Another sect leader Lansdale met, Colonel Jean Leroy, was a Catholic warlord born of a French father and Vietnamese mother who had served as a French army officer. Leroy presided over his home province of Ben Tre like a medieval despot; he “struck,” Graham Greene wrote, “with the suddenness and cruelty of a tiger, at the Communists in his region.”31 “Short, wiry, and intense,”32 Leroy reminded Lansdale of his Philippine army friend Colonel Napoleon Valeriano, who as head of the “Skull Squadron” had also been accused of committing atrocities against Communist forces: “I have to sort of pinch
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