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

24 THOMAS A. BASS
bring the colonial era to an end. “If you are a teacher, every day
when you face your students, you can see that their families are
poor, and you know why they are poor,” An says. “My grandfather
saw the consequences of the French occupation, and he
couldn’t help but be opposed to it.”
An’s father also saw the consequences. “My father mapped
the forest by laying out chains, which is hard to do in the jungle,”
An says. “He had to build towers for sight lines and rely on
chaineurs, who included prison laborers and peasants too poor
to pay their taxes.” After mapping the area around Bien Hoa,
Pham Xuan Vien was transferred to Rach Gia. This vast area of
swamps and mangrove forests bordering the Gulf of Thailand
marks the end of the road in Vietnam’s southward march. As far
from civilization as you can get, the area is sparsely settled by
refugees from China and Cambodia and by pirates who cruise
offshore in the gulf. Surrounding Rach Gia is the U Minh forest,
an aqueous domain filled with various species of Melaleuca
water palms and cajeput groves. Thousands of fish traps, triangular
cages made from bamboo sticks, float in the water.
The slender white trunks of the cajeputs thrive in the marshes,
as do a large variety of insects, including honeybees whose
combs are avidly collected. The French tried to drain these
swamps and canalize them into rice plantations, but they never
fully tamed the U Minh badlands. The forest was a staging
area for the Viet Minh. It served the same purpose for the Vietcong,
and it was here that Pham Xuan An was trained as a revolutionary
soldier.
As a child, An traveled through the vast, watery reaches of
the U Minh forest on his family’s sampan, which was loaded
with his father’s surveying equipment and maps. At night the
family docked in canal-side villages, where local authorities
loaned them huts in which they cooked dinner and slept. One
evening before An’s second birthday, the family was crossing the
estuary of a big river that opened onto the ocean when the twin
spouts of a marine tornado began racing toward them. “It