Vietnam walks down memory lane, recalls war’s end

HO CHI MINH CITY, Friday (Reuters) - Vietnam’s most notorious prison was liberated without a shot three decades ago; one of the tank crew that smashed gates at the palace where the Saigon regime made its last stand is now a barber.

And the loan of a reporter’s tape recorder helped swiftly end the fighting after the Saigon government decided to surrender.

Vietnam is walking down memory lane in the days leading up to Saturday’s 30th anniversary of the end of “The American War” with tantalising glimpses emerging of old secrets and the fate of the heroes of that time.

Hoang Thi Nghi, now aged 77, is the stuff of a Hollywood movie whose exploits as a spy match any tale from World War Two.

When Vietnam was partitioned at the end of French colonial rule in the mid-1950s, Nghi, then just 22, was sent undercover from the communist north to the capitalist south posing as the wife of a missing soldier.

North Vietnam’s leaders were already convinced they would one day be fighting the United States and her mission was to establish a network of “moles” for the coming battle. “I had to lie to my family, telling them that I was going to study in China,” she recalls.

“I asked my lover to wait for me and told him that I would be gone for two years — otherwise he should consider our relationship to be over.”

Nghi, who now helps war veterans, was gone for 20 years and she never saw her lover again.

Betrayed twice, she also spent nine years imprisoned on Con Dao Island.

It was known as “Hell on Earth” for its fearsome French-built “Tiger Cages”.

Prisoners were crammed into small cells covered by metal bars through which guards poked iron-tipped rods.

There were 500 female prisoners who would sometimes have to stand on one leg because of the cramped conditions. There would be 12 prisoners in a space meant for just two.

“We would hurl cans of urine at them. If they retaliated with tear gas we threw the cans back at them,” she recounts.

Nghi remembers that when guards learned of the liberation of Saigon, some planned to blow up the prison and its inmates with mines. But other guards, assured by the prisoners they would protect them now the war was over, headed off the plot and released the inmates.

“So we prisoners had liberated Con Dao without firing a shot,” she says, recalling that it took two more days for communist troops to reach the island.

Some of the most dramatic memories published in Vietnam’s official press this week have been of the taking of Saigon, and in particular the capture of the so-called Independence Palace in a city since renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

At the centre of events is Tank 390, now on the grounds of the palace where Saigon’s cabinet gathered for their last hours.

The Chinese-built tank smashed through the front gates of the palace and the long war was over.

The four-man crew, who have been reunited to play a key part in Saturday’s celebrations, are all now back in civilian life.

Nguyen Van Tap, the driver, became a fork lift driver; Vu Van Toan, the tank commander, is manager of a road paint workshop. Gunner Le Van Phuong became a barber, often recounting his tale to customers who seek him out; gunner Ngo Sy Nguyen, the youngest of the four who at the time was barely in his twenties, is a bus safety inspector.

Lieutenant General Pham Xuan The, now one of Vietnam’s top military leaders but 30 years ago a lowly captain, was the soldier who took the surrender of President Duong Van Minh and his cabinet after Tank 390 opened the way to the palace.