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

The Spy Who Loved Us 53
So you had to bake your bread in termite nests and vent the
smoke through piles of leaves on the forest floor.”
According to An, their only pleasure came from drinking
homemade beer, of which there were two kinds: standing beer
and sitting beer. “Standing beer was made from the urine of
men. Sitting beer from the urine of women. After you took
this urine and put yeast in it, it tasted like any other beer,” An
assures me, “but men usually preferred to drink standing beer,
and women preferred sitting beer.”
An was bunked in with his sister at the Viet Minh radio
headquarters when Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach, secretary of the
Cochin China Communist Party, arrived. Thach was responsible
for setting up what came to be known as COSVN, the Central
Office for South Vietnam. The advance element of the Communist
Party’s Central Committee, COSVN directed the war in
the south. As the two men talked, An was disappointed to learn
that he would not be joining his sister in the forest. Instead, he
was being recruited to work as a spy in Thach’s newly established
military intelligence service. “I was the first recruit,” An
says. He found his new assignment ignoble. “Spying is the work
of hunting dogs and birds of prey,” he told Thach.
“I had been beaten by the riot police during the student
demonstrations in Saigon, and I had no desire to be a stool pigeon
or an informer,” An says.
“You have to fight for your country,” Thach told him. “Whatever
we want you to do, you have to do it. You have no choice.
You are fighting for the people. Any position is honorable, unless
you are working for the enemy.”
“I was supposed to follow the implantation of the Americans
in Vietnam,” An says. “To face the future, we had to start learning
about the American intervention.” Thach ordered two instructors
to come down from the north and tutor An in military
intelligence. One was trained by the Russians, one by the Chinese,
but An found both of them pretty much useless. “Basically,
Dr. Thach said I was on my own. I should borrow books from