Pham Xuan An | Henry Kamm
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Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese by Henry Kamm (Arcade Publishing, 1997)
Trích đoạn về Phạm Xuân Ẩn (trang 35-42): .... General An, one of the boldest undercover Communist intelligence agents in Saigon throughout the war against the United States and South Vietnam, loves America and Americans and ascribes his "political awakening" to the compassion that stirred him when he saw Japanese occupation troops mistreat and humiliate the same French who not much earlier had mistreated and humiliated his compatriots. If this is puzzlingly complex and seemingly contradictory, so is An, a frail man, bent but unlikely to break, like a tree in a tempestuous landscape. I have known him – I once thought well – for a good quarter century. Not for a moment did I suspect him of being, throughout the war, a colonel of the National Liberation Front's army, the Viet Cong, as they were called by their enemies. I knew him as a generous, informative, and gently witty colleague, the only Vietnamese employed by the American press to be given by his employer, Time magazine, the status of a full-fledged correspondent, not a mere local assistant to his American colleagues sent out from New York to cover the war. His other employer promoted him to general after the war. Now, sixty-eight years old and still, at least nominally, on active service, An receives old friends and colleagues. Until doi moi, he was rarely allowed to he at home for those who requested to see him. In the book-filled living room of his modest Saigon villa – a general of the former South Vietnamese army would never have lodged so humbly – An, much frailer than in his journalistic days, his voice dim but his mind vital with restrained passion, explains. "Mine has always been a paradoxical life," he began a long conversation, in an understatement singular even for so understated a man. An's father, a land surveyor and customs agent in French service in the southernmost Mekong Delta, punished him for a failure in school http://www.viet-studies.org/PXAn_HenryKamm.htm
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at age nine by sending him to live with relatives in a village near Hue, the imperial capital, in central Vietnam. Failure in education even at an early age is a cardinal sin in a traditional family like An's in so Confucian a society. An's father wanted his son to learn how well off he was by making him experience the poverty of rural life in one of Vietnam's enduringly poorest regions. It was so poor we had no oil for the lamps and used a wick dipped into a plate of rat fat as a candle," An remembered. When he failed again the following year, his father brought him home to supervise his education himself. An's first realization of the paradoxes of his nation came at age thirteen, in 1940, when the Japanese occupied Vietnam after France's surrender to Hitler. In the southern port town of Rach Gia, An's home at the time, the conquerors rounded up the French men and in the central square chained them together under the merciless sun. The purpose was to humiliate the former white rulers in the eyes of the Vietnamese and so accredit Japan's grand vision of a new, triumphant Asia under Asian – Japanese – auspices. "I never liked the French, because the French colonialists' children mistreated us Vietnamese children," An said. But the Japanese cruelty disgusted me. The Frenchmen were thirsty. I went to ask my father, and he said, `Boil some water and take it to them.' When I did, the Japanese slapped the Frenchmen in the face. "I still don't like Japanese officials," An continued. "Before 1975 I never accepted invitations from their embassy because of that." It was the only time in many conversations on his turbulent life, so placid on the surface, that I detected an edge of vindictiveness sharpening An's voice and equanimity. The Frenchmen's fate aroused his sympathies for the underdog. Another factor in his early decision to take sides actively, he said, was Vietnamese injustice to Vietnamese. He saw landowners, his classmates' fathers, mistreat their tenants. "They tortured them," An said. "They forced their daughters and even their wives to sleep with them. "That’s why I have such respect for America," said the Vietnamese general. "They are taught to help the underdog." An joined in clandestine military training organized by the Viet Minh, the Communist-led armed movement that drove out the French. He was rejected at his first attempt because his father was a landowner and worked for the French regime, but in October 1945 he was accepted. The political instruction that was given along with the http://www.viet-studies.org/PXAn_HenryKamm.htm
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military training emphasized independence, not communism. "I was a young patriot and felt strongly about social injustice," An said. He had his baptism of fire in jungle warfare against the French army. The Viet Minh didn't have enough rifles, about fifty for more than a hundred troops, and after firing you had to pick up the cartridge cases to make new bullets," he recalled. At nineteen he was a platoon leader, but he was soon sent back to his family, in territory fully under French control. He organized student demonstrations in Saigon against French rule – "independence was my sole goal" – but nonetheless was drafted into the colonial army in 1950 and sent briefly to officers' school. A deferment demobilized him. In 1952 his Viet Minh commanders summoned him to a jungle command post near Saigon and assigned him, over his protest against becoming a stool pigeon, to work for what they called the "strategic intelligence" branch. "I was the first recruit in intelligence," An said. The following year he was made a member of the Communist party. "I was given the classic Communist texts to read, in French, and found good ideals in them," he said. "I became a Communist." In 1954, as the French departed, South Vietnam gained the independence that it owed largely to Ho Chi Minh's armed victory. An was drafted into the new army being formed under American guidance and made a warrant officer in the psycho-logical warfare branch of the general staff. His first assignment was to act as liaison officer between the Saigon command and the American and French officers who carried out the turnover from French to American responsibility for organizing, training, and supplying the armed forces of the new stare. An, who had begun studying English with a Vietnamese Protestant minister in 1945, speaks with convincing affection of the members of the military and intelligence team headed by Colonel – later General – Edward G. Lansdale, the principal American organizer of "counterinsurgency" warfare, under CIA sponsorship, against Southeast Asian Communists. It was these men who laid the basis for the unequal American – South Vietnamese military alliance, which at its peak brought a presence of more than a half million Americans to a country they little understood. An insists he never felt that his positions created a conflict of interest. "These two things are completely different," he said. "My actions were completely compartmentalized." 'No doubt he means that his personal friendship for his American and South Vietnamese colleagues was genuine and quite separate from what must have been a constant flow of his rich knowledge of their activities into the Communist "strategic intelligence" compartment. http://www.viet-studies.org/PXAn_HenryKamm.htm
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Pham Xuan An | Henry Kamm
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Among An's duties was to advise on the recommendation of officers for training courses at American military staff colleges. It is not the least irony in a life rather rich in ironies that it was An who passed favorably on the application of the young Nguyen Van Thieu, South Vietnam's last military dictator, to pay his first visit to the United States for a course at Fort Leavenworth. "I learned a lot from the Americans," An said, his appreciation of American ways unfeigned. "I was obtuse before; they enlarged my horizons." Clearly the affection was mutual. Officers of the Military Assistance Group continued to teach An English, and in 1957 they sponsored an official visit to the United States for the young South Vietnamese liaison officer. Recommended for a scholarship by Lansdale, he enrolled at Orange Coast College, a junior college in Orange County, California, as a journalism student. "I was the first Vietnamese to settle there," said An, in ironic allusion to the predilection of postwar Vietnamese refugees for Orange County. In 1959, before returning to Vietnam, he served as an intern-reporter on the Sacramento Bee. An wants it clearly understood that he was a genuine journalist and did not only use his jobs with Vietnam Press, an official news agency, then with Reuters news service, and finally with Time as a cover for espionage. "Journalism helped me to be objective," he said. "I'm sad I'm not free to do it any more." His commanders were sufficiently sophisticated, he said, not to use his position to plant fake stories. "They were decisive years for me," An said of his American stay. "I learned about American culture, the American mentality." What the Vietnarnese general says a bout American virtues, eyes aglow with admiration, could pass muster at an American Legion Fourth of July celebration — honesty, hard work, fairness, a sense of justice, openness, and kindness. "I like the United States," he said. "The Americans did a lot of good here. They trained a generation to work, to be more realistic. They gave us some notions of liberty and respect for human rights. The Gls treated the people who worked for them well. They even got a day off every week. They showed me how to see things the other guy's way, to criticize yourself first. I would like my children to be educated there." A son, Pham Xuan Hoang An, has returned to Saigon from nearly three years at the University of North Carolina, which were preceded by six years of study in the Soviet Union. He works as a press officer for the Saigon branch of the Foreign Ministry, speaks with equal http://www.viet-studies.org/PXAn_HenryKamm.htm
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fondness of his friends in Moscow and Chapel Hill, and hopes someday to return to the United States for a Ph.D. His father, no doubt because of the secrets to which he is privy, has not been allowed to accept invitations to visit American friends. "I always hoped the United States would open its eyes and help the real Vietnam," An said. "I tried to help the Americans to understand Vietnam. They were too influenced by the French and supported the Catholics from the north too much, not the people of the south. The northerners were bitter refugees, who lost everything they owned when they fled to the south in 1954." An makes light of the difficulties of his extraordinary existence on both sides of the divide, but if pressed will admit that he lived in terror. "But I'm a fatalist; God decides," the Communist general said wryly, without apparent irony. "I didn't even know my rank; 1 never think of such things." He disclosed his promotion to general with selfmocking embarrassment, and noted, as if in extenuation, that even at that rank his monthly pay was well below one hundred dollars. An said he met his ever-varying Viet Cong contacts by appointment in equally varying locations in Saigon, delivering his intelligence orally, rarely putting anything into writing. Since very few even among his comrades knew him, identification was usually only by items of clothing. But not infrequently he would slip out of the city into the nearby "liberated zones" for longer debriefings by senior commanders, usually in tunnels to shelter from bombing. Crossing the undrawn lines was frighteningly dangerous, since both sides naturally were intensely suspicious. All Saigon governments dealt harshly even with innocents whom they suspected of Communist sympathies. Only An's wife and mother knew of his perilous double life. And a double life it truly was, until its very last moment, Saigon's surrender, when An for the first time put on the uniform of the army he had served secretly for so long and continues to serve. His ultimate act in the final stage of the American evacuation was to save the life of an old friend, desperate to make his way to one of the last helicopters but trapped and unable to force his way through a panicky and hostile crowd into the building whose roof was the evacuation pad. An bluffed and bullied his elderly companion into the place of rescue. Both cried at the moment of their hasty parting. The friend was no less a figure than Dr Tran Kim Tuven, chief of the feared secret police under the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese dictator overthrown and murdered in a 1963 coup, and a longtime associate of http://www.viet-studies.org/PXAn_HenryKamm.htm
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the American Central Intelligence Agency. Perhaps Tuyen would have suffered no more than long or permanent imprisonment in a concentration camp – euphemistically called "reeducation" in Communist Vietnam – had An not made possible his escape, but on that cataclysmic April 29, 1975, when nothing was certain but the Communist victory, both had reason to fear the worst for so marked a figure of the old regime and the Viet Cong colonel who helped him ro escape from "revolutionary justice." Five years earlier An had risked his precarious status on behalf of an American colleague. A rash young reporter for Time was captured in Cambodia, the graveyard of most journalists who fell into the hands of the Khmers Rouges irregulars fighting then alongside North Vietnamese troops, who had an interest in hiding their presence on foreign territory from the outside world. An succeeded in persuading the Vietnamese to release the American, Robert Sam Anson. It was only when Anson met An again many years after the war that An, still reluctantly, acknowledged his life-saving role. "I was sad on April the thirtieth," said An of the day of his army's victory. "I said good-bye to Tuyen. Most of my friends left, and I knew those who didn't would be in trouhle." He was sad also because he had sent his wife and four children to the United States on an evacuation flight organized for Time's Vietnamese staff, to spare them what might have turned into a bloody battle for Saigon. They returned after the dust had settled. Although An is too loyal to say so, his loyalty has not been rewarded with the full confidence of the men from the north who rule the country. Shortly after what in today's politically correct language is called "the liberation," An was sent north for a period of "reeducation" organized for those whose service to the cause had exposed them to the life and ideas of the enemy. On his return to Saigon he was offered the job of press censor, which he declined. Pham Xuan An's life, with all its bewildering ambiguities, can serve as a paradigm for a people that in modern times has continually had to confront a multitude of painful choices, which tragically never included one that most could whole¬heartedly embrace. Most did no more than the minimum that the varied, frequently changing powers in control exacted from them, and even this minimum compliance cost countless lives. An, not a man who shirks ethical choices, chose. "There were true patriots on both sides, despite their differences," http://www.viet-studies.org/PXAn_HenryKamm.htm
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he said. Reflecting on the aggressive influences that for better and for worse went into the making of the minds of South Vietnamese of his age, he acknowledged a debt to all. "There are three cultures in a Vietnamese like me," he said. "And there is a little communism, too."
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