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

The Spy Who Loved Us 59
Novelist Graham Greene
Adultery can lead to sainthood.
Greene left Vietnam in February, hoping to travel to the
United States to see the filming of his novel The End of the Affair.
But his request for a visa was denied on the grounds that
he was a Communist. (He had been a member of the Party for
six weeks as a college prank.) When Greene was accidentally
granted a visa by a U.S. consular official in Saigon, the man was
sent scurrying through town to find the author in his room at the
Continental Hotel. After knocking the door and asking to see
Greene’s passport, the man whipped out a stamp pad and
marked the visa canceled.
When he was later allowed to travel to the United States on
a short-term visa, Greene attended mass with Claire Booth
Luce, wife of Henry Luce, chairman of Time Inc., and he delivered
his magazine assignment to Luce’s editors at Life, who
killed the story. As Greene wrote in Ways of Escape, “I suspect my
ambivalent attitude to the war was already perceptible—
my admiration for the French Army, my admiration for their
enemies, and my doubt of any final value in the war.”
Returning to Vietnam in December 1953, Greene spent a
“doom-laden twenty-four hours” at Dien Bien Phu, the upland
fortification in the mountains west of Hanoi. Five months
after Greene’s visit, the Viet Minh overran the fort. The battle
marked a major turning point in world affairs, said Greene,
who believed it was the first time in the history of Western
colonialism that Asian troops had defeated a European army in
fixed battle. Of the fifteen thousand French expeditionary soldiers
defending Dien Bien Phu, three to four thousand were killed
on the battlefield and another ten thousand were captured by
the Viet Minh. Half of these men would die on a five-hundredmile
forced march down from the mountains to the coast. The
day after the Communist victory, the international conference
convened to end the Indochina war opened in Geneva.