The story is set in 1952 in Saigon, Vietnam (French Indochina at that time), toward the end of the First Indochina War (1946-1954) in which French forces fought the Communist Party of Vietnam-led Viet Minh rebels. On one level, ''The Quiet American'' is a love story about the love triangle that develops between Thomas Fowler, a British journalist in his fifties; a young American idealist, supposedly an aid worker, named Alden Pyle; and Phuong, a Vietnamese woman. On another level it is also about the growing American involvement that led to the full-scale Vietnam War.