History 485A
Devine
Fall 2011
Study Questions for Truong Nhu Tang, A Viet Cong Memoir
- How
did Tang’s upbringing shape his vision of what the revolution would be
like and what the future of Vietnam would be like? How did his upbringing fortify him against
becoming a dogmatic Communist?
- Once
he arrived in Paris,
what factors led to Tang’s political awakening? Why would the scion of a wealthy family
be drawn to revolution?
- What
role did Ho Chi Minh himself play in attracting Tang and other young southern
Vietnamese into the revolutionary movement?
- How
does the story of “master spy” Albert Thao demonstrate that U.S. backing of the regime in Saigon was bound to end badly?
- How
did the actions of the South Vietnamese government, particularly under
Diem, almost insure that the NLF would gain support?
- How
did the American military escalation after 1965 affect the NLF?
- How
did the non-communist members of the Alliance
differ from the Communists? Why did
they hesitate to work with the Communists in the NLF even though they
shared some of their goals?
- How
does the author explain the nationalists’ decision to ally with the
Communists? If not commitment to
ideology, what then brought them into the Alliance and the NLF?
- What contributions
did the NLF and the Alliance
make to the revolution? Why did the
Communists need them?
- What
was the PRG? What was its
purpose? To what extent was it
merely a diversion set up to keep non-communist southern nationalists
allied with the North?
- Why
did NLF revolutionaries like Tang find it impossible to break with the
Communists even as they began to realize the Party was just using them to
gain power?
- How
did the non-communists in the Alliance
and the PRG respond to the Communists’ attempt to enforce ideological
purity on the revolution?
- How
does Tang assess Henry Kissinger? Why does he believe that Kissinger’s
failures regarding Vietnam
typified those of most American officials and diplomats?
- According
to Tang, why was it “irrelevant” that US military forces never lost on the
battlefield in Vietnam?
- What
is Tang’s central criticism of how the US
waged war in Vietnam? How does the fact that the Vietnamese
and the US saw the war
in entirely different terms help to explain what Tang sees as Washington’s
errors?
- As
peace talks continued, why did Le Duc Tho begin to move away from his
prior demand for a coalition government in the South? Why, according to Tang, was the prospect
of such a government not desirable for the northern Communists?
- What
arguments did Tang and the PRG make in favor of “reconciliation”? Why did the Communists and even some
noncommunist southerners oppose this policy?
- What
became of the PRG and the Alliance
after 1975? Why did events unfold
this way?
- Tang
ultimately concludes that the Communists had “used” the PRG. In what ways did the DRV and the Party
use the PRG? Why did the members of the PRG fail to see what was going on?
- How
did the Communist takeover in Saigon
affect daily life in the city?
- Why
did Tang become disillusioned with the revolution? Had he been naïve to believe things
would turn out differently?
- What
made the Communists so brutal and fanatical – their ideology or the
context in which many of the Vietnamese Communists had come of age? Or did the ideology channel their
behavior in the worst possible directions?