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

200 THOMAS A. BASS
He admits that the priest has a point and his logic is compelling,
“but I’m too sentimental for this sort of thing,” An
says. “That’s my problem. I don’t like to see innocent people
get killed.”
When I ask him if he ever regrets the role his intelligence
played in the deaths of innocent people, An doesn’t waiver.
“No,” he replies. “I was fulfilling my obligations. I had to do
it. I was forced to do it. I was a disciplined person.”
“So you have no regrets?”
“No.”
The author of seven books published on the Vietnam war, Tu
Cang is a sturdy, handsome man with the self-assurance of
someone who has cheated death many times. “I used to be
very strong,” he says, before enumerating a list of war wounds
that have left him “sixty-one percent incapacitated.” He rolls
down his sock to show me where a bullet passed through his
ankle. A meter of his intestine was lost to a stomach wound. He
has scars on his head from B-52 bombing raids and psychological
scars, as well. “I have a recurring nightmare about being
strangled by an enemy intelligence agent,” he says. “One night,
thinking I was striking my attacker, I accidentally hit my wife
and knocked out her two front teeth. Since then, we have slept
in separate beds.”
Nguyen Van Tau, as he was called by his parents, was a
seventeen-year-old scholarship student at Lycée Pétrus Ky
when he left school in 1945 to join the revolution. He slipped
back into the city a year later to marry his high school sweetheart.
When he left again for the jungle, she was pregnant. Twentyseven
years later he returned to Saigon to meet his daughter for
the first time. Tu Cang spent his entire adult life fighting the
First and Second Indochina Wars before heading to Cambodia
in 1978 to fight against China and its Khmer Rouge proxies. Tu
Cang boxed Vietnamese style, while An boxed English style, but
both men were natural athletes, animal lovers, and raconteurs.