A Vietcong Memoir

...Tang's story begins amidst the general break-up of the old empires after the Second World War...

...Its stated goal was a pluralistic national government, neutral and non-aligned, and it envisioned a peaceful reunification process that respected the right of national minorities to autonomy...

...And in Diem the Vietcong had the ideal opponent...

...A foretaste of what this meant was given at the victory parade in Saigon two weeks after the city's "liberation": endless rows of North Vietnamese regulars passing the reviewing stand in their brand new uniforms, followed by a few sickly companies of tattered Vietcong guerrillas under a red flag with a single yellow star, the flag of North Vietnam...

...When one of Tang's colleagues sarcastically suggested a funeral celebration for the movement, the North Vietnamese politely obliged...

...Now living in Paris, Mr...

...Nevertheless, the book is extremely important because it confirms so many of the predictions of successive American administrations, who at the time were widely accused of misleading the public...

...Despite these carefully constructed facades, strains were developing between the southern revolutionaries and their northern cousins, strains which grew steadily in the early 1970s as the emphasis shifted from the political and psychological arena to the battlefield...

...Among the passengers was Truong Nhu Tang, one of the founders of the National Liberation Front and a minister of justice in the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the highest ranking Vietcong official yet to flee his country...

...A VIETCONG MEMOIR: AN INSIDE ACCOUNT OF THE VIETNAM WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH Truong Nhu Tang, with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$17.95 Henrik Bering-Jensen On September 1, 1978, a leaky old river boat full of near-starving Vietnamese refugees reached an oil exploration station off the coast of Malaysia...

...As to foreign policy, the new Vietnam sided with the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet dispute and immediately embarked on an aggressive course against its neighbors...

...One of Tang's brothers remains imprisoned to this day...

...In so doing, he made the crucial mistake of believing that the Leninism Ho subscribed to was likewise a matter of convenience rather than conviction...

...Time and again the book bears out the validity of those warnings...

...Tang was completely won over by Ho's vision of a unified Vietnam devoid of foreign influence...

...Still the motto was "more friends, fewer foes...

...The NLF was formally set up in 1960...

...No wonder Tang and his associates were looked upon as traitors for having let them in...

...But of course other factors played a part too...

...Diem's ability to alienate whole segments of the population was indeed extraordinary: the Buddhists, the middle classes, the peasants...

...Increasingly, the southerners were treated as second-class revolutionaries, their functions taken over by North Vietnamese cadres...

...Earlier that year America had begun to take over where France had left off, funneling aid directly to Saigon and agreeing to train the South Vietnamese army...

...From the book he emerges as a representative of an overweening community of Saigon intellectuals who believed they could use the support of the Communists in the North to further their own cause...

...The prospect of seeing their monopoly on nationalism broken in the last minute understandably did not appeal to the Communists...

...His hatred of the French was therefore transferred to the Americans and their puppet Diem (as the vernacular of the period had it...

...Though a member of the privileged bourgeoisie and a product of French education, Tang experienced the first stirrings of nationalist sentiment in the anti-French riots in Saigon in August 1945...

...Tang's description of the scenes in Rex Dance Hall, the site of the southern revolution's final humiliation, are especially poignant: In this notorious den of sin the southern conspirators held their final gathering, knowing full well that the game was over...

...In 1969 the Provisional Revolutionary Government, in which Tang was named minister of justice, was launched with great fanfare...

...Essentially his is the tale of a revolution betrayed, of how the South helped bring about its own destruction...

...Fighting and talking, talking and fighting, as the strategy was known...

...Tang cites occasions when Saigon's intellectual elite had to sit through long seminars on the true relationship between patriotism and Communism, brutal and demeaning sessions employing all the classic Communist interrogation techniques...

...The massacres in Hue gave good reason for concern...

...Tang changed his studies from pharmacy to politics and stayed on in Paris to arouse public resistance to France's colonial policies...

...It had become an encumbrance that had to be dealt with once and for allˆ”or as it was put in Party parlance, "a new phase had been entered...

...Against overwhelming U.S...

...Sixteen months later, South Vietnam's internal chaos had reached a stage where only direct American intervention could save the country...

...At this point, Tang saw no reason to worry overmuch about the political differences between the parties involved...

...So much for the notions of neutrality and non-alignment of the original declarations...

...Henrik Bering-Jensen is a Danish writer who currently lives in the United States...

...refugee camp on Galang Island...

...The following year he was sent to study in Paris, where he was introduced to Ho Chi M-inh, who was in town to negotiate with the French (unsuccessfully, as it turned out...

...As the book progresses it becomes increasingly hard to reconcile Tang's cool and dispassionate exposition of revolutionary strategy with his professed naivete about ultimate Communist intentions...

...He declared himself willing to accept the help of almost any regime to rid the country of strangers...

...Consequently, when after the fall of Saigon the Provisional Revolutionary Government assumed power in the South, it was not as an internationally recognized government, but a government "riding on the back of the North Vietnamese army's tiger, precarious and tentative guests in their own house...

...The United States gave its reluctant assent to a coup to remove Diem...

...As Tang points out, this approach allowed them to see battles as psychological events and later to use negotiations to improve their military position...

...To Tang the growing American involvement meant the increased likelihood of a permanent division of his country, as part of the larger East-West confrontation...

...Everything they had fought for was lost...

...On March 8, 1965 U.S...

...Arbitrary arrests and confiscations were the order of the day, and the one-month "re-education" program for former government supporters was prolonged indefinitely...

...Tang's revelations therefore throw an interesting light on North Vietnam's eventual "concessions" in the Paris negotiations...

...Marines waded ashore at Danang...

...Tang sees the NLF's inability to discourage the U.S...

...Tang has written his memoirs...

...Most were Catholics, after all, and could be expected to disagree with Ho's regime...

...Otherwise the emphasis was on civil rights, land reform, and social welfare...

...In the policy discussions that followed, the southerners were simply pushed aside...

...It was considered a major victory, for instance, when chief negotiator Le Due Tho dropped his demands for Thieu's ouster and for the formation of an immediate coalition government, two points the North Vietnamese had so far .declared un-negotiable...

...By the fall of 1963, Diem's stubbornness had assumed such proportions that the situation was no longer tolerable...

...These years, then, saw the beginnings of the organized underground resistance that in time was to turn into the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the insurgents...

...For instance, it did not help Diem's position when the head of his crucial Strategic Hamlet Program turned out to be a Vietcong spy and Tang's friend...

...The plan was clearly devised to have the broadest possible appeal, Tang ascribing the fancy artwork to Ho Chi Minh himself...

...Despite his refusal to serve in the new unified government and despite his seeming candor, it is hard to feel any great sympathy for Tang himself...

...from stepping in as its greatest failure in the sixties...

...Consequently he paid little attention to the 900,000 people who had come south after the Geneva Accords with their grim testimony about people's justice and forced collectivization...

...The Vietcong strategy bore its first fruit after the 1968 Tet offensive, when a military catastrophe was turned into a political and strategic victory...

...But the NLF had been devastated in the South during Tet, and was now too openly controlled by the North...

...But as Tang remarks, though this would have gotten rid of the Thieu regime in one stroke, it would also have entailed sharing power with the southern nationalists...

...And had not Pham Van Dong, the North Vietnamese prime minister, repeatedly assured the world that "no one has this stupid and criminal idea of annexing the South...

...proud and self-willed, he ignored American advice that he come to terms with his non-Communist opponents...

...Furthermore, the NLF needed to counter the new Nixon Vietnamization policy...

...in them he concentrates on the political side of the conflict and in the process reveals major power struggles within the Vietcong, tensions the West has known very little about...

...Furthermore, Hanoi's two main objectives had already been assured: the withdrawal of American forces and the permanent presence of the North Vietnamese army on South Vietnamese soil...

...After intense deliberations, the refugees were given permission to climb aboard to await further passage to the U.N...

...The so-called Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces had already been established in 1968, stressing the importance of a slow and deliberate reunification that would respect the economic, social, and cultural differences between North and South...

...When Tang returned permanently to Saigon in 1955 after an added stint at the French School of Naval Supply in Toulon, it was to an independent but divided Vietnam, with Ho ruling the North and the playboy king Bao Dai and his prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem (who soon ousted Dai) controlling the South...

...According to Tang, it was as if the country had been invaded by a swarm of hungry locusts, devouring everything in sight...

...their policies of concord and reconciliation, which had sold so well abroad, were abandoned...

...military superiority, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese developed their own three-pronged response, carefully integrating their military, political, and diplomatic moves...

...Unfortunately it is ten years too late for Vietnam, and those who need most to learn its lessons are now busy propagating some of the same illusions about Central America.ions about Central America...

...Instead they ended up being used themselves, and thereby brought great harm upon their country...

...The army has already been unified," Tang was informed by the North Vietnamese general standing next to him...

...It is of course interesting to compare this approach with that of the Americans, whose military and diplomatic efforts tend to be treated as separate and unrelated...

...A strong effort was necessary to re-establish the autonomous and broad-based image of the southern movement and to allay the widespread fears that a Vietcong victory might turn into a blood bath...

...Their success depended on their ability to work together, and the traditional Vietnamese emphasis on personal ties and family was thought to offer sufficient guarantee against betrayal...

...According to Tang, the fierce nationalism that gripped him at the time was more a xenophobic patriotism than a coherent set of political beliefs...

...Symbolically the idea was expressed in the NLF flag with its blue and red halves and the yellow star in the middle, signifying the two halves of the nation unified in their common aim...

...But Diem's death only made things worse, as one military government replaced another with tiresome regularityˆ”"this coup shit," as an exasperated Lyndon Johnson so aptly called it...