I would like to sketch in this part of the book a fairly simplistic as well as surgical background overview of the warring picture of former French Indo- China as well as Vietnam, part of which appeared on the policy-making agenda of the last years of Sir Winston S. Churchill at Number Ten. As such, this Preface also partly extends, in a way, the broad content of the first chapter, the Introduction, insofar as an overall background treatment is concerned.

The staffing of a salary man bureaucracy in a decolonized South East Asian Greeneland might also be likened to the direction and movement of an army corps that might fare better or worse with different terrains and weathers. Greeneland is defined in an Oxford dictionary as a ‘world’ of the characters in the noveldom of Graham Greene which includes The Quiet American–first published in 1955–referring to the last years of the French Union in South East Asia with many Vietnamese and others leading a life fraught with instability and danger. The Quiet American was probably the first rather well-known fiction of an established writer in Great Britain who mentioned the name ‘Viet Nam’ of a country in the Far East to his readers. In this respect and connection, a South East Asian or Asian Greeneland is mentioned in my book when Vietnam or a country comparable with the Vietnamese nation of the late 20th and early 21st century is touched upon albeit necessarily only at the outer edges of the work for some more or less pertinent vagueness or hypothesization without any ambitious attempts of alchemy.