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The Viet Cong's Victory Reward - Jail
In 1943, two years before his birth in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, Toai's father and older brother joined the Vietminh, the communist underground movement in Vietnam. Toai became a National Liberation Front (NLF, Viet Cong) supporter as a high school student and rose to be an important student leader in the Saigon University during the late 1960's. He published a student magazine Tu Quet, (Self Determinination) and unswervingly followed the Viet Cong's highly-attractive propaganda line, "Peace, Freedom, Independence, Neutrality, and Social Welfare."

Toai never formally joined the Viet Cong, but, for nationalistic and idealistic reasons, he served it superbly. He led takeovers of the Vietnamese National Assembly and the Cambodian Embassy in Saigon, and lectured at Berkley to American anti-war activists (who thought his views too tame). After the North Vietnamese Army imposed peace 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 quickly and unceremoniously tossed into jail.

Toai had previously read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and dismissed its substance as propaganda. When arrested, he vividly recalled Gulag's chapter 2, entitled "Arrest," in which the freshly arrested victim invariably thinks, "Who me? What for? It's a mistake, they'll clear it up." Toai consoled himself that the Gulag was in "old" Russia, and that he was in the "new" Vietnam. It turned out that there was no significant difference. He lived through two and a half years of horrors that may seem unbelievable to those who have not read Solzhenitsyn's works.

Toai was never charged with any offense, and was thus jailed for no reason at all. His wife, a French citizen, managed to return to France and from there won his freedom. As he was being released, the fact that there was no official reason whatever for either his arrest or his release caused bureaucratic gyrations that would have been hilarious had the issue been less serious.

During much of his time in prison, Toai was befriended by Nguyen Van Hien, an old and often-jailed Vietminh cadre from before the time that Ho Chi Minh left the Soviet Comintern and returned to Vietnam. Hien asked Toai to recall the NLF's program, a shining beacon - promulgate all democratic freedoms, amnesty to all political detainees, abolish all concentration camps, and strictly ban all illegal arrests and imprisonments. "What do you make of all that now," asked Hien, and his expression suggested, "We've all been taken in...Look around you stupid, what do you see?"

Incredibly, despite his sufferings and disillusionment, Hien remained a loyal communist. Like uncountable thousands of other idealists before him, he still grasped his lifelong ideal although he probably understood that he had been purged purely because he knew too much. "I've never eaten chocolate," he said. "I'll probably never know what it tastes like."

Toai eventually spoke again to former anti-Vietnam war activists in the U.S., thinking that he had something important to tell them. He was wrong. Most of them didn't want to listen.

(Published in a local newsletter in 1987.)