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

New Year
S
omething odd happens when I phone An’s journalist colleagues
to talk about him. They remember him fondly and
count him among their best Vietnamese friends, but they disagree
on what he looked like. One person recalls that he was a
bit shabby and down at the heels, with a hacking cough and lack
of social graces. Others remember him as an elegant bon vivant
who easily fooled them with his story about being the son of a
rich landowner in the Mekong delta. He was tall. He was short.
He was a sturdy, athletic man or a tubercular wraith. Like
Woody Allen’s Zelig, An slips into the picture at every key moment
in Vietnamese history over the past fifty years. He is there
at the battle of Ap Bac, the Buddhist crisis, the assassination of
Diem, the fall of Saigon. He witnesses these historic events at
a distance, displaced from the center. He lurks at the edge of
the frame, commenting on the scene, with an ironic smile tugging
at the corners of his mouth. But what exactly was An doing
during the war?
After the overthrow of Diem, An comes into focus again
during the Têt Offensive, the simultaneous attack on more
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