National Liberation Front

The National Liberation Front appears both as a clandestine force operating in Cholon and as the victorious movement whose flag is raised over Saigon’s presidential palace. Its presence in the novel is mediated through police intelligence, wartime memory, and a film production that turns Vietnamese political conflict into spectacle. These perspectives do not provide a full institutional portrait, but together show how the organization is pursued, feared, and represented by opposing powers.

Underground Network and Activity

In Cholon, the National Liberation Front has constructed an underground network for political agitation, terrorist organizing, and black-market smuggling. Its activity is embedded in the city’s ordinary commercial life: the narrator and The crapulent major associate a suspected tax collector with a rice-wine business that also operates a hidden casino. A secret door in the shop’s storeroom opens onto gambling tables, where customers play cards and shoot craps while waitresses serve rice wine and soup. The clandestine political economy is thus not separate from the neighborhood’s trade but concealed within it.

The police raid follows a dossier assembled by The crapulent major, who says that enough people have identified the merchant as a National Liberation Front operative to justify neutralizing him. Police seal the ward with roadblocks and patrols, while a second squad waits at the casino’s rear exit. The operation ends with the merchant in custody, but the narrator has already alerted Man and expects the suspected tax collector to be absent. His secret warning exposes the divided loyalties beneath the raid: the police operation is not simply an effort to identify an enemy, since the narrator is also protecting the underground network from within the government’s security apparatus.

Defeat of the Republic and Political Victory

After the refugees reach Guam, televised images show the final evacuation from Saigon, followed the next day by communist tanks breaking through the presidential palace gates. National Liberation Front troops raise their flag from the palace roof. The scene makes the movement’s victory visible at the precise moment the refugees lose their country: they watch the new flag appear while their former political identity becomes untenable. The narrator’s account links the public change of power to the private experience of displacement, rather than treating the flag as a detached military emblem.

Fighters Recast for the Screen

The National Liberation Front also enters the novel through the production of a war film. In the film’s casting scheme, its guerrillas are labeled as both possibly freedom-loving nationalists and hateful communists, yet treated as people who can be killed regardless of which description applies. The narrator notes that refugee extras—many of them former freedom fighters—do not want to play these roles. The production offers higher wages to persuade them, turning political revulsion into a question of compensation while leaving the underlying contradiction intact: the refugees are asked to perform an enemy identity that overlaps with their own past.

The Hamlet war-film director gives the extras a script in which the captured soldier Binh is treated as a traitor and tortured by National Liberation Front guerrillas. His directions assign the fighters a ready-made psychology of hatred and revenge, then tell them to act naturally. The resulting scene is a film performance, not evidence about the organization’s actual practices. Its staging instead reveals how Hollywood converts political conflict into simplified roles, while the refugee performers must enact the violence and ideological labels imposed on them. The narrator’s attention to the extras’ discomfort keeps that production process in view, exposing the gap between the film’s confident categories and the complicated histories of the people hired to embody them.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, the National Liberation Front is associated with underground organization, the overthrow of the republic, and competing claims over who may represent Vietnamese fighters. The Cholon raid shows political resistance entangled with commerce and police surveillance; the flag over the palace records a decisive transfer of power; and the film set shows exiles being paid to reproduce a hostile image of a movement they once served or fought alongside. The organization’s significance therefore lies not only in its military presence but also in the struggle over how its actions and members are named, remembered, and depicted.