[...] But my attitude changed when the new regime turned its back on the promises of a national reconciliation and, taking off its patriotic mask, revealed its Marxist face.
When I was suddenly ordered to work on a plan to confiscate all private property and create a Communist state, I refused. [...] I resigned from my post. A few days I was arrested as I was attending a public concert in the National Theater. I asked my captors, "Why have you arrested me, what have I done?" They replied: "That is for you to work out." [...]
While I was in jail, Mai Chi Tho, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, addressed a selected group of political prisoners. He told us: ''Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man. The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer, and the Americans are the invaders.'' He concluded that ''the key factor is how to control people and their opinions. Only Marxism-Leninism can do that. None of you ever see resistance to the Communist regime, so don't think about it. Forget it. Between you - the bright intellectuals - and me, I tell you the truth.'' And he did tell us the truth. [...]
When I was still inside, I used to talk to one of the older prisoners who was a South Vietnamese Communist named Nguyen Van Tang. Tang had been imprisoned for 15 years by the French, for 8 years by Diem, for 6 years by Thieu, and now for 2 years already by his own comrades, the Marxist rulers of the New Vietnam. While we were in prison together this old Communist said to me, "My dream is not that I will be released. My dream is not that I will see my family. My dream is to be back in a French prison 30 years ago."
(a version of this essay was published in the NY Times Magazine, 3/29/81, titled A Lament for Vietnam.)
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