Portrait of the Enemy; The Other Side of the War in Vietnam, Told Through Interviews with North Vietnamese, Former Vietcong, and Southern Opposition Leaders
New York: Random House, 1986. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. xxii, 215, [3] pages. Includes Acknowledgments; Introduction; Struggle; Resolution; Afterword by David Chanoff; Important Dates and Events; and A Note on Sources. David Chanoff is a noted author of nonfiction work. His work has typically involved collaborations with the principal protagonist of the work concerned. His collaborators have included; Augustus A. White, Joycelyn Elders, oàn V n To i, William J. Crowe, Ariel Sharon and Kenneth Good. He has also written about a wide range of subjects including literary history, education and foreign for The Washington Post, and The New Republic and the New York Times Magazine. He has authored more than twelve books. oàn V n To i (1945 – November 2017) was a Vietnamese-born naturalized American activist and the author of The Vietnamese Gulag (Simon & Schuster, 1986). Doan became an antiwar activist, a supporter of the National Liberation Front and vice president of the Saigon Student Union in 1969 and 1970, and spent time in jails in South Vietnam for antigovernment activities as a student leader. After the invasion of the North Vietnamese Army and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, he became a senior official of the Ministry of Finance under the Provisional Government. He soon disagreed on purely professional grounds with a superior official and was jailed for 28 months. He left Vietnam in May 1978 and went into exile in Paris. In 1989, he was shot and wounded. There was speculation that he was shot by anti-Communist protesters. This book allows us to hear, for the first time, the voices of the enemy--guerrilla fighters, terrorists, militant monks, opposition leaders, propaganda chiefs, and village secretaries, as well as the common people such as villagers, peasants, factory workers, and artists from both the north and south. It reveals the full story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of the other side.
Derived from a Kirkus review: An oral history, for the first time bringing to the West a perception of what it was like to fight on the side of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army. Chanoff and Doan have previously collaborated in publishing A Vietcong Memoir and The Vietnamese Gulag. Through the stories of a handful of soldiers and southern opposition leaders, several of whom provide a biographic thread connecting the whole, we are shown that "disillusionment, cynicism, family conflicts, and deep psychological trauma were as pervasive on the other side as on our own." We learn that wounded North Vietnamese veterans were given a treatment by their homeland far worse than any experienced or perceived by returning American soldiers. The authors depict soldiers "born into a social matrix that considered self-sacrifice a normal concomitant of the human condition." Indeed, they have done well in drawing these people out. In addition to the fear of reprisals by ardent Vietnamese anti-communists, the authors had heavy doses of inscrutability to deal with. But draw them out they do and the result is often a burst of insight, as when one ex-VC assassin says, describing his stabbing to death of a young woman sentenced to death by the VC, "I regret that I killed her while she was pregnant. I should have waited for her delivery." A good start to what should begin an accumulation of books making sense of the war in Vietnam, as we move into the second decade since its end. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Vietnam War, Vietcong, Oral History, Xuan Vu, Nguyen Thi Ty, Tran Van Tra, Le Thanh, Hoang Huu Quynh, Trinh Duc, Sau Thuong, Sappers, Tran Van Truong, Richard Stratton, Van Anh
ISBN: 0394536711
[Book #80052]
Price: $45.00