Word: giap
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...those little ironies of fate that General Vo Nguyen Giap's name contains the Vietnamese words for force (Vo) and armor (Giap). The commander of North Viet Nam's armed forces and the overlord of the Viet Cong, he is a dangerous and wily foe who has become something of a legend in both Viet Nams for his stunning defeat of the French at Dienbienphu. He is one of the principal developers-along with Mao Tse-tung and Cuba's late Che Guevara-of the art of guerrilla warfare, a tactician of such talents that U.S. military...
...Giap, 56, was not born to the bush. The son of a poor but educated landholder in what is now North Viet Nam, he was sent to an exclusive college in the old imperial capital of Hué, got a law degree from the French-run University of Hanoi and finally emerged as a history teacher at Hanoi's Thang Long School. His idol, even then, was Napoleon. "He could step to the blackboard," one of his former students recalls, "and draw in the most minute detail every battle plan of Napoleon." But his admiration for the French stopped...
...French banned the party, and Giap-together with scores of other Communists-fled to China. There he met Ho Chi Minh and became a charter member of a group that the French will long remember: the Viet Minh. His assignment, based largely on his blackboard battlegrounds, was to organize Ho's ragtag guerrillas into a fighting army. That was in 1941, and Giap has been in charge of the army ever since...
...Giap is an ascetic man who neither smokes nor drinks, wears baggy, high-collared uniforms, and frequently goes about shod in sandals made from rubber tires. Yet there are streaks of vanity in him. Because of his short stature (5 ft.), he likes to stand on boxes to deliver his speeches. On visits to his troops, he is liable to shuck his uniform, four-starred helmet and all, and show up dressed conspicuously in civilian clothes. He is a ruthless taskmaster, utterly contemptuous of the value of human life-even that of his own troops. "Every minute, thousands...
...Giap's life has not been easy. He married in 1938 and fathered a girl, but his wife was arrested by the French and died in prison while he was in China; he has since remarried. An emotional man whose temper often got the better of his cool-and earned him the nickname of "The Volcano and the Snow"-he has, at times, been put down by Ho. An outburst against a French general in 1945 cost him a place on the negotiating team that tried to win independence from France at the end of World...