Tin Speaker

Just throwing this out there for you. It’s a paper I wrote about Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general. Do with it what you will. Why am I posting it? To learn you a thing or two! And to have the longest Web log post in the history of the planet. Why am I including a works cited page? Because MLA format, that’s why! And for your further reading pleasure, too, duh. The formatting is not ideal, particularly with the block quotations, but just deal with that, okay?

A Revolutionary Life:
Vo Nguyen Giap and the Struggle for an Independent, United Viet Nam

The people of Viet Nam have been fighting for independence from foreign invaders for millennia. Ever since 111 B.C., when the Chinese Han Dynasty invaded to establish a suzerainty that would maintain control for over a thousand years, Viet Nam has been engaged in a near-constant struggle for independence (Currey 323). For centuries, China was the main adversary, until the West began to take notice of Southeast Asia, beginning in the 17th century and continuing through the treaties of the 19th century, which gave France control over all the ancient Annamese lands (Currey 326-327). It was these treaties that would catalyze the chain of events that would eventually lead to the rise of a general, Vo Nguyen Giap, under whose leadership, along with Ho Chi Minh, Viet Nam would finally exercise control over its own destiny as a sovereign, unified nation. The road was long and difficult, and it began well before Giap was born, with the precedent of resistance that his ancestors established providing an inspiration and a motivation for Giap that would drive his pursuit of independence and unity for Viet Nam. Continuing the long history of Vietnamese opposition to foreign invaders, and using a military acumen of uncommon grade, Giap was able to bring Viet Nam’s 2000-year-old struggle to a victorious end at last.
The seeds of Giap’s revolutionary discontent were sown early. His father was a nationalist who participated in uprisings against the French occupiers in 1885 and 1888. The elder Giap was later arrested for subversion and died in prison in 1919 (Macdonald 19). Shortly after their father’s death, one of Vo Nguyen Giap’s two sisters was also arrested and imprisoned, and soon died from illness contracted in prison (Macdonald 19). The deaths of two close relatives before his tenth birthday undoubtedly had a profound effect on Giap, and several years later he began taking part in clandestine nationalist activities at the Lycée National, attracting notice of the French Sȗreté security service by the age of thirteen (Macdonald 20). Clearly, Giap’s environment was one of powerful nationalism from a very young age, and he took up the mantle of resistance with passion.
At fifteen, he was banned from the Lycée and joined the Tan Viet Cach Meng Dang nationalist group, where he was exposed to some of the ideas that would prove most influential in shaping his ideology. The pamphlet “Colonialism on Trial,” by Nguyen Ai Quoc was especially crucial to the development of Giap’s politics, attracting him Communism with the promise of a “fair, just and classless society” (Macdonald 21). Giap would eventually meet and come to know Nguyen Ai Quoc, who would by that time be living under a different name – Ho Chi Minh. Despite his revolutionary bent, Giap’s fierce intelligence allowed him to return to school, and even though he was arrested and imprisoned for three months, he received his baccalaureate to enable him to study at university (Macdonald 21). In Viet Nam, this was an extraordinary accomplishment, and in July of 1937 Giap became one of just 408 Vietnamese lawyers to graduate from university in the twenty-five years before 1945 (Macdonald 22). Giap had proven himself to be among the finest young minds in Viet Nam, and his future adversaries may not have understood just how intelligent he was.
After receiving his degree, Giap wrote for revolutionary newspapers such as Tin Tuc (The News) and Nhan Dan (The People), developing and disseminating his political philosophy (Macdonald 22). He also once again experienced firsthand the brutal side of French colonialism when his sister-in-law, a revolutionary recently returned from Russia where she was studying communism, was arrested, tried and executed, bringing the total to three of Giap’s relatives to have been killed at the hands of the foreign oppressors (Macdonald 22-23). Resistance continued to be a passion of Giap’s. He continued his education outside of school, studying the history of the Vietnamese wars of resistance against the Chinese (Macdonald 23). Reading about the long history of Vietnamese struggle against foreign invaders undoubtedly gave Giap a strong sense of nationalist pride and a desire to continue Viet Nam’s dogged legacy. He also explored the roots of his communist principles, reading Marx, Hegel and Lenin, and finding “the ideological basis for the new social system that was to replace all the old injustices with a bright new egalitarianism,” and in Mao Tse-tung finding the military means to bring that system into existence (Macdonald 23).
Giap’s version of the system would begin to become a reality amid the global confusion of 1945. With the current occupiers, the Japanese, facing an impending, massive assault by the Allied powers, and the French overly confident that they would regain easily their former colonial possession, Giap and the Vietnamese recognized an opportunity to seize control of their own country. Giap and Ho Chi Minh orchestrated the August revolution, facing little resistance from a beleaguered Japan. Japan, recognizing their own vulnerability in the larger war and wanting to damage the Allies as much as possible, had imprisoned French colonial administrators in Viet Nam, further reducing the resistance that Giap and Ho faced. On 2 September 1945, the revolutionaries proclaimed Viet Nam’s independence from French rule (Herring 3). The timing seemed perfect for a push for autonomy. Giap described the enthusiasm with which the population received the uprising:
One day before, the city had been paralyzed by famine, epidemics, and terror. Now, life was seething in every street and lane. Thousands upon thousands of people marched through the streets with the force of surging waves. The people’s revolutionary power had been established. Robbery and stealing virtually disappeared. Beggars were nowhere to be seen. The atmosphere was one of purity and excitement. (qtd. in Macdonald 58-59)
Though Giap would undoubtedly be disposed to exaggerate the fervor displayed by the Vietnamese populace in response to the uprising, the numbers support his claims. The Viet Minh dominated the 1945 national elections, with Giap pulling in 97 per cent of the vote in Nghe An Province (O’Neill 39). The popular support for the new government was clear and undeniable. This widespread nationalist undercurrent foreshadowed the sentiments that later drove the “every citizen a combatant” style that would characterize the future struggle against French and American invaders.
At the time of the 1945 independence movement, Giap and the other leaders of the revolutionary forces saw the United States not as the foreign aggressors they would become, but rather as representatives of a model of colonial independence that the August Revolutionaries sought to match. The rhetoric of Ho Chi Minh and Giap reflected their admiration for the American Revolution and their belief that the United States would prove to be a respected ally and friend in the early years of the nascent free Viet Nam. Giap spoke of Viet Nam’s “‘particularly intimate relations’ with the United States” (qtd. in Herring 3) and Ho borrowed from the rhetoric of the American Founding Fathers, proclaiming the Viet Minh conviction that “each man has an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (qtd in Macdonald 61).
What Ho and Giap did not realize, however, was that the United States had already planned, at the Potsdam Conference, to give back to France all of its pre-war colonies – including Viet Nam. The U.S. was also prepared to support French efforts to suppress revolutionary anti-colonial activity (Herring 3). This suppression would become the First Indochina War
This war would come to be shaped by Giap’s military strategy and tactics. Giap recognized the importance of a well-executed plan leading up to a battle, and this proved crucial in ensuring his success against the powerful French forces. Macdonald quotes Giap, revealing an important insight that guided his strategy through the First Indochina War and then the Viet Nam War: “A battle […] can only represent the high point of a developing situation” (138). This philosophy proved particularly essential to Giap’s success during the battle of Dien Bien Phu, which eventually forced the French to negotiate terms of a ceasefire. The siege of Dien Bien Phu came as a result of the “developing situation” of Giap’s military strategy. Giap understood that the circumstances of the war had changed and he needed to adapt, so he changed the Viet Minh course of assault. In his own words, the battle was no longer “a large-scale siege that took place unremittingly in a short time,” but rather “a campaign in which a series of siege battles having the character of positional warfare would be fought for rather a long time” (qtd. in Macdonald 139). This strategy shift allowed Giap to take advantage of his army’s strengths, solidifying Giap’s reputation as a military mastermind and, with Dien Bien Phu, putting the Viet Minh on equal negotiating ground with the Western powers.
The siege of Dien Bien Phu was one of the most astonishing military feats of the twentieth century. Giap was still largely an unknown quantity in the West, a persistent guerilla leader with outsize ambition who was overmatched by the superior European forces and would not be able to avoid defeat much longer. Giap’s strategy at Dien Bien Phu, however, confronted the French head-on and suffocated them, leaving Paris no choice but to negotiate terms of a ceasefire at the Geneva Conference. Giap’s great achievement at Dien Bien Phu was his success in transport – both soldiers and supplies – which the French thought impossible. In the midst of the siege, the Viet Minh mobilized an army of 50.000 into the hills surrounding the French fortification (Herring 37). Vietnamese men and women moved tons of supplies and equipment to Dien Bien Phu, using whatever rugged trails they could find (Herring 37). The Viet Minh network of trenches stretched nearly one hundred kilometers, and the continued trench- and tunnel-building effort was carried out by soldier and citizen alike (Macdonald 140-141, 145). During Dien Bien Phu, the French general Henri Eugène Navarre referred on the radio to Giap for the first time as “general” (Macdonald 147). Clearly, Giap was demonstrating his military prowess and was finally gaining the respect of his opponents. In May, Giap and his troops finished the job, attacking and seizing the central command post of Huguette (Macdonald 155-156). With the capture of French general Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries and his command bunker, the Viet Minh were victorious, and in Geneva, the French began to give up their colonialist ambitions.
Viet Nam’s occupation by France after World War II represented the latest in a long line of foreign incursion into Viet Nam, the history of which Vo Nguyen Giap knew all too well and all too personally. The resistance that would grow into the First Indochina War began as rural insurgency against the French occupiers and ended with the Geneva Accords partitioning Viet Nam at the 17th parallel. The north was given to the Viet Minh as the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam under Ho Chi Minh and the south became the state of Viet Nam under emperor Bao Dai. This division was necessary to prevent the Viet Minh from taking over the entire country, as Ho Chi Minh’s enormous popularity at the time would have guaranteed his ascendancy to power in a general election (Herring 50-51). While the Geneva Accords promised that elections would take place in 1956 to determine a unified national government in Viet Nam, the United States and South Viet Nam “refused to associate themselves with the formal agreements” (Herring 49), and in 1956 Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S.-backed president of South Vietnam, blocked the elections called for by the Geneva Accords (Herring 66).
With the end of the First Indochina War, the dominant Western influence in Viet Nam was no longer France. The United States, already heavily invested financially and politically in Viet Nam’s future, began to take a more active, nation-building role in South Viet Nam, while doing everything possible to “prevent the loss in Northern Vietnam from leading to the extension of communism throughout Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific” (John Foster Dulles, qtd. in Herring 51). The United States had been sinking money into the French efforts in Viet Nam for years, including $2.6 billion in the years between 1950 and 1954, and was now eager to take the lead in controlling the anti-communist effort.
Over the next decade, this attempted control escalated from aid to direct involvement to airstrikes to ground troops. The Rolling Thunder campaign of 1965 concentrated aerial bombing on presumably key targets: “military bases, supply depots, and infiltration routes in the southern part of the country” (Herring 173-174). In one year, from 30 June 1965 to 30 June 1966, total U.S. military personnel in South Viet Nam grew from 59.900 to 267.500, and the number kept climbing, to a high of 543.700 on 30 April 1969. The war dragged on, however, with the dogged forces of North Viet Nam avoiding crippling blows while delivering quick, opportunistic strikes whenever the chance arose. Giap was once again proving himself a more-than-capable leader, and two towering, related achievements – the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Tet Offensive – would elevate him to the level of genius and eventually lead to the U.S. withdrawal.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was perhaps misnamed, as its chief architect was Giap (Colvin 10). Neither was it something that had been established in Viet Nam before the war, only to be exploited by Giap; rather, he had turned it from a simple “network of footpaths used by peasants and travelers” into a “major military logistical system” (Currey 281). The trail contained about 12.000 miles of roadways; paved in some places, it was shadowed by a fuel pipeline that ran adjacent to it (Currey 281). The Viet Cong relied on it heavily: the C.I.A. estimates that “from 1966 to 1971, 630.000 soldiers, 100.000 tons of food, 400.000 weapons, and 50.000 tons of ammunition cam down the trail into the South” (Currey 281-282). This was clearly the essential supply line for Giap to reach South Viet Nam; the United States knew this, and tried to destroy the trail, but with little success. The U.S. efforts were exercises in bustling brute force, expending time, money and manpower but with little results. For every Vietnamese killed in attacks on the Trail, the United States had to drop three hundred bombs (Macdonald 251). With such a poor ratio of success, Giap was able to maintain the effectiveness of the Ho Chi Minh Trail throughout the war.
The establishment and maintenance of the Ho Chi Minh trail allowed Giap to enact his second extraordinary achievement of the Viet Nam War: the Tet Offensive, the southerly assaults that would indelibly alter the course of the war. The Tet Offensive, beginning on 30 January 1968, represents a psychological turning point of the Viet Nam War. Tet was the second of Giap’s three-phase campaign of 1967-68. The first was a series of “probing attacks in the central highlands,” designed to test new methods and equipment for the northern army. The third phase, code-named “Second Wave,” would be just that – further assaults on the south, in both rural and urban arenas, designed to “undermine morale in the South and bring about the general uprising” (Macdonald 262). In this way, Giap was not merely using his army to fight a war with conventional indicators of success and failure. Instead of judging a campaign on number of casualties or amount of land held, Giap was interested in fighting for the psyche of the nation. He understood the power of the nationalist fervor within Viet Nam because he had experienced firsthand the devastating effects of colonialism and invasion. He also understood the history of Vietnamese resistance, and recognized that this era was a new chapter in that long history. This recognition and insight into the national psyche gave Giap a huge advantage in running the campaign for the forces of North Viet Nam. Though Giap did not understand as well the American public’s perceptions of the war, his strategies in 1968 would prove to be precisely what was needed to turn the tide of American public opinion against the war, giving him and the North Vietnamese a dramatic psychological advantage.
In a strictly militaristic sense, the Tet Offensive was a victory for the ARVN and the U.S. Casualties on that side totaled between 8.000 and 12.000 versus up to 50.000 dead on the northern side (Colvin 248). The crucial effect of Tet, however, could not be measured in terms of numbers of dead or wounded. Rather, the impact of Tet was a much more powerful shift in the perceptions of the war among the American people. As Giap perceptively noted, the biggest victory of Tet was “to change the ideas of the United States. The Tet Offensive had been directed primarily at the people of South Viet Nam but, as it turned out, affected the people of the United States more. Until Tet, they had thought they could win the war but now they knew that they could not” (qtd. in Colvin 248). Media coverage of the war grew more negative every day, and Americans could see every night on the news images from this distant war in which American soldiers were dying every day, for an increasingly murky cause. By March of 1968, 78 per cent of Americans “were certain that the United States was not making any progress in Vietnam” (Herring 243). Giap’s fervent nationalism and unyielding belief in his cause allowed him to justify with this vital political advantage the enormous human and economic loss incurred by North Viet Nam during the Tet Offensive. The willingness of his soldiers to die for the advancement of the cause proved that Giap was not alone in his convictions. These were not the leanings of a solitary, power-hungry military commander. These were the beliefs that centuries of oppression and subordination had instilled in an entire people, and when they recognized an opportunity to overturn that long and sordid history, they were willing to sacrifice tremendously to achieve their long-overdue independence and unification.
This willingness to sacrifice reflects the staggering differences between the two sides in approaching the Viet Nam War. Vo Nguyen Giap instilled in his army seven basic rules for interacting with the civilian population – from simply being polite to paying for any damage done to not fraternizing with women – and his soldiers took these lessons to heart (Macdonald 106). The cause was too important to the Vietnamese to be sacrificed for childish pleasures or senseless bullying. Giap knew this, his soldiers knew this, and, perhaps most importantly, his soldiers could feel that Giap embodied these ideals. With the right attitude emanating from the top of the chain of command, the entire army was driven by the same passion and purpose, and subscribed to the same code of ethics, ensuring their moral superiority – along with the resulting psychological advantage – over the Americans.
Though U.S. General William Westmoreland issued nine “good conduct” points that were similar to Giap’s seven rules (Colvin 194), they became the exception rather than the rule when it came to American G.I. behavior in Viet Nam. Where Westmoreland advised Americans not to flaunt their relative wealth and disrespect their host country, many soldiers did just the opposite, separating themselves from Vietnamese culture except to visit prostitutes or gamble. One soldier, Arthur Woodley, recalls in the book Bloods how he strung around his neck the ears and fingers of Viet Cong he had killed, went downtown, and got “free drugs, free booze, free pussy because they wouldn’t wanna bother with you” (244). This type of attitude is less reflective of Westmoreland’s good conduct points and more indicative another set of instructions that G.I.s received in Viet Nam. Haywood Kirkland, also in Bloods, describes it: “Right away they told us not to call them Vietnamese. Call everybody gooks, dinks” (90). These directives are a far cry from Westmoreland’s friendship-fostering ones. The disparity between the two sets of instructions reveals a disjunction among the U.S. military leadership that weakened it, especially in comparison with Giap and his army. This is not to say that the difference was simply that Westmoreland was a bad leader and Giap a good one. Rather, Westmoreland was just not connected to his sub-officers and to his troops in the same way Giap was. Many U.S. soldiers never truly understood what their purpose in Viet Nam was, or else had their initial beliefs shaken once they arrived. Arthur Woodley explains his perception of the war effort when he first joined the Army: “I didn’t ask no questions about the war. I thought Communism was spreading, and as an American citizen, it was my part to do as much as I could to defeat the Communist from coming here. Whatever America states is correct was the tradition that I was brought up in” (238). After witnessing, and taking part in, the atrocities of the war, and seeing nothing gained from it, Woodley returned to the United States with a drastically altered and much harsher assessment of the situation: “this country befell upon us one big atrocity. It lied. They had us naïve, young, dumb-ass niggers believin’ that this war was for democracy and independence. It was fought for money” (256). His illusions had been shattered, as they had for many thousands more – both soldiers and civilians.
This was not the case among the Vietnamese. Giap was not coy or secretive about his objectives or motivations. The unity of purpose among the northern forces gave the common soldier a powerful point of harmony with Giap, the highest-ranking commander in the army. Giap’s skill at harnessing this connection allowed him to use his army to its maximum potential; by impelling his soldiers to a total commitment to the cause, he was better able to bring civilians to his side as well, giving him a crucial advantage in the hearts and minds of the people. The same power that Giap had to enact effectively his seven basic rules for the military also proved essential in the implementation of the “every citizen a combatant” dimension of the war.
It is this psychological mastery, in addition to his logistical and tactical brilliance, that make Giap a true military genius and allowed him to defeat wave after wave of foreign invaders – Japanese, then French, then American. Because he understood the history of Viet Nam’s struggle for autonomy, he understood the potency of the desire for independence under a unified government, a desire rooted deep within the Vietnamese collective unconscious. This was a people made resilient by years of struggle and defeat. Within this framework, then, the purpose for the war was relevant for all citizens, and all citizens were deeply and essentially involved in the struggle. Giap took this situation towards a logical end, proclaiming that all “citizens are soldiers; all villages and wards are fortresses and our entire country is a vast battlefield on which the enemy is besieged, attacked and defeated” (qtd. in Currey 321). This universalization of the war proved to be a brilliant tactic against his more conventionally minded Western foes. As in the American War of Independence, where the colonists flustered and befuddled the highly trained but cripplingly traditional British forces, Giap’s underfunded and undermanned forces maintained their strength through exploitation of their knowledge of the land, as well as strong convictions in their cause.
The conversion of the whole country into a battlefield had another effect. U.S. forces in Viet Nam relied on Vietnamese workers for basic services like cleaning and cooking. However, the close proximity to American soldiers that these jobs afforded to Vietnamese citizens made them ideal for clandestine Viet Cong missions. Stephen A. Howard describes in Bloods a scene during the Tet Offensive that illustrates just how deeply integrated in South Viet Nam the Viet Cong were:
When we pulled the bodies out, there was three people that worked in the kitchen in battalion headquarters. They served the food to the officers. One of the cooks from our mess hall was there. Some of the people that owned the little shops that was just outside the base. Some of the boom-dee-boom girls. Some of the owners of the boom-dee-boom clubs. Some of the guys that you see in the clubs that just seem to come in and just be standing there. And the people that worked in the barbershop. Two of them. And the girls who polished our shoes and washed our clothes. (123)
Here, Howard demonstrates with frightening precision the extent to which American soldiers were surrounded by hostile Vietnamese. This was an essential part of victory for the Viet Cong. This was a devastating blow to the American psyche. This was the genius of Giap.
Giap’s psychological prowess was not limited to this understanding of his own people, however. He also displayed an uncanny knack for manipulating and exploiting his enemies’ minds with crucial campaigns that were, although not resounding successes – or even successes at all – according to traditional military standards, overwhelmingly effective in damaging the psyche of his opponents. In the First Indochina War, the siege of Dien Bien Phu represents most perfectly the strategic efficacy of Giap’s tactics on his opponent’s will. Dien Bien Phu was devastating for Giap’s forces – an estimated 7.900 dead and 12.000 wounded (Macdonald 162), plus the depletion of most of the supplies that Giap had received from China in the preceding months (Macdonald 161). However, these losses were offset for Giap by the shift in perception that Dien Bien Phu caused. Coming, fortuitously, just as the Geneva Conference was starting, Dien Bien Phu put the French in a position of weakness and forced concessions that not too long before would have been anathema to the former colonial power. Because of Giap’s masterly manipulation of his opponents’ minds – not just his military opponents, but his political ones, too – he extracted the most possible effectiveness out of what men and supplies he had, and secured, albeit not a perfect cease-fire agreement, at least an acceptable one, especially coming as it did when his forces were too depleted to continue with any major military campaigns (Herring 50).
Giap demonstrated the same mastery against a different foe with 1968’s Tet Offensive. Here, too, he sacrificed deeply for what were mostly psychological gains, with the end result being, eventually, even more advantageous to him. This was not conventional military strategy, or even common sense. But Giap was not concerned with being a proper tactician. He had no military training (Currey 318) – all he knew how to do was win, in whatever manner best presented itself to him. With Tet, he found it necessary to commit massive resources to a brutal campaign that would cost many lives and risk much of the Viet Cong’s position. He executed the plan, though, because it was what worked, and this is part of what made him brilliant.
The circumstances of Vo Nguyen Giap’s upbringing instilled in him an anti-colonial fire that would continue to be stoked throughout his life. This revolutionary rearing affected his command at every step; the books he read, the people he knew and the history he studied all contributed to his passion and determination to achieve his goals, which had been so elusive for his people throughout their history. With this deep understanding of his people’s history, along with a tactical military brilliance, Giap was able to achieve what had eluded the Vietnamese for millennia: a unified, independent Viet Nam.

Works Cited
Colvin, John. Giap: Volcano Under Snow. New York: Soho Press, Inc., 1996. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Currey, Cecil B. Victory at Any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam’s Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, Inc., 1997.
Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. 4th ed.
Howard, Stephen A. Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History. Ed. Wallace Terry. New York: Presidio Press, 2006. 118-129.
Kirkland, Howard T. Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History. Ed. Wallace Terry. New York: Presidio Press, 2006. 89-108.
Macdonald, Peter. Giap: The Victor in Vietnam. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993.
O’Neill, Robert J. General Giap: Politician and Strategist. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1969.
Woodley, Arthur E., Jr. Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History. Ed. Wallace Terry. New York: Presidio Press, 2006. 236-257