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

The Spy Who Loved Us 253
over the past few years I have ridden the train out to the
working-class suburb north of Paris where Tin lives in a rooftop
garret with his “sister,” a young woman who spends her days sitting
in the kitchen hemming silk scarves for Hermès. Tin has become
the strange bedfellow of American revisionists who argue
that if the United States had unleashed the full force of its military
power in Vietnam—invading the north and pushing westward
into Laos, bombing the dikes around Hanoi, and using
nuclear weapons—it could have “won” the war. In this case, Tin
thinks Vietnam would resemble Korea. “An impoverished North
Vietnam would be looking across the border at a booming
South Vietnam, which would be leading the pack as the most
advanced of all the Asian Tigers.”
An partially agrees with Tin. “Two times America came
close to winning the war,” he says. “Once, in the late 1950s,
when I was studying in America. This is when they wiped out
eighty percent of the north’s security apparatus in the south. The
second time was immediately after the Têt Offensive, which destroyed
the Vietcong as a fighting force. Then the United States
introduced the Phoenix Program, which was extremely effective
in assassinating thousands of Vietnamese and neutralizing
the opposition in the south.”
“And what would Vietnam look like if America had won
the war?”
“Vietnam would not look like Korea,” An says. “North Vietnam
would have been absorbed into China.”
“And South Vietnam?”
“The South Vietnamese are not as ruthless as the Koreans.
The south would have ended up as nothing more than a minor
star in the Western orbit.”
An sits near the telephone in his old office chair with metal
rollers and a green plastic seat. He looks as if he is on duty,
erect, pen at hand, ready to report on a major battle or an impending
coup. The phone rings. Following a terse conversation
in Vietnamese, he hops up from his chair and begins moving at