The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

114 THOMAS A. BASS
America instead of flying. “I had bought a ten-year-old Mercury
from an old lady for two hundred and fifty dollars,” An says. “It
had an eight-cylinder engine and consumed gas like it was
drinking water. It had a heater but no air-conditioning. The
director of the foundation advised me to stay in YMCAs, which
cost only five dollars a night, or cheap motels. ‘Don’t pick up any
hitchhikers. They’re dangerous. They will know that you are
alone and a foreigner. They can take your money and kill you.’”
Although he possessed two Vietnamese driver’s licenses,
one military and one civilian, An had never actually driven a car
before coming to the United States. The Sacramento Bee had
kindly provided its interns with a driver’s education course,
and, promising not to “drive like a hot rodder,” An started traveling
at the end of August. “It was because my French teacher
had taught me about Chicago gangsters and the city’s humane,
modern methods for killing animals that I wanted to drive
across America.” An saw a summer windstorm race across the
Nevada desert like a big tornado. Amazed to see branches and
tree limbs and entire trees swirling up into the sky, he stopped
to record the event with a camera shooting Ektachrome slides.
“I drove very slowly. I would often stop to drink a Coke and
rest. I took the middle route from California to the East Coast.
Whenever there was a beautiful landscape, I would stop and
watch it. I would pull over to the side of the road and get out
of my car. I would lie down and stare up at the sky until I was
ready to start driving again. I was lucky. I met more nice people
than naughty people. Maybe they were naughty among
themselves, but not to me, like when I was in San Francisco.
One evening, I was walking toward the wharf to have dinner
when I ran into a band of guys with knives drawn. They were
chasing another band of guys, but they were too busy trying to
kill each other to bother me.”
An drove down the Strip and visited the gambling casinos
in Las Vegas. Outside the city, he saw a long line of freight
cars rolling across the mountains and disappearing into a tun-