Truong nhu tang biography of abraham lincoln pdf
In December , at a memorable jungle meeting, my friends suggested that we form the Provisional Committee of the NLF. Subsequently a larger meeting was set up on a rubber plantation in Bien Hoa, twenty miles northeast of Saigon. Present were about twenty people, all of them Southerners and educated in France. Our first thought was to choose a president and Tran Kim Quan, a Saigon pharmacist, was proposed.
Quan had been a leader of the peace movement and seemed the ideal candidate, but he refused. My comrades formed a commando unit to kidnap Tho, but on their first attempt they somehow managed to make off with the wrong man. Another raid was promptly organized and this time we succeeded. At this meeting we decided to form a Permanent Committee of the NLF and we officially elected the newly liberated Tho as president.
Throughout this period we had close support from the North Vietnamese communists. We were in fact dependent on them for weapons, communications, and especially for our propaganda network. But almost all of us were Southerners along with a few Northerners who had moved south years earlier —and many of us were not communists. Ours was not a communist movement and we believed that the North Vietnamese leaders, who had been fighting so resolutely against the French, would place the interests of the people and the nation above the interest of ideology.
The North Vietnamese on their part never indicated that they wanted to impose communism on the South. On the contrary, they knew, they said, that the South must have a different program altogether, one that embodied our aspirations not just for independence but also for internal political freedom. I believed, in addition, that the Northern leadership would have the wisdom to draw from the experiences—both good and bad—of other communist countries, and especially of North Vietnam, and that they could avoid the errors made elsewhere.
North Vietnam was, as Ho Chi Minh often declared, a special situation in which nationalists and communists had combined their efforts. Clearly South Vietnam was no less special, and the newly constituted NLF Permanent Committee felt a certain amount of confidence in working with our Northern compatriots. In , I was arrested for the first time.
I had been helping other Saigon intellectuals form the Self-Determination Movement of South Vietnam, an organization opposed to the South Vietnamese regime. For this offense, I was imprisoned for two years.
Truong nhu tang biography of abraham lincoln by william m thayer: Trương Như Tảng (14 November – 8 November ) was a South Vietnamese lawyer and politician. He was active in many anti- South Vietnam organizations before joining the newly created Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam as the Minister of Justice.
In a sense, though, it was only a warning because there was no evidence at that time of my Viet Cong contacts. I was arrested again and this time my imprisonment was harsher. The police used many of their favorite techniques to torture me. They forced me to drink soapy water and ran volt electric shocks through my body.
For a month I was held in a tiny cell less than two meters square. They forced me to confess that I was a communist although I was not , and to describe my underground activities.
Truong nhu tang biography of abraham lincoln
I was still in prison when the Tet offensive swept the country. At one point the police told us that if the Viet Cong got into Saigon we would all be killed. To my surprise and relief there were two Americans in the van as well, and they brought us to a CIA safe house. Later I discovered that secret negotiations had been going on between the Americans and the NLF for a prisoner exchange and that I was to be traded for two American colonels.
Before I left the CIA safe house I was given a letter for the NLF authorities and pressed to accept a radio as well, which I refused, believing it to contain an electronic bug. A helicopter flew me and two other exchanged prisoners to Trang Bang, a small district about fifty miles northwest of Saigon. We were released at a soccer field where the Viet Cong security chief for Loc Ninh province a Viet Cong-controlled area was waiting for us.
Traveling by night and sleeping by day to avoid ARVN hunters and American bombardments, we took almost two weeks to get there, even though COSVN was located on the Mimot plantation near the Cambodian border, only about one hundred miles from Saigon. The headquarters was guarded by a single regiment, and well armed though they were, I could not help wondering at the vulnerability of the place.
In the early Sixties, before I was jailed, there had been quite a few North Vietnamese military cadres assisting us but not many soldiers. The great majority of our troops then were Southern resistance fighters many of whom were veterans of the French colonial wars. Others were peasants who joined us when the NLF was formed.
Almost all of this latter group still lived at home. During the day they were loyal citizens of South Vietnam; at night they became Viet Cong.
Truong nhu tang
For the most part these guerrillas cared nothing about Marxist-Leninism or any other ideology. But they despised the local officials who had been appointed over them by the Saigon dictatorship. They were treated as brothers by the NLF, and although Viet Cong pay was almost nonexistent, these peasant soldiers were loyal and determined fighters.
Moreover, they had the support of much of the population: people in the countryside and even in the cities provided food and intelligence information and protected our cadres. Although South Vietnamese propaganda attacked us as communists and murderers, the peasants believed otherwise. To them we were not Marxist-Leninists but simply revolutionaries fighting against a hated dictatorship and foreign intervention.
But our goals were in fact generally shared by the people. We were working for Southern self-determination and independence—from Hanoi as well as from Washington. While we in the Viet Cong were beholden to Hanoi for military supplies and diplomatic contacts, many of us still believed that the North Vietnamese leadership would respect and support the NLF political program, that it would be in their interest to do so.
Unfortunately the Tet offensive also proved catastrophic to our plans. In February , he and two other women anti-government organizers, San No and Duy Lien, were part of a secret prisoner exchange for two American prisoners. The nature of the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime and the total victory of the PAVN gave total control to the communist elements.
The nationalist forces in the south were brushed aside in favour of communist cadres from the north. Not helping matters was the imprisonment of two of his brothers in the reeducation camps. Through friends of his wife, he and others pooled their money to buy a boat, which they boarded in August While on the open ocean, they tried to flag down ships patrolling the busy shipping lanes.
However, none of the freighters would stop to pick them up, and they drifted further and further south. They were attacked by Thai pirates, who stole money and valuables from the passengers but let the boat continue on. Stopping there, they were picked up by UN ships and taken to a refugee camp on Galang Island , Indonesia. My wife and I gathered the few personal things we had decided to take and said a painful farewell to my mother.
Then we took the bus to Long Xuyen, arriving at the home of Dr. Ton's parents late in the afternoon. We made our way down to the hold and through a trap door in the fake deck that Ton's cousin had built. In the bowels of the boat we sat down among water barrels and sacks of rice and tried to find comfortable positions.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I began to make out other people in the hold, about 20 of them, adults and a few children — our fellow passengers on this journey. The adults sat with their backs against the side walls, the children in the middle. Below us was the ballast, a foot above our heads the false floor that would conceal us, if we were lucky, from prying eyes.
After a few minutes the engine began throbbing and the boat moved slowly off, easing into a steady motion downriver. What with the slightly fetid air and the boat's gentle roll, I soon fell into an exhausted sleep. It must have been several hours later that I dragged myself awake to the knowledge that the throbbing had stopped and the boat was lying still in the water.
Suddenly the trapdoor opened, and one of the crew poked his head in to tell us in a stage whisper that we should make room for more passengers. But before anyone had time to do more than register shock, another 25 people were climbing down and squeezing themselves in among us. About midnight, some 20 hours after we had left Long Xuyen, the boat arrived at the river's mouth.
In the hold, we sensed a change in the rhythm of the swells and guessed that we must be ready to break into the open sea. But the former businessman who was our pilot knew very little more about the tidal currents than the most ignorant of his passengers, and now his inexperience proved almost fatal. Misjudging the channel in the dark, he ran the boat onto a sand bar that the low tide had brought near the surface.
Under us, the bottom growled, then gently shuddered as the boat stopped dead. Crew and passengers strove for hours to free the craft, to no avail.
Truong nhu tang biography of abraham lincoln for kids
But then, around 4 o'clock, someone noticed that the water around the boat was beginning to deepen. The tide. No one had thought of the tide. The boat began to rock, and, just as traces of light began to reveal the eastern horizon, it came free and the engine went into gear. A cheer went up. Our excitement, though, was short-lived.
Light had come, and with it the danger of being spotted by regular police patrols. Wisely, the pilot decided that our safest course would be to hide until dark, then try again the next night. The only option was to go back upriver, pretending to be on a return run. Heading slowly inland to deflect attention, we retraced our path toward Long Xuyen.
We continued upriver until dark, then turned once more for a second try. Near midnight we arrived again at the river's mouth, expecting at every moment the same growl we had heard last night as the ship's bottom scraped onto the sand bar. But this time there was only the choppier pitch of the sea as the pilot steered us safely through. We had planned to sail into the South China Sea and toward the trade lanes, where we hoped to be picked up by a freighter or tanker, or perhaps by one of the United States Seventh Fleet ships we had heard were in the area.
But as the sun rose we saw in front of us the black outlines of an island, which one of the crew identified as Poulo Condore. This was the infamous Con Son prison island that had been used in turn by the French, the Saigon Government and now by the new regime. Instead of leaving it far to our east, as we had supposed, we were now headed straight at it.
The prison at that hour appeared to be still asleep under our anxious eyes as we passed less than half a mile away in what seemed to be slow motion. All day we ran without sighting another vessel. Then, shortly after dark, as I was on deck staring into the night, one of the crew pointed out a glimmer of light barely visible in the east.
The pilot immediately altered course toward it and word spread quickly through the ship that we might soon be picked up. As people climbed up from the hold, the talk was full of hope that this might be an American Navy ship, one of those that President Jimmy Carter had ordered into the South China Sea to rescue whatever boat refugees they could find.
So it was full speed ahead toward liberation — or so everyone thought. Three hours later, the glimmer had become a ship sitting in the water with all its lights on; not an American warship after all, but a large trawler. As we moved in closer we could see a flag at the mast, a red flag, caught momentarily in the glare of a searchlight. Someone near me shouted "Bo doi!
I saw Dr. Ton pull a pistol from his pants pocket and throw it overboard, afraid of being caught with a weapon. Stumbling to the far side of the boat, I readied myself to jump overboard, hoping that I could disappear under the water before anyone noticed that I was gone. I struggled to compose myself, wanting to face these last seconds with courage.
Then I took a final glance at the trawler, which was now directly alongside. Above the rail I could see men holding machetes and hammers, ready to jump down onto our boat, and I realized that these weren't Vietnamese soldiers at all, but Thais. We were about to be boarded by Thai pirates. Oddly, the thought filled me with sudden relief.
Twenty or so young Thai men clambered onto our boat grasping a variety of weapons — long knives, hatchets, hammers, but no guns.
These were obviously not professionals, but Thai fishermen-pirates. Encounters with thieves of this sort always left the refugees poorer, but seldom resulted in the butchery and rapine that were the trademarks of the professionals. Our amateur pirates rounded up everybody, searched us and the boat, and took our money, jewelry and a few shirts that caught their fancy.
They also liberated our compass and binoculars. But they left us food and water, and they pointed us toward the sea lanes before climbing back on. After this, our journey assumed a monotonous routine. On the sixth day we saw a ship, a freighter passing miles off in front of us. Soon we spotted others, some of them coming a good deal closer.
We had entered what we thought must be the main route from Singapore to Hong Kong. To each ship we signaled our distress, waving shirts, gesturing, imploring. We even lit fires on the deck. Some of the sailors on board these ships stared, some waved back. But no ship stopped. Then, on the night of Aug. By the next morning we had arrived, not at a coast, as it turned out, but at an Indonesian oil exploration station.
There he saw fellow Vietnamese, some members of the NLF, chained, starved, beaten, and bloody. The torturers urged him to confess to being a communist, but Troung never was and so never claimed to be. Curiously, after Tet, American intelligence forces secured his release. He was treated extremely well by American forces.
As part of a prisoner exchange, they took Troung via helicopter to a remote location and then released him.
Truong nhu tang biography of abraham lincoln author
He wandered through a jungle path until he met with a Vietcong propaganda team. He was elected by committee to be work for the Ministry of Justice. He and his comrades worked to create a pluralistic government that would eventually unify with the North once the war ended. It was an extremely harsh existence and they often had to constantly relocate and dig new tunnel networks to avoid the relentless B bombings.
Troung desperately wanted to prevent revenge killings many feared would happen if the North decided to dominate the South.