The Revolutionary Duty to Sacrifice for the People

The Revolutionary Duty to Sacrifice for the People is the principle that revolutionaries must accept suffering, death, and personal loss in service of the nation and its people. It links the exiled fighters’ armed struggle to the prisoners’ ideological education, but its meaning shifts between faith, political discipline, and coercion. The Admiral presents sacrifice as proof of belief; the Commandant demands it as evidence of revolutionary consciousness; and the narrator’s exchanges with both reveal the gap between sacrificing for others and deciding on their behalf.

A Faith Sustaining the Struggle

The Admiral grounds sacrifice in a long view of history and religious faith. On the last day of the war, he says, he commanded a transport ship carrying marines, soldiers, policemen, and civilians rescued from the piers. Rather than sail to the Seventh Fleet with other South Vietnamese captains, he chose Thailand, where he expected asylum and believed resistance to communism could continue. He rejects the idea that he needs saving by Americans, whom he considers discredited, and describes his decision as a commitment to keep fighting for months, years, or decades. Seen from God’s perspective, he tells his listeners, that span is no time at all.

When Bon asks whether the cause has a chance, The Admiral compares the two hundred men in the camp to the early Christians: they have faith, a radio station broadcasting freedom into their enslaved homeland, and guns. He treats God’s support as the decisive advantage. Bon counters that Jesus and the apostles died, and the Affectless Lieutenant concludes that they, too, will die. The Admiral does not promise survival. Instead, he says that those the fighters save will be grateful, as those saved by the apostles were grateful to them. Sacrifice is thus not presented as a guarantee of victory or even of life; its justification lies in the people it may rescue and the faith that gives endurance a meaning.

The People as the Measure of Duty

The Admiral’s promise of gratitude meets an immediate objection. Bon points out that many people the apostles went to save did not want to be saved, and that they ended up dead. His response presses on the assumption beneath the Admiral’s argument: a revolutionary may understand himself as acting for the people even when those people reject the rescue offered to them. The Admiral’s answer, that Bon does not sound like a believer, turns the disagreement into a test of faith rather than a question about consent or the consequences of the mission.

The Commandant gives the principle a more explicitly political form during the narrator’s reeducation. He criticizes the narrator’s confession for displaying individual selfishness and Christian superstition, and for showing no willingness to sacrifice himself to rescue the nation and serve the people. He contrasts the narrator’s bourgeois habits with the privation endured by northerners, then invokes To Huu’s poetry about belonging to tens of thousands of families and standing alongside homeless, hungry children. In this account, revolutionary identity is collective: the self must be remade in relation to the suffering of others, rather than treated as an independent moral center.

Sacrifice as Political Discipline

The Commandant makes the duty concrete through battlefield examples. He recounts seeing a dog eat the brains of a battalion doctor after the doctor’s intestines had already been eaten by another dog. The grotesque scene becomes evidence of the conditions revolutionaries endure, but he insists that the deaths of his men were worth it because the bombs dropped on them were not dropped on their homeland and because they liberated the Laotians. His conclusion is that revolutionaries sacrifice themselves to save others. The physical horror does not weaken the principle; in his reasoning, it demonstrates the cost that gives the principle its force.

The narrator’s reeducation extends that demand from wartime death to the remaking of the self. The Commandant says that the narrator must abandon bourgeois and Western inclinations and learn to write for the people. When the narrator challenges the idea that Marx wrote for ordinary people, the Commandant treats the comparison as proof of elitism and threatens that the final phase of reeducation will transform him from an American into a Vietnamese once more. The duty to serve the collective therefore includes submission to the political process that claims to define the collective’s needs.

Suffering, Friendship, and Contradiction

The Commissar gives sacrifice an intimate, personal rationale when he explains why he has subjected the narrator to sleep deprivation. Morphine can numb the body and brain, he says, but imagining someone else’s greater pain is the only way he has found to manage his own. Remembering the suffering of losing one’s country, he recalls having imagined the narrator’s exile as worse than his own pain after losing his face, skin, and family. Now that the narrator has returned, the Commissar says, he can no longer use that comparison to diminish his suffering.

He describes revolutionaries as people made by suffering, who chose to suffer for the people because they sympathized with the people’s suffering. He then insists that he inflicts suffering on the narrator as a friend and brother, claiming that only the deprivation of sleep will make the horrors of history fully understood. The passage binds solidarity to violence: the Commissar’s claimed sympathy is real within the terms of his explanation, yet it does not prevent him from coercing the person he calls his friend.

Across these encounters, sacrifice remains both an ethical ideal and an instrument of power. The Admiral asks fighters to risk death for people who may thank them; Bon reminds him that those people may refuse the rescue. The Commandant turns self-sacrifice into a measure of ideological worth, while the Commissar makes another person’s suffering part of a lesson in historical understanding. The duty’s central contradiction is that service to the people can demand the surrender of the self, even as the people’s own wishes become difficult to hear.