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

FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, pp. 64-65.

43 Gaston, George. The Pursuit of Salvation: A Critical Guide to the Novels of Graham Greene (Troy, N.Y: Whitson Publishing Co., 1984), p. 59.

44 Malamet, Elliott, The World Remade: Graham Greene and the Art of Detection (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 96.

45 Gaston, The Pursuit of Salvation, p. 62.

46 The text of Leibling’s review, “A Talkative Something or Other,” is reprinted in Pratt’s Viking Critical Edition, pp. 347-355.

47 Atkins, John, Graham Greene. (London: Calder and Boyars, 1966), p. 232.

48 The historian Schulzinger adopts the phrase “And to hell with everybody” for the title of Chapter 4, A Time for War, which deals with the American presence in Vietnam from 1954 to 1960.

49 Pratt, “Introduction” to the Viking Critical Edition, p. xiii.

50 Schulzinger, A Time for War p. 70.

51 Greene, “Introduction,” The Quiet American (London: William Heineman, 1973), pp. xviii-xix.

52 Neilson, Jim, Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 87.

53 Paraphrased from Renny Christopher’s comments on Mankiewicz’s film, in Pratt’s Viking Critical Edition, p. 308.

54 Qtd. from Judith Adamson, Graham Greene and the Cinema (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), p. 88.

55 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 87.

56 Neilson, Warring Fictions, pp. 87-88.

57 Gordon, Haim, Fighting Evil: Unsung Heroes in the Novels of Graham Greene (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 30, 36. Qtd. by Neilson, pp. 87-88.

58 Lederer, William J., and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: W.W. Norton, 1958). Page numbers given in parenthesis refer to the Crest (1960) paperback edition.

59 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 98.

60 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 94.

61 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 98.

62 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 75.

63 Neilson, Warring Fictions, pp. 95-96.

64 Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 98.

65 Neilson, Warring Fictions, p. 92.

66 Pratt, Bibliographic Commentary for Reading the Wind, p. 126.

67 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 42.

68 Sheehan, et al., The Pentagon Papers, p. 17.

69 Bosse, M.J., The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 190. Further page numbers referring to this edition will be inserted within parentheses in the text.

70 Short, Anthony, The Origins of the Vietnam War (London: Longman, 1989), p. 34.

71 Greene, Ways of Escape, qtd. In Pratt, Viking Critical Edition, p. 480.

72 Lartéguy, Jean, Yellow Fever, 1962, translated by Xan Fielding (New York: Dutton, 1965), p. 23. Further page numbers referring to this edition will be inserted within parentheses in the text.

73 Buttinger, Joseph, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 380.

74 Sullivan, Marianna P. France’s Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 52-53.

75 According to Young, The Vietnam Wars, p. 49, the fighting broke out on April 27, 1955, although the novel cites April 25.

76 Just, Ward, A Dangerous Friend. Further references to thus edition of the novel will be inserted within parentheses in the text.

Chapter Two

      Fictional History & Historical Fiction: The Fall of Diem

      South Vietnam was an American invention, conceived

      by Dwight Eisenhower but delivered by John Kennedy

      (Loren Baritz, Backfire).

      South Vietnam was essentially the creation of the United States

      (The Pentagon Papers).

i. President Ngo Dinh Diem

The major sign of the failure of the US project of nation-building in South Vietnam was the fall of its American-chosen leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. In this chapter, four early novels that deal with Diem’s dramatic final days will be examined. They share roughly the same time frame: the seven-month period from the outbreak of the Buddhist crisis in May 1963, which both exposed and brought to a head public dissatisfaction with Diem’s regime, to his US-assisted assassination in November 1963. In this first section, an overall chronological review of Diem’s career will be given to suggest why Diem was assassinated; more specifically, the events leading up to his death will clarify how the assassination