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

The Spy Who Loved Us 229
fortunate reality that he lived and worked in the midst of a
bloody war that killed several million people.
When I went to see him, An often reiterated that Vietnam
fought three Indochinese wars, the first against the French, the
second against the Americans, and the third against the Chinese.
Following a series of provocations, with Cambodian forces crossing
the border to kill Vietnamese villagers in the Mekong delta,
Vietnam invaded Cambodia on December 25, 1978. Phnom
Penh was captured a few days later, and for the next decade Vietnam
would be mired in a guerrilla war against Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge, who were armed by the Chinese. Knowing more
about how to wage guerrilla wars than fight them, Vietnam lost
more than fifty thousand soldiers in this third Indochinese conflict,
before the last shot was fired in March 1990.
In February 1979, China invaded Vietnam across its northern
border. They captured the cities of Cao Bang and Lang Son,
before withdrawing at the end of a bloody, twenty-nine-day
war, which resulted in thousands of casualties on both sides.
Today the border bristles with troops—Vietnam has more than
thirty divisions facing China—and the war continues with crossborder
raids and diplomatic disputes involving the Paracel and
Spratly islands, two rocky archipelagos in the South China Sea
rich in fish and subterranean oil.
In 1990 Colonel An was elevated to the rank of general. At
the time, Vietnam was beginning to adopt doi moi, the “renovation
policy” that opened the country to the West. An explains his
promotion with a joke. As Western journalists began returning to
Vietnam, people would ask to see “General Givral,” and to
avoid embarrassment, the government decided to raise his rank
to match his title.
When I first met him in 1992, An was a pleasant host to anyone
who troubled to pull the bell on his gate. He had resumed
his old role as cultural informant and commentator on all
things Vietnamese. An was a genius at the art of conversation,
a brilliant raconteur and jokester, as well as an astute analyst.