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

The Spy Who Loved Us 23
rules regarding single-sex education. After high school, Vien
went north to Hanoi for his training as an agent technique, a civil
engineer. The engineers divided their tasks into different specialties:
mapping, surveying, dredging canals, building roads.
An’s father excelled in mapping. He spent most of his working
life in the jungles and wild areas of Cochin China scouting out
the plan of attack for his colleagues, who arrived later to build
South Vietnam’s public works. An himself mastered these skills
when he started mapping battlefields during the Vietnam war.
One of his most important jobs at Time was to submit weekly
coordinates for all the troop emplacements and battles in the
ongoing war.
In spite of their privileged position as civil servants, An’s
family members were not oblivious to the suffering around
them. Forced labor and an immiserated peasantry formed the
base of the colony’s economy. Ngo Vinh Long, in his book Before
the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French,
describes how Vietnam’s rubber plantations functioned as slave
labor camps, with annual death rates higher than twenty percent.
Stiff taxes on the peasantry, corvée labor, an elaborate
system of police controls and prisons, periodic famine in the
countryside followed by peasant revolts and swift reprisals—this
was the political economy that ground the vast majority of Vietnamese
into poverty. At the same time, the French built roads
and schools throughout the countryside, and the mail was delivered
with remarkable celerity. This economic system operated
like a great machine for converting jungle into rubber and rice
plantations, and it also provided the leisure for French colons
to spend their afternoons sipping Pernod on the terrace of the
Continental Palace hotel.
Vietnamese opposition to French colonial rule took a variety
of forms. Some Vietnamese wanted to ameliorate the brutality
of the French system while maintaining a Franco-Vietnamese
alliance to keep the Chinese at bay. Others called for throwing
off the French colonial yoke. An’s immediate family wanted to