Word: giap
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Communists hoped their offensive would spark an uprising against the government of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu. It did not: the invaders were thrown back, suffering disastrous casualties. Yet for the brilliant North Vietnamese commander, General Vo Nguyan Giap, Tet was an important symbolic victory. American confidence in the war effort, and in the leadership that had promised success, was irrevocably shattered. The images of war -- always shocking, bleak, agonizingly poignant -- took on a darker significance. "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it," declared a U.S. major in the battle for Ben Tre, a provincial capital...
...GENERAL GIAP...
...NGUYEN GIAP...
...General Giap, 72, one of the most successful military tacticians of the past 40 years, orchestrated the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Tet in 1968 and the conquest of the South. But he was replaced as Defense Minister in 1980 and dropped from the Politburo in 1982, possibly because he was too outspokenly pro-Soviet. That was heresy to Hanoi's xenophobic leaders, despite their alliance with Moscow. Giap remains on the party's Central Committee, however, and last May met with reporters at the 30th anniversary of Dien Bien...
...press conference in Hanoi, the legendary General Giap, a smiling but still tough, grand fatherly figure who engineered the victory, attributes the Vietnamese military triumph to "a succession of surprises" that forced General Henri Navarre, the French commander in chief in Indochina, to make a stand at Dien Bien Phu. "Why were we successful?" he asks. "President Ho Chi Minh found a path: the combination of the struggle for national independence and the struggle for socialism." In a nearby sugar-cane field, close to where hundreds of French soldiers are said to be buried, the Vietnamese are erecting a modest...