2005-04-24 A country fought for and betrayed

In one passage of A Vietcong Memoir, the author relates the experience of his daughter, whose attempts to study at the MIT, a hotbed of the US antiwar movement, were curtailed, because as a family friend of South Vietnam's president Thieu, there were fears for her safety. One wonders what the reaction would have been if it had been known that her father was Truong Nhu Tang, a founding member and justice minister of the National Liberation Front's government-in-exile, who was at that moment fleeing from US B-52 bombers in the jungle. That this admission, which wouldn't have suprised anyone in Vietnam, has to be confined to footnote, only gives some idea of the density of information contained in his account of his role in Vietnam's long and poingnant war.

While Vietnam memoirs by Americans are commonplace, few, to my knowledge, are accounts by Vietnamese, especially the NVA or the Vietcong. Truong Nhu Tang's account is doubly unusual, because he was a non-communist Vietnamese nationalist from a rich southern family, who helped found the NLF in 1960 to rid the South of its US-backed dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem. As a result, Tang has to go into some detail, to explain why so many Southerners opposed the Saigon regime to the point of rebellion.

His own struggle began as a student in 1945, while caught up in the mass demonstrations against the return of the French, a cause which, while studying in Paris, led to him to join the antiwar movement, and where he met Ho Chi Minh, who he would come to see as the Father of the Nation. Returning home after the French war, his nationalism and opposition to Diem's corrupt dictatorship lead to his fateful choice to join the Hanoi-backed NLF. Diem, who would play Batista to Ho's Castro, caused so much opposition that even the South's elite turned against him.

While much of Tang's account isn't unknown, his inside knowledge of society provides a fresh context, for example he recounts that Vietnamese prefer to set more store by family contacts rather than institutions, he explains how many southerners could conspire and cooperate with the other side. But while this is fascinating, it isn't until he is betrayed to the regime and arrives in jail, to find many of his comrades lying in agony from the effects of torture, that the book really comes alive.

Perhaps because of distance and disillusion over time, Tang writes in a self-effacing style, that leaves one to doubt at times his and his colleagues blind trust in the North Vietnamese promises that the South would be allowed to choose its own system after the war. A trust that would be betrayed after the Americans were sent packing and the Saigon regime fell. Nonetheless it shows how (deliberately?) short-sighted the US was as it went to fight for a dictatorship, while many of Vietnam's intelligentsia were forced to take refuge in the arms of the Communists.

Still, it ends on a hopeful note, as Tang remarks, in 1984 before glasnost, that Japan's democracy movement was crushed by 1939, only to reemerge after World War 2. Recommended.