40 Men and 12 Rifles
Indochina 1954
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
By the author of Such a Lovely Little War and Saigon Calling, a stirring graphic novel about love, beauty, and war in 1950s Indochina.
40 Men and 12 Rifles is an expansive, gripping graphic novel set in Indochina in the year leading up to 1954, when the French-held garrison at Dien Bien Phu fell after a fifty-five-day battle, which lead to the end of the first Indochina war opposing both French and Nationalist Vietnamese forces to Ho Chi Minh's National-Communist underground state. Minh (no relation to Ho) is a young man from Hanoi, an aspiring painter who dreams of experiencing la vie de boheme in Paris's Latin Quarter. To dissuade him from pursuing an artistic life, his father sends him into the countryside to tend to the family holdings. He is soon pressed into serving with the Ho Chi Minh People's Army, where he becomes a soldier, and is co-opted by his leaders to the Communist propaganda machine, despite repeatedly defying his cadres—ideological Communist commanders with whom he disagrees— becoming both hero and anti-hero in the process.
40 Men and 12 Rifles is a moving and beautifully illustrated book about the human and artistic spirit of the Indochinese people, who persevered in the face of warfare and suffering.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this magnificently researched and crafted historical fiction, Truong (Saigon Calling) explores the conflict between art and war through the little-known story of the the Việt Minh's armed propaganda artists. Minh, a handsome young painter, is living comfortably in 1950s Hanoi when civil war breaks out. His wealthy father pulls strings to smuggle him to the countryside for safety, but along the way he's captured and conscripted into the People's Liberation Army. He ends up assigned to the Armed Propaganda Unit, a group of "artist-soldiers" embedded in the military to create communist propaganda. "Your job is not to inform the people," his superior reminds him, "but to form them!" Truong avoids simplistic conclusions as he depicts the brutality and censorship of the military regime, the pre-revolutionary injustices that turned many to communism, and the universal yearning for freedom. In expressive rose- and sepia-toned comics, he brings midcentury Vietnam to life, from cosmopolitan Hanoi with its streets full of pedicabs and French-style cafes to lush rural landscapes and bombed-out war zones. This is a Vietnam war story like no other.
