Peter Dewey was the first of nearly sixty thousand Americans to be killed in Vietnam. His body was never found, and the French and Viet Minh accused each other of being responsible for the murder. Washington reacted to the killing by scaling back the OSS presence and activities in Saigon. Before he left for the airport on that final day, Dewey had summarized his thinking in a report: “Cochinchina is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we [the United States] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”
