“Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!”

“Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” is remembered as more than a slogan: on the unnamed narrator’s college campus, it turned a seasonal refrain into an unmistakable political declaration. Its place in his account also exposes the divide between the students’ public protest and his concealed position as a South Vietnamese officer and intelligence operative.

The Chant on Campus

When the unnamed narrator was a student at Occidental, the chant was a familiar sound of the antiwar fervor spreading through American colleges. Its opening echoed the call of Santa Claus, but the rest announced support for Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front. The playful cadence sharpened rather than softened its politics: a festive refrain became a public declaration that the opposing side would win.

A Divided Political Position

The chant mattered to the narrator because he could not join the students’ openness. He envied their unreserved political passion, while he had to submerge his own convictions to perform the role of a good citizen from the Republic of Vietnam. By then, he had served as an infantry officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and worked with the Special Branch—parts of his history he considered delicate to disclose on a campus shaped by antiwar feeling. The chant thus marks the pressure between the political expression surrounding him and the identity he had to conceal.

The Changed Campus

When the narrator returned to Occidental as a refugee and employee, the political atmosphere had shifted. The students he encountered belonged to a less politically engaged generation: unlike their predecessors, they were not daily confronted with images of wartime violence and were no longer personally threatened by the draft. Against this quieter campus, the remembered chant stands as a sign of an earlier moment when student protest was conspicuous and politically charged.