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

208 THOMAS A. BASS
the Têt festivities. “The Têt Offensive had three goals: to take
over Saigon, to kill the puppet forces, and to make a big noise.
For the first goal, we failed. For the second goal, we failed. Only
for the third goal did we succeed.”
After passing a former police checkpoint, Tu Cang tells the
driver to pull over. We stop at a little white house with a brick
patio. The front yard is filled with bamboo frames that are covered
with drying rice paper used for wrapping spring rolls. A
silver-haired woman dressed in flower-print trousers and blouse
greets us. She smiles up at him as Tu Cang wraps his arm around
her. It is the embrace of old soldiers, bonded through their
memory of death and surprised to find themselves still alive.
Nguyen Thi Se was one of Pham Xuan An’s couriers. She hid Tu
Cang in her house and fed him. After she was caught bringing
him a radio, she was sent to prison and tortured for three years.
As we walk behind her house into the garden, the air is
sweet with the smell of frangipani. We stroll among palm trees
and jackfruit trees, with their pendulous green fruit hanging low
to the ground. The garden is nicely irrigated and tended. It includes
a banana grove, a sty full of happily grunting pigs, and
several conical, hat-shaped haystacks that are used to fuel
Se’s stove and feed her buffalo. At the foot of the garden floats
a sampan tied to a tree on the banks of the Saigon River. Jumping
into the small, flat-bottomed boat, Tu Cang shows how he
used to escape from the Americans when they came to search
the house. The river here is wide and brown with topsoil
washing down from the mountains. “The water used to be clear
and drinkable,” he says, “but now it is polluted and all the fish
are dead.”
Crossing a canal and walking into a forest of thick-trunked
bamboo, Tu Cang points to where he hid a radio transmitter and
a communications team along the river. “This was a good place
to operate,” he says. “From here we could easily melt into the
forest. We used Morse code and a radio, a PRC-25 captured