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

The Spy Who Loved Us 153
everything else, so haphazard and sloppy and careless, not as deliberate
as the French cruelty and perhaps thus even worse.”
When the footage from Cam Ne was shown to Americans on
the evening news it marked, said Halberstam, “the end of the
myth that we were different, that we were better.”
In his assessment of Cam Ne, An is surprisingly forgiving.
“The Americans had never had colonies,” he says. “For them,
Vietnam was part of a planetary strategy.” He describes how
the marines were confused about Vietnam from the moment
they landed. “After being trained in North Carolina, an incredibly
tough course where they stood in water for hours on
end, they charged off their landing craft to hit the beach at
Danang. And what did they find there? A bunch of pretty girls
with garlands draped around their necks. The enemy was
nowhere in sight. They were disconcerted. They didn’t know
what to do. The marines were nice during the daytime, but
they behaved differently at night. Someone full of hate suddenly
gave an order to burn down a village.”
Cam Ne was a “traumatic event” for An, a personal turning
point in the war. “It’s like when the World Trade towers were
attacked by terrorists and many innocent people were killed.
Maybe these soldiers were nursing the poison of revenge. That’s
unavoidable in war. It’s like what happened later during the
My Lai massacre. Human beings have two parts, an animal
part and a human part. Sometimes the animal nature is so
strong that you lose your reason. The Vietnamese do this to the
Vietnamese. They don’t know whether they are brothers or
enemies. Even God cannot explain it.”
We return to this subject when I visit An’s house on the
morning of May 20, 2004. Both of us have been up late watching
CNN broadcast congressional hearings on the torture of
Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, another defining moment in
America’s far-flung wars. Pictures captured on cell phones and
floated on the Internet show naked prisoners being led around
on leashes and hooded prisoners with their outstretched arms