Set during the Vietnam War, the United States tries some trickery that involves seeding the jungles with listening devices that look like plants, so they can hear the truck convoys at night and precisely bomb them.
The trick is almost immediately revealed to the NVA's head of intelligence, a Madame Ngha, because she's made allies of the hill people in those jungles, who can recognize plants that don't belong. From that point forward, the book is Madame Ngha figuring out how to manipulate the U.S. into bombing things to the benefit of the North Vietnamese. Play recordings of trucks in an open field that has a lot of game, let the bombers kill a bunch of buffalo to feed the hill people and the NVA. The Air Force switched to napalm? Get them to bomb places that could be used to plant rice. The Air Force switched to herbicides that effectively salt the earth? Get them to bomb a place you want to build a new highway.
The U.S. is too impressed with their technological marvel to figure out it's been turned against them. Everything is automated, so the people in charge barely have any idea of where they're hearing the "convoys" or what they're bombing. Totally divorced from the process, or maybe even from reality. There's a brief digression where, as the U.S. is dropping all these defoliants that will stop the jungle from growing back for potentially decades, they are also very concerned with the damage done to the environment by use of chemicals at home. This does eventually carry to the war, but it means they just go back to dropping high explosives. More environmentally friendly.
And Madame Ngha has an agent working for the general in charge, who is of course touched by Thu's stories of how she desperately wants to help the Americans after the NVA killed her family. Except it was actually a flight of B-52s that killed her family, but it lets the general feel like a dad, since he's apparently failed so utterly at maintaining a connection with his own daughter.
There's also a subplot where Thu, when alone in her quarters, envisions herself with a family of her own, complete with a maid and the maid's daughter (also named Thu.) I guess the emotional toll of the war, which the Americans are also oblivious to as they bomb the shit out of villages. She's dedicated to her duties, but she also likes the fantasy she's been able to concoct while working for the Americans. Not really sure what I was supposed to take from that.
I think The Bridge Over the River Kwai was a stronger book, maybe for being more focused. Or the notion of the incredibly sophisticated fake plant listening devices, which are nonetheless immediately thwarted, felt too fanciful. The book read easily enough; it wasn't any sort of difficulty to get through, but I kept waiting to feel drawn in, really invested in what was happening. But the Americans were duped so thoroughly, so quickly, there were never any stakes beyond what particular goal Madame Ngha felt like using them to achieve at that moment. By 50 pages in, there was no chance the bombers would hit anyone she didn't allow as part of some larger plan, so there was no tension to the proceedings.
'The process rendered the place immaculate, leaving only ashes, but poisoned ashes, from which nothing could ever rise again, lying in a desolate landscape forbidden to all vegetation. This dead earth, it was clear, could no longer bear rice or manioc.
Yet for all this, traffic on the trail continued uninterrupted.'
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