The Third Force in the Vietnam Wars The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75 by Sophie Quinn-Judge (z-lib.org)

140 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Figure 6.3 Father Nguyeˆ˜n Ngoc Lan at a demonstration in 1974. Photo
˙
by Paul Quinn-Judge.

Four, where they found the tiny metal door leading to the Tiger Cages.
These were stone compartments topped by iron bars where prisoners
were shackled for months at a time, in groups of three to five. Although
the delegation was informed that this door could not be opened, when
they rattled the lock a guard turned up to let them in. What they
encountered was beyond imagining, in a country where the US
government paid the budget of the penal system. Each stone cage of
about five feet by nine had one wooden bucket for excrement, which was
emptied once a day. On the platform above the cages where the guards
patrolled, there were buckets of lime. The prisoners called out to tell the
visitors that the guards threw lime down on them when they asked for
food. Don Luce translated as they begged in French and Vietnamese for
water. The common wisdom was that only communist prisoners were
sent to Coˆn Sơn; however, the delegation encountered Buddhist monks
in the Tiger Cages who had been imprisoned during the 1966 Struggle
Movement. Altogether, the Tiger Cages housed around 300 prisoners, in
two different buildings. In the women’s cells, five people were shackled
together in each one. The Congressional visit brought the conditions on
Coˆn Sơn to the attention of the US public, but in spite of the photos

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 141

Figure 6.4 Huy`nh Lieˆn, leader of the ‘Begging Nuns’, and Mrs Ngoˆ Ba´
Tha`nh demonstrate against the Thiệu government, 1974. Photo by Paul
Quinn-Judge.

published in Life magazine, the Tiger Cages continued to be used.
Eventually they were replaced by somewhat larger ones.

The parliamentary opposition was one of the few forces that remained
to broaden the political spectrum in South Vietnam. The legal
opposition was small, but composed of eloquent and charismatic
personalities, several of whom had become well known in Saigon thanks
to their journalism. Their parliamentary immunity from prosecution
gave them the freedom to speak out that ordinary citizens did not
possess. At the heart of the opposition were three youthful men who
entered the political arena during the Constituent Assembly elections in
1966. These three, Ly´ Quı´ Chung, Ngoˆ Coˆng Đức and Hồ Ngoc Nhuận,
ran successfully for places in the Lower House of the National˙Assembly
in 1967. Running in Saigon constituencies, Chung and Nhuận would
repeat their success in the 1971 elections, but at that point Ngoˆ Coˆng
Đức would be forced into exile, as we shall see.

To backtrack for a moment, we should take note of the other
opposition leader who might have made a difference in southern politics,
Trần Ngoc Chaˆu. Also elected to the Lower House in 1967, he had been

˙

142 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Figure 6.5 Deputy Hồ Ngoc Nhuận, on right in 1974. Photo by Paul
˙
Quinn-Judge.

removed from the scene by his arrest in 1970, after the capture in 1969
of his brother, Trần Ngoc Hiền, a high-ranking communist proselytizer.
Chaˆu had defected from˙ the Việt Minh in 1950, while a rising military
leader, when he realized that he would have to become a communist
party member if he continued in a leadership role. Yet he was never
wholly at ease in the Saigon government structures, where he tried to
convince his superiors of the need for honest, humane service to the
ordinary people. His closeness to the more reformist Americans serving
in Vietnam, such as John Paul Vann, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward
Lansdale, brought him a leading role in the original pacification
programme of 1965– 6. It also led him to inform them when his brother
Hiền first showed up in Kiến Ho`a Province in 1964, requesting an
introduction to the US Ambassador. Vann passed on the message on
behalf of the brothers, but Henry Cabot Lodge would not risk the
possible fall-out from such a contact. Hiền disappeared from view after
this, but returned in 1968, after the first waves of Tết attacks had petered
out. This time he tried to convince Chaˆu to take a position in the
coalition government being promoted by the NLF. Chaˆu, disturbed by
what he had recently observed of the Tết aftermath in Hue, refused to

Figure 6.6 Mrs Ngoˆ Ba´ Tha`nh at her sentencing, being held by her
husband. AFSC collection.

144 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

consider the offer. When Hiền’s arrest occurred in 1969, Chaˆu resolved
that he should inform the Saigon authorities of their contacts, a step
he had thus far avoided. In spite of Chaˆu’s parliamentary immunity,
Thiệu worked to strip him of this protection and have him arrested.
Having decided against an escape by helicopter to Cambodia (a plan
suggested by John Paul Vann), Chaˆu returned to his office at the
National Assembly building to await his arrest. He did not want to run,
for fear that this might appear to justify the charge that he was a secret
communist.

Chaˆu’s real problem was that he had begun to challenge Thiệu:
elected Secretary General of the Lower House of the National Assembly,
he was openly organizing a coalition of deputies and intellectuals to
support a peace plan that would have involved direct RVN negotiations
with the DRV. On the face of it, this plan seemed to lie firmly within the
anti-communist ambit of Chaˆu’s other activities. But the Americans
backed off it because they felt it was not loyal to the president. Thiệu, on
the other hand, feared that such a plan would cost him the support of his
anti-communist base. Chaˆu was sentenced to twenty years, but by the
end of 1970 the Supreme Court declared the sentence void. Thiệu,
however, who had once been a close friend of Chaˆu’s, refused to set him
free, citing a ‘higher law’ than the Constitution, the demands of national
security. Trần Ngoc Chaˆu remained in prison until 1974.9

The 26-year-old˙ Ly´ Quı´ Chung was the second-youngest member of
the new assembly (from which, we should recall, all communist
candidates, neutralists and a number of Central Vietnamese Buddhists
had been excluded). Chung was first elected as part of the Movement to
Restore South Vietnam (Phong Tra`o Phuc Hưng Miện Nam), led by
the Catholic engineer Vo˜ Long Triều. He s˙aw the new assembly above all
as a place to voice opposition to the war and to US involvement in
Vietnam.10 The son of a well-educated civil servant in the French
bureaucracy, Chung passed his higher-level Baccalaureate, concentrating
on philosophy, at the Lyce´e Yersin in Dalat. He then enrolled at the
National Institute of Administration, but left in his second year out of
boredom and a growing taste for writing. He became a full-time
journalist after he married, against his parents’ wishes, a young woman
from the wrong social class. The couple rented a room in a working-class
neighbourhood and he wrote to make a living and pay the rent. His first
challenge as a journalist was to learn to write expressively in Vietnamese.

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 145

(His French education had treated Vietnamese language as a minor

subject.) Chung contributed to the sports pages of a number of

pwuribtleircsa;ttioontsh,efrwoemekTlyhaÐnuho´ˆcVTi˙eˆht i(eˆVngiet(nTahme eSseacYreodutTho)r,cwh)h, ifcohr did not pay its
which he wrote

about the Tour de France; Buổi Sa´ng (The Morning Paper) and in French

for Journal d’Extre`me Orient.

In the Lower House, Hồ Ngoc Nhuận, elected from Saigon’s
District 8, was the leader of the N˙ew Society group (Nho´m Xa˜ Hội

Mới) with around ten members, including Dr Hồ Va˘n Minh and, from

Tra` Vinh in the Mekong Delta, Ngoˆ Coˆng Đức. By 1970 Đức had

emerged as the acknowledged leader of this group of opposition

journalist-politicians.

From a wealthy landowning family, a cousin of the Saigon

Archbishop, Đức had by then found his role as a publisher and

journalist. His father had been killed by the Việt Minh, when Đức was in

the first class at the Catholic Lyce´e Taberd in Saigon. Instead of finishing

his baccalaureate, he returned home to manage his family’s affairs. In the

Diệm years he led the Republican Youth, a Ngoˆ Ðı`nh Nhu creation, in

his province. When the NLF began their uprisings in the early 1960s,

Nhu encouraged the youth group to engage in intelligence work. But

after around one hundred of the youth were killed, Đức refused to allow

them to continue this role. For this insubordination, Nhu removed him

from his leadership position. So Đức returned to Saigon, aged 25,

exempt from military service thanks to his father’s martyrdom, and

established himself as a successful journalist and entrepreneur. A new

law, passed in 1966, ended his military exemption – this is when he

chose to contest the election for the National Assembly in 1967, to
become a Deputy rather than a soldier.11 Đức was criticized by the

military as a draft dodger, but he in turn pointed out that he knew the

names of countless government and military officials who had protected

their sons from the draft. Among his list were the sons of the Minister of

Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both well-off students
in Paris.12

Trần Ngoc Chaˆu recalls his first impression of the young Đức, when
he emerged ˙as a government critic:

During our first months in the House, I too resented Đức and
several other deputies I regarded as draft dodgers. Gradually

146 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

I realized that they formed the most active group of Southerners
opposed to the government’s abuses of power . . . This group of
Southern deputies chose the National Assembly as their platform

to fight for reform. They also established the only real opposition
newspaper, Tin Sa´ng . . . Đức’s group was the first in South Vietnam
to generate support from intellectuals and students in the cities.
It soon expanded its appeal to the population at large.13

The activist southerners in the National Assembly did not at first unite,

but joined separate groupings. In order to gain the privileges given to

blocs of twenty or more deputies, Chung eventually gathered the seven

deputies from his movement, a group of Buddhists from Central

Vietnam led by the former math teacher Phan Xuaˆn Huy (son-in-law of

General Minh), and scraped together several more independents to form

the 20-member Khối Daˆn Tộc (the Nation Bloc). (A bloc was given an

office, and a car with a driver, and its leader had the freedom to speak in
debates without registering first.)14

Nhuận’s New Society bloc joined forces with several young deputies

identified with the Taˆn Ðai Việt (New Great Vietnam) party, who had

been trained at the National School of Administration. In the final

National Assembly, elected in 1971, the Nation Bloc and the New

Society group merged to form the Society and Nation Bloc (Khối Xa˜

Hội – Daˆn Tộc).

All three, Ly´ Quı´ Chung, Hồ Ngoc Nhuận and Ngoˆ Coˆng Đức,
were, by 1970, prominent journalists in˙ Saigon. As Chung wrote in his

memoirs, ‘An opposition deputy without a newspaper was like a crab
without claws.’15 After 1969 their primary mouthpieces became the

daily newspapers Tin Sa´ng (The Morning News) and tÐhia˙ˆetn T´ın (The
Telegraph). In his memoir Hồ Ngoc Nhuận claims Tin Sa´ng,
published and edited by Ngố Coˆn˙g Ðức, was regularly one of the

papers with the highest circulation in the South. Notoriety was good

for circulation – the fact that both Tin Sa´ ng apnhdysÐicia˙eˆlnly T´ın were
frequently confiscated by the censors and even attacked

made them more tseomugphortaraifltyers.usÐpie˙ˆenndeTd´ınp,uwblhicearteioCnhiunn1g97fo1uanfdterhiits
journalistic home,

was fire-bombed. Tin Sa´ng more than once printed the Four and Seven

Point Peace Proposals of the PRG, which called for President Thiệu to

resign. In response the government organized a demonstration where

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 147

Ðức was burned in effigy; they hung banners in the streets denouncing
Nhuận.16 Eventually, in February 1972, following Ðức’s escape to
Sweden, the team of journalists from Tin Sa´ng moved to reopen Ðieˆn
Tı´n, where Hồ Ngoc Nhuận became the lead writer. This pap˙er
continued its spirited˙ opposition to the Thiệu government until the
last days of the RVN.17

By 1970 Ngoˆ Coˆng Ðứcc and Hồ Ngoc Nhuận were making contacts
with the PRG in Paris, sometimes on pe˙rsonal trips, and at other times
via General Minh’s son, Dương Minh Ðức. Both papers backed what
became known in 1971 as the ‘Dương Va˘n Minh Solution’ for an end to
the war. This was the moment when the role of the ‘Third Segment’ in a
peace settlement was becoming an important part of the Paris
negotiations.

The Dương Va˘n Minh Solution and the PRG’s
Seven-Point Proposal

Ngoˆ Coˆng Ðức travelled to Paris in September 1970 to give a press
conference at the Hotel Lute´tia. By this time he held the title of
Secretary-General of the Socialist Opposition bloc in the National
Assembly, as well as President of the Federation of Newspaper Editors of
South Vietnam. This conference marked the reappearance of the Third
Segment on the international scene, where it had been eclipsed by the
government-led peace negotiations. The time had come to alert world
opinion to the new reality in Saigon, they believed. The US policy of
Vietnamization was turning out to be a prolongation of the war, with
total support for the ‘militarists’ in the government of Nguyễn Va˘n
Thiệu. As Ðức stated in introducing his peace proposals,

The current war is destroying untold human and material
resources in South Vietnam. Not including the forces of the NLF,
the army of the Republic of Vietnam numbers one million men; to
this figure must be added the forces of self-defense, numbering one
million men; and the police forces numbering 100,000 men.
In other words, two million young people, instead of pursuing
their studies and engaging in productive work, are forced to
take up arms in order to help American imperialism achieve its
political aim in South East Asia.

148 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The government of Mr. Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu is a dictatorial
government, which persecutes all those who struggle for peace and
independence, and jails the innocent. In 1969 the Americans
stated that there were only 20,000 (communist) cadres in South
Vietnam; at the end of 1969, however, the government arrested
more than 70,000 people, and it appears that the number of
Communist cadres has not diminished.18

Mr Đức put forward a set of proposals divided into three sections that
would lead up to the creation of a neutral, provisional government in
South Vietnam. First would come the withdrawal of all American forces
and war materiel, along with the forces of Thailand, New Zealand,
Australia and South Korea; the Thiệu government would have to end
torture and free all illegally held prisoners; and all parties to the war
would have to de-escalate, meaning the USA would have to stop the
bombing and use of ‘harmful chemical products’ on the territory of
South Vietnam; the NLF should halt ‘all indiscriminate bombings by
rockets or mortars, which victimize the innocent’. When these
conditions had been fulfilled, the Paris Peace Conference should be
enlarged. As Đức believed,

the overwhelming majority of the South Vietnamese population,
who demand peace, independence, democracy, freedom and national
reconciliation, are not represented. This is why there must be a
delegation representing the political and religious groups and forces
. . . in order that it may join the other delegations in finding a
concerted solution to the problem of Vietnam.

With the addition of this extra delegation, the peace conference could
proceed to ‘discuss the conditions for a ceasefire and for the withdrawal of
the North Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam and to solve the
problem of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and of the National
Liberation Front’. The very last step would be to establish the
provisional government, which would ‘establish relations with North
Vietnam and organize free elections in South Vietnam’.19

This set of proposals made clear the fact that the South Vietnamese
opposition now saw the Americans as the heart of the problem. A US
counter-proposal made by President Nixon on 7 October called for a

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 149

ceasefire, but did not show any readiness to compromise over the make-
up of the Saigon government. The Executive Committee of the
National Union of Students in Saigon blasted Nixon’s proposal for an
‘internationally controlled and immediate cease-fire’ without conditions,
saying that it would be ‘a means to legalize the illegal US presence in
South Vietnam’.20 However, by the spring of the following year, after the
disastrous ARVN invasion of Laos, Henry Kissinger appeared to take a
renewed interest in the genuine negotiating process.

At the same time, the southern Vietnamese communists were still
recovering from their Tết 1968 losses. The Workers’ Party Central
Committee plenum at the end of 1970 had to resist pressure from some
of its members for another large-scale offensive, in view of those losses.21
By the summer of 1971 they seem to have calculated that the USA was
in as much need of a negotiated peace as they were. At this point the
PRG and the Hanoi leadership made another concerted effort to revive
the peace process. This came in the form of the PRG’s Seven Point
Programme, announced in early July at one of the sessions of the Paris
Conference. The overall objectives of the seven points (as summarized by
Lưu Ðoa`n Huynh) were: (1) to get the Nixon administration to set a date
for complete troop withdrawal and the return of POWs; and (2) to get
the Nixon administration to join in addressing the political aspect of the
Vietnam War.22

The focus of these peace efforts throughout 1971 was the October
presidential election in South Vietnam. The PRG’s Seven Point
Programme was designed to sway southern public opinion to vote
against the incumbent, Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu, to open a path to
negotiations. This programme marked another effort to revive the
Geneva framework, in that it called for a peace government in the
South, which would lead to neutralization and consultations between
North and South on reunification.

The push for a negotiated settlement via elections in 1971 involved a
number of actors. From early 1971 the French took an active role in
pushing the different sides towards a political solution. Although they
had to admit by 1970 that the ‘institutional frame’ of the Geneva
Conference was outdated, they still held to the idea that the fundamental
principles established at Geneva remained an important measure of any
peace initiative. The Ambassador to China, Etienne Manac’h, wrote to
his Foreign Ministry that, the ‘ground-floor’ of any structure of peace

150 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

would have to be established by the Vietnamese themselves, but a true
solution would rest on a new ‘international equilibrium’ involving the
Soviet Union, the USA, and China, with France serving as a ‘poˆle de
rapprochement’ among the communist powers and the USA.23

The Quai d’Orsay had a strong interest in keeping the Paris
negotiations alive, as records of their diplomatic conversations show.
Their conversations with the PRG Foreign Minister, Nguyễn Thi
B`ınh, and Leˆ Đức Tho, now Kissinger’s Hanoi counterpart in secret˙
negotiations, make it cl˙ear that they still saw the Geneva framework as a
useful basis for negotiations. But the French acknowledged that an
enlarged international conference could only serve to guarantee any
settlement agreed on in Paris. Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann, in a
February 1971 conversation with Madame Bı`nh, claimed that he had
tried to convince President Nixon in 1969 that ‘there was a possibility of
seeing a political solution take shape’. This would be based on a ‘neutral
and independent South Vietnam’, he explained.24 In order to convince
the Americans that they should move back to negotiating, the minister
said that they needed to be shown that ‘escalation would lead to nothing’
and that there existed a concrete possibility of a political solution. The
failure of the ARVN’s incursion into Laos would take care of the first
point, he felt. As for the question of a political solution, he told Mme
B`ınh, ‘you may have to help us a little’.25

In this exchange Mme B`ınh expressed scepticism as to whether there
was anyone on the political horizon who could lead a neutralist force.
She even asked the Director of the Foreign Ministry’s Department for
Asia and Oceania, Henri Froment-Meurice, if he had encountered any
personalities who might play this role.26 When pushed by the French to
define how the PRG would define a Saigon administration favourable to
peace and what actions it should take, she said the following:

We want to see an administration established in Saigon without
Thiệu-Kỳ-Khieˆm, but at the moment we have no idea who is
capable of being ‘inserted’ in this administration. Dương Va˘n
Minh has declared that he will run [in the election], but since then
he has done nothing . . . we are ready to hold discussions with an
administration that is not in favour of pursuing the War, that
would not back Vietnamization, that would not support the
mutual slaughter of Vietnamese, but that would support a peaceful

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 151

solution, that is to say peace, independence and that other aspect of
independence, neutrality.27

She continued by explaining how the PRG would negotiate with a

‘peace administration’ to establish a provisional coalition government

to hold elections. Such a coalition would have three segments: one

composed of members of the Saigon administration who supported

peace, another from the PRG and a third composed of representatives

of political and religious forces who were linked neither to the Saigon

government nor the PRG, what was now regularly referred to as the

‘Third Segment’. This formula outlined the political solution proposed

in the Seven Points later that year. In a follow-up conversation on

22 March, M. Froment-Meurice asked that Mme Bı`nh consider what

the PRG might do to clear up ambiguities about their attitude to a

new administration in the South, without Thiệu. She responded

by saying that, ‘For the US, the best way of resolving the Vietnam

problem would be to negotiate with the PRG; but if Mr Nixon desires,
these elections could be an exit door.’28 She was now ready to admit, as

well, that she had met South Vietnamese political figures in Paris who

agreed with the French view of the coming elections as a good chance

to escape from the impasse of war.

27 A meeting between Leˆ ĐexứacmTphleo˙ and Foreign Minister Schumann on
July provides a further of how persistently the French were

promoting the electoral solution to the War. It also reveals their

awareness that the planned Nixon visit to China might be viewed by the

Vietnamese as an attempt to escape from the confines of the Paris

negotiations and make peace over their heads. In this conversation

Leˆ Đức Tho described the Seven Point Proposal as ‘reflecting the
fundamental˙ points of the Geneva Accords of 1954’, but with more

flexibility and generosity. Regarding political issues, he stated that ‘the

replacement of the Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu administration is the key to a

political settlement in South Vietnam’. Like Nguyễn Thi Bı`nh, Tho
expressed doubt that there could be ‘truly democratic’ elect˙ions held in˙

the South under the Thiệu regime. But he promised that ‘when there is a

new administration in South Vietnam calling for peace, independence,

neutrality and democracy, the PRG will immediately begin negotiations

with such an administration, in order to find a political solution to the
problem of South Vietnam’.29

152 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Maurice Schumann emphasized his understanding that the Seven
Points proceeded from the idea that questions of war and peace would be
settled by the Vietnamese themselves. Thus a peace settlement would
have to be negotiated first of all by the Vietnamese:

Certainly, we have always judged that, as in 1954 and 1962, and
perhaps even more today, the effective participation of China in the
negotiations is an essential, even indispensable, element for peace.
But we do not believe that it is the role of the great powers and
superpowers to substitute themselves for those parties who are
directly interested. Thus, if we rejoice at anything that brings
China back into the ranks of the powers [concert des puissances]
and to the negotiating table, we think that the negotiations
themselves are the responsibility of those who have suffered and
felt the weight of war, that is to say the Vietnamese people and the
peoples of Indochina in general.30

The Minister finished by expressing his fears that the coming Nixon
visit to China might slow down the negotiations in Paris or distract
attention from them. He explained that France felt a duty towards the
Vietnamese people, who are ‘closely linked to us’, and that moreover, he
felt a particular responsibility towards those who had drawn up the
Seven Points, ‘because they have taken into account a number of our
suggestions’. He then reiterated his view that the Paris talks would be
the appropriate framework for carrying on negotiations on the Seven
Points, should Thiệu be defeated in the elections.

Of course, as we know, the elections in October 1971 did not go the
way the French had hoped, and eventually Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu ran
unopposed. Nguyễn Cao Kỳ was eliminated from the race by Thiệu’s
manipulation of the nominating process, and General Dương Va˘n
Minh withdrew his candidacy when he became convinced that the USA
would give Thiệu their full support. One witness, philosophy professor
and Minh speechwriter Ly´ Cha´nh Trung, described the scene when
General Minh met US Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker to ask for a
pledge that the United States would help to guarantee a fair election.
Bunker refused, but suggested to Minh that he run and lose, and then
become leader of the opposition to prepare his candidacy for the
following presidential election in 1976. Minh was so insulted when the

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 153

Ambassador asked him how much money he wanted to run against
Thiệu, that he showed Bunker the door.31 So Thiệu won with a
declared 94.3 per cent of the vote.

Ngoˆ Coˆng Đức was also forced out of the 1971 election for the Lower
House, but by less gentlemanly means than Dương Va˘n Minh was
subjected to. All opposition candidates faced obstacles that authoritarian
governments apply around the globe against their foes: these included
government control of radio and television, rigid press laws discouraging
favourable stories about opposition candidates, and army logistical
support for pro-government candidates. Đức, however, was singled out
for special treatment. Especially after his 1970 Paris press conference, he
became the object of police harassment. His newspaper was confiscated
150 times, the press itself was drenched with gasoline and set on fire,
while the offices of Tin Sa´ng were bombed on two occasions.32 His
Saigon residence was fire-bombed and his home in Vı˜nh B`ınh province
(today named Tra` Vinh) was set on fire. Perhaps the most alarming
threats were those against his supporters in Vı˜nh B`ınh. They claimed
that government officials had threatened to reclassify their villages as
communist, should Đức win his race for the National Assembly. This
would leave the villagers open to forced relocation to refugee camps;
their homes could have been demolished and bombed. In this situation
Đức could not ask his supporters to vote for him. He finally opted to
make a secret escape to Cambodia and from there to Sweden, as he no
longer had the right to receive a visa for foreign travel.

The view of the Quai d’Orsay and South Vietnamese neutralists such
as Professor Ly´ Cha´nh Trung was that the 1971 election was a major
missed opportunity for peace. ‘If Minh had won, we would have had a
military structure that remained intact, but the political life would have
changed. We might have had a different peace’, Trung believes.33 On the
other hand, Henry Kissinger’s view of this election sums up the United
States’ rejection of an authentic South Vietnamese political process, and
by extension, all-Vietnamese consultations, as called for in the Geneva
Final Declaration. ‘It would be preposterous to maintain that Hanoi
lamented the absence of a fair election in Saigon. What bothered it was
our refusal to use the election as a pretext to decapitate the leadership of
the non-Communist political structure in South Vietnam’, he writes.34
Thus the United States continued under Nixon and Kissinger to believe
that South Vietnamese political leaders had to meet their standards of

154 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

anti-communism. As a Saigon witticism put it, ‘For the Americans, a
South Vietnamese nationalist is someone who does what they want
without having to be told.’35 In the view of Henry Kissinger, a free
election would have spelled the death of democracy. Yet by 1971,
Kissinger was already negotiating in secret with the Chinese communist
leaders who in 1964– 5 had provided the rationale for the American
entry into the Vietnam War. And the final negotiations for peace in Paris
would be carried out with total disregard for the opinions of citizens of
the RVN. In the view of war critic George Kahin, a myth had taken root:

that the regime in Saigon that they [the US administration]
designated as our ally genuinely represented the 18 million people
living in South Vietnam. Although this myth was helpful in
justifying US intervention to the American public,
‘representativeness’ was never in fact one of the central purposes
of the United States in building up this regime.36

The Spring Offensive and the Paris Peace Agreement

The communist’s ‘Easter Offensive’ of 1972 was their answer to the lack

of political progress in Paris and Saigon. Their goal this time was to force

the Americans to the bargaining table. Beginning in March, this three-

pronged assault left little room for urban demonstrations or popular

participation. After some initial PAVN victories, with tanks rolling into

the capital of aQt uthảnegenTdr˙iopfrTovếitn1ce96so8u, tAhmofertihceanDaMirZp,oawnedr the retaking
of zones lost stopped the

communist side from gaining the decisive advantage they desired.

Nixon, buoyed by his visit to China in February, gave orders during the

first two weeks of April to remove the bombing restrictions established

by Lyndon Johnson in 1968. In an operation known as ‘Linebacker I’

the B-52s returned to the skies over the DRV and began bombing

the Hanoi-Haiphong area. On 8 May Nixon ordered the mining of
Haiphong harbour and other northern ports.37 The US bombing of

massed PAVN troops attacking Kontum in the central highlands and An

Lộc, north of Saigon, resulted in some of the worst carnage of the war, as

naval airpower was beefed up and the B-52 force based at U-Tapao in

Thailand and on Guam grew from 52 planes in January to over 200 by
the close of May.38

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 155

Due to visit Moscow for a summit later in May, the US president
gambled that the Russians would not call off the meeting. They did not,
much to the chagrin of their Vietnamese allies. The US public also failed
to react to this escalation of their government’s role, as numbers of men
on the ground in Vietnam continued to decrease (they would drop by
20,000 to 49,000 men as of 1 July, as the President announced in April).
Much of this decrease, however, as Arnold Isaacs points out, was made up
of ‘Air Force flight and ground crewmen who simply moved from
Vietnam to bases in neighbouring Thailand without missing a day of
combat.’39

This brutal round of fighting left both sides with heavy casualties,
equipment destroyed and questions about the commitments of their
respective allies. Negotiations in Paris picked up speed in the autumn,
as the US presidential election approached. Both sides returned to the
negotiating table, knowing that the war had become an anachronism
in terms of international relations. None of the major backers of the
two Vietnamese opponents, not the Chinese, Soviets or the Americans,
had much interest in prolonging the conflict. The USA no longer
needed to hold the line on communism in South Vietnam, if the
Chinese were going to become allies against the Soviet Union. The
time for concessions had come.

The Paris Agreement, officially titled ‘The Agreement on Ending the
War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam’, had the same fatal weakness as the
Geneva settlement, that it separated the military and political aspects
of the conflict. Once the USA withdrew its troops and the prisoners of
war were returned by the stipulated 60-day deadline, the Nixon
administration showed little interest in the implementation of the
political agreement. Much was left to the goodwill of the two southern
sides. Unfortunately, President Thiệu had no intention of displaying
goodwill or making any concessions to the PRG. He announced his
campaign of ‘Four No’s’ well before the agreement was signed: there
would be ‘no recognition of the enemy, no neutralization of South
Vietnam, no coalition government, and no surrender of territory’. His
opposition to the agreement delayed the signing until after the US
elections, when Henry Kissinger had promised the voters that ‘peace is
at hand.’ (Nixon won re-election in a true landslide with only one
state voting for his anti-war opponent, George McGovern.) This delay,
from October to January, did not result in a substantially different

156 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

agreement, but allowed the USA to complete a massive transfer of
military equipment known as ‘Operation Enhance Plus’ before the
ceasefire would limit resupply to a one-for-one replacement principle.
Thus by January 1973, the RVN air force had become the fourth largest
in the world.40

Kissinger’s high-handed treatment of his South Vietnamese partners
was humiliating – they discovered some of the details of the draft
agreement from a captured DRV translation – but in the end, as the
dependent child of US policymakers, they were forced to sign.41 As a
cynical consolation prize, the USA carried out one last bombing
campaign, titled ‘Linebacker II’, to weaken the DRV’s war-making
capacities before the final signatures on 27 January 1973. This was the
heaviest bombing of Hanoi of the whole war, aimed at air defences,
transportation hubs and fuel supplies, but civilians in these densely
settled neighbourhoods were not spared. The idea that the ‘Christmas
bombing’ brought concessions from the DRV is not backed up by the
content of the agreement. Moreover, most serious evaluations of the
bombing campaign reveal that the USA lost a punishing number of
planes, including B-52s – from 15 to 34, depending on whose estimate
one believes – during the 12 days of bombing.42 Even the lower figure
did not represent a sustainable rate of attrition. The DRV had found
ways to improve their radar and may have also extended the range of
their SAMs, with Soviet assistance. The almost universal international
condemnation of this last bombing campaign was, finally, too costly to
US prestige to make it a successful policy.

The key political points of a peace settlement for the South had in fact
been agreed on in October 1972. Neither of the southern parties to
the agreement was completely happy – the PRG and its allies had to
swallow the fact that the demand for Thiệu’s replacement by a coalition
government had been dropped by the DRV at the end of August.
According to this compromise, Thiệu would remain in power while the
elections for a new government were organized. But at the same time,
President Thiệu had to accept a ceasefire in place, with North Vietnamese
forces remaining on the territory of South Vietnam. In hindsight, one can
see that these arrangements would promote a military solution to an
inherently unstable, unworkable political situation.

The formula agreed upon for a ‘National Council of Reconciliation
and Concord’ composed of three parts transformed it into an

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 157

‘administrative structure’ that would organize elections. But it would
not have the status of a governing body. Still, had the formula been
implemented, the Third Segment would have had an internationally
sanctioned role in creating a new political future for Vietnam. Article 12
of the agreement called for political negotiations in which the two
south Vietnamese parties would agree on ‘the internal matters of
South Vietnam as soon as possible and to do their utmost to accomplish
this within ninety days after the ceasefire comes into effect’. These
political talks began on 19 March in a chateau outside of Paris, but
the two sides were so far apart that no steps towards a new election were
ever mapped out.

In the early months of the ceasefire, the PRG policy was to publicize
the peace agreement and the rights it accorded to people of all political
shades within the territory of the RVN. Their plan was to isolate the
politically unpopular President Thiệu and narrow his base of support.
But Thiệu did not make this easy for them. Refusing to honour the
ceasefire, the ARVN went on the offensive to enlarge their areas of
control. COSVN remained in a defensive posture, hoping for a political
breakthrough, until the middle of the year.43 By then the creation of a
Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, with or without real
power, appeared unlikely. The communists would not stand back to wait
for the Paris Agreement to be enforced, as they had waited after Geneva.
Still, those in Saigon who identified with the Third Segment fought on
for a political solution.

Once the US POWs had been released, the USA abetted Thiệu in his
fight to retain his power as the constitutional leader of the RVN.
‘Toward South Vietnam’, Arnold Isaacs writes, ‘the United States
behaved not as if carrying out a peace treaty or disengaging, but as if
reconfirming a military alliance’.44 US signals to Thiệu, that he would
receive US air support in case of a communist attack, were backed up by
real contingency plans. ‘The four ARVN corps commanders were flown
to the new US South East Asia headquarters at Nakhon Phanom in
Thailand and given procedures for requesting air strikes . . . None of
these arrangements were altered, even after the US Congress voted to ban
all bombing after 15 August 1973.’45 The Saigon CIA Station Chief
Thomas Polgar recalls being in the room in San Clemente in April 1973
when President Nixon informed Thiệu that ‘should the North
Vietnamese violate the essence of the Paris Agreement, our retaliation

158 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

would be instant and brutal’.46 President Nixon’s resignation over the
Watergate scandal was still over a year away. From what we now know of
the 1968 Nixon– Thiệu pact, this obdurate loyalty to Nguyễn Va˘n
Thiệu appears to result from the bargain Nixon made to get elected. But
Nixon was supported in his attachment to Thiệu by the new US
ambassador Graham Martin; and, until the bitter end, by his new CIA
director, William Colby.47

Saigon Politics After the Ceasefire

As Ly´ Quy´ Chung describes it, the time from Thiệu’s unopposed

election until the final communist victory in April 1975 was gloomy,

but still very lively for the Saigon opposition and the anti-war
intellectuals.48 Different groups and organizations appeared to contest

the policies of Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu. While many of these were probably

the brainchildren of underground communist organizers, the opposition

deputies, Catholic priests, Buddhist nuns, students, workers and

courageous laypeople involved were mainly non-aligned citizens who

were tortured by the fate of their nation.

Thiệu had undermined any semblance of normal political

competition in the RVN with a new law on political parties, introduced

in March 1973. In order to compete with the communists if new

elections were held, he organized his own political party, the Democracy

Party, which civil servants and military men were expected to join.

Seventeen existing parties were dissolved under the law, including what

were considered to be leftist parties, the old nationalist parties and
Buddhist groups.49

The deputies in the Society and Nation bloc attempted to rally an

organized Third Segment, but found themselves stymied by Thiệu’s

machinery of police control. HtoồpuNshgo˙focrwNahrduậanpocoliotricdailnpatreodgrcalmosmeley,
with Ngoˆ Coˆng Đức in France,

but as he explained in his published letters to Đức, it was hard to hang

on to their supporters: ‘The reliable organizers in our force, who have

been active by my side have all been wiped out . . . people are still being

arrested and locked up, or are being forced to join the Democracy
Party.’50

‘It is too bad that there are so many tendencies and influences’, he

wrote in this letter of 21 March 1973. He felt isolated in Saigon, as:

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 159

the majority of our friends are working for ‘the Old Man’ [their
code for General Minh], while I am doing something a bit
different. However, I can’t leave them and go off on my own with
another minority group, so I have decided to stick to organizing
with ‘the Old Man’. It took me almost one month to persuade him
and other friends to do something, even though they all agree with
me. So we finally created a new programme [cương lı˜nh], but it
has not gone anywhere, because the ‘old man’ says it is not urgent
and he does not want to impose himself on anyone.51

Nhuận concluded that the weakness of the opposition to Thiệu at this
stage was their unwillingness to coordinate their activities. He was in
the process of organizing a coordinating committee of 40 deputies and
senators to persuade the General to take action, the day this letter was
written.52

Gradually the supporters of the Paris Agreement got organized and a
‘Coordinating Committee to demand Liberty, Democracy and Peace’
took shape. By 13 May, Nhuận could report that ‘the Old Man’ was
content with his role and making contacts with local groups, following
Nhuận’s suggestions.53 A key opposition demand became the
implementation of Chapter IV, Article 11 of the Paris Agreement,
that prohibited acts of reprisal and discrimination and called for
democratic liberties to be ensured. Without these conditions it would
be difficult to imagine the formation of the National Council of
Reconciliation and Concord.

Activists without parliamentary protection or international reputa-
tions continued to be picked up and held by the police under edicts such
as ‘Decree Law 004/66’, whose article 19 permitted the authorities to
detain citizens under the pretext of national security for a maximum of
two years, renewable. Hồ Ngoc Nhuận was followed everywhere by
plainclothes policemen, so that ˙if he visited a supporter, the police could
burst in on the spot and summon the host to the police station for an
appointment the following morning. Volunteers who distributed left-
wing Catholic publications were frequently arrested as well.54

In these last years of Thiệu, as the press remained closely controlled,
the most active opposition deputies introduced what they called ‘talking
newspapers’ to spread their message beyond the confines of Saigon.
A group would travel in a small van with a loudspeaker to lecture the

160 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

public on the state of the country, on the Paris negotiations and other

local issues. They liked to take along the Catholic priests Father Nguyễn

Ngoc Lan and Father Chaˆn T´ın as a way of confusing the police. (A
you˙ng policeman was unlikely to rough up a priest in a black cassock.)

Even the ferryboats crossing the Mekong provided an opportunity to
address an audience.55 After the Paris Agreement, they introduced this

method of spreading information to Huế.

One of the most effective organizations fighting for democratic rights

was the Committee to Reform the Prison System (Uỷ Ban Vận Động Cải

Thiện Chế Dộ Lao Tu` ), started in 1971 with the aim of making known

the situation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. The young teacher

Cao iTdhe˙ia Queˆ Hương, whose husband died under torture, first brought
this to the Catholic fathers, who had more protection to speak out

on sensitive topics than the families of prisoners. The council of advisers

and chairmen included most of the anti-war deputies, professors, lawyers

and priests in Saigon, with Professor Nguyễn Va˘n Trung serving as the

titular head. The Redemptorist priest from Huế, Chaˆn T´ın, was the

heart and soul of the committee, and it was his office that published the

monthly journal Lao Tu` (Prison). He gathered letters from prisoners and

from family members who had visited the prisons, and also passed on

information to foreign organizations and the press. So, for example, in

October 1973 when the Young Catholic Worker leader Ðoa`n Khắc

Xuyeˆn was illegally transferred to Taˆn Hiệp prison from Ch´ı Ho`a, after a

Military Field Court had acquitted him of the charge against him, Chaˆn

T´ın could inform the local press. The Thiệu government had secret

policemen keeping watch on visitors to Father T´ın’s office on Kỳ Đồng

Street and had in the past arrested Catholic priests, including Father Lan,

for brief periods. But the sprawling compound of the Redemptorist

Church offered a protected space, where information could be exchanged
and publications edited.56 It was from this compound that Father Lan

also published his journal, which changed its name every time

permission to publish was withdrawn.

President Thiệu was able to ignore the efforts to create an organized

Third Segment for more than a year after the Peace Agreement was

signed in January 1973. He claimed that a ‘third force’ had failed to

materialize; in an April 1974 speech in Ngoˆ Coˆng Đức’s home province

of Vı˜nh B`ınh, he threatened that ‘the government and the people of

South Vietnam will take appropriate measures against traitors who call

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 161

themselves the third force’.57 Ly´ Qu´ı Chung came to believe that ‘any
kind of change would be better than the present situation’. As he
explains, the group around General Minh worked to isolate President
Thiệu by providing backing for both Buddhist and Catholic groups who
were willing to oppose his policies. Among the Catholics, the chairman
of the Senate, lawyer Nguyễn Va˘n Huyeˆn, declared his support for Minh
and also began to mobilize the Saigon Archbishop, Nguyễn Va˘n B`ınh.
Among the Buddhists, the former Foreign Minister and current Senator,
lawyer Vu˜ Va˘n Mẫu, was a member of Minh’s inner circle. He became the
chairman of an organization called the ‘Forces for National
Reconciliation’. However, the real challenge was to win over Th´ıch
Trı´ Quang, still nominally under house arrest. He retained considerable
authority and could throw the weight of the Ấn Quang pagoda
Buddhists behind General Minh’s initiatives. Ly´ Quı´ Chung took on the
task of persuading the somewhat reluctant Trı´ Quang to join the
declared supporters of Dương Va˘n Minh. The agreement was sealed by
General Minh’s public visit to Ấn Quang, followed by a return visit of
Trı´ Quang and a press conference at General Minh’s compound.
Privately, Thı´ch Tr´ı Quang described Minh as someone who was ‘not an
astute politician’ but who was the ‘man who is necessary now’.58

In the summer of 1974, Thiệu’s luck began to change. The 9 August
resignation of President Richard Nixon, as he was on the point of being
impeached for his role in covering up the Watergate burglary, caused a
sea change in Saigon politics. The sense that without Nixon’s protection,
Thiệu was vulnerable, underscored the heavy reliance of the southern
leadership on Washington’s approval. As Nixon’s grip weakened, a more
assertive US Congress also became a decisive factor in Thiệu’s crumbling
dominance. They cut back the military funding appropriated for the
RVN in 1974– 5, becoming increasingly sceptical that South Vietnam
could be saved by additional appropriations. At the same time, rising
fuel prices after the 1973 Arab– Israeli War made running a fuel-
dependent military more expensive.

In the autumn of 1974 a new level of opposition to Thiệu arose from
an unexpected quarter. This was the People’s Anti-Corruption Force led
by a Catholic priest who had once written speeches for Ngoˆ Ðı`nh Diệm.
Father Nguyễn Hữu Tha`nh, with the air of a professor in his wire-
rimmed spectacles, became another figure in a black cassock to lead
demonstrations in the streets of Saigon. Three hundred priests joined

162 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

him in signing a six-point indictment of Thiệu’s corrupt practices. One
of their accusations was that, ‘Under the protection of influential
officials, narcotics dealers, gangsters, gamblers, prostitutes, and
smugglers have become a true menace to a society plagued with
purse-snatching, fraud, rape and other unthinkable crimes.’59

Part of the Saigon establishment was now preparing to join the
struggle for a more open, responsive government, one that could make a
serious attempt to implement the Paris Agreement. The police seized
the newspapers that printed this indictment of Thiệu, but there was
probably no one in Saigon who had missed the message. Even a dissident
US diplomat, cited anonymously in the New York Times, joined those
who saw the urgent need to begin a political peace process:

‘Saigon cannot win militarily’, he observed, adding that the only
chance of preserving a non-Communist government is through the
political mechanism of the Paris agreement – democratic liberties
and open general elections . . . ‘If another regime would take over,
willing to take the political risk, there’s a real hope of keeping the
place out of Communist control. I don’t see any hope on the
military side.’60

Thiệu decided to ignore the anti-corruption campaign, and in a televised
speech, he stuck to the theme that the opposition to his rule was
infiltrated by the Communists. But, as he clung to power, time was
running out for the political process that was the best hope for peace to
take effect. The New York Times noted that:

the summer months have seen the bloodiest, most sustained level
of heavy fighting since the signing of the ceasefire agreements 20
months ago. Some military analysts believe that, particularly in
the northern provinces and in the lower Mekong Delta, the
Communists have achieved that critical, highly intangible edge in
a war of attrition: momentum.61

This was indeed the case, despite the optimists who still hoped that
with more substantial US aid, the Saigon government could rebuild
and develop a successful export-based economy. But there was not
going to be a ‘residual force’ of American military men remaining in

VIETNAMIZATION AND SAIGON'S POLITICAL OPPOSITION 163

South Vietnam, as there was in Germany and South Korea, and as
Thomas Polgar had been promised when he took up his CIA post in
1972.62 When the PAVN overran the province of Phước Long, on the
Cambodian border, in January 1975, there was no reaction from the US
military, none of the air support that Thiệu still believed would be
forthcoming. This was an important test for the DRV and COSVN, the
prelude to the Hanoi meetings that drew up plans for a final offensive.



CHAPTER 7

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF
VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION

Introduction

I first arrived in Saigon in October 1973, to join the team of the American
Friends Service Committee, along with my husband Paul. We were to
be the Saigon representatives of this Quaker-based organization, whose
main focus was the physical rehabilitation of civilian war victims in
Quảng Nga˜i province, one of the most fought-over provinces below the
17th parallel. In addition to supporting the medical work of the Quảng
Nga˜i Rehabilitation Centre, we were encouraged to keep track of the
Saigon political scene and to report on the implementation of the Paris
Agreement. For almost three months we did nothing but study
Vietnamese, which gave us enough confidence to start practising
conversation on the streets and to work out what the newspapers were
covering. Having come from Paris, we were also fluent in French, making
it easy for us to communicate with educated Vietnamese, especially those
who had done their studies before the 1960s and the start of American
influence. Like most Westerners who attempted to learn the Vietnamese
language, we were overwhelmed by the warmth and encouragement of the
Vietnamese people. We came to know many of the figures in the Third
Segment, who were working for peace in 1973–5.

Quickly we were immersed in the post-Paris Agreement struggle of
the southern Vietnamese. In January of 1974, on what was going to be a
short visit to a refugee resettlement area near to Quảng Nga˜i town with
our team member and fluent Vietnamese speaker, Diane Jones, we were

166 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

picked up by young guerrillas of the NLF. They held us captive for
almost two weeks. It was a traumatic experience, especially the initial
moments of having guns pointed at the back of our heads and not
knowing what they were going to do with us. Crossing Highway 1, the
main north– south highway, with a troop of guerrillas and political
cadres, when we were roped together to prevent our flight, was also fairly
scary, as there was no guarantee that the ARVN would not detect this
movement and open fire. A few other moments left deep impressions.
First was our meeting with the cook who had memorized the Paris
Agreement. We had been led along the Tra` Khu´ c River up to the edge of
the mountains, where we stopped in a hamlet with a mixed population
of Hreˆ montagnards and revolutionaries. The cook, who brought us rice
and fresh vegetables for every meal, would stop and chat while we ate.
One of the first topics of conversation was the Paris Agreement – did we
understand its provisions? She proceeded to recite the key political
articles, in case we did not. That January was the first anniversary of the
agreement and it turned out that we had been captured on the
assumption that we were former US military personnel who had put on
civilian clothes to remain in the country. (We were not really what the
guerrillas were hoping for, but while they checked our backgrounds and
tried to figure out how to release us, we had a rare opportunity to visit
the countryside of Central Vietnam.) The other moment that is
imprinted in my memory was when the NLF took us back across the
porous front line, stopping at one point to cock their pistols. This
brought home to me the reality of war for the local people. We were led
to a hamlet in the ‘no-man’s land’ south of Quảng Nga˜i town, from
where we would be able to walk back to the Saigon zone in the morning.
We spent the night in a thatched hut, on the one woven-straw bed of a
peasant family, who all retreated to sleep in their earthen bunker. Very
soon we began to wish that we had chosen the bunker. All night long,
bullets and tracer bullets from a nearby base lit up the sky around this
hut, seeming to fly right past the open door. In the morning light we
could see that the bed was just about the family’s sole possession.
We followed a little boy at a discreet distance, as he carried a load of
firewood to a market on Highway 1, where we flagged down motorcycles
to drive us back into town.

From then until the spring of 1975, time passed in a rush. We were in
Quảng Nga˜i with the AFSC team when in mid-March the local US

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 167

consulate suggested that we evacuate to Saigon. Afterwards, three of our
team members tried to return once more to Quảng Nga˜i with a canvas
duffle full of piasters, to pay the final salaries of the Vietnamese staff
there. They never made it to Quảng Nga˜i, getting caught up in the
evacuation of Danang later that month. Our team doctor opted to stay
with a local Buddhist group, to treat the wounded if fighting broke out;
he remained in Danang for six months, working in a local hospital. The
other two were evacuated on an overloaded barge to a US ship, to be
delivered to the temporary safety of Cam Ranh Bay, a large naval base.
The bag full of money was lost. From there they made their way back to
Saigon. None of our team took part in the final evacuation of Saigon –
by then we had decided that the safest thing was to stay put. We had
student friends who promised to vouch for us if we stayed on to observe
what we all then knew would be a change of government. But no one
could have predicted how this would happen.

April 1975

As the month of April 1975 progressed, there were two schools of thought
about the future of Saigon and the Republic of Vietnam. One was the
bloodbath theory and all of its variations. This prognosis was based on the
Huế precedent: the massacre that was uncovered there, after the
communists were driven out during the 1968 Tết Offensive. The memoirs
of the man who was soon to become the Minister of Information in the last
South Vietnamese government show how the bloodbath stories were
ratcheted up during the final weeks of war: on 16 April, Secretary of
Defense James Schlesinger told the US Senate that if the communists were
victorious, 200,000 Vietnamese would be killed; on the 18th, Pentagon
spokesman Robert Burke announced that according to secret reports from
areas that had already been overrun, there had been many reports of bloody
revenge killings, with horrifying details; Pacific Stars and Stripes, the army
newspaper, published a headline saying that, at the very least one million
Vietnamese would be murdered.1

An American observer, the CIA analyst Frank Snepp, noted the same
pattern. He wrote in his diary for 15 April that:

Atrocity stories abound too, now imaginatively embroidered by
Saigon radio, the local press and the Embassy. At the Ambassador’s

168 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

orders, Joe Bennett [the political counsellor] is still zealously
churning out his share of them, playing on thirdhand reports
relayed out of Ban Me Thuot by a Buddhist monk. ‘They’re tearing
out women’s fingernails up there and chopping up the town
council’, one of Bennett’s younger staffers advised me gleefully this
afternoon. ‘That should turn some heads in Congress.’2

By mid-April of the final communist offensive, it was too late to frighten
the Congress into approving new military measures to stem the tide.
But it was not too late to start a panic – one that did not abate until
30 April, when the surrender was declared.

The other scenario for the end of the Vietnam War was perhaps
equally fantastic: that there would be no vengeance, that the Provisional
Revolutionary Government’s (PRG’s) policy of national reconciliation
and concord would embrace all of the people of South Vietnam who were
not guilty of ‘acts of cruelty’ against their communist opponents. While
reconciliation was taking place, it was understood that the South would
live under a separate system for at least ten years, perhaps longer. This
policy had been in place ever since the founding of the National
Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960, and was restated at intervals, as new
peace proposals issued forth from Hanoi, the maquis, Moscow and Paris.
In 1971, the PRG’s Seven Point Programme had made this position
clearer; at the same time French-sponsored efforts to find a neutral
candidate to run in the southern presidential election that autumn had
created the impression that a solution to the war relying on a ‘Third
Segment’ leader such as General Dương Va˘n Minh was a workable
proposition. The Soviets had also endorsed such a solution.

Trương Như Tảng, the Minister of Justice in the PRG, established in
1969 to represent the southern communists at the Paris peace
negotiations, reveals in his memoirs that the policy of reconciliation
became the cause of dissension in revolutionary ranks as the final peace
agreement was being hammered out in 1972. During discussions at the
communist command centre for the South (COSVN), he claims that
many southern guerrillas and the NLF’s nationalist intellectuals argued
that Vietnam’s war-devastated condition demanded that the:

entire Vietnamese people must be regarded as victims, even
including the Southern bourgeoisie, even including those working

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 169

for the Saigon government and fighting in its army . . . Our Party
comrades, however, were not to be persuaded by arguments either
of compassion or reason. They had (or so it seemed to me) given up
their consciences and pragmatic sense both in return for the
certitudes of their political religion.3

To prevent a split in the revolution, Workers’ Party First Secretary Leˆ
Duẩn had to intervene personally and in August issued a signed
directive to all political and military cadres: ‘The policy of national
concord and reconciliation without reprisal is the long-term strategy,
and it is the political line and the political behaviour of the Party.
It is also the position of the worker class.’4 After the signing of the
Paris Agreement on ending hostilities in January 1973, copies of this
policy were circulated in South Vietnam. (I was shown a carbon copy
in Saigon, late in 1973, by one of the young women teaching me
Vietnamese.) Whether this was simply a propaganda tool used to
hasten a negotiated settlement, or whether it reflected the position of
part of the Hanoi leadership is unclear. But Leˆ Duẩn’s declaration, that
it was the long-term aim and the position of the ‘worker class’, sounds
like a stance taken to undercut the ideological arguments of his fellow
politburo members. What he was saying was that even when the
‘national democratic revolution’ was completed, the policy of
reconciliation should remain in force.

As late as mid-April 1975, French diplomats in Saigon were working
on the assumption that some sort of negotiated settlement with the
communists would be possible, if President Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu would
resign and Dương Va˘n Minh could take his place. Frank Snepp saw this
last-minute foray into peacemaking as pure illusion, and despaired that
it was giving false hope to his Ambassador, Graham Martin. The
Ambassador was refusing to face the need to plan for an evacuation of
American and Vietnamese personnel at risk. He did not endorse the
French plan, however, and preferred to wait until a constitutional means
of replacing Thiệu could be found. Neither Martin nor the French
ambassador, Jean-Marie Me´rillon, appeared to comprehend that the end
was at hand.5 The US evacuation did not begin until 20 April.

When exactly the communist leadership understood that all of South
Vietnam was falling into their laps is hard to say. But they kept moving
their long-range battle plans forward, starting from the capture of Phước

170 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Long province on the Cambodian border in January 1975. It was on
5 February that General Va˘n Tiến Du˜ ng set out with a large contingent
of military and political officers for the Central Highlands to establish a
new command for the coming military campaign. By 11 March the town
of Banmethuot (now Buoˆn Ma Thuột) had fallen to the communists, and
a retreating column of ARVN soldiers with their dependents was
clogging up the route to the coast, Highway 19, as communist troops
pursued them. At this point the Politburo began to imagine a larger
campaign than they had originally planned for the season, including
possibly an attack on Saigon.6 But according to Leˆ Duẩn’s Thư va`o Nam
(Letters to the South), it was only after the liberation of the coastal city of
Ða` Nẵng at the end of March that the leadership shifted their attention
to Saigon. As he wrote with only slight hyperbole, ‘our revolution is now
developing at a pace, where one day has become like twenty years’.
He was especially heartened by the news that the population of Ða` Nẵng
had participated in the takeover of their city.7 On 31 March he sent the
order to General Va˘n Tiến Du˜ ng to proceed south to COSVN to prepare
for the attack on Saigon. From that point on, the communist forces had
trouble keeping up with the collapse and flight of the ARVN troops, as
they moved down the coast.

The CIA was receiving reports on the new timetable with
impressive speed: Frank Snepp was warned by an agent on April Fool’s
Day that the North Vietnamese were on a ‘blood scent’. Then on
8 April the station’s best agent supplied the intelligence that the
communist high command had just issued a new resolution calling for
‘the liberation of all territory north of Saigon during April and a move
against the capital at an as yet unspecified date, with no allowance
whatsoever for a negotiated settlement’.8 Saigon politicians, the diplomatic
corps and the Eastern European members of the International Control
Commission (ICC), however, continued to believe that with the
removal of President Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu, a ceasefire or negotiations
could be arranged to preserve a South Vietnamese state in Saigon and
the Mekong Delta. The memoirs of Saigon General Trần Va˘n Ðoˆn show
that discussions on the formation of a government that would be
‘acceptable to the NLF’ continued up to the last days of the Saigon
regime, with both Nguyễn Cao Kỳ and Trần Va˘n Hữu, the exile in
Paris who had been linked to the Third Segment since 1954, among
those being promoted as successors to Thiệu.9

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 171

Dương Va˘n Minh and the Surrender

The handover of power in Saigon on 30 April 1975 went remarkably
smoothly, when one considers what might have happened if General
Dương Va˘n Minh had been unwilling to surrender. He had finally
become the last RVN president on 28 April after Nguyễn Va˘n Thiệu’s
resignation on 21 April left his 71-year-old vice president, Trần Va˘n
Hương, in power for an agonizing week. As Hương balked at
transferring power to Minh, the possibility that the communist forces
would fight their way into the city grew. Rumours of ultimata were
floating around Saigon, including the demand that all Americans should
depart. On 24 April the PRG announced that all US intelligence officers,
as well as military personnel disguised as civilians, must depart. There
must be an end to both military and economic aid to the Saigon
government.10 By the time of Thiệu’s resignation, it appears that the
communists had already set the date of their final attack as 29 April.
(My experience gives an idea of what a close call the people of Saigon
had. I was living in a small row house on a crowded alley between the
airport and the centre of town, with the other Quaker volunteers who
had earlier evacuated from Central Vietnam. We had all decided to stay
to witness the change of regime, as had a handful of Western journalists.
We were told by a student friend who dropped by around 8.00 a.m. on
30 April that we should stay in our house unless it started to burn.)

Minh was believed by many people in the know to maintain contact
with his brother, a colonel with the NLF. But unlike 1963, there was no
sign that his sibling was in Saigon. In April 1975 there was no one in his
inner circle who had a direct line to the communists, at least not to those
who were making the decisions. Information about the ‘other side’s’
intentions was being passed to Washington by the Soviets; in Saigon it
was Liberation Radio and the PRG delegation in Paris that kept the
major actors informed. Since the signing of the Paris Agreement on
ending hostilities in 1973, General Minh had put himself forward as a
representative of the Third Segment, as one of those neutralists who
would make up one-third of the Council of National Reconciliation and
Concord mandated by the agreement. This council was to have, by
weight of its moral authority, overseen elections and the transition to
some sort of coalition government. As Thiệu had stonewalled on
implementation of the political provisions of the Paris Agreement,

172 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

however, the council never took shape and those identifying themselves

as neutralist or Third Segment were treated as dangerous dissidents.

Among these were the opposition deputies from the National Assembly

who grouped themselves into a political bloc under Minh’s protection.

General Minh gave little evidence of providing political leadership to

this group, preferring to follow the consensus among his advisers.

But he understood that he was necessary as a figurehead for the Third

Segment and undertook his final role in Vietnamese politics with great

dignity.

Ly´ Quı´ Chung was designated to be Minister of Information in the

short-lived Minh cabinet. By his own admission, he had no direct

information in the final days about communist intentions, with the

exception of the advice coming from the staff cartoonist at his

newspaper, Ðc_aierntoToı´nns (The Telegraph). (This cadre, Huỳnh Ba´ Tha`nh, who
signed his as Ơt (Hot Pepper), only began to reveal his

connections towards the very end, when he advised Ly´ Quı´ Chung that

General Minh had no option other than surrender.) On 29 April when

Chung addressed the people of Saigon on television, he could only guess

about the latest policy of the Liberation Forces – would they or would

they not fight their way into Saigon? But he reassured the populace that

they should not worry about a bloodbath in the city, since he believed

the communists would not fight if the Saigon army laid down its arms.
He advised the people to stay put.11

As the evacuation of Westerners and at-risk Vietnamese grew in

urgency, the mood in the city changed from panic to lawlessness. In the

early morning of 29 April the communist troops started to rocket Taˆn

Sơn Nhứt airport, tearing up the runways and making a continued

evacuation by plane impossible. The US Embassy’s final option,

‘Operation Frequent Wind’, evacuation by helicopter, was launched

hours later. The houses and villas left empty by departing dignitaries

were stripped bare by looters. After the Chief of Police, Nguyễn Khắc

B`ınh, departed, General Minh’s aide Dương Va˘n Ba called B`ınh’s second

in command to request that he do everything in his power to prevent

looting. But the new government really had little control over the

Saigon military and police, in this situation of every man for himself.

It was the knowledge of this powerlessness and of the carnage that had

occurred in Ða` Nẵng, when drunken soldiers, deserted by their officers,

had shot up the city before the entry of the communist troops, which

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 173

forced the next decisions of General Minh. After Minh’s swearing in, Ly´
Qu´ı Chung begged the General to declare Saigon ‘an open city’, so that
the Liberation forces could enter and take up responsibility for law and
order. That would be the only way to prevent chaos.12 By then Chung
was more frightened of what the desperate ARVN soldiers might do
than he was of the Việt Cộng. The new government put off the
declaration of a ceasefire until the following morning, to prevent a night
of anarchy, and while the American evacuation continued. His cabinet
convinced Minh to spend the night in Independence Palace, for his own
safety. The palace had a bomb-proof bunker – had the General been
killed by a random shell, there would have been no one with the
authority to announce the ceasefire or transfer power the following day.
The evacuation helicopters continued to depart from the roofs of US
Embassy buildings until the dawn of 30 April.

At 8.00 that morning Minh’s inner cabinet met at the prime
minister’s residence, to hear his decision on announcing the ceasefire.
Technicians from the nearby television studio came to record the
announcement, although there was no video camera. Later French
General Francois Vanuxem dropped by, to try to convince Minh that he
should send an appeal for help to some ‘powerful country’. But Minh
rejected the idea, saying that he had been ‘a lackey of the French and a
lackey of the Americans’, and that he could not continue that path. A call
came from Thı´ch Trı´ Quang, the monk who had led the Buddhist
uprisings in 1963 and 1966. He begged General Minh to surrender. The
question now was to whom.13

Around 9.30 a.m. the Minh entourage drove back to the palace, to
wait for the Liberation troops. They remembered to tell the guards the
news about the ceasefire, and the General asked them to open the main
gates. Later Ly´ Qu´ı Chung remembered being puzzled by the images of
the communist tank knocking down the gates, as though the palace had
been locked up. (This may have been part of a re-enactment for the
communist press, which included a soldier dashing across the lawn of
Independence Palace with a huge PRG flag.) The first T-54 showed up
around 11.30 a.m. The young captain who commanded tank 843, Bu` i
Quang Thận, was helped up to the palace roof to take down the old flag
and raise the blue-and-red flag of the PRG. (At this point, all the
arriving troops had was a small red-and-blue pennant from their tank
antenna.)14 The irony, as Ly´ Qu´ı Chung points out, was that he had spent

174 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

years opposing the Americans and opposing Thiệu – and now he was

standing in for them at the surrender ceremony. The ranking officer on

the scene ordered General Minh to write a surrender declaration. He was

driven with his Prime Minister Vu˜ Va˘n Mẫu to the television station to

record the proclamation, dictated by the political officer, Bu` i T´ın.

It wasn’t until 1.30 that afternoon that they were able to broadcast the

declaration, after the student activist Nguyễn Hữu Tha´i went to round

up a technician.

When we went out on the streets that afternoon, Saigon was eerily

quiet – here and there deserted tanks blocked the streets and everywhere

were the signs of a disappearing army. Discarded uniforms and identity

cards of the da edfeeastiegdnaatremdysluitrtreernedderthpeosiindte,wsatlukdse. nAtt aVcat˙inviHsta˙snahnBdumddohniksst
University,

were collecting weapons and uniforms as soldiers turned them in. By late

afternoon the piles of M-16s were turning into small mountains. The

body of one young man in civilian clothes, someone who had come out

on the streets too early, lay by the university gate. This was a far cry from

the ‘popular uprising’ that communist history includes in the tale of

the war’s end, but there was a student movement and members of the

Hồ Ch´ı Minh Youth ready to play their part in keeping order. Two

diminutive sisters, both young, attractive and secret members of the

communist party, had to take the surrender of hundreds of soldiers in the

B`ınh Thanh district in Gia Ðinh, just outside the city centre. More
importan˙t members of the Sai˙gon underground were waiting before

making themselves known, and the NLF infrastructure appeared to be

short-handed.

During the next week, students directed traffic, set up health

checkpoints, cleared garbage and tried to reassure the population. Basic

services such as the water and electricity supply continued without

interruption, thanks to the underground’s mobilization efforts. They had

quietly been contacting managers in the essential services and asking for

their cooperation in the weeks before the surrender. Tom Polgar noted

that, as the last Americans flew out of Saigon, ‘the city had its normal

night time picture. The street lights were on, the traffic lights were

working.’ Of the last weeks in Saigon, he said, ‘they were so unreal

because everything appeared to be so normal. It wasn’t like the long

siege of Warsaw, you know. A day before the collapse you could still go
to restaurants and get a very nice meal and a good wine.’15

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 175

After what seemed a long hiatus, a temporary Military Management

Committee was introduced to the city on 7 May, under the leadership of

the legendary southern general Trần Va˘n Tra`. In his speech that day,

General Tra` took pains to present the communist victory as ‘the victory

of all Vietnamese’; ‘anyone with Vietnamese blood in his veins has a
right to feel proud’, he stated.16 Reconciliation felt natural for the first

few weeks – the northern soldiers camped in the shaded central park by

the cathedral, spent their days chatting with the Saigonese who

gradually came out to meet them. But the official image of the tanks

crashing through the gates of Independence Palace belied these

sentiments. There was before long a sense in the air that Hanoi would

insist on its moral superiority as a conquering power. The bloodbath had

not happened, but the mood in the city was not as jubilant as might have

been expected after the end of a 30-year war. The Buddhist nun, Ni sư

Huỳnh-Lieˆn, who had led several anti-Thiệu demonstrations in the last

years of the war, a few days after the surrender described her situation

candidly as ‘somewhat sour and somewhat sSwegemet’en(cthuleaa-dcheursa,inngt_ohte-nSgo_out)t.1h7,
She, like other religious people and Third

was discovering that her role as a leader and spokesperson for ordinary

people was coming to an end. Her order of mendicant nuns, who like the

Theravada monks in Thailand and Cambodia begged for their food,

would in the future have to support themselves and give up begging.

But their retreat house remained an open and vibrant place to visit,

serving exceptionally good vegetarian food on religious holidays.

Unification and the Building of Socialism

There were some early signs after 30 April that the process of
reconciliation would not be given the priority that many peace advocates
had expected. One was the conquerors’ treatment of General Minh as a
representative of the old regime. In fact, Catholic representatives of the
Third Segment in Paris had been informed sometime in April by the
PRG ambassador Ðinh Ba´ Thi that there was no longer any place for
such a force in Vietnamese politics. Either you supported the revolution
or you were an enemy. As they were preparing to head home to engage in
relief work, Ambassador Thi advised them not to work with General
Minh, so that they would be free to cooperate with the PRG when the
government changed hands.18 But this policy change was not made

176 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

explicit to any of the Third Segment leaders in Saigon, so far as I can
determine. Another sign was the early merger of the armed forces of
North and South, at the Victory Parade held in Saigon on 15 May.
At that time the Việt Cộng divisions marched under the northern flag.19
Yet in his speech that day, Leˆ Duẩn declared that the South would build
a ‘national democratic regime’, a confirmation that the newly liberated
territory would preserve a separate political and economic system for the
time being.20 But at a conference held in November, in what was now
Hồ Ch´ı Minh City, a new plan emerged for the rapid reunification of
North and South, to be completed in 1976. This was a clear indication
that the gradualist policies spelled out in various PRG peace
programmes had been scrapped.

The re-education of high-level officers and civil servants of the Saigon
government was an example of the strange terrain that the southern
population was entering: the officers ordered to report to meeting points
in the city in mid-June were advised to bring clothing and supplies for
one month. After a few weeks their wives were reassured that all was
well, and that their husbands’ release date would depend on ‘their
attitude’.21 When no one returned after the month was up, and the
government made no clear explanation of its policy, people began to
realize that they were living in a system where there were no clear rules.
Roughly 200,000 men were affected by this open-ended system of
imprisonment. The Hanoi government often explained that the policy
on re-education was a humane one, since many of these men might
otherwise have been tried as war criminals. (In contrast, the Diệm
government’s treatment in 1955–6 of communist suspects, who were
protected by the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, was far harsher.)
But the round-up also included large numbers of men who had been
apolitical civil servants, whose skills were lost to the nation.

By June the student committees and other ‘spontaneous’ popular
organizations were replaced by official communist party structures in
all aspects of urban life. The student leader Nguyễn Hữu Tha´i
remembers the situation in his neighbourhood, a modest housing
development for military families. His friend, the engineer Nguyễn
Tha´i Sơn, thought he had the approval of relatives in the NLF to set up
a people’s self-management committee to run the quarter. But before
long he was arrested, and his administrative committee was dissolved.
Va˙n Ha˙nh University students who had organized the collection of

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 177

ARVN weapons on 30 April, when there was no civil or military

authority on the streets of Saigon, were later criticized for exceeding
their authority.22 Even communist party members in the city felt the

heavy disapproval of certain guardians of revolutionary morality. One

of the two lseifsttetrhs einpvaorltvyedafitnerthteoosumrraennydercriinticGisima sÐo˙inf hheprro‘vpientciet
eventually

bourgeois’ habits. One of these was listening to classical music. The

final straw came when she was summoned to an urgent meeting of her

party cell, just as she was returning home from a wedding. She was

wearing one of her two good ao-dais, a rose-pink tunic dress, when she

turned up at the meeting. One of the cell members, a woman who had

come to the city from the resistance base, gave her a lecture for wearing
the pink dress, saying it was petit bourgeois clothing.23 The influence

of China’s Cultural Revolution had apparently seeped into some

segments of Vietnam’s revolution.

Nguyễn Hữu Tha´i, who had never managed to join the communist

party, played his part in organizing the city’s young people in the first

weeks of transition. But he, too, began to realize that he was part of the

past. He received a message from Thı´ch Trı´ Quang advising him that

‘now the Revolution needs new people, and we must be conscious
that we are no longer needed. Do not venture too much.’24 Still Tha´i

continued to work as an organizer of young intellectuals in the front

committee of the Communist Youth Organization. He took part in the

campaign to eliminate ‘decadent capitalist culture’ – but even the youth

leading the campaign had no understanding of what was expected of

them or where the limits were. Tha´i admits that he did not know for sure

if his own books and research documents would be the objects of the

campaign. The government’s intention appeared to be to eliminate

both Western propaganda and sources of information: the 15 May

communique´ from the Military Management Committee had stated

unequivocally that the ‘circulation, sale and lending of all publications

printed during the American occupation and under the puppet regime
must cease within a week’.25

Some overzealous volunteers started entering private homes and

confiscating books they deemed unsuitable, even holding public book

burnings. After many complaints from the public, the newspaper Sa`i

Go`n Giải Pho´ng (Liberated Saigon) had to publish a clarification, listing

what publications could be kept. The 6 June statement gave the okay to

178 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

scientific and technical books; novels and works of poetry used for
purposes of study; books published before 1954 by revolutionary
writers and poets; classical and modern French, American, Chinese and
Japanese foreign publications that are not counter-revolutionary, except
publications of an existentialist or corrupting nature; history books
about our country that do not contain falsehoods about the Revolution;
and foreign dictionaries. Happily, this attempt to control culture was
doomed to failure in South Vietnam, where the remnants of French-
inspired intellectual life still flourished in combination with many other
influences, from all parts of Vietnam and neighbouring countries.

Rushing the Socialist Revolution in the South

The declaration that Vietnam would be formally unified in 1976, as the
‘Socialist Republic of Vietnam’, was a surprise to most of us who had
been following Vietnamese politics. (By then, I had returned to the
USA.) Was the change of policy towards the South simply a normal
transition to ‘a new phase’ in the life of the revolution (the term used
by politburo ideologue Trường Chinh)? Or was the rush to rapid
unification and socialism the unplanned result of Vietnam’s challenging
geopolitical situation? By early 1975, relations with China and
Cambodia may have been more worrying to the Hanoi leadership than
they let on. Was insecurity leading them to keep the newly liberated
south on a tighter rein than had been promised during the years of war?
The attitude of the Chinese, who were moving closer to the Americans
by then, was clearly a source of concern. Trương Như Tảng describes the
eagerness of Chinese leaders to court the southerners in the PRG during
an April 1975 trip to Beijing. Tảng was leading a PRG delegation to the
funeral of Queen Sihanouk’s mother in Beijing. As Tảng explains,
‘Throughout our stay the Chinese had treated us with a good deal more
cordiality than they had the DRV delegation. They were plainly using
this opportunity to express their feelings about Hanoi’s already serious
romance with the Soviets. At the same time they were signalling to the
PRG that they were open to independent contacts.’26 Of course such
signals were ill-timed, as at the end of April the PRG diplomats were
looking forward to their return to the South and the long-hoped for
reunions with their families, in a country where freedom of movement
had suddenly become possible.

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 179

Figure 7.1 Communist soldiers walking past the US Embassy in Saigon,
after 30 April. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

The Vietnamese hoped to continue their wartime practice of
balancing relations with their Soviet and Chinese allies in peacetime.
But neither power would make this an easy task. Disputed islands in the
South China Sea had already become a source of friction between the
Vietnamese and Chinese at the end of 1973. On 19 January 1974,
the Chinese occupied an island claimed by South Vietnam in the
Paracels island group. The communist government would later claim
that this was China’s ‘first act of armed aggression against Vietnam’.27
In 1975, the Vietnamese took great pride in ending the US role in
Indochina, but to the Chinese government, this looked like a dangerous
shift in the balance of power in South East Asia, one that would favour
the Soviet Union.

For the Hanoi leadership another destabilizing factor had appeared
as the final victory neared. The Khmers Rouges had captured Phnom
Penh on 17 April, winning their own battle against imperialism.
Neither side in Vietnam could have expected what came next: on
19 April the commander of the Democratic Kampuchea navy, Khe
Muth, began to shell the Vietnamese island of Phu´ Quốc in the Gulf of
Siam, long claimed by the Cambodians as their territory. Muth then
landed six boatloads of troops on a smaller Saigon-held island, along

Figure 7.2 Monk collecting discarded weapons of ARVN at Van Hanh
˙˙
University, 1 May 1975. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 181

Figure 7.3 Buddhist nuns, with Amerasian children left with nuns by
fearful mothers. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

with a smaller force on Phu´ Quốc. Although the Saigon forces
recaptured the smaller island, the fighting continued as the
government of South Vietnam changed hands. From 10 to 25 May
the Khmers Rouges occupied another Vietnamese island, where they
destroyed villages, according to Hanoi. The communist Vietnamese
retaliated by capturing the Cambodian Wai Island.28 The Khmers
Rouges had apparently miscalculated the speed with which the
Vietnamese victory would follow their own – during negotiations in
the summer of 1975 they took responsibility for the hostilities over the
islands, saying their troops were ignorant of local geography.29 But the
unthinkable had happened: blood had been spilled in fighting between
the communist brothers. These events must have increased Hanoi’s
awareness of the vulnerability of the newly won South.

In South Vietnam the basic problem was how to replace the war-
making economy with a peacetime one. The South had become a food
importer during the war, and depended on foreign aid, just as the DRV
did. Saigon, now renamed Hồ Chı´ Minh City, was a special problem – it
was a swollen urban area of five million people, full of old and new

182 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Figure 7.4 A student-turned-guerilla returning from the NLF zone on
1 May 1975. Photo by Sophie Quinn-Judge.

refugees from the years of fighting, demobilized soldiers, unemployed
civil servants, stranded employees of the Westerners who had left, bar
girls, journalists and thousands of small traders. Even before the war
ended, in February 1974, the South Vietnamese Deputy Premier Phan
Quang Ða´n had complained that there were from four to five million
unemployed in the Saigon-controlled areas. As historian Ngoˆ Vı˜nh
Long writes, ‘Hanoi acted more out of a sense of insecurity than from
confidence that its development model was completely adequate in
dealing with the situation in the South.’ The efforts to collectivize
agricultural production in South Vietnam, which began in 1978, he also
attributes in part to Hanoi’s desire to achieve greater political control
and penetration in rural areas.30

Another element in the DRV’s eagerness to push ahead with political
transformation in the South may have been the political tensions in the
North itself. For years the efforts to collectivize agriculture in North
Vietnam had been the subject of party debates. As of 1968 the peasants
were still growing a large proportion of the nation’s food on their private
plots, which furnished 40 per cent of their incomes, and as young men
departed to fight, the country was increasingly dependent on Chinese

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 183

Figure 7.5 A foot soldier from the NVA, chatting with boys in a Saigon
park, May 1975. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

food aid. In 1967– 8, as a more orthodox style of communism returned
to the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, the hard-liners in the
Vietnamese politburo appear to have been reinforced in their positions.
In 1968, as described in Chapter 5, Trường Chinh gave a series of
lectures on Marxism, which articulated a strong commitment to class
struggle, the elimination of all vestiges of capitalism and to a full
military victory in South Vietnam. That same year, we should recall, he
had announced that experiments with family-based production within
cooperative farms must be ended. As of 1970 the leadership was still
debating agricultural policies and whether or not to accelerate the
formation of large-scale cooperatives. Because of the DRV’s lack of
modern technology, they delayed this step until 1973– 4.31 When it did
begin, this effort to rationalize production and to create a more efficient
modern agriculture only backfired, however. As one expert wrote, ‘the
larger the cooperative, the poorer the economic results’.32

Yet the leadership resolved to implement their creaking and much-
contested model of economic transformation in the South. The party
plenum held in Dalat in September 1975 announced that in its new
phase the Vietnamese revolution had only one strategic task: ‘socialist

184 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Figure 7.6 Man on motorcycle: Looting of US post exchange at Newport,
outside Saigon, April 1975. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

revolution and socialist construction’. At a 15 November Political
Conference held in Saigon’s Independence Palace, Trường Chinh
announced that whatever differences still exist between North and
South must be reduced and levelled.33 At some level this decision
seemed to reflect an almost religious faith in Marxism – Leninism, of
the sort Trương Như Tảng had noted during his time in the jungle
bases of the NLF. Of course, on a pragmatic level, the party hoped that
a merger with the southern economy would provide more resources to
the struggling northern one; at the same time, on another plane, the
ideologues hoped to prove to their domestic critics that their model
was both effective and just.

By 1978, these different factors – including both geopolitical
insecurity and ideological intransigence – would come together in a
truly disastrous way for Vietnam. Relations with Cambodia had fallen
into a downward spiral of border conflict, which for Vietnam involved
considerable loss of life and a decrease in food production. Tensions
with China erupted into border clashes that year, and saw the
beginning of an exodus of Chinese across the northern border. Then
the campaign to ‘eradicate commercial capitalists’ (xo´a bỏ tư sản thương
nghieˆp) that began that March in Hồ Ch´ı Minh City led to accusations

˙

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 185

Figure 7.7 Woman in Saigon (Ho`ˆ Chı´ Minh City) selling photos of Hoˆ` Chı´
Minh on the street, after 30 April 1975. Photo by Sophie Quinn-Judge.

that Vietnam was discriminating against its Chinese population.
(A large proportion of the affected urban population were of Chinese
extraction, the Hoa-kiều. The measure was intended to convince
traders to engage in productive activities.) This, in turn, led the
Chinese to cut back their remaining aid to Vietnam and to make the
dramatic and destabilizing gesture of sending a ship to Saigon to rescue
any Chinese residents who desired to depart. In the end the ship left
without picking up any passengers, but many Hoa had made known
their wish to leave. A new semi-legal exodus of boat people began,
which involved leaky freighters from Hong Kong and the sale of
passage on these ships by corrupt southerners from the security organs.
Altogether, from 1975 to 1979, over 400,000 Hoa would depart from
Vietnam, both by ship and over the northern land border.34 In
November of 1978, Vietnam signed a long-term friendship treaty with
the USSR, which gave Moscow basing rights for its navy in what had
once been the US Navy’s largest base in Vietnam, at Cam Ranh Bay.
Throughout the year, the Vietnamese had been equipping an anti-Pol
Pot army and preparing the structures of a rival government for
Cambodia. Using the very thin cover of this Cambodian force, the

186 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Vietnamese army began an invasion of Cambodia in December 1978

that would turn into a ten-year occupation.

In spite of moral condescension, unworkable cultural restrictions,

censorship and downright lies from the communist party after 1975,

some idealistic southerners continued to engage with their new socialist

government in 1978 and the following years. It had been their hope in

the months before and after 30 April 1975 that they would be able to act

as a bridge between the southern populace and the government in

Hanoi. Leftist Catholic priests such as the Redemptorist Father Chaˆn

T´ın, who had led the Committee to Reform the Prison System under the

old regime, and his collaborator Father Nguyễn Ngoc Lan sympathized
with the communist goal of eliminating povert˙y. Their belief in

liberation theology had led them to welcome the change of government.

Father T´ın agreed to stand for election to the Fatherland Front (Mặt Trận

Tổ Quốc Việt Nam) because, as he saw it, he could help ‘the

revolutionaries to understand the Catholics better, and at the same time,

help the Catholic community to understand the Revolution’. But by

1983, when he addressed a meeting of the Front’s Central Committee, he

remarked that there was little mutual trust between the people and the
party.35 The suspicion and discrimination against people with the wrong

family background or religious beliefs meant that a large part of the

southern population was living on the margins of society, unable to send
their children to university or to find suitable work.36

Father Lan left the priesthood and married after 1975, to live as an

ordinary citizen. A gaunt, intense intellectual, he continued to publish a

monthly journal, which changed its name from Ðo´ˆi Dcriu˙eˆnm(bIlnedO.ppBosuittiohne)
to Đứng Daˆy (Rise Up) as the Saigon government
refused to˙ continue publication after December 1978, when the

government insisted that he allow a party ‘guide’ to serve on his staff.

He and Father T´ın eventually experienced house arrest and exile, and in

1998 a suspicious motorbike accident left Lan with a head injury and

persistent health problems. He died in February 2007. Father Chaˆn Tı´n

remained a stalwart of the movement for pluralism and freedom of

opinion in Vietnam, living out his last years in the Redemptorist

compound in Hồ Ch´ı Minh City. He died in 2012.

The group of former opposition deputies and newspapermen in

General Minh’s group were able to play a limited role as intermediaries

between the old and new worlds, by reopening Ngoˆ Coˆng Ðức’s old

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 187

daily newspaper, Tin Sa´ng (Morning News) in August 1975. After 1978,
however, they had to accept the presence of what amounted to a party
censor on the paper. One of their successes was their report of
2 September 1980 on experiments in the Mekong Delta with new
systems of agricultural production. This, they believed, led to the
passage of a decree (Resolution 10) in 1981 by a party plenum,
legalizing the family contract or ‘responsibility’ system within collective
farms.37 But by the end of 1980 the government announced that Tin
Sa´ng had ‘completed its mission’ and the last non-party newspaper in
Vietnam ceased publication. As individuals, their lives took different
paths. The publisher and editor-in-chief, Ngoˆ Coˆng Đức, had enough
money to set up a cooperative to produce lacquer ware, which provided
employment to many of the paper’s former staff. Later he branched out
into ceramics, and began to supply ceramic pots to IKEA. Before his
death in 2007, he was dreaming of opening a private boys’ school in his
home province, but such ventures in private education have rarely
succeeded in contemporary Vietnam.

Ly´ Quı´ Chung, the Minister of Information for almost two days in
1975, was one of the few Tin Sa´ng writers who continued to work in
journalism after 1980. After writing for the much-quoted Hồ Ch´ı
Minh City Party youth newspaper, Tuổi Trẻ, he went to Hanoi in 1994
to become the general manager of the labour union paper, Lao Ðoˆng.
As an experienced sports writer, he found plenty of outlets˙ for
his articles on soccer, a passion among Vietnamese sportsmen and
gamblers. He claims in his memoirs that he could make as much as
US$2,000 per month this way.

But one casualty of his loyalty to the communist regime was his
relationship with his father. This was a man who had been fired from his
post as an administrator in the Thiệu government, because of his son’s
political activities. While Chung was still working for Tin Sa´ng, he
heard the news that his parents’ house had been sealed, and his father
taken off to the local police station, on the grounds that he was a high-
ranking officer in the ARVN. The district authorities had decided to
confiscate the house as the property of a ‘capitalist’, because his mother
owned a small shop. (Chung gives no date for these events, but they
probably occurred in 1978, the time of the anti-capitalist campaign.)
The worst insult was that the local people were invited to visit
the ‘palace’ of Ly´ Quı´ Pha´t, which in fact was an unremarkable but old

188 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

three-storey house near the Nguyễn Tri Phương market in District 10.

No one showed up for the tour, as his parents had lived in the

neighbourhood for several decades and were known as decent people.

Although in the end his parents were allowed to stay in the house, the

authorities continued to pressure them to move to a ‘New Economic

Zone’ and turn over the house to the government. His father developed

high blood pressure, suffered a major stroke, and for a time was unable to

speak. When he did regain some speech, his first words to his son were, ‘I

don’t want to see you again. Look what has happened to your family, and
to your father. And you are still a journalist for the communists!’38 His

father remained paralysed for the last ten years of his life, while seven out

of Chung’s ten younger siblings became boat people.

‘Mistakes’ and excesses became a part of the daily routine of Hồ Chı´

Minh City and Ly´ Qu´ı Chung’s family was not the only one to suffer at

the hands of abusive cadres. Within less than a year, a number of the

worst offenders in District 10 were removed, after an investigation by

the People’s Court. There were clearly differences of opinion in Hanoi as

to who and what constituted a threat to the new order. Yet all too often

the security forces had a way of winning these arguments. The memoirs

of journalist and politician Hồ Ngoc Nhuận depict the ongoing struggle
for tolerance and justice in the Sou˙th. Nhuận was one of a small number

of former opposition politicians who in 1975 was permitted to take part

in a special ‘re-education’ course with the powerful younger brother of Leˆ

Dức Tho, known as Mai Ch´ı Tho or ‘Na˘m Xuaˆn’. (Mai Ch´ı Tho served as
Chief of˙ Security in the South,˙ and later moved to Hanoi t˙o become

Minister of the Interior and a Politburo member.) Nhuận, who worked

as a political writer for Tin Sa´ng and a member of the Fatherland Front,

attempted to use his relationship with Mai Chı´ Tho to free some of his
old colleagues from their open-ended re-education. T˙wo of these were the

former publishers of well-known opposition newspapers in Saigon.

In the case of Vo˜ Long Triều he did not have much luck. Triều, publisher

oopf pÐos_aiitiDonaˆtno Toˆc (The Great Nation), a paper that engaged with the
T˙hiệu and the Americans in 1972 –5, was rearrested after a

short period in re-education. He then did ten more years in prison and

finally left legally for Paris in 1993. The publisher of Ðiˆen-T´ın, the
leading voice of the Saigon opposition from 1973 until 197˙5, was also

unlucky. Hồng Sơn Ðoˆng was a retired colonel and former Senator,

which in Hanoi’s eyes made him an actor in the old regime. Nhuận and

THE END OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND REUNIFICATION 189

others worked to get him released, and finally they were informed that
Pham Va˘n Đồng had intervened on his behalf. But he wouldn’t be
com˙ ing home directly – he was being sent to Hanoi for a few days’
vacation. His friends guessed that this ‘vacation’ was a way of improving
Ðoˆng’s nutritional state before he returned to his family.39

When the reform process known as Đổi Mới was getting underway in
1987, Hồ Ngoc Nhuận would find that the system of justice remained
arbitrary. Afte˙r the closing of Tin Sa´ng, he and a number of former
colleagues formed a trading company in collaboration with the far
southern province of Minh Hải. One of their most successful ventures
was purchasing timber in Laos. The leader in this enterprise, Dương Va˘n
Ba, was another of the former opposition deputies associated with
Dương Va˘n Minh. In the final years of the US – Vietnam War he had
taken refuge in Minh’s house, to avoid an arrest warrant for draft
dodging issued by Thiệu’s police. The success of the Laotian venture
apparently alarmed the Ministry of the Interior – they created a flimsy
case against Dương Va˘n Ba and some of his collaborators from Minh
Hải, charging them with carrying out a CIA plot against the
Vietnamese government. When these accusations failed to hold up, the
charge was changed to a variety of economic misdeeds, which resulted in
a seven-year prison term for Ba.40 His friend Nhuận’s relationship with
Mai Ch´ı Tho was no longer effective; in fact Nhuận himself discovered
that he was ˙under suspicion as part of a US ‘stay-behind’ network. The
charges were proven to be unfounded in 1996; neither economic
malfeasance nor political crimes had been committed. Nhuận, who
returned to his work with the Fatherland Front, has assembled a dossier
of documents on this case, which he has had to publish himself. But no
restitution or public apology has been made to those who lost years of
freedom and their good names.

Conclusion

The Western creation, the Republic of Vietnam, died amid high drama
in the spring of 1975. One can call those events a liberation in the sense
that millions of people were liberated from what had become an
apparently endless ‘hot war’. But the Cold War did not release Vietnam
from its grip in 1975 – that would happen in the years between 1989
and 1992, as the Sino – Soviet split ended and the United States began