The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

58 THOMAS A. BASS
officers of the Foreign Legion, whose eyes light up at the mention
of Saigon and Hanoi.”
“The spell was first cast, I think, 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
arrêtés ou attaqués en cours de route, prévenez le chef du premier
poste important.’” [If you are detained or attacked en
route, alert the station chief at the next guard post.]
On this first visit to Vietnam, Greene met the man who
would become the model for the quiet American. Greene was
in the marshes of Ben Tre in the Mekong delta, visiting “the happiest
of the warlords in Cochin China,” the Eurasian colonial
Leroy, who provided his visitors with an evening of dancing on
his private boat. “I shared a room that night with an American
attached to an economic aid mission—the members were presumed
by the French, probably correctly, to belong to the CIA.
My companion bore no resemblance at all to Pyle, the quiet
American of my story—he was a man of greater intelligence and
less innocence, but he lectured me all the long drive back to
Saigon on the necessity of finding a ‘third force in Vietnam.’ I had
never before come so close to the great American dream which
was to bedevil affairs in the East as it was to do in Algeria.”
Greene returned to Vietnam in October 1951, eight months
after his first visit. Again he was on assignment from Life, this
time to write about the French war in Indochina. Also in October
Greene was featured on the cover of Time. His leonine
head was superimposed on a dark tunnel resembling a vagina,
at the end of which glowed a Christian cross. The caption at the
bottom of the cover read: