Execution of Colonel Ho Ngoc, Army of the Republic of Viet Nam on 14 August 1975.

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Remembrance

Execution of Colonel Ho Ngoc, Army of the Republic of Viet Nam on 14 August 1975.

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 Last words:

"If I won the war, I would not condemn you as you have condemned me.

I would not humiliate you as you have humiliated me.

I would not ask you questions that you asked me.

I fought for the freedom of my people.

I have merit and I am not guilty.

No one can convict me.

History will criticize you as my Communist enemy.

You want to kill me, then kill me.

Do not blindfold me.

Down with the Communists.

Long live the Republic of Viet Nam !"

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Born in Rach Gia, Republic of Viet Nam in 1938, he graduated as sub lieutenant from the Dong De, Nha Trang training camp.

During his military career, he was awarded a total of 78 medals.

In 1973, at age 37, he was promoted Provincial Governor, the youngest governor in Viet Nam, of 
Chuong Thien, a heavily infested Viet Cong area.

When Saigon surrendered on Wednesday 30 April 1975, he continued to fight until the next day, when he ran out ammunition.

Taken prisoner, he was condemned to death on Thursday 14 August 1975

Posted by Brock Townsend at Sunday, November 19, 2017 

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“Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn?”: Theorizing the Relationship between History and Cultural Memory

Evyn Lê Espiritu, Pomona CollegeFollow

Graduation Year

Spring 2013

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

History

Second Department

Media Studies

Reader 1

Tomás Summers Sandoval

Reader 2

Jonathan Hall

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2013 Evyn Lê Espiritu

Abstract

Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn? He was born in Rạch Giá, Việt Nam in 1938; served in the South Vietnamese army—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—during the Second Indochina War; and was publicly executed by the Communist forces on August 14, 1975, after refusing to surrender. Beyond that, it depends whom you ask. To the current Communist government of Việt Nam, whose historical narrative of national unity against foreign invasion denies the legitimacy of South Vietnam, he is a political traitor. To the American state, who conceptualizes the Vietnam War as a struggle between the U.S. and the Communists, he is a forgotten subject. To patriotic South Vietnamese veterans in the diaspora, who push back against these state imposed narratives of “organized forgetting,”[1] he is hero. To Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn’s family members, most of whom live in Việt Nam, he is a loved a one. To me, he is a grand-uncle. But I did not know of his fame—of his story—until I was twenty-one.

Researching Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn, I grappled with the following questions: Who has the power to write history? How do stateless peoples archive their own history? What is the relationship between history and cultural memory? How is cultural memory embodied and enacted? How do cultural memory practices both challenge and constitute “official” history and nationalist discourse? What is the nature and use of a politics haunted by ghosts and oriented towards the past?           http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&context=pomona_theses