A Parallel to "Gathering Of Eagles." What did the North Vietnamese think of the antiwar movement?

A LOT of parallels to current events here for some of the younger folks who do not know what REALLY went on in the past, and WILL go on now ... IF we do not stand-up and speak-up.

What did the North Vietnamese leadership think of the American antiwar movement?

Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, answers these questions in the following excerpts from an interview conducted by Stephen Young, a Minnesota attorney and human-rights activist [in The Wall Street Journal, 3 August 1995]. Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam's army, received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. He later became editor of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of Vietnam. He now lives in Paris, where he immigrated after becoming disillusioned with the fruits of Vietnamese communism.

Answer: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said,

"We don't need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out."

A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.

A: Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.

A: Cut the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Laos. If Johnson had granted [Gen. William] Westmoreland's requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh trail, Hanoi could not have won the war.

A: Train South Vietnam's generals. The junior South Vietnamese officers were good, competent and courageous, but the commanding general officers were inept.

Q: Did Hanoi expect that the National Liberation Front would win power in South Vietnam?

A: No. Gen. [Vo Nguyen] Giap [commander of the North Vietnamese army] believed that guerrilla warfare was important but not sufficient for victory. Regular military divisions with artillery and armor would be needed. The Chinese believed in fighting only with guerrillas, but we had a different approach. The Chinese were reluctant to help us. Soviet aid made the war possible. Le Duan [secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party] once told Mao Tse-tung that if you help us, we are sure to win; if you don't, we will still win, but we will have to sacrifice one or two million more soldiers to do so.

Q: Was the National Liberation Front an independent political movement of South Vietnamese?

A: No. It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960. We always said there was only one party, only one army in the war to liberate the South and unify the nation. At all times there was only one party commissar in command of the South.

A: It was the only way to bring sufficient military power to bear on the fighting in the South. Building and maintaining the trail was a huge effort, involving tens of thousands of soldiers, drivers, repair teams, medical stations, communication units.

A: Not very effective. Our operations were never compromised by attacks on the trail. At times, accurate B-52 strikes would cause real damage, but we put so much in at the top of the trail that enough men and weapons to prolong the war always came out the bottom. Bombing by smaller planes rarely hit significant targets.

A: If all the bombing had been concentrated at one time, it would have hurt our efforts. But the bombing was expanded in slow stages under Johnson and it didn't worry us. We had plenty of times to prepare alternative routes and facilities. We always had stockpiles of rice ready to feed the people for months if a harvest were damaged. The Soviets bought rice from Thailand for us.

A: To relieve the pressure Gen. Westmoreland was putting on us in late 1966 and 1967 and to weaken American resolve during a presidential election year.

A: Our senior commander in the South, Gen. Nguyen Chi Thanh, knew that we were losing base areas, control of the rural population and that his main forces were being pushed out to the borders of South Vietnam. He also worried that Westmoreland might receive permission to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

In January 1967, after discussions with Le Duan, Thanh proposed the Tet Offensive. Thanh was the senior member of the Politburo in South Vietnam. He supervised the entire war effort. Thanh's struggle philosophy was that "America is wealthy but not resolute," and "squeeze tight to the American chest and attack." He was invited up to Hanoi for further discussions. He went on commercial flights with a false passport from Cambodia to Hong Kong and then to Hanoi. Only in July was his plan adopted by the leadership. Then Johnson had rejected Westmoreland's request for 200,000 more troops. We realized that America had made its maximum military commitment to the war. Vietnam was not sufficiently important for the United States to call up its reserves. We had stretched American power to a breaking point. When more frustration set in, all the Americans could do would be to withdraw; they had no more troops to send over.

Tet was designed to influence American public opinion. We would attack poorly defended parts of South Vietnam cities during a holiday and a truce when few South Vietnamese troops would be on duty. Before the main attack, we would entice American units to advance close to the borders, away from the cities. By attacking all South Vietnam's major cities, we would spread out our forces and neutralize the impact of American firepower. Attacking on a broad front, we would lose some battles but win others. We used local forces nearby each target to frustrate discovery of our plans. Small teams, like the one which attacked the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, would be sufficient. It was a guerrilla strategy of hit-and-run raids. [lloks like a re-writing of history with the benefit of hindsight]

A: Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise;. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election. The second and third waves in May and September were, in retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was.

A: Well, when Nixon stepped down because of Watergate we knew we would win. Pham Van Dong [prime minister of North Vietnam] said of Gerald Ford, the new president, "he's the weakest president in U.S. history; the people didn't elect him; even if you gave him candy, he doesn't dare to intervene in Vietnam again." We tested Ford's resolve by attacking Phuoc Long in January 1975. When Ford kept American B-52's in their hangers, our leadership decided on a big offensive against South Vietnam.

A: We had the impression that American commanders had their hands tied by political factors. Your generals could never deploy a maximum force for greatest military effect.

From Saigon surrender to French exile: an officer's bitter way

From Saigon surrender to French exile:
an officer's bitter way

PARIS, April 11 (AFP) - In the closing scene of his "Vietnam: A History", a narrative of 30 years of war in the Southeast Asian country, veteran US newsman Stanley Karnow describes how, on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin accepted the surrender of Saigon's US-backed regime.

With the capitulation of Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, Bui Tin stepped into history almost inadvertently -- "completely by accident," as he put it in an interview with Agence France-Presse.

While he happened to be the highest ranking officer with the first tank unit to ride into the presidential palace grounds, Bui Tin was there, in fact, not as a field commander but as a senior war correspondent for Quan Doi Nhan Dan, communist North Vietnam's army newspaper. So, the next thing he did was to file his dispatch.

Then, Karnow writes, Bui Tin "strolled into the park behind the palace. Stretching out on the grass, he gazed at the sky, exalted."

That state of exaltation was to be very short-lived.

"I became disillusioned almost immediately with Hanoi's leadership," Bui Tin said in the interview.

"There they were, with their lofty talk of national reconciliation and clemency, while at the same time sending South Vietnamese army and government officials to so-called re-education camps -- in effect, sentencing hundreds of thousands to years of forced labour and brainwashing."

Bui Tin also recalled how appalled he was at finding out that Commmunist police officials were charging Vietnamese boat people hefty bribes to allow them to leave their country illegally, often aboard overladen and unseaworthy ships.

"They were demanding payment in gold bars or wads of US dollars to send desperate people on highly risky journeys, in many cases to their deaths," he said.

Now 73, the wiry officer in jungle green fatigues and pith helmet who accepted the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam's last president, General Duong Van Minh -- known as "Big" Minh because of his unusual size for a Vietnamese -- had joined Vietnam's small communist guerrilla force in the mid '40s, in the early days of the war that led to independence from France.

He was at Dien Bien Phu, the legendary 1954 battle in which the communist troops, who had become under Ho Chi Minh's leadership one of the world's most formidable fighting forces, routed the French, and he later participated as a frontline commander or as a war correspondent in the fighting that ended up in defeat for the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies.

But in 1990 Bui Tin fled Vietnam to France. He now lives in a Paris suburb and Hanoi critics consider his defection as one of the most powerful indictments of the communist regime in Vietnam.

Ironically, Big Minh also lives in exile in France. Bui Tin said that they had occasionally been in touch, pointing out that the 84-year-old former South Vietnamese president was in poor health and had completely withdrawn from politics.

Not so Bui Tin, who has just published in French an updated version of a 1992 book in English, "Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese", a powerful exposure of official Vietnamese corruption and arrogance, coupled with a passionate plea in favour of tolerance and democracy.

As in his book, Bui Tin insisted during the interview on his outrage at the political humiliation inflicted after Ho Chi Minh's death in 1969 on his mentor, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Phu.

And he repeated earlier attacks against Hanoi's invasion of neighbouring Cambodia between 1979 and 1989, which he considers was misguided morally as well as politically.

"We have wasted 25 years. Vietnam is dirt poor, in fact has become poorer while Thailand and its other neighbours were developing fast. A very poor country it is, and a country without freedom," Bui Tin said.

Another old article quoting Col. Tin

Hanoi indignant over article on Ho Chi Minh.
By: Reuters

Hanoi indignant over article on Ho Chi Minh.

HANOI, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Communist-ruled Vietnam expressed indignation on Wednesday over an article in an international magazine that questioned Hanoi's official history of late revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.

Time magazine, in its August 23-30 issue, published the two-page article as part of a series profiling influential Asians of the 20th century.

``The article by Bui Tin, a traitor, is not worth comment,'' said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh, in response to questions from Reuters.

Bui Tin, a former deputy editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece Nhan Dan (People) who entirely true.

Ho was disciplined in the former Soviet Union during the 1930s for ``failing to display the proper class spirit,'' Tin wrote.

He also said Ho may have had reasons other than seeking national salvation for the country when he left Vietnam in 1911 for three decades.

``This (article) has offended the sacred feeling of the Vietnamese people toward their beloved leader. The people of Vietnam are extremely indignant and strongly protest this deed,'' Thanh said.

Censors had torn out the offending two pages from subscriber copies of the magazine delivered in Hanoi.

Tin, an ex-North Vietnamese colonel who also accepted the surrender of the former U.S.-backed Saigon regime in 1975 to end the Vietnam War, has been a thorn in Hanoi's side since he took asylum in Paris in 1990 and issued calls for political change.

Ho Chi Minh, who died in 1969, is widely revered in Vietnam for his lifelong quest for national independence and any form of criticism is generally taboo.

His embalmed body remains on public display in an imposing granite Hanoi city centre mausoleum.

`(Ho) has left an invaluable ideological, cultural and moral heritage for the generations of Vietnamese people today and tomorrow,'' Thanh said.

Tin said the Communist Party used Ho's name to justify its own policies as if he were still alive.

``The government should not use Uncle Ho, cold in his tomb, as a defence against...opposition,'' Tin wrote.

-----

Vietnam's independence leader was a hero to his countrymen, a wise uncle to friends and a monster to enemies

By BUI TIN

Ho Chi Minh was a friend of my father's. They lived side-by-side in the jungle during the resistance struggle. Over the years, they exchanged poems. I recall vividly the poem Ho dedicated to my father in 1948:

The mountain birds sing at my windows

The spring flowers flutter down on my inkwell

The panting horses bring news of victories

And my thoughts go to you with this poem

Isn't it touching that Ho should write this in the jungle in the midst of the resistance? And when my father died in April 1955, it was Ho who came to console my family. He arranged the funeral and granted my father's wish that he be buried not in the official cemetery, as befitting a former president of the National Assembly, but in our village. That's the way Uncle Ho was.

Communist propaganda elevates Ho to the status of sage, national hero, saint. He has become the Strategist, the Theoretician, the Thinker, the Statesman, the Man of Culture, the Diplomat, the Poet, the Philosopher. All these names are accompanied with adjectives like "legendary" and "unparalleled." He has become Ho the Luminary, Ho the Visionary. Peasants in the South build shrines to him. In the North old women bow before his altar, asking miracles for their suffering children.

Others--boat people, anti-communist fanatics, those who suffered in the re-education camps--see him in a negative light. They label him the enemy of the nation, the traitor who sold out Vietnam, the source of all misery.

What is the truth? It is difficult to know because Ho's life is shrouded in shadows and ambiguities. Even the date of his birth has been obscured by the authorities, who believe this uncertainty will somehow add to his mystique. The official date is May 19, 1890, but archives in Paris and Moscow show six different dates from 1890 to 1904.

Similarly, Ho's official biography says that he left Saigon in 1911 on a French boat in order to rescue the revolutionary cause, which had stalled. But recent scholarship indicates that his motivations may have been quite different. We now discover that Ho's father, a mandarin in Binh Dinh province, had been cashiered by the French after beating a peasant to death while drunk. Shamed, he fled to the South to eke out a miserable living practicing traditional medicine. Ho was so shocked by this that he left school early to petition, in vain, to have his father reinstated. Ultimately Ho went abroad, where he worked as a cook, a street cleaner, a photographer. And only in Europe, in 1918, did he begin his political education, when he was welcomed into French socialist circles.

There is more ambiguity--more shadows and fog--in the official biographies regarding the period from 1934 to 1938. Recently opened archives in Moscow show that Ho was subjected to Stalinist discipline there. He was required to undergo re-education for failing to display the proper class spirit and identify with the international proletariat.

Ho himself aided in the creation of his myth. A booklet written in 1948 under the name of Tran Dan Tien describes President Ho as a modest man of the people who was nonetheless the father of the nation and a hero greater than Le Loi and other luminaries of Vietnamese history. When in 1990 I pointed out that Tran Dan Tien was a pseudonym used by Ho and thus Ho was praising himself, I was called a traitor and berated for attempting to tarnish the image of Uncle Ho.

Perhaps the most serious charge facing Ho is that he was responsible for starting a brutal and fratricidal war. The truth is that he did all he could to avoid war. The responsibility for the war falls to the French and to Charles de Gaulle, who wanted to re-establish the French Empire after World War II. Even the French communists rallied to support this policy. And what about the Americans? Truman abandoned Roosevelt's anti-colonial policy and supported French imperial aspirations. And who undermined the 1954 Geneva Accords and prevented the general elections in 1956? U.S. officials, who also ignored letters from Ho pleading for support.

The policies of the Western democracies pushed Ho and his people into the open arms of the Soviet Union and China. He took their tanks, ships, airplanes and missiles, but he refused to allow foreign combat troops on Vietnamese soil. And he declined Russian and Chinese advice on how to conduct the war. The Russians did not want him to fight for the liberation of South Vietnam because they feared an escalation of the war with the U.S. might lead to international catastrophe. And the Chinese favored a long, patient guerrilla war. But Ho and his crowd decided to follow their independent course on the war and thus bear some responsibility for it.

Ho made other mistakes. It was he who wholeheartedly adopted a Stalinist political and economic model for Vietnam. Thus, there was the development of heavy industry, hasty collectivization, the elimination of the bourgeoisie, the starting of concentration camps and the mistreatment of intellectuals. All those policies led to disaster. Ho later took responsibility for them.

Had Ho lived to see the fall of Saigon and the liberation of the South, would things have worked out differently? Would the re-education camps have been avoided? Or the exodus of the boat people? Or the occupation of Cambodia and the war with China? Would Vietnam have suffered economic isolation during the 1980s? I think Ho would have avoided these disasters. He always cautioned people not to lose their heads after a victory. Had there been proper leadership, victory could have been managed more smoothly and the country more readily accepted into the international community.

In Hanoi these days the leadership is using Ho's name to justify its policies, as if he were still alive. What would Ho have thought of doi moi, Hanoi's half-baked economic reform plan? Would he have seen it as a forced marriage between socialism without soul and capitalism without backbone? Perhaps. The government should not use Uncle Ho, cold in his tomb, as a defense against the opposition forming around such people as the mathematician Phan Dinh Dieu or the physicist Nguyen Thanh Giang.

In times like these I have a great desire to approach Ho--our luminous Uncle Ho--to ask him to clarify his famous slogan: "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom." Does this mean the collective freedom of the kind being fostered by the regime's intellectuals at the Marx-Lenin Institute in Hanoi and not individual and civic freedoms? If so, the heroic people of Vietnam are two centuries behind the times.

Poor Vietnam! Poor old Uncle Ho!

Translated by Phuong Nga and Barry Hillenbrand. Bui Tin, a refugee living in France, is a former North Vietnamese colonel and deputy chief editor of Nhan Dan, the Communist Party newspaper

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