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

42 THOMAS A. BASS
and then he got to swing happily through the Communist jungle
of collective ownership. “You know, God is always changing
his mind,” An says. “He never decides anything properly.”
An’s instructors in Rach Gia were guerrilla fighters from
North Vietnam who had been incarcerated by the French on
Poulo Condore. “The French system for controlling Vietnam
was quite simple,” An says. “They built a big palace for the
provincial governor and next to it they built a prison, and next
to that they built a courthouse. They captured you, took you to
court, passed sentence on you, and threw you in prison, where
the governor and his subordinates could watch you. It was all
very logical.”
“In addition to the main prison in each province, there
were many concentration camps and prisons scattered throughout
Indochina. In order to be a leader you should have spent
time in one of these prisons. These people had been captured
because they loved their country.” When An uses the word
captured, it is one of the rare instances when he employs a
revolutionary term for its Western equivalent, in this case, arrested.
The old Time reporter is discreet about tipping his hand
with politically loaded words.
“The Communists who made propaganda in the prisons
were well trained. They knew how to recruit members from
among the other nationalist parties, the VNQDD, the Hoa
Hao, and the Cao Dai. These people were also patriotic, but
they were vague. They didn’t have any ideology. The Communists
were ideologues. This was very important. They had a
system for acting on their nationalist sentiments, a plan of
action. When you ‘graduated’ from prison, this was the first
step to being promoted.”
I have asked him to tell me this story before, but only once
does An let slip that he saw combat in at least one battle as a
Viet Minh platoon leader. “One day I was assigned to fight the
French. I led my platoon out into the field. We set up an ambush
along the road. This was in the hot season, April 1946. The