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

188 THOMAS A. BASS
wounded on the Cambodian border while working for Time. An
was dispatched on another assignment involving Flynn. He was
sent to clean out his apartment, which was “full of marijuana
and a huge selection of guns picked up as war trophies. Fortunately,
we got there before the police,” An says.
An worked to save the lives of other captives, including a
“dairy farmer” who was actually a colonel in the Australian air
force. On other occasions he tried to keep the Communists
from attacking strategic hamlets defended by conscripted peasants.
“In 1967, Rufus Phillips and I learned about some fighting
fifteen kilometers outside Saigon. He grabbed me and said,
‘An, why don’t we go out there and take a look?’ We drove
there in my small car. Rufe was a big man. He could barely fit
in my car. Bob Shaplen could ride with me, but that was the
limit. I couldn’t fit in anybody bigger than that.”
“We found that many poor peasants had been killed. They
had been forced to work on the government side, as part of the
self-defense forces. This is what you had to do if you didn’t
want to be drafted into the army. They had died in the attack
on the village. These were farmers who lived in thatched-roof
houses. Their children were wandering through the village in
rags. Now that the soldiers were dead, their families couldn’t
even afford to buy them coffins.”
“I complained to the policy makers,” An says. He wanted
the Vietcong to stop attacking Phillips’s strategic hamlets, but
I can tell from the way An shrugs his shoulders that his meddling
failed. “I felt sorry to see people killed, Americans too,”
he says. “They were young and innocent. Human destiny is
tough. We don’t know if we are brothers or enemies. Only God
can answer this question, but so far he has refused to answer.
This is the problem.”
On returning from the countryside, An found his four-yearold
son whining and acting petulantly. “I slapped him in the face.
I was thinking of the poor people who were dead and the children
in that village who didn’t have enough to eat. They didn’t