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

The Spy Who Loved Us 7
were talking to each other for anything other than a book,
which An had not been authorized to do. When I went to visit
him for the last time, in January 2006, we were preparing for
what I thought would be a long night of conversation, the usual
mix of stories and jokes, when he told me this would be our last
meeting. There was no going back on his decision. We would
never see each other again.
I knew by this point that An was working with another “official”
biographer. “What’s the difference between my book
and this other book?” I asked. “Your book is being written from
inside Vietnam,” he said, implying that I had access to sensitive
information that should not be revealed. I took this as a compliment
to my Vietnamese research assistants, whose legwork
and tenacity were sometimes as remarkable as An’s back in the
days when he was the hardest-working journalist in Vietnam.
I was hurt by An’s decision not to see me again, and I took
the news personally, until I learned that he was acting on orders
from above. His story was meant to be spun as Halberstam
had told it. In this version of An’s life, created for Western consumption,
he was a nationalist, inadvertently caught up in his
country’s history, a strategic analyst who had looked down on the
war from the Olympian heights of Time. A different picture is
presented here, of a master tactician and committed fighter
for the Communist cause. I have written the unauthorized biography
of a spy. Although An withdrew his support from this
project—along with some of his American friends who took
up the cudgels on what they thought was his behalf—I persist
in thinking that if this book says anything true about Vietnam
and its prolonged wars or the nature of war in general, An
would secretly be smiling on it.
On several occasions I nearly abandoned the project, and
even as this book goes to press, the fundamental questions remain
just that—questions. If I were talking to An about this
dilemma, as I often did, he might crack a joke or launch into an