40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina 1954
by Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel
Buy on AmazonBy 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 four-month battle, leading to the end of the first Indochina war between French forces and Ho Chi Minh's nationalist rebels. Minh (no relation to Ho) is a young man from Hanoi, an aspiring painter who dreams of experiencing la vie bohème 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's holdings.…
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"The title of this richly illustrated graphic “faction” – a term used by Marcelino Truong to describe fiction based on meticulously researched facts – refers to a propaganda unit of 40 ill-equipped, not-quite-battle-ready artists who nevertheless helped Ho Chi Minh’s army achieve victory at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and terminate France’s century-long colonization of Vietnam. The narrative centers on Minh, an illustrator conscripted into serving the communist war effort but openly resisting the facile David and Goliath narrative. The book makes a clear distinction between the romance of Marxism and its totalitarian approach: The fact that a nation behaves heroically or suffers tremendously in war does not make the ideology that governs it admirable."
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