Word: giap
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...shaped bunkers and tunnels dug into a hill covered with bamboo thicket. B-52 bombers hit the Red supply areas ten miles behind their redoubt, and the Airborne's artillery and mortars laid a curtain of steel down the hillside. Some U.S. units were hit hard by Giap's "human wave" mass attack: Company Commander William Carpenter (see THE NATION) heroically called down napalm strikes on his own position when Communist troops overran it. But at week's end the Airborne and Vietnamese forces had killed an estimated 700 North Vietnamese...
They may well have killed more than men, breaking up the rehearsal for one of the Red Napoleon's coveted set-piece strikes. If so, as is happening with increasing regularity to Giap's best-laid plans, another timetable must be destroyed, and all the meticulous, delicate structure of insurgency tactics be reassembled. It is General Vo Nguyen Giap's own aphorism that he may only attack when success is certain. Even more than his rice and his bullets, that certitude is in scarce supply in the new war the men from the North must endure...
...annoying to U.S. commanders, who are spoiling for a fight they are confident they can win-and for an end to the suspense as to what the Reds will do next. The North Vietnamese eminence grise with the answer to that question is tiny, plump General Vo Nguyen Giap (pronounced Zhop), 55, Commander in Chief of the North Vietnamese army, Hanoi's Defense Minister and Deputy Premier, who shares with China's Mao Tse-tung a reputation as the world's foremost practitioner of the dark art of insurgency warfare...
...Giap earned his reputation with victory against the French in 1954, when he became the first modern commander to drive a white European nation out of Asia. Then he was largely unknown, except to his French adversaries, who dismissed him with St.-Cyr-bred contempt as a sometime schoolmaster who had been awarded his general's stars by Communist bush politicians. But Giap's native army defeated his far-better-equipped foe by entrapping a French force of 12,000 in the mountain fortress of Dienbienphu and liquidating it, thus destroying the will of the politicians back...
Still, he is a rewarding study, for Giap is a general with a problem, and that problem is the deployment of U.S. troops with all their mobile force and firepower in South Viet Nam. Scarcely a year ago, Giap, as he looked southward, could see victory in his grasp. Both Phase 1 (grassroots political organization) and Phase 2 (guerrilla warfare, terrorism, sabotage) in Mao's handbook of insurgency had long since been accomplished in South Viet Nam. Late in 1964, Giap apparently decided that the time had come for Phase 3-an escalation of the conflict into conventional...