This is that rare book on Vietnam which contributes new information which is essential to understanding the war and the country. Chanoff and Toai have assembled an extraordinary set of new interviews, published reminiscences, and war-time interrogation reports with northern and southern Vietnamese participants in the decades long struggle to build a unified communist country.

These are as frank and revealing a set of eyewitness interviews as anyone is ever likely to assemble. They deal honestly and painfully with the hardships of war, the combination of idealism and brutality that pervade daily life during war, and the shattered dreams of many participants during land reform, ideological purges and power grabs.

I consider this one of the 15 or 20 books that belongs on everyone's list of the ten most important books written on the war. Along with books by David Marr, Hue-Tam Ho Tai and Le Ly Hayslip, I consider it one of the essential sources on Vietnam itself. There is not just the insight of personal memoirs from well-known events, there are also many major revelations about critical events in the war -- such as the Buddhist struggles and the building of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

I have been teaching courses on the contry and the war for over 20 years at the University of California at San Diego. I expect to be using this book in class for many years.

In 1943, two years before his birth in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, Toai's father and older brother joined the Vietminh, the communist underground movement in Vietnam. Toai became a National Liberation Front (NLF, Viet Cong) supporter as a high school student and rose to be an important student leader in the Saigon University during the late 1960's. He published a student magazine Tu Quet, (Self Determinination) and unswervingly followed the Viet Cong's highly-attractive propaganda line, "Peace, Freedom, Independence, Neutrality, and Social Welfare."

Toai never formally joined the Viet Cong, but, for nationalistic and idealistic reasons, he served it superbly. He led takeovers of the Vietnamese National Assembly and the Cambodian Embassy in Saigon, and lectured at Berkley to American anti-war activists (who thought his views too tame). After the North Vietnamese Army imposed peace in 1975, he became a senior official of the Ministry of Finance under the Provisional Government. He soon disagreed on purely professional grounds with a superior official and was quickly and unceremoniously tossed into jail.

Toai had previously read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and dismissed its substance as propaganda. When arrested, he vividly recalled Gulag's chapter 2, entitled "Arrest," in which the freshly arrested victim invariably thinks, "Who me? What for? It's a mistake, they'll clear it up." Toai consoled himself that the Gulag was in "old" Russia, and that he was in the "new" Vietnam. It turned out that there was no significant difference. He lived through two and a half years of horrors that may seem unbelievable to those who have not read Solzhenitsyn's works.

Toai was never charged with any offense, and was thus jailed for no reason at all. His wife, a French citizen, managed to return to France and from there won his freedom. As he was being released, the fact that there was no official reason whatever for either his arrest or his release caused bureaucratic gyrations that would have been hilarious had the issue been less serious.

During much of his time in prison, Toai was befriended by Nguyen Van Hien, an old and often-jailed Vietminh cadre from before the time that Ho Chi Minh left the Soviet Comintern and returned to Vietnam. Hien asked Toai to recall the NLF's program, a shining beacon - promulgate all democratic freedoms, amnesty to all political detainees, abolish all concentration camps, and strictly ban all illegal arrests and imprisonments. "What do you make of all that now," asked Hien, and his expression suggested, "We've all been taken in...Look around you stupid, what do you see?"

Incredibly, despite his sufferings and disillusionment, Hien remained a loyal communist. Like uncountable thousands of other idealists before him, he still grasped his lifelong ideal although he probably understood that he had been purged purely because he knew too much. "I've never eaten chocolate," he said. "I'll probably never know what it tastes like."

Toai eventually spoke again to former anti-Vietnam war activists in the U.S., thinking that he had something important to tell them. He was wrong. Most of them didn't want to listen.

(Published in a local newsletter in 1987.)

" A Viet Cong Memoir" is an intriguing historical account of the "other side" of the Vietnam War. Mr. Truong was a member of the National Liberation Front, as opposed to an actual military guerilla. The media always referred to the NLF as "the political arm of the Viet Cong". That always struck me as a dark, typical Vietnam type mystery. With "VCM", the NLF has a human face to go with the mystery. Right from the outset, any Vietnam vet as myself must take a story told by a VC with several grains of salt! Mr. Troung is beyond a doubt engaging in a bit of revisionist history, painting the indigenous (Southern) Vietnamese NLF in a fairer light than the more taciturn, hard core Communist Northern invaders. (...) A decent awareness of the conflict is needed to fully appreciate the book. With all these constraints aside, "VCM" rates as 5 star history. This should be required reading for serious students of the War, almost on a par with Bernard Fall's epic "Street Without Joy". The reasons are many: Troung is an excellent writer, both at once engagingly formal yet abidingly down to earth. Well educated, well connected and intelligent, he was involved with the NLF from the early 1950s-the French era of the War. The reader senses Troung's commitment to Ho Chi Minh's cause right from the time he meets "Uncle Ho" as a student in Paris. I believe that he believed in Ho's aphorisms- "liberty sweet liberty", "victory great victory", etc. Since Troung was not a jungle guerilla, the military side of the conflict is not emphasized here. Four major aspects of the War are mentioned; these are the book's strengths. 1) The reader will understand how the nation of South Vietnam ran and eventually disintegrated. The author paints a grim picture of a string of venal, petty and authoritative Saigon regimes. Troung came from an upper class Southern family and was well placed to report accurately.He even does time in a dank Saigon prison. Typical for Vietnam, his wife springs him with a bribe! 2) For a foreigner, the author had an excellent (!) grasp of the American political scene. The Vietnamese must have seen the U.S. letting the War slip away long before we did. 3) "VCM" is the only place I have read a fair, balanced and nuanced version of the back room deals at the 5-year debacle known as "The Paris Peace Talks". There was actually an ebb and flow, a system of sorts. Did Henry Kissinger blink? Was he outfoxed? Or, as the author seems to suggest, were he and Nixon just out of maneuvering room? 4) Critically, Troung takes pains to paint the South Vietnam oriented NLF as a kinder, gentler "third way" between the real bad guys (the Saigon regimes and their American cronies) and the hard core Marxists from Hanoi. The NLF wanted to set up a quasi-independent government in Saigon that would allow for the obvious differences between the 2 Vietnams. The infighting was intense and the "good guys", if that's what they really were, got stiffed good and hard. I chose to take Troung at his word; other readers may disagree. As a finale, "VCM" offers a rare, poignant, and touching chapter on the refugees known as the "boat people". I used to think that "Vietnam" consisted of that remote, little dusty Engineer camp I lived in for a year. Then I started reading other folk's far (!) more earthy accounts of RVN. 30 years after coming home, I continue to be ASTOUNDED by how many stories and sides there are to this foggy and mysterious place. "VCM" makes some sense out of the mystery. Then again, this being Vietnam, it may deepen it! Night always did fall quickly over there.

I read this book when it was first published and have used it as a reference as both a student and teacher of the Vietnam Conflict for many years. Before having traveled to Vietnam, this was one of the first sources I'd encountered that put a human face on a former enemy that other texts and media reports had failed to provide. The text gives the reader an excellent view of one man's perspective in the National Liberation Front and shows its readers an outlook rarely seen from an American political sentiment. Of particular interest to me were the author's personal accounts of espionage during the war and the physical and emotional affect American fire power had on the Vietnamese combatants.

"A Viet Cong Memoir" by Truong Nhu Tang (Former Minister of Justice) offers some rare glimpses into the Vietnam War. I haven't finished reading the book just yet, but did scan the last chapter to read the punch line. Truong Nhu Tang, fed up with the mismanagement of Vietnam, he 'lost the faith' and became disavowed, and fled to Paris, France in 1978. Albert Pham Nooc Thao, a close friend of the author and fellow Communist, was Chief of Security for South Vietnams armed forces when Diem was in power. Albert worked hard to institute programs in Vietnam to anger the civilians and make them more prone to blame the government and join the NLF. He also bird dogged and acted as Diem's bloodhound to locate officers and officials who didn't support Diem. What a Trojan Horse! I wonder how many other high ranking RVN officials also were on the other side, using their positions to spy, bring charges of corruption on the RVN gov't, get rid of competent officers and officials by McCarthyism (accusing them of being communists) and cause general confusion?