PARIS, April 11 (AFP) - In the closing scene of his "Vietnam: A History", a narrative of 30 years of war in the Southeast Asian country, veteran US newsman Stanley Karnow describes how, on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin accepted the surrender of Saigon's US-backed regime.
With the capitulation of Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, Bui Tin stepped into history almost inadvertently -- "completely by accident," as he put it in an interview with Agence France-Presse.
While he happened to be the highest ranking officer with the first tank unit to ride into the presidential palace grounds, Bui Tin was there, in fact, not as a field commander but as a senior war correspondent for Quan Doi Nhan Dan, communist North Vietnam's army newspaper. So, the next thing he did was to file his dispatch.
Then, Karnow writes, Bui Tin "strolled into the park behind the palace. Stretching out on the grass, he gazed at the sky, exalted."
That state of exaltation was to be very short-lived.
"I became disillusioned almost immediately with Hanoi's leadership," Bui Tin said in the interview.
"There they were, with their lofty talk of national reconciliation and clemency, while at the same time sending South Vietnamese army and government officials to so-called re-education camps -- in effect, sentencing hundreds of thousands to years of forced labour and brainwashing."
Bui Tin also recalled how appalled he was at finding out that Commmunist police officials were charging Vietnamese boat people hefty bribes to allow them to leave their country illegally, often aboard overladen and unseaworthy ships.
"They were demanding payment in gold bars or wads of US dollars to send desperate people on highly risky journeys, in many cases to their deaths," he said.
Now 73, the wiry officer in jungle green fatigues and pith helmet who accepted the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam's last president, General Duong Van Minh -- known as "Big" Minh because of his unusual size for a Vietnamese -- had joined Vietnam's small communist guerrilla force in the mid '40s, in the early days of the war that led to independence from France.
He was at Dien Bien Phu, the legendary 1954 battle in which the communist troops, who had become under Ho Chi Minh's leadership one of the world's most formidable fighting forces, routed the French, and he later participated as a frontline commander or as a war correspondent in the fighting that ended up in defeat for the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies.
But in 1990 Bui Tin fled Vietnam to France. He now lives in a Paris suburb and Hanoi critics consider his defection as one of the most powerful indictments of the communist regime in Vietnam.
Ironically, Big Minh also lives in exile in France. Bui Tin said that they had occasionally been in touch, pointing out that the 84-year-old former South Vietnamese president was in poor health and had completely withdrawn from politics.
Not so Bui Tin, who has just published in French an updated version of a 1992 book in English, "Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese", a powerful exposure of official Vietnamese corruption and arrogance, coupled with a passionate plea in favour of tolerance and democracy.
As in his book, Bui Tin insisted during the interview on his outrage at the political humiliation inflicted after Ho Chi Minh's death in 1969 on his mentor, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Phu.
And he repeated earlier attacks against Hanoi's invasion of neighbouring Cambodia between 1979 and 1989, which he considers was misguided morally as well as politically.
"We have wasted 25 years. Vietnam is dirt poor, in fact has become poorer while Thailand and its other neighbours were developing fast. A very poor country it is, and a country without freedom," Bui Tin said.