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

8 THOMAS A. BASS
anecdote from Vietnamese history or suggest I read a book,
such as Nguyen Khai’s 1983 novel about An’s life, Thoi Gian
Cua Nguoi (The Time of Man). Conversations proceed like this
in Vietnam. They are circuitous and languorous, before shifting,
almost imperceptibly, into moral tales that simultaneously
amuse and instruct.
I have told this story in Vietnamese style, fluid in point of
view and sense of time. Pham Xuan An is dead. He was hooked
to a ventilator for several weeks before his lungs collapsed for
good in the fall of 2006, ending all those years of conversation.
David Halberstam is dead. He survived a lifetime of covering
wars in Africa and Asia before dying in the passenger seat of a
car that was struck at an intersection in Menlo Park, California,
in 2007. For as long as I can still hear them, I will keep their
voices in the present tense. The reader should be warned,
though. There is no one true story of Pham Xuan An’s life, because
his life contained multiple truths. Even his name is a
warning. An in Vietnamese means “hidden” or “secret.”
During the twenty years it fought the Vietnamese, the
United States never understood the people or the culture of
Vietnam. South Vietnam was to be remade in America’s image.
Terra incognita preceded terra nova. America’s disregard for its
enemy cost it dearly. It lost the war, with fifty-eight thousand soldiers
killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, and it lost its
naïveté about its invincible military might.
America’s enemy did not make the same mistakes. The
Vietnamese studied their adversary. They cultivated an agent
who could think like an American, who could get inside the American
mind to learn the country’s values and beliefs. The Vietnamese
needed a spy in the enemy camp, although not a
common, second-story man. They needed a strategic spy, a
poetic spy, a spy who loved Americans and was loved by them
in return. After gaining their confidence, he would pick the
lock most prized in military strategy—the lock to their dreams