Communist colonel saw off the last US troops from Vietnam, but later defected
When the first communist tank charged through the gates of the Independence Palace in Saigon, it fell to Bui Tin, a journalist in the North Vietnamese army, to break the news: the revolution had arrived. Although it had taken the tanks longer than expected (the unit had to stop and ask for directions to the palace), the Vietnam War had come to an end.
Tin, who has died aged 90, was a reporter, not a soldier, but he was still a colonel, the highest-ranking officer on the scene. The commander of the tank unit insisted that he accept the last president’s surrender.
And so it was Tin who strolled into the palace’s secondfloor
Bui Tin salon a few minutes after
11am on April 30, Viet Minh soldier
1975, where the b December 29, 1927
president, Duong d August 11, 2018
Van Minh, told him he had been waiting ‘‘since morning to transfer power’’. ‘‘There is no question of your transferring power,’’ Tin said, according to journalist AJ Langguth’s book Our Vietnam.
‘‘Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have.’’
For Tin, the charismatic son of a government minister, the episode marked the culmination of three decades of sacrifice and unusual good fortune. Striding on to the historical stage at pivotal moments – the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the creation of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the 1978 invasion of Cambodia – he eventually became a leading opponent of the state he helped build, settling in France to broadcast an anti-communist ‘‘petition’’ that reportedly reached three million Vietnamese.
Although his family had helped administer the country during French colonial rule, Tin and his father were early backers of the nationalist Viet Minh movement led by Ho Chi Minh.
Born in the northern city of Nam Dinh, he joined the Communist Party at 19. In a 1995 memoir, Following Ho Chi Minh, he recalled: ‘‘I equated joining the party with patriotism and gaining independence. A life full of activity, yet simple, beckoned; it would be bright and glorious without a ripple of concern discernible in the future.’’
Less than a decade later, he was wounded during a French airstrike at Dien Bien Phu. The battle resulted in a 1954 ceasefire that gave Vietnam its independence from France and split the country in two, setting the stage for a 20-year conflict with the Americanbacked South Vietnamese government.
Tin said he helped plan the deployment of northern troops into South Vietnam in the early 1960s, when he ventured down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But he found that he was more suited to communications than combat, and he worked as a reporter and military spokesman amid negotiations over prisoners of war and a ceasefire agreement.
In March 1973, when the last US combat troops boarded a plane and left Vietnam, Tin
‘‘This is an historic day. It is the first time in 100 years that there are no foreign troops on the soil of Vietnam.’’ Bui Tin as the last US troops left Vietnam
was there to farewell them. ‘‘This is an historic day,’’ he told the Washington Post, after handing a goodbye package that included Ho Chi Minh postcards and a bamboo scroll to one of the last remaining US soldiers. ‘‘It is the first time in 100 years that there are no foreign troops on the soil of Vietnam.’’
As he had in Saigon, Tin accompanied Vietnamese tanks during the invasion of Phnom Penh. But he failed to convince military and political leaders to quickly end the war, arguing that Cambodia’s fate should be left to the international community.
So, too, was he unsuccessful in advising against collectivisation programmes and ‘‘reeducation’’ efforts that forced an estimated 300,000 South Vietnamese officials, soldiers and supporters into prison camps.
By 1990, he had become fed up with the country’s politics. When the French communist newspaper L’Humanite invited him to Paris, he bought a plane ticket and embarked on a new life as a dissident, delivering what he called ‘‘a petition from a single, ordinary citizen’’ – a multipart, pro-democracy radio broadcast on the BBC’s Vietnamese- language service.
Soon after arriving in Paris, he told the New York Times he planned to stay for only a few months. But the Vietnamese government interrogated his wife and children, he said, and expelled him from the Communist Party. He never made it home, fearing for his safety.
In addition to criticising the regime in Vietnam, Tin called for greater understanding and assistance from its former adversaries, including the United States. When the Senate held hearings in 1991 on servicemen missing in action, he was among the star witnesses from Vietnam, testifying that no American POWs remained in the country.
‘‘In Vietnam, there are 200,000 missing in action, and we have never found their remains,’’ he said. ‘‘In my own family, two out of five are still missing. Being a soldier and also a member of an MIA family, I would like to take the opportunity to share the sadness and pain of the American POW and MIA families.’’
He concluded his testimony with an embrace of Senator John McCain, who was shot down during the war, tortured and imprisoned for nearly six years.
Tin is survived by wife Le Thi Kim Chung, and two children. – Washington Post