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

174 THOMAS A. BASS
to drop to the ground. Thuong shot off the rotor with his pistol.
The helicopter crashed into a field and exploded. Thuong hid
his documents and a thousand dollars in cash in a ditch and
began running across the rice paddies.
A battalion of paratroopers came for him. He was surrounded
by four hundred American soldiers and three hundred
South Vietnamese soldiers. With twenty-one bullets remaining,
he killed twenty-one enemy soldiers. He jumped in a bunker to
hide but was smoked out with gas and roughed up before being
put on a helicopter and flown to an American military base.
Here he confronted temptation. “A beautiful girl came to serve
me. She invited me into the ‘open arms’ program. More beautiful
girls came, singing songs, trying to persuade me to confess
my identity. An American colonel began interrogating me in
Vietnamese. I told him that I was a farmer, but they examined
my feet to see if I had been wearing rubber sandals. They saw
that I had been wearing shoes. They looked at my hands. I
didn’t have the calluses of someone who worked in the field.”
The colonel promised Thuong a hundred thousand dollars
and a sumptuous villa if he informed on his colleagues and
came over to the American side. They would make him a lieutenant
colonel. They would give him a Mercedes and lots of
girls. As Thuong recounts what happened next, the house fills
with the smell of lunch cooking in the kitchen. The already
dripping air thickens with the odor of garlic and green onions.
Thuong’s wife opens and closes the front gate as family members
stream through the living room. Thuong’s son comes home
from work and his son’s two children and a granddaughter,
who is wearing a blue school pinafore with a red scarf tied
around her neck.
“I could have saved myself, but I chose to save my network,”
Thuong says. “Actually I knew the names of many people
involved in several networks. This was against our general
rules, where I was supposed to know only about one network,