"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

in the popular magazine The Saturday Evening Post, presumably to publicize him as a heroic figure in the struggle against Communist tyranny.18 As FitzGerald puts it, Landsdale had “faith in his own good motives…a man who believed that Communism in Asia would crumble before men of goodwill with some concern for ‘the little guy’ and the proper counterinsurgency skills.”19

In a crucial mission in October 1961, Kennedy sent Landsdale, along with arch cold-warrior Rostow, on General Maxwell Taylor’s mission to Vietnam to evaluate what could be accomplished by US forces there. According to David Halberstam, The Taylor-Rostow Report revealed “a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the war.”20 It was contemptuous of an enemy that had for centuries successfully resisted foreign invasion; it assumed that the people and the government of South Vietnam were identical; and it was endorsed by a general who himself had seen the danger of ground war and the limits of air-power in Korea and who ignored the warnings of his great predecessor, General Matthew Ridgeway. Nevertheless, with reservations by Robert McNamara, the report would eventually be adopted as policy. It advised an increase in the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) and the introduction of an American military task force.21 It may be concluded then that Landsdale was directly influential in bringing about the American War in Vietnam, both in his advisory capacity to the American leadership and through his influence on Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. As Neil Sheehan has succinctly put it, South Vietnam was in no small measure the creation of Edward G. Landsdale.22

ii. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

When the first important novel in English about Vietnam was written, Greene’s The Quiet American, the United States had not yet arrived there in force. The novel’s setting is Saigon in the final years of French colonial rule in Indochina before Dien Bien Phu. Internal evidence suggests that the events of the novel take place in 1951-1952, since at one point the narrator, Thomas Fowler, a British newspaper correspondent, observes that any news he might report will go unnoticed because everyone now wants to read about the Korean War.23 There is also a reference in the text to “de Lattre” (114), that is, Commanding General Jean de Lattre Tassigny, who died of cancer in January 1952, after a trip to the US to plead for an increase of American aid.24

At this point in time, the Americans were not yet militarily involved but were giving the French material aid, including arms, to prosecute the colonial war. Fowler at one point watches American bombers being unloaded on the docks (the US began subsidizing the French military effort in 1950).25 Characters in the novel are constantly aware that large areas of the country, even the other side of the river in Saigon, are controlled by the Vietminh, whose clandestine organization seems to have ubiquitous eyes and ears, as well as closed mouths. With reference to the Viet Minh agent whom Fowler meets, for example, “everybody here knew all about Mr Muoi, but the police had no key which would unlock their confidence” (142).

It has been assumed by most commentators that Landsdale was the model for Greene’s title character, the operative Alden Pyle—notably, Charles Currey, in his biography: Edward Landsdale: The Unquiet American (1988).26 Charles J. Gaspar’s entry on the novel in the Vietnam Encyclopedia, on the other hand, argues that Pyle is a composite figure, blending Landsdale with Leo Hochstetter, a member of the American legation in Saigon.27 Judith Adamson, in her critical study of Greene, argues that the real-life model for Pyle was an American attached to an economic aid mission (perhaps Hochstetter, although he is not named), who once shared a room with Greene and lectured him on the necessity of creating a “third force” in Vietnam that he thought might be led by the self-styled General Thé, as actually occurs in the novel.28 Greene himself comments on this encounter in his memoir Ways of Escape (1980). He assumed that the man in question worked for the CIA but noted that his “companion bore no resemblance at all to Pyle, the quiet American of my story—he was a man of more intelligence and less innocence.”29

The long-running, back-and-forth controversy over a positive identification of Landsdale as Pyle is perhaps best illustrated by John Clark Pratt, who, in an early commentary on Vietnam War fiction, wrote that Pyle was “unmistakably modelled on Landsdale,” who was also the model for “a major character” in at least two other novels.30 In a footnote, Pratt added that “Landsdale believes he was the model,” because in 1983, he told Pratt (who was, like Landsdale, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the US Air-Force) that he thought he was the model, noting that both he and Pyle owned dogs. In the Introduction (1996) to his critical edition of Greene’s novel, however, Pratt evidently changed his mind, pointing out that the historical context of the novel, the years 1951-1952, predates Landsdale’s actual arrival in Vietnam: one month (incognito) in June 1953, and then the two years that he headed the SMM in 1954-56.31

Greene, for his part, always denied that he knew Landsdale personally, commenting in an interview for the British Sunday Telegraph (in 1975) that he had “never had the misfortune to meet” him.32 Of course, Greene would not have to have actually met Landsdale in order to use him as a fictional model, only to have heard of him, but it is not altogether certain that the two men—despite Greene’s denial—did not meet. Pratt cites a letter apparently addressed to himself in which Landsdale mentions that the French hated the Cao Daist General Thé (who goes by his real name in the novel), for having had the popular French General Chanson killed: “I was his [Thé’s] American friend and the French used to mock me about him in the presence of Greene.”33 In an interview with his biographer, Charles Currey, Landsdale mentions at least one episode when such a thing happened, recalling that a group of French officers, with Greene among them, booed him at the Continental Hotel. And yet, as Pratt observes, even this evidence is suspect, because Landsdale did not actually meet Thé until 1954, by which time Greene had left Vietnam and was already at work on the novel.34

If the Landsdale-Pyle mystery will never be completely solved, it is likely that its origins have arisen, as Pratt suggests, from the legendary character of Landsdale’s “exploits in the Philippines and Vietnam after World War II [which] have provided not only historians but also journalists, novelists and filmmakers with material for their countless stories and myths.”35 That is to say, Landsdale’s exploits, not the man himself, may have served as any number of fictional models. Pratt, finally, neatly sums up both the inconclusiveness of the factual evidence and its ultimate insignificance when he comments that “given the outcome of the American presence in Vietnam, perhaps Landsdale should have been the model after all,”36 a recognition of Landsdale’s mythical, even metonymical presence in Vietnam for the Americans who came later. Decades after its publication, The Quiet American has continued to astonish readers with its prophetic vision of the disruptive American presence in Vietnam, which would only gradually be recorded in fiction and non-fiction by American writers. The “prescience” of the novel, as much