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

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FOREWORD
willing to die on her behalf. American humorist P. J. O’Rourke
captured this truth in an essay he wrote on Vietnam in 1992: “In
the early evening in Hué, the girls from the secondary schools
come home from classes, fleets of them bicycling through the
streets, all dressed in white ao dais, trim shirtdresses worn over
loose-fitting trousers. Not for nothing do the remaining Catholic
churches ring the Angelus this time of day. I wonder if it
changes the nature of a society for beauty to be so common.”
After exclaiming over the “huge aggregate percentages of
sirens and belles” in this Edenic country, O’Rourke writes,
“Now I understand how we got involved in Vietnam. We fell in
love. . . . [We] swooned for the place. Everybody, from the
first advisers Ike sent in 1955 to Henry Kissinger at the Paris
peace talks, had a mad crush on Vietnam. It broke their hearts.
They kept calling and sending flowers. They just couldn’t believe
this was goodbye.”
Before beginning my story about Vietnam and America
(with sideways glances toward France and other parts of the
world), let me say that this book is about war and love, the lessons
of Vietnam, counterinsurgencies, and other conflicts called
irregular. It is about spies and journalists and the confusion
between them. Some would claim that journalists helped to
lose the war in Vietnam. In this case, I am claiming that a
journalist helped to win the war—for the Vietnamese. This
discomfiting book is about knowledge and deception and the ineluctable
incertitude of knowing where one shades into the
other. It offers no verities to be redacted into the new lessons
of the Vietnam war. It is the simple life of a complex man. The
truth is in the details. We begin.