A Vietcong Memoir

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.

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.