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

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The Spy Who Loved Us 261

nant women rushing up to touch the casket for good luck. An

would have loved the horns and pregnant women, but he was

loaded onto a military truck and driven to the Ministry of Defense

funeral facility in Go Vap near the Thu Duc cemetery reserved

for military heroes. An’s picture in military uniform was

placed in front of his ornately decorated red coffin. His family

wore white tunics and head bands. Sticks of incense, gathered

into big bundles and stuck into trays of sand, filled the air with

smoke. Attending the memorial service were Vo Van Kiet, Vietnam’s

former prime minister, and a host of generals, including

Nguyen Chi Vinh, the head of TC2 (Defense Intelligence),

who delivered the bai dieu van, An’s life history. Calling him

“the assault spearhead and main attack force” of his intelligence

cell—here identified by its code name, H.63—Vinh enumerated

An’s “extraordinary military achievements,” accomplished while

he lived “in the bowels of the enemy.”

One observer described the scene as “a gathering of spooks.

An was being admitted into the Pantheon of military intelligence.”

The process had already begun months earlier, when

a twenty-seven-inch Sony TV was delivered to his house with a

sign on it saying, “From your friends at Tong Cuc hai” (TC2).

Following the memorial service at Go Vap, rain was falling

heavily as Tu Cang and An’s wife and children followed his

coffin out of the building. They walked through a parade of soldiers

with bayonets mounted on their guns, and watched as

the coffin was loaded back into the glass compartment on the

military truck. The cortege drove to the cemetery along the highway

to Bien Hoa, where An was to be buried next to Ba Quoc

and other colleagues in military intelligence. This burial ground,

with about five hundred graves, is maintained like a park. Across

the highway lies a cemetery reserved for South Vietnamese

soldiers who fought on the losing side of the war. The Republican

graveyard is overrun with weeds, and the tombstones are

cracked and tumbling onto the ground.

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