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

The Spy Who Loved Us 251
day honeymoon when I married my wife. Since 1959, I had only
five days of sick leave, because of the effects of tuberculosis.”
An tells me that Little An, because he is not a member of
the Communist Party, has reached a glass ceiling in his career.
He earns a salary of two million Vietnamese dong, about a hundred
and sixty dollars a month. When I ask An why his son is not
a Party member, he pushes the question aside. “My son is too
old to join the Party,” he tells me. “It’s very difficult to learn
Marxism and Leninism. You have to start when you are young.”
Is it more difficult to learn Marxism than to get a law degree
from Duke University? I am wondering how to phrase this
thought when An tells me that I am asking too many questions
and writing too slowly.
“I too was a slow writer,” he confesses, “but Bob Shaplen was
very fast. He just took his notes and wrote them up, no problem.”
When I mention other slow writers, An agrees that “writing
slowly produced the best book on the Vietnam war. This is
Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a book that revealed the
American character.”
And what is this character? “When Americans think something
is right, they just barrel ahead and do it,” he says. “They
like having fun. They are helpful. They are nice and they play
fair, but you have to fly under their radar if you want to survive
their aggression. Of all the world’s empires, the American empire
is the best. It is better than the French, better than the
British, but it is still an empire, nonetheless, and the Vietnamese
have always preferred—in fact they have always fought
to the death—to have their own empire.”
I ask An if he would still throw himself into this fight as a
revolutionary. “I was never a revolutionary,” he says. “I was a
romantic, in love with my country and willing to defend her to
the death.” An writes in my notebook the two words lang man,
“romantic,” and cach mang, “revolutionary.” Someone later explains
to me that he has written a play on words, a joke. While