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

44 THOMAS A. BASS
property from the Viet Minh. Then he floats the idea of enlisting
in the newly formed officer training school of the Franco-
Vietnamese colonial army.
“An, don’t be stupid,” Khanh told him. “A soldier gets killed
very easily. Stay here in Can Tho, and the next time I return, I’ll
take you to Saigon and give you a scholarship to go to France
and finish high school. When you grow up you’ll be able to
learn properly. Now you’re too crazy.”
An laughs heartily, remembering his old teacher and his
former craziness. The scholarship to France never materialized.
The opportunity disappeared when Truong Vinh Khanh was
ambushed by the Communists and killed in a roadside attack.
They were aiming for the prime minister, a Cao Dai optometrist
named Le Van Hoach, but they got Khanh instead.
“In 1947, in broad daylight, outside My Tho, the Communists
ambushed a whole convoy of government officials,” An
says. This bold move was the first major attack organized by
Tran Van Tra, the young military commander who later led the
assault on Saigon during the Têt Offensive in 1968. By 1975, Tra
would emerge as deputy commander of the Ho Chi Minh campaign,
the last battle in the Vietnam war.
It is hard to imagine the pain An must have felt when he
learned that the Communists had assassinated his French
teacher. The moment reveals with blinding clarity the tragedy
of modern Vietnam. An was caught up in a war, an actor who
had taken sides. He knew that many people, including friends
and family members, would die in this conflict. He had no
choice but to carry on. “It’s not a matter of reason or justice,”
a French military officer says to the British journalist who is the
protagonist in The Quiet American. “We all get involved in a
moment of emotion and then we cannot get out.”