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

The Spy Who Loved Us 35
In the context of wartime Vietnam, Khanh’s recommendation
that An become a gangster was not far-fetched. Vietnam has
a long tradition of criminal gangs. The French used criminal enterprises
to finance their colonial administration, and they put
gangsters in charge of running the country. In colonial Vietnam
becoming a gangster could indeed “make you highly respected
by your friends and family.”
Preeminent among Vietnam’s modern gangsters was Le
Van “Bay” Vien. An illiterate, bullnecked assassin who was
adept at Sino-Vietnamese boxing, Bay Vien was chief of the
Binh Xuyen river pirates who controlled the opium traffic and
all the casinos and houses of prostitution in Saigon. A graduate
of the Poulo Condore prison camp, he would rise to become the
unofficial mayor of Saigon, the city’s richest man, its de facto police
chief, and a general.
In one sense, the entire history of Vietnam—all fifty centuries
of it—can be seen as a long succession of rival war bands
and gangsters. Vietnam is a great crossroads, a veritable stew of
cultures, all of which seem to have staked out this territory because
it was as far from home as one could get. Vietnam was
where you went after a failed revolution in China, India, Cambodia,
or France. It was the land of pirates, exiles, war lords, and
criminal gangs, all fighting each other in the dark obscurity of
the country’s jungles and tropical flood plains.
Vietnam is named for the Nam Viets, or “southern” Viets, who
were forced to migrate from the Mekong headwaters in Tibet into
the Red and Black river valleys. As the Viets continued to move
south, they bumped into groups of people from India, Cambodia,
and Malaya who had settled in the rich, rice-growing regions
of the Mekong delta. The contentious history of the delta
emerges from obscurity in the first century C.E., when the Indianized
civilization of Funan was established. Funan had walled
cities replete with libraries and silversmiths and a strong fleet,
which allowed it to control Vietnam’s coastal waters. To the north
of Funan, another Indianized culture took root in Champa.