Word: giap
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...throw off balance any enemy monsoon offensive plans. All up and down South Viet Nam, the U.S. has been out hunting in a record number of battalion-size or larger operations (25 last week). Significantly they are making contact, after nearly eight months in which North Vietnamese General Giap's forces and the Viet Cong were notably reluctant to fight. Yet another sign of the quickening war: Giap has moved two fresh regiments from staging areas in Laos into the Central Highlands, the 34th and 88th, totaling some...
...sits in his office in the buff-colored onetime French colonial-ministry building in Hanoi and contemplates his war maps, Vo Nguyen Giap today confronts a far more difficult situation. Unlike his ill-fated French predecessors, who were told to make do with the troops on hand, U.S. Commander William C. Westmoreland has been promised everything he needs to win the war-and has been getting it. Allied troops already outnumber Giap's forces in the South by over 4 to 1, and there are more to come: an estimated 100,000 more U.S. fighting men to be added...
...Viet Cong of the South, there are other problems. One of the biggest is the presence of the 30,000 North Vietnamese regulars that Giap has sent down the Ho Chi Minh trail in the past year. Regional distrust and dislike between northerners and southerners in Viet Nam is centuries old, and, says one expert in Saigon, "the southern Viet Cong have long been afraid of a Red Napoleon." They now have one: half the main-force Viet Cong units not tied down to static defense are led by North Viet Nam officers, and there have been major seedings...
Unlike the fight against the French, whom he took on largely within what is now North Viet Nam, Giap today must wage war by remote control, with every foot of the long line of command under potential attack day and night. He must wield the most cumbersome logistical system since Hannibal brought his elephants over the Alps, winding down through the mountains and jungles of Laos and Cambodia. Captured diaries of infiltrators tell harrowing tales of the journey. Marchers carry 70-lb. packs up 40° slopes, cope with insects, snakes, mud, hunger, disease and even, occasionally, the attacks...
Guitars & Tennis Rackets. Unable to view or even get close to the battlefield itself (unlike Westmoreland, who tours his commands four times a week), Giap must rely on reports from his commanders in the field that he cannot check -which probably leads to a rosier picture of the war than is justified by facts. While Hanoi, thanks to the careful targeting of the U.S. bombers, as a population center is probably safer than any place in South Viet Nam today, its atmosphere is hardly conducive to clearheaded armchair generalship. Bomb shelters are everywhere: at 8-ft. intervals between sidewalks...