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

60 THOMAS A. BASS
“Dien Bien Phu was a defeat for more than the French
Army,” Greene wrote in Ways of Escape. “The battle marked virtually
the end of any hope the Western Powers might have entertained
that they could dominate the East. The French, with
Cartesian clarity, accepted the verdict. So, too, to a lesser extent,
did the British: the independence of Malaya, whether the Malays
like to think of it or not, was won for them when the Communist
forces of General Giap, an ex-geography professor at Hanoi
University, defeated the forces of General Navarre, ex-cavalry officer,
ex-Deuxième Bureau chief, at Dien Bien Phu. (That young
Americans were still to die in Vietnam only shows that it takes
time for the echoes even of a total defeat to circle the globe.)”
When asked by the Sunday Times to write about the most decisive
battle in world history, Greene chose Dien Bien Phu.
Greene visited Vietnam for the last time in 1955. Scheduled
to meet Ho Chi Minh for an interview but feeling a bit under
the weather, he resorted to his customary cure—smoking a
few pipes of opium. “The pipes took away the sickness and
gave me the energy to meet Ho Chi Minh at tea.”
“Of those four winters which I passed in Indochina, opium
has left the happiest memory, and as it played an important part
in the life of Fowler, my character in The Quiet American, I add
a few memories from my journal concerning it, for I am reluctant
to leave Indochina forever with only a novel to remember
it by.” Greene’s remark in Ways of Escape is followed by eleven
pages describing his opium smoking, which began during his
first visit to Vietnam in 1951. “A French official took me after
dinner to a small apartment in a back street—I could smell
the opium as I came up the stairs. It was like the first sight of
a beautiful woman with whom one realizes that a relationship
is possible: somebody whose memory will not be dimmed by a
night’s sleep.”
Pham Xuan An was formally inducted into the Communist
Party in 1953 at a ceremony in the U Minh forest presided