Truong's A Viet Cong Memoir

In A Viet Cong Memoir, we receive excellent first hands accounts of events that unfolded in Vietnam during the Vietnam War from the author of this autobiography: Truong Nhu Tang. Truong was Vietnamese at heart, growing up in Saigon, but he studied in Paris for a time where he met and learned from the future leader Ho Chi Minh. Truong was able to learn from Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary ideas and gain a great political perspective of the conflicts arising in Vietnam during the war. His autobiography shows the readers the perspective of the average Vietnamese citizen (especially those involved with the NLF) and the attitudes towards war with the United States. In the book, Truong exclaims that although many people may say the Americans never lost on the battlefield in Vietnam — it is irrelevant. In order to understand this mindset, we have to understand how the NLF

President Lyndon Johnson declared a campaign to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, and the United States decisively lost that battle. At the beginning of Truong’s book he shares what ideas are going through his heart and mind, “I would have been willing to accept almost amy regime that could achieve real independence and that had the welfare of the people at heart. I was quite prepared to give Ho’s Northern government the benefit of the doubt on this score”(36). This quote illustrates the minds of a Vietnamese population desperate for independence in any form. They had been subjected to outside imperial forces for hundreds of years prior and were poised to accept any leader willing to help them to independence. Although Ho Chi Minh and his policies could be characterized as communist, the people of Vietnam were able to connect with him and his aspirations of a independent