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

The Spy Who Loved Us 189
even own a porcelain bowl. They ate out of coconut shells, and
here was my son in a comfortable house, with a good warm bed,
and he was still crying. I wanted to take him into the field the
next time I went, to see the fighting and the blood and the poor
peasants dying. My wife thought this would be too much for
him. ‘Let him see the funerals,’ she said, ‘but not the blood.’”
Four months after Sean Flynn disappeared, An got involved
in trying to rescue his colleague Robert Sam Anson,
who was captured in Cambodia in August 1970. Anson was a
twenty-five-year-old journalist who had arrived in Saigon the
previous year. He had stashed his wife and two young children
in Singapore to join Time’s five other Saigon correspondents in
reporting what he called “the biggest, most exciting, interesting,
dangerous story of all.” Soon after his arrival, Anson concluded
that “the war in Vietnam was murderous and immoral.” It was
“a neocolonialist criminal war of aggression.” With no interest
in publishing views such as these, Time banished Anson from
the Saigon office and sent him to cover Cambodia—a hardship
post, a dangerous little offshoot of the main conflict. Soon
Anson was opposing another war that he found even more
lethal and nonsensical than the one in Vietnam.
In a singular act of bravery, Anson tried to prevent a massacre
in the Cambodian village of Takeo. Two hundred Vietnamese
civilians had been rounded up by Cambodians and
placed in an internment camp, where they would be killed.
Anson drove out every day to check on the Vietnamese prisoners.
He staved off the massacre for a few days, but one morning
he arrived to find a great heap of bloody corpses, among
them a few children who were still breathing. When Anson
was later captured, It was An’s description of his good deed at
Takeo that convinced the Communists to release him.
After three weeks in captivity, Anson was given a pair of Ho
Chi Minh rubber sandals as a going away present and released.
He made his way back to Saigon and rushed into Time’s
office to wrap Pham Xuan An in a bear hug of thanks. It would