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

The Spy Who Loved Us 243
virtually every top revolutionary leader in twentieth-century
Vietnam.
On rented motorbikes we travel a kilometer down the island’s
main road to Poulo Condore’s original French prison,
called bagne or camp number one, which was built in 1862.
Passing under a guard turret erected over high stone walls, we
enter a courtyard decorated with a small white Catholic church
and shaded walkways which give no hint of the horrors that are
summoned as we enter cell block six. After our eyes have adjusted
to the gloom in this cavernous chamber, we are surprised
to find one hundred and fifty life-size mannequins of
emaciated prisoners chained to the floor. Hundreds of prisoners
lived in this one room, where many of them starved to
death or died of diarrheal infections or other diseases. As a
former prisoner wrote of Poulo Condore in 1934, “The air
reeks from the stench of latrines and sweat from dozens of
naked bodies.” The food is “rotten, stinking, and full of maggots.”
The guards are “ferocious brutes” capable of beating
prisoners to death with their bare hands. This prison can only
be compared to “monkey cages in a zoo.”
The courtyard is lined with six identical cells, some reserved
for women and others for prisoners on death row. In a
dark and airless cell used for solitary confinement we discover
a small altar built on a concrete bench. For want of incense, pilgrims
have left upright cigarettes to burn in memory of the
souls who died here.
Modern Vietnam was born on this dark granitic island.
Every colonial power that tried to rule Indochina began
by laying claim to Poulo Condore. Marco Polo got swept onto
these shores during his Asian explorations in the thirteenth
century. The Portuguese landed here in 1560. The British
landed here in 1702. In fact, it was the British East India Company
that built the island’s first prisons—a short-lived experiment
that ended when the company’s Sulawesi mercenaries