The Dark Journey: Inside the Reeducation Camps of Viet Cong [Anglais] [Broché]

Well named, "The Dark Journey" is a story that needs to be told. It is a revealing breakdown of the political background to the rise of communism in Vietnam, and at the same time, it graphically describes the hardships endured by political prisoners caught in the crossfire of malicious communistic policies enforced by vindictive cadres. Nobody should have to suffer what Mr Truong and over 100,000 other political prisoners had to endure. His story evokes sympathy from the reader in direct proportion to the atrocities he experienced. It is a heavy book to read, but the effort is worth it for the revelations it contains, and the greater empathy awakened in the reader for political prisoners everywhere, for refugees, and for soldiers who fought in the Vietnamese and other Asian wars.

I urge everyone to read this book and read it to their children. Within it's pages we read how the communist takeover in Vietnam destroyed Vietnam and with it the freedoms of the individual. It shows how communism slowly spreads and the dangers and evils of it. It shows how big the propaganda machine is and the parallels we can all find happening right now in our world as the left are slowly permeating governments everywhere! I like the style of the author. He writes how I talk, changes subject often then goes back to what he was talking about. A must read.

This book is difficult to read for several reasons:

(1) The topic. Hoa was interned in several communist "re-education" camps, a misnomer. They were more like work-and-death camps run by the Vietcong (South Vietnamese Communists). The prisoners are South Vietnamese military men. They are constantly starved, overworked, and tortured. As the chapters proceed, one realizes that some men do not make it out of the camps alive.

(2) The writing. Hoa transliterates quite a bit, so there is a definite "Vietnamese voice." There are idioms such as "stupid donkey" that makes the reader cringe. Hoa clearly describes the Vietcong captors as uneducated, rather evil persons without personalities. This is easily understood. He intersperses his personal narrative with historical data that sound at times like they were plagiarized and at other times off-color opinions due to his bias. The English is sub-par and needs a lot of work to be readable.

(3) The bias. I cannot help but feel for the author that he has a deep-seated resentment toward his captors and the Vietcong involvement in the Communist North regime. However, an enlarged magnanimity would have made the reading more enjoyable. Insights into the plight of the military officers, not just their treatment, would have been useful.

(4) The plagiarism. There are passages that syntactically do not sound like Hoa wrote them. I am dismayed that an educated officer, albeit one whose native language is not English, should have to resort to plundering other authors' stylistic narratives to enhance his own. Hoa has fertile resources at his disposal that would make this book excellent without the coy cut-and-paste from other sources. This book suffers from not having a bibliography or an index.

While THE DARK JOURNEY is an important story, one written with the intention of "telling the truth" to later, post-1975 generations, a different approach would have served this purpose better. I would not recommend this book to my children even though I am personally afflicted by the events mentioned.