One of President Nixon's top-ranking advisors predicted last week that the North Vietnamese and their allies now fighting in the South will have been so totally crushed by July that they will not be able to recoup for two years.

Even if they do suffer defeat--and that does not seem too likely at the moment--the North Vietnamese and the PRG and the other Vietnamese who oppose the United States and the Thieu regime will surely return to the fight.

For instance Ngo Ba Thanh, an authority on international law trained at Columbia Law School, has been repeatedly imprisoned for her outspoken opposition to the Thieu regime. Although her damp cell at Thu Duc prison has aggravated her already severe asthma, Mrs. Thanh refuses to surrender her beliefs.

Last March as she waited to have her stretcher carried back to Thu Duc prison after a "trial" in Saigon, Ngo Ba Thanh discussed--in somewhat broken English--her views with an American doctor. During most of the conversation, Mrs. Thanh was gasping for breath. At one point after the trial ended, she required artificial respiration.

Interview with Ngo Ba Thanh

Mrs. Thanh: This is the rule of Law?! Free arrest of citizens who want Peace, Democracy. Independence. We don't want Americans to come here. We don't want anyone to come here and interfere in our affairs and put on our heads such a puppet as Nguyen Van Thieu, which is a shame.

I want all the Americans to go home, and hand back our Sovereignty and we want to talk with the other people from the other side, about our business, among the Vietnamese. You people go talk with the Chinese if you want to, but not here, in Vietnam.

I also call on President Nixon, that he should take this chance to listen to the voice of the Vietnamese people. I am sure that he would not be disappointed, as he has been up to now. Because for a long time he has been dealing with a minority that just care about themselves--that's all. Never about the people. This is my personal message to President Nixon.

The transcript of Mrs. Ngo Ba Thanh's statement was made available to the writer by the Indochina Mobile Education Project in Washington, D.C.

The two poems are printed by permission of that project from a compendium of Vietnamese poetry entitled We Promise One Another--poems of an Asian war.

Le Hieu translated Kim Van Kieu.

(At this point. Mrs. Thanh began discussing the situation at Thu Duc. the prison she was being returned to.) Mrs. Thanh: At Thu Duc the conditions are reluctantly better. Because it is not an interrogation place. But lying on the floor and the humidity is very bad for asthma The food--(we get) one supply for a week--and the nutrition is very bad for the health. But I still am very good morally. I know what I am doing is right.

Question: Mrs. Thanh. what university did you go to in the U.S.?

Mrs. Thanh: I was at Columbia University.

Question: When you return to prison will you return to Thu Duc?