Truong Nhu Tang, with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai

Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, the political wing of the Viet Cong, was Minister of Justice in the VC's Provisional Revolutionary Government. He led a double life in Saigon as a high-level official in the South Vietnamese government while he was a member of the Viet Cong. He was captured and tortured by the South Vietnamese government, but after he was released in 1968 in a secret U.S.-VC prisoner exchange, he spent the rest of the war living in the South Vietnamese jungle near the border of Cambodia. In the following excerpt, he discusses a few of the hardships the VC endured during the war.

Life in the jungle was not easy for the Viet Cong. The soldiers lived like hunted animals, trying to avoid detection by...