A Viet Cong Memoir by Truong Nhu Tang

Title: A Viet Cong Memoir
Author: Truong Nhu Tang
Publisher: Vintage Books, New York (1st US paperback edition)
ISBN 0 394 74309 1

Summary:
Truong Nhu Tang was not your typical VC. He did not lead ambushes or stage assaults against firebases. He never fired a weapon in anger. Yet he was being held in the cells at the Saigon Police HQ at the time of the Tet Offensive, and he was sufficiently important for his release to be brokered by the CIA in exchange for someone big being held in North Vietnam. He subsequently spent several years living on the Cambodian border, where he managed to escape an airborne assault on his headquarters during the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and took part in the founding of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, for which he became the Minister of Justice. It seemed to be the penultimate step on a straight road to a radiant victory.

Thoughts:
This is the political autobiography of a leading figure in the Vietnam War whose life embodies all the contradictions of Vietnamese nationalism. The son of an affluent Saigon family, Truong Nhu Tang was still a law student when he met Ho Chi Minh in France shortly after World War II; a meeting that changed the course of his life. In 1958, he was one of the three men who took part in the founding meeting of the National Liberation Front in Saigon, and was one of the men who designed the VC flag. At the same time, he was living a double life as a high-ranking official, ending up directing South Vietnam's national rubber industry, and was on a first-name basis with military figures such as Nguyen Cao Ky through his friend Albert Pham Ngoc Thao, a former Viet Minh who became a master spy, helped foment the 1963 coup and was also the South Vietnamese military attaché in Washington for a time. The extent to which the National Liberation Front infiltrated the South Vietnamese establishment is shown here through the portrayal of his friend Albert's life: he pushed Ky's upward progress into national politics at the same time as falling foul of the regime as a result of his failed 1965 coup attempt. Truong Nhu Tang ultimately found out that North Vietnamese party politics were just as dangerous. Seeing how the Southerners who led the NLF were being sidelined by doctrinaire Marxists from Hanoi from 1972 onwards, he fought against the flow but ultimately resigned as the NLF Minister of Justice, dismayed at the treatment being meted out to South Vietnamese veterans and the large number of people going "missing" after Saigon fell in 1975. As a disillusioned middle-aged man he was forced to concur with his father's earlier warnings to him about the Communists, resulting in him turning his back on a position in the new national government and fleeing Vietnam by boat in 1976.

This is an insightful read about the political dimensions behind the military struggle involved in the Vietnam War. The most telling moment is the victory parade in Ho Chi Minh City on 15 May 1975, when Truong Nhu Tang, standing on the podium with the other bigwigs, watches the march-past of NVA tank squadrons, anti-aircraft batteries, artillery and missiles, followed by massed NVA troops, which ends with "several straggling companies" of VC "looking unkempt and raging after the display that had preceded them". He asks "Where are our divisions one, three, five, seven and nine?" The reply: "The army has already been unified." His concluding message is that, although independence of sorts as a Soviet satellite State was achieved in 1975, meaningful national unification was not achieved.

Rating: ***

He should have called me many years ago and I could have told him how it would end. That's just communism. 

Tom

He himself points out that his businessman dad warned him about the Communists, but he didn't listen.

Yes I read that. I would think one would have to live in a vacuum to be fooled by communisim. Even back then. But it usually gets adherents in parts of the world with little education. But this guy was not one of those.

Oh well, a sucker is born every minute. They just cause so much suffering for everyone.

Tom