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

18 THOMAS A. BASS
An’s uncle also directed an elementary school. Another
uncle became a civil servant working for the post office, while
his aunt married an agent technique, who, like An’s father, had
graduated from the University of Hanoi. An’s successful, upwardly
mobile family might have been expected to feel beholden
to the powers that had trained and employed them,
but instead of supporting the French, they resisted them. They
ran the schools, built the roads, and delivered the mail, but at
the same time they were patriots who opposed French colonial
rule in Vietnam. They were quiet revolutionaries, not the ones
who went to prison or fought in the Viet Minh resistance, but
their fervor was deep and unwavering, and it would come to
fruition—with devastating effect—in the revolutionary career
of Pham Xuan An.
The Viets are a fierce tribe whose history consists predominantly
of battles against enemies from the north (Genghis
Khan and the Chinese and Japanese), the east (Portugal,
France, and America), and the west (Laos, Khmers, Indians,
and Thais). The list of Vietnam’s warriors, including women
warriors, is long, and so too is the duration of their struggles.
The Vietnamese fought for a thousand years to oust one Chinese
occupation.
Patriotism in colonial Vietnam was inadvertently fostered
by the French. They taught the Vietnamese about nationalism,
including the idea of the nation-state and its aspirations to express
the spirit of a unified people. Vietnam’s school curriculum
was devoted to studying the French Revolution and its
happy conclusion in a republic devoted to liberté, egalité, and
fraternité. The French never intended for the Vietnamese to
embrace these ideas as their own. They were talking about
France, not Vietnam. But once the nationalist ideal began
bleeding into the colonies, not even the guillotine could cauterize
it.
“To make a living, you had to work for the French regime,
but none of the Vietnamese wanted their country dominated by