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

260 THOMAS A. BASS
family brought flowers, fruit, and incense. They placed their offerings
on the family altar. Then they prayed with their palms
touching and bowed three times.
On display beside the open coffin, framed behind glass and
pinned on a field of black cloth, were An’s sixteen medals. Previously
it had been reported that he had won four military
medals, but the actual number was now revealed to be fourteen,
not including the medal naming him a Hero of the People’s
Armed Forces and the award for fifty years of service to the
Communist Party. The medals were awarded for specific battles
and campaigns which had been won thanks to An’s tactical
engagement. The world had known about An’s role in the battle
of Ap Bac and at Têt, but not about two more First Class
medals. One was awarded in 1970 for giving advance warning
to the Communist command, which allowed them to avoid
being bombed or captured during Richard Nixon’s invasion of
Cambodia. Another confirmed that An was a key player in Lam
Son 719, when the South Vietnamese army was decimated
after its failed attempt to invade Laos and cut off the Ho Chi
Minh Trail in 1971.
“As soon as we saw all of An’s medals, we knew he was responsible
for a big string of American defeats,” Kyle Hörst tells
me. “There’s a one-to-one correspondence between specific
battles and each one of these medals. An used to say to me, ‘If
I tell my story, people will lose heart.’ For a long time I wondered,
‘Who are these people who will lose heart?’ Then I realized,
it was his American friends who had trusted him for so
many years while he fought against them. This is not the work
of someone who was exclusively a strategic analyst. It is the
work of a master tactician.”
An was buried with full military honors on September 23,
2006. The ceremony included a color guard carrying the framed
display of his medals. Traditionally in Vietnam, a funeral entails
a procession through the streets, with blowing horns and preg-