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

The Spy Who Loved Us 115
nel. “I asked a man who was standing near me, watching the
train, ‘Is it carrying people from the West Coast to the East
Coast?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is a special train. It doesn’t take any
passengers. It is carrying scientists into a tunnel in the mountain,
where they do atomic research.’ Then he showed me on
a map where America makes its atomic bombs. ‘Don’t go here,’
he said. ‘They will arrest you.’” An chuckles on remembering
the friendly American who told him these military secrets.
Communist intelligence agent Pham Xuan An now knew where
the Vietnamese army should attack if it ever invaded the
United States.
An visited the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City and
watched cowboys herding cattle in Wyoming. He drove only
during the day, and when the sun went down he stopped at the
YMCA or a cheap motel. He would start driving again the next
day at sunrise. “The country was big and beautiful, with enormous
variety. I had never realized how big America is. This is
not something I imagined from hearing it described.”
After crossing the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains,
An was amazed by the rich farmland in Iowa. “I saw mile after
mile of corn. It took me almost a whole day of driving to get
through the corn. I stopped to look at the turkeys they raise
there, huge, chocolate-colored turkeys. They stretched all the
way to the horizon.”
By the time he reached Chicago, he was having trouble
with his carburetor. He was surprised when a new one was installed
quickly instead of the old one being taken out and repaired.
He started driving around town, looking for the
miraculous machine his French teacher had told him about. “I
drove to the stockyards, but I couldn’t find the machine anywhere.”
An laughs, “I would have to create this machine if I
wanted it to exist.”
Except for the speedy car repair, An was disappointed by
Chicago. “I thought I would find something in Chicago that
made it more modern than Vietnam.” But even the gangsters