VIII

DE LATTRE SOUGHT TO PUT SOME OF THAT EQUIPMENT TO IMMEDIATE use upon his return to Saigon. He did not have much time left, he knew. He was dying. Doctors had operated on him in Paris in October and had told him his final stay in Vietnam would be brief. Visibly weakened upon landing in Saigon but encouraged by the banners of support along the road as he drove from the airport to the Residency ("Vive le General de Lattre"), de Lattre sought to show both Paris-where lawmakers prepared to debate the Indochina budget for 195253-and Washington that France could regain the ascendancy in the field.

Major military engagements had been few since Giap's return to guerrilla warfare in the summer. Attacks on convoys continued, and there were frequent hit-and-run attacks and assassinations: Most notably, in late July, in a rare example of a suicide bombing, a Viet Minh youth had unloosed from his jacket a grenade that killed himself along with Brigadier General Charles Marie Chanson, the French commander for South Vietnam, and Thai Lap Thanh, a Vietnamese local governor, during a public reception in a town southwest of Saigon. For de Lattre, it was another bitter blow. He considered Chanson-who had earned plaudits for his work in Tonkin in 194647 and more recently for getting the better of his Viet Minh counterpart in the south, Nguyen Binh-one of his ablest generals and had watched over and pushed his career for many years.54

In the Red River Delta in the north, tension remained high in the late summer and fall, as Giap used regional troops to harass the French to considerable effect. The French answer in the delta was to conduct continual sweeps, using both static battalions and groupes mobiles. When these units located a fortified Viet Minh village, its inhabitants were given notice to quit; if they refused to comply, air support was called in to raze the village, usually using napalm. These operations achieved considerable short-term tactical success, and-these being rice-producing areas-caused the DRV's food situation to grow worse. But the old problem remained: The French, undermanned as always, could not long stay in the conquered areas; as soon as they departed, the Viet Minh flowed back in. There existed no civil service organization to stay on the scene to try to work with the peasants, few of whom were in any mood to cooperate with those who had attacked their village.55

De Lattre determined that his forces had to take the offensive, to extend their line outward on ground the enemy would have to defend, accepting a pitched battle. He chose the area around Hoa Binh, in the mountains to the west of the delta. An important river and road junction, Hoa Binh was reached by the RC6 from Hanoi and by the Black River, so transport should not be a major problem for French units. Sparsely populated, the area was also likely to suffer few civilian casualties in the fighting. Most important of all, de Lattre reasoned, success at Hoa Binh would cut the main line of communication by which the Viet Minh had drawn rice supplies from the south and sent down Chinese military equipment from the north. An added bonus: Hoa Binh was the capital town of the Muong tribe, whose hostility to the Viet Minh and potential loyalty to the French cause de Lattre sought to cement.56

At dawn on November 14, three French paratroop battalions descended on the town, encountering almost no resistance. Simultaneously, some twenty-two infantry and artillery battalions and two armored groups, along with engineering forces to repair sabotaged roads and bridges, began moving up the narrow Black River valley. By the afternoon of the fifteenth, the French had achieved their objectives with virtually no losses and almost no enemy opposition. Giap, sensing he had neither numerical superiority nor an adequate route of withdrawal, had refused battle, pulling his troops back into the forested hills, content to fight another day on his own terms. In December, he was ready. He ordered his 304th, 308th, and 312th Divisions to close in on Hoa Binh and the RC6, while back in the delta he had elements of the 316th and 320th infiltrate from the north and south to harass French rear areas. Although unsuccessful in taking Hoa Binh, the Viet Minh were able to cut first the water and then the land routes into the town. French attempts to reopen communications exacted heavy cost in lives and equipment, and meanwhile the security situation in the delta deteriorated. "We shall never give up Hoa Binh," de Lattre vowed, but he was wrong. In February 1952, General Raoul Salan ordered the post's evacuation.57 The Viet Minh duly took it and began to push a north-south trail toward central and southern Vietnam, the beginning of what would become the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The decision was Salan's because by then de Lattre had died. On November 19, 1951, he had left Vietnam, ostensibly for a high-level Paris meeting. On the eve of his departure, there had been a cocktail party in his honor, attended by, among others, Graham Greene, the novelist, who spent the first of several consecutive winters in Saigon in 195152. Greene had visited Vietnam briefly early in the year and had been impressed then by de Lattre's fierce dynamism. Now, the novelist observed, "the changes were startling." De Lattre was an altered man, weary and morose, "his rhetoric of hope wearing painfully thin." Even some of his subordinates criticized him, Greene went on, tired as they were of his constant references to his own loss-"others had sacrificed their sons too, and had not been able to fly the bodies home for a Paris funeral."58

At the meeting in Paris, de Lattre was lucid and forceful but so weak physically that afterward he had to be carried in a chair up to his apartment. His real reason for coming to France was medical, and on December 18, he underwent major surgery. An additional operation followed on January 5. His condition worsened until his death, confirmation crucifix clutched in his hand, on January 11. In the final days, he confided to General Valluy: "There is only one thing that upsets me: I have never completely understood Indochina." His last words, voiced during a moment of brief consciousness on the ninth, were "Where is Bernard?"59

So came to an end l'annee de Lattre. His year had shown both the power and the limits of individual human agency in issues of war and peace. De Lattre indisputably demonstrated what a decisive contribution to events a leader can make, for without him the war in Tonkin might well have been lost in the early weeks of the year. The Viet Minh might have realized their propaganda claim "Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi by Tet." Critics could reasonably respond that he would have been wiser to concede the north and center and focus instead on strengthening Cochin China, and it's certainly the case that de Lattre faced deep structural problems in his vow to preserve all of Indochina within the French Union. He himself was aware of these problems, not least the lack of broad popular support for the Bao Dai regime and the unwillingness of anti-Communist Vietnamese to fight for the cause. More than his predecessors, he worked to build up the VNA and more broadly to mobilize the population in French-held areas to actively back the war effort.

At the same time, de Lattre's dictatorial methods alienated many Vietnamese, who also found his definition of Vietnamese independence far too restrictive. In one breath, he would say he fully supported Vietnamese nationalist aspirations; in the next, he would demand full popular loyalty to the French Union and to himself as France's representative. He had no patience for the political navigating that independence must involve or for the nationalist who appeared insufficiently grateful. In this way de Lattre, for all his military sagacity and dazzling leadership, for all his daring and elan, was cut from the same cloth as the high commissioners who went before. His parting comment surely is telling: Never did he fully comprehend Indochina.

His determination to keep Indochina within the French Union led him to expend great effort on a second objective: to boost the U.S. military involvement in the war. Here his legacy was of profound importance. De Lattre recognized immediately that only the Americans could supply the material assistance he needed, and over the course of the year he (along with his civilian counterparts in Paris) achieved great success in cementing America's presence. Franco-American tensions remained considerable, but Harry Truman and his top aides bought the general's argument that Korea and Indochina were the same struggle. Of de Lattre's fifty-five weeks as commander in chief, none were more important than the two he spent in the United States. By January 1952 he was gone, but the Americans were more firmly committed to his cause than ever before.

His passing cast a pall over the whole of France. Public mourning was decreed for three days, and for two days the body lay in state in the Invalides while a vast and reverent crowd filed silently past the bier. On January 15, the casket was placed on a tank beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and that evening mounted troops carrying torches escorted it to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, where the president of the republic bestowed upon de Lattre the title of Marshal of France. He was the first in almost three decades to be so honored. The following morning the archbishop of Paris led a solemn mass in the cathedral in the presence of the president, the government, the diplomatic corps, and the top military leadership, together with a large contingent of the general public.60

For those who seek symbols, there were several. Charles de Gaulle, so crucial to the initial decision to reclaim Indochina for the empire after World War II, and (even though out of office by then) to wage war there, arrived alone and remained standing solitary for a long time before the coffin. General Eisenhower, soon to begin his campaign for president of the United States, and destined to face his own momentous decisions concerning war and peace in Vietnam, was one of the pallbearers as the casket was conveyed on a gun carriage from the cathedral through the silent crowded streets back to the Place des Invalides. And there was, finally, this: On January 17, the funeral cortege proceeded slowly from Paris to Versailles, Chartres, and Saumur, and on to Mouilleron-en-Pareds, where the coffin was placed in a grave next to that of Bernard, the only son, in the shade of two trees. A nearby windmill was made into a memorial chapel to perpetuate the memory of the father and son who, the citation said, gave their all for France.

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 Theatre, 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 Theatre 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 Surete. Speculation turned to Colonel Trinh Minh The, 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, The's operatives took credit for the January 9 blasts, and French officials concluded that he was indeed responsible.4

General The. 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 etes arretes ou attaques en cours de route, prevenez 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 Cafe (where, in the novel, Fowler plays quatre-cent-vingt-et-un with Lieutenant Vigot of the Surete), or at Givral's confectionary shop, or at the rooftop cafe 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 publication 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 The, 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 The.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....