Four years ago, the guard towers spindled out from Saigon mile after mile along the main roads, outposts of frightened men in a teeming darkness of shadowy figures and shadowy hate. One such guard tower was a central factor in Graham Greene's Quiet American, a semi-novel purporting to display the hopeless struggle of French colonialism to save the truncated country from the onrushing tide of the Communist Viet Minh. As late as two years ago, touring Columnist Joseph Alsop pronounced South Viet Nam doomed. And the French, embarrassed at seeing the U.S....
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