[News] Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Who Ousted U.S. From Vietnam, Transitions

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Who Ousted U.S. From Vietnam, Is Dead


            By JOSEPH R. GREGORY


            Published: October 4, 2013
            http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/world/asia/gen-vo-nguyen-giap-dies.html?emc=edit_na_20131004&_r=0



General Giap, smiling, with President Ho Chi Minh, second right, during 
a military campaign in 1950.

Vo Nguyen Giap, the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general 
whose battlefield victory at Dien Bien Phu drove France out of Vietnam 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/vietnam/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> 
and whose tenacious resistance to the United States in a long and costly 
war there eventually sapped America's political will to fight, died on 
Friday in Hanoi. He was believed to be 102.

The death was reported by several Vietnamese news organizations, 
including the respected Tuoi Tre Online <http://tuoitre.vn/>, which said 
he died in an army hospital.

General Giap was among the last survivors of a generation of Communist 
revolutionaries who in the postwar decades freed Vietnam of colonial 
rule and fought a superpower to a stalemate. In his later years, he was 
a living reminder of a war that was mostly old history to the 
Vietnamese, many of whom were born after it had ended.

But he had not faded away. He was regarded as an elder statesman in a 
unified Vietnam whose hard-line views had softened with the cessation of 
war. He supported economic overhaul and closer relations with the United 
States while publicly warning of the spread of Chinese influence and the 
environmental costs of industrialization.

A teacher and journalist with no formal military training, Vo Nguyen 
Giap (pronounced vo nwin ZHAP) joined a ragtag Communist insurgency in 
the 1940s and built it into a highly disciplined force that through 30 
years of revolution and civil war ended an empire and united a nation.

He was charming and volatile, an erudite military historian and an 
intense nationalist who used his personal magnetism to motivate his 
troops and fire their devotion to their country. His admirers put him in 
the company of MacArthur, Rommel and other great military leaders of the 
20th century.

Seth Mydans contributed reporting.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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