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

152 THOMAS A. BASS
bellies were distended with worms. They gave them colorful
Band-Aids. The kids who looked hungry got extra C rations. We
thought these were nice men. They said lots of nice things as
they helped people.”
“At three or four in the afternoon, we left the field and returned
with the marines to their company base. They had
rigged up a stainless steel water tank. They invited us to take a
shower and served us a hot meal. We were good friends by
the time we left that evening to return to the press center.
Later that night, actually very early in the morning, the soldiers
went out on the Cam Ne operation. We didn’t follow them. It
was nighttime. Beverly was a young lady. She didn’t go out
at night.”
No one had mentioned to Deepe that the marines were
going out on a military mission. Morley Safer and his film crew
moved in to take their place. This allowed them to capture one
of the defining moments in the war, when a village of three hundred
thatch-roofed houses was burned to the ground by rampaging
soldiers wielding Zippo lighters. “Cam Ne was the first
time the marines burned an entire village. Safer got the scoop,”
An says, admiringly. He goes on to describe how the marines
made a mistake. “They thought the village belonged to the
Communist guerrillas. Actually it belonged to the government.
The provincial chief wanted the villagers punished for not paying
‘taxes,’ which were bribes. The three soldiers wounded in
the action were hit from the rear by friendly fire.”
After witnessing a moment of deep national shame, Safer
had the bravery to report it (for which President Johnson tried
to get him fired). Safer had covered French counterterrorism
in Algeria, which also involved immiseration of the civilian
population, but what bothered him about Cam Ne, wrote David
Halberstam in The Powers That Be (1979), “was the senselessness
of it all, for even when the French had applied torture they
had usually done it with a certain precision, they knew exactly
what they were trying to find out. This seemed, in addition to