"Straight" and "Secret" History in Vietnam War Literature

Abstract

Graham Greene concludes the dedicatory letter to R6n6 Phuong that prefaces The Quiet American (1955) this way: This is a not a piece of history, I hope that as a about a few imaginary characters it will pass for both of you one hot Saigon evening.' But despite Greene's ironic disclaimer, readers have understood that the novel is a history of the early fate of Americans in Vietnam. Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina, Michael Herr writes in Dispatches (1977), when Alden Pyle's body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud. .. .2 And readers have recognized that the novel is a visionary or proleptic history of what would happen to Americans in Vietnam. He had always understood what was going to happen there, Gloria Emerson writes in her account of an interview with Greene, and in that small quiet novel, told us nearly everything.'3 Greene's remark notwithstanding, The Quiet American is a sort of history, a fiction of the actual past the real future, a story in the place of history. The collapse of the distinction between these two terms occurs in much of the literature of the American war