves the account of what has already happened. Their return gives the battered volume a significance beyond its anti-communist contents or its usefulness as a cipher. It is a durable, handled object that connects the narrator’s earlier clandestine life to the possibility of communication after confinement.