Giai Phong

The book is very interesting because it shows how really and sincerely vietcong fought against occupation. They were "pure". No doubt about that. Also amazing how no revenges happened after the victory against the loosers (and after 2 millions killed). So you can feel that all the "good" conditions were there to produce a "good experience", to relize the dream. This didn't happen and after few months it turned to be a failure as many other communist experiences. Terzani relized this and explain this clearly in the latest prefaction to the edition of 2000. Terzani after being indicated as an hero by the communist vietnamese government (this book went also read in that country schools), started writing how the the situation was changing and in the end he was expulsed by that nation!! After he was also arrested by Chinese and rieducated for one month (and expulsed afterward). Terzani said that he would have written the same things at that time but something different only if he could have seen what was happening with the experience he had lately. What more honest than this? This IS the best journalism you can imagine. Terzani was the only one journalist witness of the Saigon fall not running out of the country together with the americans. He was not afraid, he wanted to see with his eyes and not to follow some press conference of some secret service agent in charge... Bottom line this is the book everybody should read to understand the situation there (and to avoid further mistakes).

It is a propaganda tool to call the Vietnamese civil war either Communist aggression or solely a war of national liberation. Arguments about whether Ho Chi Minh would have become President of a united Vietnam if there had been free elections in accordance with the Geneva Accords that ended the Franco-Vietnamese and the disingenous nature of "Liberation Army" are addressed, but only superficially. Terzani is a very good chronicler of the events immediately following the fall of Saigon, but his disgust with American foreign policy and the wildly unpopular regime that it propped up--that was not as much defeated as simply dissolved with the continuing advance of the PAVN--to some extent blinds him to just how nasty the Communists were capable of being once they had established control of the South. He only saw austerity in the future, and not the idiotic implementation of soviet socialist models for production and agriculture that would bring only poverty. Though not a Communist himself--it seems unlikely that the German Weekly Der Spiegel would have employed an active Party member--Terzani admires the singleness of purpose and the great sacrifices that he observed South Vietnamese opponents of the Thieu regime and American intervention make in order to speed unification. Terzani makes fun of, and has some serious criticisms that he levels at the Communists, but he really goes to easy on them for my taste--and almost certainly for the taste of most Americans. Ultimately though, it is a book worth the time of anyone interested in going beyond the realm of what the war did to Americans and entering the realm of what it did to those who did most of the dying.