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

The Spy Who Loved Us 211
singing. He is joined by Thuy and then the guides chime in. The
rattattat of AK-47s resounds through the forest as Cu Chi is
filled again with voices calling for Vietnam to dye its land red
with the blood of the enemy.
Apart from the Têt Offensive, the other big story of 1968—
although it would not be revealed until the following
year—was the My Lai massacre. On March 16, 1968, a company
of soldiers who had been in Vietnam for three months and had
lost ten percent of their men to snipers and bombings walked
into a village seeking revenge. Finding no enemy soldiers in the
hamlet known as My Lai 4, they began raping and shooting
more than five hundred women, children, and old men. It took
them a day to kill everyone, and they stopped in the middle to
eat lunch. Of the thirteen soldiers later charged with war crimes,
only one, Lieutenant William Calley, was convicted by courtmartial
of murder and sentenced to life in prison at hard labor.
The sentence was reduced to ten years, and then Calley, because
of time already spent under house arrest, was released
after spending six months in federal prison. As the mother of
one of the soldiers at My Lai told Seymour Hersh before he
broke the story, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me
back a murderer.”
After the Têt Offensive in January and mini-Têt in May,
which provoked America’s disengagement from the war, Time
moved its offices back to the Continental Hotel, where it rented
two rooms overlooking café Givral on the old rue Catinat (then
known as Tu Do Street). An was in his element, never having
to walk more than two steps from Givral to the Continental terrace
and La Dolce Vita, as the hotel’s restaurant was ironically
named. An presided over Radio Catinat, the rumor mill. He attended
the military briefings known as the Five O’Clock Follies,
and when Bob Shaplen was in town, he regrouped for
cocktails in Shaplen’s room at the Continental, which included