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

118 THOMAS A. BASS
intelligence. If I met him I might take advantage of him reflexively.
Because I know his father, I might get some information
out of him. What if I were tortured? What if I broke and
revealed that this man had given me information? It would be
very bad. So to respect the man who had helped me and not by
mistake, not voluntarily, not willingly to take advantage of his
son, I refused to see him.”
“This is why I don’t want to write a memoir,” An says.
“I would have to name names, and that’s not good. Some people
have died already, but others are still alive. A lot of people
helped me out of personal friendships. There is no reason to betray
them now.”
I ask An how he feels about the fact that his intelligence was
responsible for getting Americans killed. “I hated to see this,”
he says. “When I saw young American soldiers being evacuated
from battle, lying on top of personnel carriers, many of them
dead or dying, it reminded me of my friends in junior college,
young men eighteen or nineteen years old who might have
been drafted and sent to Vietnam. This is why I prayed that the
war wouldn’t last long.”
An’s double life was filled with conflict and tragedy, but
there was no fake sentimentality on his part. He had a choice
to make, and he made it. Some of this I credit to the fact that
he was a journalist. He faced reality and dealt with it. There was
a war on. He was a soldier in this war. He did his duty. “That’s
all,” he would say. “It was very simple.” This was one of his favorite
expressions. Of course it was not simple. It was heartwrenchingly
complex, and the moral dilemmas were insoluble.
A man less tough in mind and spirit would have been destroyed
or would have given himself away. An reminded me of a great
gambler, one of those Las Vegas professionals who has learned
to disguise what are known as “tells”—the involuntary signs
that reveal your hand, either good or bad. An the jokester, the
prankster, the dog-loving man-about-town had displaced onto
his quirks and personal habits all the emotion that otherwise