Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...deadly. One fight pits the U.S. and its allies against North Vietnamese and main-force Viet Cong regular soldiers whose primary mission is as old as war itself: to kill and maim the opposing armies. The second fight is waged by a second enemy, the clandestine Viet Cong guerrilla. His uniform is the peasant's black pajamas, and his mission is a Communist innovation: to steal people as well as territory away from the South Vietnamese government...
...Vietnamese under Hanoi's Red rule. But the dual assault, with all its variations, has made the task of the U.S. and its allies doubly difficult?tough to assess and hard to explain. Victories over the North Vietnamese troops do not readily translate into visible progress in the guerrilla war. The bombing of North Viet Nam may slow the southward flow of arms and aid, but as yet has not notably diminished the vast acreage of land now in Viet Cong hands. That differential in payoff is the chief reason for the war's frustration. For it is accepted...
Part of the reason lies in the vast areas of countryside they still control. The countryside is what Mao Tse-tung called "the true bastion of iron" for a revolutionary and guerrilla war, and from that bastion, particularly the populous, rice-rich Delta, comes food for the ten or so North Vietnamese divisions fighting south of the DMZ as well as fresh recruits for the V.C. main-force units. V.C. women assemble hand grenades in jungle factories, stitch uniforms, care for the wounded. Small boys dig trenches and bunkers, carry messages, build booby traps and learn to throw an occasional...
...cadre (Communist coinage for a trained political agent), guerrilla or main-force soldier, the Viet Cong is a creature of bureaucracy, a product of his own planning?and a far cry from the tabloid image of an ignorant peasant on a senseless rampage...
...vote, he was ready to try another kind of takeover. To a 10,000-strong network of Viet Minh he had left behind in the South, he sent orders for the start of what has now become the century's second longest war in Asia (after the Malayan guerrilla war against the British...