Tucker's Last Stand by William F. Buckley Page A

oldest son of an aristocratic family in Hué, the second-largest city in South Vietnam. The Bui clan had for generations lived well, very well, off their great tract of farmland. They had to pay taxes to the French, but Bui Tin’s father was never apparently concerned about this: what he had always feared, he told his son in the late 1930s when Bui Tin was a teenager in the French-run Haute École, was the Japanese; and of course the Japanese had come and for four frightening years, beginning soon after the military strike against Singapore a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, life at Hué had been very hard. The father and mother had been moved to a peasants’ cottage that sat on their own property, quickly confiscated in the name of the Japanese emperor. Tin had been permitted to continue to attend his school, run now by a harsh Japanese academic who doubled the work of the students and tripled the discipline. When Tin reached seventeen, he would be conscripted and used for the imperial purposes of the Co-Prosperity Sphere of the Japanese. His fluent French and schoolboy knowledge of English and Japanese suggested a clerical career, which never eventuated because a few months after his seventeenth birthday the Japanese surrendered. The fate of Hiroshima at the hands of something called la bombe atomique was the cause of much celebration in Hué, and by Christmas of 1945 the harshly aged father had begun the reconstitution of his properties and was again reporting to the very same French deputy who had escaped the scene just in time, and was lately sent back to Hué as overlord of what was to be, in turn, the reconstitution of the French Empire.
    It had been a source of great dismay when, on Christmas Day, young Bui Tin announced to his father that he intended to go north to join the forces of Ho Chi Minh, consecrated to ending French colonialism in Indochina. He was eighteen years old when he first presented himself to Ho Chi Minh.
    Tin knew, as indeed everyone in Vietnam knew and, increasingly, the whole world knew, that Ho Chi Minh was a man of commanding presence. He was the supreme ascetic, and dozens of interviewers went to him to behold the man who had undertaken to outwit, militarily and psychologically, the mighty French. Asked about his genius in mobilizing an effective army from peasants who had needed to break from their long docility first to the French, then to the Japanese, Ho had merely given his benign smile and answered that he had learned the principle of the class struggle from his reading of Marx and Lenin, but that all other impulses were the result of his immersion in poetry. Poetry, he had announced (“Ho closed his eyes when he spoke these words,” the French reporter had written in Le Monde ), was his daily bread, and nothing was more beautiful than the alignment of poetry and the class struggle designed to eliminate the base instincts of man, corrupted under the bourgeois order. His pointed features and wispy beard, Tin thought when first he was presented to him, might have been modeled by a great artist molding the face of a Spartan poet pained by the sounds of war, warmed by the peals of beauty that rang out of men’s verbal inventions. But Tin had no reason to doubt that Ho was also a highly organized commander in chief—and Ho did not hesitate in deciding what to do with his latest volunteer.
    Ho told Tin to go out to the field where his partisans were engaging the French, to learn guerrilla warfare. Tin was stationed in Saigon, close to French headquarters, and before long Ho Chi Minh grew to rely on the young, resourceful patrician to undertake intricate assignments. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the division of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh made it known, quite simply, that the war against colonialism would continue; that the so-called government of South Vietnam was in fact an ad hoc aggregation of lackeys of foreign imperialists, primarily American this time