Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  CHAPTER 12

  THE QUIET ENGLISHMAN

  “REDS’ TIME BOMBS RIP SAIGON CENTER: MISSILES KILL 2 AND Injure 30 in Spectacular Viet Minh Strike in Indo-China.” So blared the headline in The New York Times of January 10, 1952. Later newspaper issues raised the dead to eight Vietnamese and two Frenchmen, and thirty-two injured.

  Reporter Tillman Durdin had the story: “Agents here of the Viet Minh forces this forenoon staged one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism in Saigon. Two time bombs were exploded at 11 o’clock in the crowded center of two main downtown squares, killing two persons and injuring thirty. Thirteen automobiles were blasted and burned, walls were pitted, windows knocked out, and plaster jarred loose in buildings all around the scene of the explosions.”

  The bombs had been left in two parked cars, Durdin continued. One blast went off at the Place de Théâtre, which was overlooked by the Opera House, the Continental Hotel, and a complex of shops and offices. The other blast occurred in the square in front of the City Hall, a block away. The two explosions occurred within two minutes of each other, and the police determined that the two automobiles, each bearing false license plates, had been driven up and parked only a short time before the bombs went off. The perpetrators had had time to flee the scene before the explosions occurred.1

  Life magazine published a photograph of the Place de Théâtre taken immediately after the explosion, and described the scene:

  At 11 o’clock … a powerful bomb planted by the Viet Minh Communists, exploded in the trunk of an auto parked in the crowded, busy square. The bomb blew the legs from under the man in the foreground and left him bloody and dazed, propped up on the tile sidewalk with his broken left ankle twisted beneath him. It killed the driver of the … delivery truck as he sat at the wheel. It riddled and set fire to the truck, made a torch of a cloth-topped jeep, smashed and burned more autos and raked the square with fragments and flame.2

  Almost immediately doubts emerged that the attacks were the work of the Viet Minh. Their preferred terrorist methods were different: hand grenades thrown from a bicyclist or rolled down a movie aisle, or point-blank shootings, execution-style. To Donald Heath, the U.S. minister, this merely meant the Viet Minh had shifted tactics. “While feat selected is less [an] exhibition of strength than of VM willingness to indulge in cowardly and brutal acts of terrorism,” he cabled Washington, “exploit was carried out with grim efficiency and will undoubtedly be heralded as Commie triumph.”3 But veteran journalists thought someone else must be the culprit, as did the French Sûreté. Speculation turned to Colonel Trinh Minh Thé, a flamboyant former Cao Dai chief of staff who had broken with the French in 1951 and, together with twenty-five hundred Cao Dai troops, had set up a headquarters in a swampy area past Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border. His aim: to fight both the French and the Viet Minh, since any authentic nationalism had to oppose both sides. He would be a “Third Force.” In radio broadcasts, Thé’s operatives took credit for the January 9 blasts, and French officials concluded that he was indeed responsible.4

  General Thé. The Third Force. A bomb blast in a crowded Saigon square. To readers of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—or viewers of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s or Philip Noyce’s movie version—it all sounds familiar. Each features prominently in the novel. Greene was away from the city on the day of the explosions but he would soon return, his Vietnam stay now into its third month. He had loved the country—and more particularly, its women—from the start, from his first brief stop in early 1951 on his way home to England from Malaya (which he liked far less). He had come then at the encouragement of his friend A. G. Trevor-Wilson, the British consul in Hanoi. “I drained a magic potion,” Greene later said, “a loving cup which I have shared since with many retired colons and officers of the Foreign Legion, whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi.

  “The spell was cast,” Greene went on, “by the tall elegant girls in white silk trousers; by the pewter evening light on flat paddy fields, where the water buffaloes trudged fetlock-deep with a slow primeval gait; by the French perfumeries in the rue Catinat, the Chinese gambling houses in Cholon; above all by the feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket: the restaurants wired against grenades, the watchtowers striding along the roads of the southern delta with their odd reminders of insecurity: ‘Si vous êtes arrêtes ou attaqués en cours de route, prévenez le chef du premier poste important.’ ”5

  Greene would frequently remark on Vietnam’s stunning geography, but that wasn’t what drew him in. His explanation for his Malaya sojourn applied equally well to Vietnam: “Nature doesn’t really interest me—except in so far as it may contain an ambush—that is, something human.” As an uncommonly bored schoolboy, Greene is said to have played Russian roulette, to have had a kind of death wish; perhaps he never changed. He was drawn mothlike to “the exciting thing,” to physical danger, to societies in the throes of violent upheaval. In Ways of Escape, his otherwise reticent autobiography, he acknowledged that he traveled to the revolutions and wars of the colonial world “not to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity which I had enjoyed in the three blitzes on [wartime] London.” To his brother Hugh, he revealingly expressed disappointment in mid-1951 that he had not been present during Vo Nguyen Giap’s attack on Phat Diem that spring.6

  His base of operations was Saigon’s best hotel, the luxurious Majestic, built in 1928 according to French design and offering fabulous views of both the rue Catinat and the Saigon River from its fourth-floor rooftop bar. Here he heard the pianist play the latest hits from Paris and saw the sampans floating by on the river below. On occasion, the tracer fire from besieged French posts across the river arced across the evening sky. He also spent time at an apartment a little farther up rue Catinat, at number 109, which today is the Mondial, an unassuming hotel. In between the two stands a building that was the setting for Fowler’s apartment in the novel and now occupies the elegant Grand Hotel. Greene liked to take daily walks along this thoroughfare, stopping as the mood struck for a vermouth cassis at the Palais Café (where, in the novel, Fowler plays quatre-cent-vingt-et-un with Lieutenant Vigot of the Sûreté), or at Givral’s confectionary shop, or at the rooftop café of the Continental Hotel, whose proprietor, Monsieur Franchini, was an affable opiumsmoking Corsican known to import prostitutes directly from Paris.7

  The Pearl of the Far East had begun to lose its luster, to look faded and feel gritty, but that only added to the city’s allure for Greene, who reveled in the atmosphere. He stayed out late at restaurants like l’Amiral, a favorite spot of French parachutists and special operations types, and the Arc-en-Ciel on rue des Marins in the Cholon district, with its Chinese food and its upstairs nightclub featuring a Filipino band and floor shows headlined by the likes of Josephine Baker and Charles Trenet, and a bartender whose gin fizz was famous all over the Far East. He developed a taste for opium, boasting in one letter that he managed to smoke five pipes in a night; in later years he would devote many hours during his Vietnam visits to taking the drug.8 And he sought out prostitutes, notably at Le Parc aux Buffles (Park of Buffalo; in the novel, The House of 500 Girls), reputed to be the world’s largest brothel, with four hundred women of various nationalities. The vast complex was surrounded by a wall and contained separate sections for officers and ordinary soldiers.9

  Greene described a visit in his journal: “After hours. The huge courtyard with the girls sitting in groups. The little lighted rooms. Strolled around. Enormous bonhomie. The Fr. police post inside the brothel. The girl stretched across two pairs of knees. The white elegant legs crossed under the light. Price asked 30 pesetas—8/6d. Then directed to officers’ brothel. Much less attractive place, though better girls. To go inside would have made getting out difficult. Price 300 pesetas.”10

  II

  GREENE ARRIVED IN VIETNAM IN OCTOBER 1951, SOON AFTER THE pu
blication of one of his masterpieces, The End of the Affair, and having just that week graced the cover of Time. (“The next Dostoevsky,” the magazine called him.)11 He had not come with the intention of writing a novel on the war. He was on assignment from Time’s sister publication, Life, whose publisher, Henry Luce, and editor Emmet John Hughes had been impressed with an evocative—and staunchly anti-Communist—piece Greene had written for the magazine on the insurgency in Malaya. They commissioned him to write one also on the Indochina struggle. He wasted no time getting into the action, joining a French bombing squadron on an operation in Tonkin mere days after his arrival. “I went on two missions,” he wrote his son Francis.

  The first was to bomb & machine gun round a town which the Communists had captured. My aircraft went alone. Tiny little cockpit, just room for the pilot (who was also the gunner & bomber), the navigator & me—an hour’s flight each way & then three quarters of an hour over the objective. We did 14 dives. It was most uncomfortable, coming rapidly & steeply down from 9000 to 3000 feet. You were pressed forward in your seat & then as you zoomed up again your stomach was pressed in. I began to get used to it after about four dives.

  Coming back we went down to about 200 feet & shot up a sampan on the Red River.…

  It’s very hot & difficult to write letters, so would you let Mummy see this one if you think she’d be interested in bombing!12

  Greene returned to the scene in The Quiet American, inserting details he spared his son: “Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected rice fields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks; we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home.” Fowler found the action troubling: “There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of prey—we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.”13

  Greene also paid an early return visit to Phat Diem, sixty-five miles southeast of Hanoi, not far from the sea, where the Catholic bishop, Le Huu Tu, ruled his diocese like a medieval prince and had his own small army. Himself a Catholic, Greene was fascinated by the bishop and by Phat Diem, with its looming cathedral. Here again his own experience, as recorded in his journal, tracks closely with Fowler’s. Like Greene, Fowler accompanies a small group of legionnaires on patrol; like him, he comes across a gruesome scene. “The canal was full of bodies,” Fowler narrates. “I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-gray, and anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck out of the water like a buoy. There was no blood: I suppose it had flowed away a long time ago. I have no idea how many there were: they must have been caught in a cross-fire, trying to get back.”14

  The idea for a novel was already now taking hold in Greene’s mind. A key moment was a trip to the province of Ben Tre, forty miles southwest of Saigon. In charge in Ben Tre was Jean Leroy, a Catholic Eurasian (his father was French, his mother Vietnamese) who had taken part in the pacification efforts under Leclerc. Now a colonel in the French Army, Leroy achieved a modest amount of success against the Viet Minh using a militia recruited largely among Catholics. His conviction that success in the war effort depended primarily on winning the popular backing of the peasantry impressed Greene, as did the efforts Leroy had made in that direction: He instituted a system of local elections for a consultative assembly, and he cut the land rents for tenants in the province by half. Nor did Greene mind that Leroy had a flair for entertaining: On an island in a lake, he ordered built a bar lit all night by neon lights. To the apparent delight of guests (or at least Greene), he poured brandy down the throats of women and played the theme music from the movie version of Greene’s The Third Man on the gramophone.15

  GRAHAM GREENE VISITS PHAT DIEM IN LATE DECEMBER 1951, IN THE COMPANY OF FRENCH UNION TROOPS. IT WAS GREENE’S HABIT TO REFUSE A HELMET ON SUCH MISSIONS. (photo credit 12.1)

  One night in Ben Tre, Greene shared a room with Leo Hochstetter, an American serving as public affairs director for the Economic Aid Mission. By Greene’s own telling, Hochstetter was more intelligent and less innocent than the Alden Pyle character in The Quiet American, and more gregarious, but there’s little doubt that he was a main inspiration for the novel’s title character. (Later it would become conventional wisdom that Pyle was modeled on Edward Lansdale, whom we shall encounter in due course and who would become a champion of Trinh Minh Thé, but Greene did not meet Lansdale until after completing much of the novel.) The two men drove together back to Saigon, as Pyle and Fowler do in the novel, and the American lectured Greene on the necessity of creating a Third Force in Vietnam, one beholden neither to the French nor to Ho Chi Minh. Hochstetter even had a candidate in mind: General Thé.16

  In the novel, which is set in early 1952 and which Greene began writing in March of that year (some of it while ensconced in room 214 at the Continental), Pyle likewise is attached to the Economic Aid Mission. A clean-cut young Bostonian “impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance,” he brims with references to The Challenge to Democracy and The Role of the West, written by his fictional hero York Harding, a political theorist partial to abstractions. “York wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force,” Pyle tells Fowler at one point. Later, Fowler hears from his assistant:

  “I heard [Pyle] talking the other day at the party the Legation was giving to visiting Congressmen.…

  “He was talking about the old colonial powers—England and France, and how you couldn’t expect to win the confidence of the Asiatics. That was where America came in with clean hands.…

  “Then someone asked him some stock question about the chances of the Government here ever beating the Viet Minh and he said a Third Force could do it. There was always a Third Force to be found free from Communism and the taint of colonialism—national democracy he called it; you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.”17

  To many readers of the novel, Pyle seems singularly naïve, but his views on the Third Force are not really at odds with what many actual U.S. officials felt at the time. Greene almost certainly heard this line of argument from others besides Hochstetter—including at second hand from bitter French colonial officers. Certainly, we know that Robert Blum, Hochstetter’s boss at the Economic Aid Mission, and Edmund Gullion, Heath’s young deputy at the legation, were sure that the war effort would fail unless the Vietnamese were convinced they were fighting for genuine independence and democracy. The only way to make them so convinced was to build up a genuine nationalist force that was neither pro-Communist nor obligated to France and that could rally the public to its side. Even those Americans who still insisted on the need to back the French—Heath in Saigon, Bruce in Paris, Acheson and Truman in Washington—fully shared the belief that ultimate success in the struggle depended on the emergence of a Vietnamese government possessing sufficient authority to compete effectively with the Viet Minh for the allegiance of the populace. This, as we’ve seen, was the motivation behind Washington’s embrace of the Bao Dai solution in 1947.

  Even the phrase “Third Force” was in currency that winter as Greene began assembling his notes. The previous summer, in July 1951, The New Republic had published an article bearing the title “Viet Nam Has a Third Force.” The author, Sol Sanders, recently back in the United States after two years in Southeast Asia, excoriated the French and the Viet Minh with equal gusto but said all was not lost: “Beneath the layers of opportunists, French spies, and hangers-on, there is a hard nucleus of patriots who are fighting for a truly independent, libertarian Viet Nam.” And later: “Bao Dai’s regime, cleansed of the French-supported parasites that now infest it, can still rally to our side the Viet Nam’s people [sic] who are sick of war and afraid of Stalinism.”18


  III

  MORE THAN ANY OTHER OF GREENE’S NOVELS, THE QUIET AMERICAN contains firsthand reportage, much of it done on this three-and-a-half-month stay in 1951–52. A comparison of the book with his letters home, his journal, and his articles makes this clear. Much of the time he was in Saigon or Hanoi, but occasionally he accompanied French troops into the field. Tall and unarmed, he was an easy target, but he showed complete disregard for his own physical safety, even when at Phat Diem he found himself in the midst of heavy fighting. (This action too features in the novel.) Greene was not at this point pro-Communist, but the talent and fierce dedication of the Viet Minh impressed him. In his article for Life, he acknowledged that many of Ho Chi Minh’s supporters were motivated by idealism and were not part of any monolithic Stalinist movement. Even worse from the editors’ perspective, Greene saw little chance of stopping Communism in Indochina. The article urged France to prepare herself for retreat from the region and warned Washington that not all social-political problems could be overcome with force. Hughes and Luce, aghast at this message, rejected the piece, despite the fact that Greene also offered up a crude articulation of the domino theory of the type that Fowler ridicules in the novel. (“If Indo-China falls,” Greene wrote, “Korea will be isolated, Siam can be invaded in twenty-four hours and Malaya may have to be abandoned.”) Thus rebuffed, Greene offered the article to the right-wing Paris Match, which published it in July 1952.19

  Greene concluded the article with a jarringly sentimental tribute to the courage and skill of French soldiers. Maybe he was trying to soften the blow of the impending defeat. But it’s also the case that he retained in 1952 a good measure of sympathy for the French cause, and for European colonialism more generally. He had himself been born into the British Empire’s administrative class, and its worldview and mores continued to imbue him. He could write movingly of Saigon as the “Paris of the East,” and he much enjoyed spending time in the cafés along the rue Catinat in the company of French colons and officials. He was indeed in this period something of a Frenchman manqué. Castigating the Americans for being “exaggeratedly mistrustful of empires,” Greene said the Old World knew better: “We Europeans retain the memory of what we owe Rome, just as Latin America knows what it owes Spain. When the hour of evacuation sounds there will be many Vietnamese who will regret the loss of the language which put them in contact with the art and faith of the West.”20