Truong Nhu Tang (1923–2005)

Autobiography of a Vietcong politician, telling his story from how colonialism shaped his desire for independence, to fighting in the Vietnam War, to his experience navigating the post-war government.

This was recommended when asked for an account of the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective. After loving The Jakarta Method, I've also been looking for more non-western pov history, so I jumped on this and it did not disappoint. What I wasn't expecting, though, was that the author was show more born and raised in the Western style in South Vietnam, then joined the communist north. The post-war period he experienced was every bit as fascinating as the war-time period. It's still surreal to think about what a totally unique, invaluable story this was.

On a personal note, my library's copy of this book came with some very, uh... "interesting commentary" written in the margins. Particularly valuable were some notes about points that the author omitted in the book. So reading this was a doubly fun lesson on not taking anything at face value. show less

An absolutely astonishing autobiography, the Vietnamese equivalent to A Bright Shining Lie, and a candid look into the inner workings of the revolution, its strengths, and its flaws.

Tang was a child of privileged in colonial Saigon, second of sixth sons, educated in French culture by his father and Confucian tradition by his grandfather. In 1945, when the Japanese surrendered and Ho Chi Minh proclaimed a revolutionary state, Tang took his father's bird rifle and joined the vanguard youth, show more where be became a platoon commander by virtue of being the only one with a gun. He quit in disgust after seeing other vanguard youth beat an innocent French civilian. Tang went to Paris to further his education, and while he met Ho Chi Minh and was most impressed with the man's personal integrity and humility, and became patriotic and anticolonial, remained resolutely anti-political. He returned to Saigon after the Paris peace accords, eager to help build an independent South Vietnam and willing to give the new American-backed President Diem a chance. Within a year, Diem's brutality and incompetence had blown through Tang's goodwill and optimism, and he became a committed revolutionary.

By day Tang was Director General of the national sugar company, but by night he was a leader of the resistance-organizing meetings among the Saigon elite. A first arrest in 1965 had Tang in prison with what seemed like most of Siagon's civil society-businessmen, professors, doctors, lawyers, poets. This was fun, but a second arrest in 1967 saw Tang personally tortured by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan (subject of the infamous Tet Offensive street execution picture) and confined in a dark, solitary cell for 6 months. When Tang was released in a high-level prisoner exchange with the Americans, he decamped to the jungle full time. As a guerrilla fighter, Tang survived earth-shattering B-52 strikes, starvation rations, and malaria, becoming Minister for Justice in the new Provisional Government of South Vietnam.

Looking back, Tang saw his time with the guerrillas as one of the best of his life-part of a clear fight against American imperialism for the good of the Vietnamese people. But not all was well in the revolution: Northerners and hard-line Communists came to dominate the National Liberation Front. Once the war was over in 1975, Tang became Minister of Justice, but he was merely a rubber stamp for the Politburo. Perhaps the most tragic moment in a book full of tragedies is when Tang personally drove two of his brothers to their 'reeducation' camps. He expected they would be in for a 30-day seminar on Marxism and their own anti-revolutionary attitudes, similar to the one he had undergone in the jungle; an experience that was frustrating and aggravating in the extreme, but ultimately innoxious. Tang never saw his brothers again, and they along with hundreds of thousands of others, were imprisoned for years in reeducation camps. With arbitrary imprisonments and confiscations going on at all level by locust-like Northern Cadres, and the surviving Southern liberals locked out of power, Tang saw no future in Vietnam. With dozens of others, he boarded a boat and fled the country, ultimately becoming a refugee in Paris. A sad end for a dedicated patriot.

The biography is wonderful, but Tang also writes well about the political strategy of the Revolution, as opposed to the military strategies adopted by the United States, South Vietnam, and ultimately the Communists. For Tang, every action had to be evaluated holistically; success was measured by having more allies at the end of the day than they had at the beginning. The goals were to demonstrate the moral rightness of the National Liberation Front as opposed to the corruption and brutality of the Government forces, and to separate the hardlines from potential allies. Peace activists and liberals were courted, the inflexible transformed into the open minded. The difference between Tang's means and ends and that of the Government side, which aimed for momentary military freedom of action even at cost of moral legitimacy or its alliances, is staggering. That America was not able to reach an accord with Tang and his comrades, and that they were ultimately betrayed by their Communist allies, is one of the greatest historical tragedies of a very tragic war. show less