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Truong Nhu Tang with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai Truong Nhu Tang grew up in Saigon, one of six sons in a wealthy family. He was educated in French schools where he was taught to take pride in “nos ancestres les Galois” (our ancestors the Gauls) while remaining “profoundly ignorant” about his own country. Coming of age as the French colonial period ended, Tang hoped to find a nationalist Vietnamese leader in Ngô Đình Diệm but found himself deeply disappointed in Diệm’s administration and, with other nationalist intellectuals, began the formation of what would become the National Liberation Front (NLF). Never a soldier combatant, Tang was involved in the psychological and political side of the NLF. He operated as a “Vietcong urban organizer ,” recruiting members of Saigon society into the NLF, and he served as Minister of Justice in the South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government. At the end of the war, he was deeply disillusioned by reunified Vietnam and emigrated to Paris. He continues to live in France. He wrote his memoir in English with the help of David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai and published it in America in 1985. from A Vietcong Memoir (1985) After three years it was apparent that the new president1 was a powermonger , not a builder. For those who could see, the fatal narrowness of his political understanding was already evident. In the first place, Diem’s armed enemies had for the most part only been mauled, not destroyed. Elements of the defeated sect armies went underground , licking their wounds and looking for allies. Gradually they began to link up with groups of former Vietminh2 fighters fleeing from the To Cong suppression.3 The core of a guerrilla army was already in the making. Even as old enemies regrouped, Diem was busy adding new ones. In the countryside he destroyed at a blow the dignity and livelihood of several hundred thousand peasants by canceling the land-redistribution arrangements instituted by the Vietminh in areas they had controlled prior to 1954. He might have attempted to use American aid to compensate owners Truong Nhu Tang with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai | 37 and capitalize on peasant goodwill; instead he courted the large landholders . Farmers who had been working land they considered theirs, often for years, now faced demands for back rent and exorbitant new rates. It was an economic disaster for them. In 1957 Diem promulgated his own version of land reform, ostensibly making acreage available, though only to peasants who could pay for it. But even this reform was carried out primarily on paper. In the provinces it was sabotaged everywhere by landowners acting with official connivance. The result of all this was a frustrated and indignant peasantry, fertile ground for anti-Diem agitation. Meanwhile, the city poor were tasting their own ration of misery. In Saigon the government pursued “urban redevelopment” with a vengeance, dispossessing whole neighborhoods in favor of modern commercial buildings and expensive apartments, which could only be utilized by Americans and the native upper classes. Not a few times, poorer quarters were completely razed by uncontrollable fires (Khanh Hoi and Phu Nuan were particularly calamitous examples).4 Few thought these fires were accidental; they were too closely followed by massive new construction. The displaced moved onto sampans on the river or to poorer, even more distant districts. In the slums and shanty villages resentment against the Americans mixed with a simmering anger toward the regime. In the highland regions of the Montagnards, too, Diem’s policies were cold-blooded and destructive. Attempting to make the tribespeople more accessible to government control, troops and cadres forced village populations down out of the mountains and into the valleys—separating them from their ancestral lands and graves. In Ban Me Thuot5 and other areas, the ingrained routines of social life were profoundly disrupted by these forced relocations, which seemed to the tribespeople nothing more than inexplicable cruelty. By the end of 1958, Diem had succeeded brilliantly in routing his enemies and arrogating power. But he had also alienated large segments of the South Vietnamese population, creating a swell of animosity throughout the country. Almost unknown at first, in a few short years he had made himself widely detested, a dictator who could look for support only to the Northern Catholic refugees6 and to those who made money from his schemes. Most damning of all, he had murdered many patriots who fought in the struggle against France and had...

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