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

52 THOMAS A. BASS
and dreamed of traveling to the United States. He liked many
of the Americans he met, often befriending them, but he was
also convinced that the colonial powers occupying his country
had to be defeated by any means possible. Only then could
Vietnamese and Americans truly be friends.
During the Têt new year celebration at the end of January
1952, An was summoned by his Communist superiors to report
to the jungle. He was excited, thinking he was finally being
called to the war zone for action. He expected to be issued a gun
and get to work fighting the enemy. “Already by 1947 I had decided
I was ready to go into the jungle,” An says. “But because
my father was sick, I had to stay in the city and take care of
him.” Before he left Saigon, An was instructed not to quit his
job at the customs house, curiously, and he was told to pretend
that he was merely traveling out of town for the Têt holiday.
After journeying to Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border,
An spent the night in a remote village before being picked up
by a guide. They walked all day through the forest. “The French
were continually sweeping through the area on military operations.
It was hard to slip in and out. You sometimes had to wait
for days before it was safe to move through the jungle.”
An had already been here while visiting his younger sister,
Pham Thi Cuc, who had moved to the jungle three years earlier
to become “the Voice of Nam Bo,” a radio broadcaster for
the Communist network. An sometimes brought her food and
medicine and stayed overnight at the radio station, hidden
under the jungle canopy. (In 1955 An’s sister moved to North
Vietnam to work for the state-run coal mines.)
“It was a very hard life in the jungle,” An says. “They didn’t
have enough food. They ate manioc and foraged for edible
leaves. If they were lucky, they got rice. They made bread out
of cassava, which you can eat when it’s hot, but when it’s cool,
it’s very tough, very difficult to chew. The French had Moraine
spotter planes, which flew over the jungle looking for smoke or
other signs of habitation. If they saw anything, they bombed it.