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

The Spy Who Loved Us 225
In the meantime, he was biding his time, waiting for the
anti-American climate to change as Vietnam went on to fight
other wars against the Cambodian Khmer Rouge and their
Chinese allies. On January 15, 1976, he was named a Hero of
the People’s Armed Forces—the country’s highest military
honor. By 1978 he was a lieutenant colonel, by 1981 a senior lieutenant
colonel, and by 1984 a full colonel. By 1990, still serving
as an active duty officer, he had risen to the rank of general.
As he looked out on Saigon through the gates of the villa
into which he had retreated, An saw no signs of a Communist
idyll. The city was overrun with humorless apparatchiks and
carpetbaggers from the north. Prison camps sprouted in the
countryside, and social ostracism and revenge were the order
of the day. Like Voltaire, An devoted himself to cultivating his
garden. Actually, his wife, Thu Nhan, cultivated the garden, but
part of it was always reserved for the cages holding An’s fighting
cocks and exotic birds.
On those occasions when An left his house and tried to
contribute to rebuilding postwar Vietnam, he was rebuffed.
He proposed renaming the little park in front of the Catholic
cathedral Morrison Square, after American Quaker Norman
Morrison, who had doused himself with gasoline and burned
himself to death outside Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon.
McNamara had stood at his office window and watched
Morrison burn, and as he later wrote in his 1995 memoir, In
Retrospect, “Morrison’s death was a tragedy not only for his
family but also for me and the country. . . . I reacted to the horror
of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided
talking about them with anyone—even my family. Marg [Mc-
Namara’s wife] and our three children shared many of Morrison’s
feelings about the war . . . and I believed I understood and
shared some of his thoughts.” Known in colonial times as the
Place Pigneau de Béhaine, after the eighteenth-century French
missionary who opened Vietnam to European colonial influence,
and during the Vietnam war as John F. Kennedy Square,