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

154 THOMAS A. BASS
and penises wired with electrodes. “One of the generals at the
hearings said the situation in Iraq is something that America has
not confronted for fifty years,” An says. “He was referring to
Vietnam. He was wrong about the date. He should have said
thirty years.”
An asks if I remember General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the
Saigon police chief who is shown in the famous Eddie Adams
photo shooting a Vietcong prisoner at point-blank range, with
the bullet flying out the back of the man’s head. Taken during the
Têt Offensive in 1968, the Pulitzer Prize–winning photo became
another defining image of the war’s corrosive cruelty.
“General Loan was actually a very sweet man,” An says.
“His father was a Communist in the Viet Minh during the
French Indochina War. Loan was drafted when General de
Lattre de Tassigny set up the Vietnamese armed forces. To
avoid serving in the infantry, he took the exam to be trained as
a French pilot. You buy time. You hope the war will be over before
you commit the crime of killing your own people. Loan was
sent to be trained in France. They made him the highest ranking
officer in the Vietnamese air force.
“Loan was supposed to drop bombs on the Viet Minh revolutionaries.
Instead, since the French had no system for
recording the results, he bombed in the jungle and the swamps.
He made sure he flew low enough to look down and see that no
one was killed.”
But after becoming chief of police in Saigon, “Loan was
turned into a tiger, first a tiger cop and then a full-fledged
tiger,” An says. “He became very cruel. A commander has to
know how to handle the animal part of human nature. If you
don’t control this aspect of your men, if you let them run wild,
then you are finished. This is what happened at Cam Ne. These
nice young marines were good people. They loved women,
they loved children, and then suddenly when someone gave the
order they burned down a village. The blame should be put on