A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath

by Truong Nhu Tang

Overview

"An absorbing and moving autobiography...An important addition not only to the literature of Vietnam but to the larger human story of hope, violence and disillusion in the political life of our era."—Chicago Tribune

When he was a student in Paris, Truong Nhu Tang met Ho Chi Minh. Later he fought in the Vietnamese jungle and emerged as one of the major figures in the "fight for liberation"—and one of the most determined adversaries of the United States. He became the Vietcong's Minister of Justice, but at the end of the war he fled the country in disillusionment and despair. He now lives in exile in Paris, the highest level official to have defected from Vietnam to the West. This is his candid, revealing and unforgettable autobiography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394743097
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/12/1986
Edition description:	1st Vintage Books ed
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	689,835
Product dimensions:	5.17(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front and Minister of Justice in the Vietcong's Provisional Revolutionary Government, was one of the most determined adversaries of the United States during the war. Living a double, at times a triple, life in Saigon, he was a high-level economics official for the South Vietnamese government who simultaneously worked as one of the revolution's most effective urban organizers. Captured and tortured by the Thieu police, in 1968 he was traded in a secret U.S.-Viet Cong prisoner exchange and spent the rest of the war in the resistance strongholds on the Cambodian border.

A revolutionary for almost thirty years, after liberation Tang fought a losing battle on behalf of the policy of national reconciliation and concord which he had helped design. In the end, profoundly disillusioned by the massive political repression and economic chaos the new government brought with it, he carried out a dramatic escape by boat to a U.N. refugee camp in the South China Sea. He now lives in exile in Paris, France.

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Foreword
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Vietcong Memoir"
by .
Copyright © 1986 Truong Nhu Tang.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

"Beautifully written." — William Shawcross, front page, Washington Post Book World



"By showing the nature and hidden strength of our opponents, this account goes a long way toward explaining why America failed in Vietnam despite its greatly superior military power. But A Vietcong Memoir is more than just an exposition of the revolutionaries' side of the war. It is also an absorbing and moving autobiography...An important addition not only to the literature of Vietnam but to the larger human story of hope, violence and disillusion in the political life of our era."

— Arnold R. Isaacs, Chicago Tribune

"Literate, mercifully free of the stridencies and banalities that characterize the Communists' agitprop prose. The prose gives off an aura of authenticity and reasonableness."

— Robert Manning, The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher