Please tell us about your clandestine activities, about your technique in gathering information on the enemy and about your method of passing messages on.

First of all, after I had already gathered the information, I would go to the village inhabitants who sympathized with us and who trusted in the revolution to ask them to help. There were two ways to do this. The first was to carry the message in person. But it was difficult for the people to go about at that time because the enemy was terrorizing them. The second method was to arrange pickup places such as in the hollow of a certain tree trunk or inside a certain termite hill. This was the way we used to pass on information on the situation in the village. If we used courtiers on a daily basis, the enemy would catch on. So we agreed with the village inhabitants that pickup spots should be arranged. The spots were fixed. And so when we came, we just looked the places up to see whether there was any message. If there was a message, then we would try to find out what the real situation reported by the village inhabitants looked like. There was no other way we could find out about the situation concerning the enemy. In the final analysis, in the village and hamlets the enemy was terrorizing the population and was checking people going in and out. They searched especially for food and papers. And so we had to agree with the inhabitants to arrange drop off places for messages.

What I want to ask you is where you were before liberation, this is to say where were you before the liberation of Ban Me Thuot on March 10, 1975, and what were your activities among the population. For example, how you informed the population to prepare for a very big offensive and how the military post near where you were surrendered.

Before the offensive of March 10, I was assigned to be in close contact with the infrastructures that is to say, to be in close touch with the local inhabitants and to follow closely the situation regarding the enemy. I had to rally the population. On the morning after the battle, I was assigned to take over the administration of the village, to rally the masses and to arrest the local despots and the reactionaries. At the same time, we were trying to stabilize the situation.

When the attack was about to happen, the local inhabitants did report to us the situation concerning the enemy in the village and also the activities and movements of the soldiers in the fort nearby. This helped us protect our secrecy as well as our preparation for the attack. Therefore, right after liberation, besides supplying the armed forces we also worked at stabilizing the situation in the village. This was to help them normalize their lives as well as to believe more strongly in the final victory of the revolution. We called on the puppet troops and civil servants to surrender and to turn over their weapons and documents. As for those remnants who fled to other places or who were hiding out, we rallied the population to call them out to present themselves to us.

A while ago you talked about the puppet military post. Did the soldiers there flee or did they surrender?

Inside the village they had only a platoon of regional forces. But on the bank of the river, near the bridge, there was a battalion of army engineers who were specializing on road building. But when we mounted our attack, they tried to resist us. When they found out that our forces were large and included infantrymen, artillery units and tank units, however, they surrendered. Some fled.

Just when did you realize that it was a big campaign which aimed at liberating the southern part of the country?

From the 10th to the 12th of March there were attacks on the three highland provinces and then liberated them. After that our forces advanced to the remaining provinces. As the situation changed drastically every day and as the Liberation Forces grew stronger and stronger, I myself became convinced that this time we were going to liberate the whole of South Vietnam. There was no way the puppet army could turn the situation around because the American forces were no longer inside the country.