[News] Vietnam Will Win: Building an Army

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/12/vietnam-will-win-building-an-army/


  Vietnam Will Win: Building an Army

by Wilfred Burchett 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/> - February 12, 2018
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How does one build a modern army from scratch without holding state 
power and without arms or money, and with only a handful of dedicated 
men with faith to form the first nucleus? Fidel Castro did it by 
secretly training a few devoted followers in the jungles of Latin 
America, disembarking 82 strong from the dilapidated boat /Granma/ on 
Cuban shores on December 2, 1956, in a seemingly hopeless venture – 
losing almost all equipment in getting ashore – reduced to 12 men after 
a few days of murderous combat. But in two years and one month, Fidel’s 
band had expanded into a powerful force that smashed the U.S.-equipped 
50,000-man army of dictator Batista and took over state power in Havana.

Ben Bella began in November 1954 with half a dozen conspirators, 
inspired by the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, meeting secretly in the 
Aures region of Algeria with hardly a weapon among them. Yet they 
decided to take on the French colonial army and fought to victory nearly 
eight years later.

In Vietnam on December 22, 1944, Vo Nguyen Giap organized the famous 
Tran Hung Dao platoon of 34 men. From this tiny nucleus was born the 
formidable Vietnam People’s Army which within ten years had paralyzed 
the French colonial army and won an historic victory at Dien Bien Phu.

In these three struggles, the armed forces were formed around the 
personification of the military and political leadership of the 
liberation movement. Fidel Castro chose as his original instrument of 
armed struggle the autonomous military column under his personal 
leadership. After it had been built up to full strength and developed 
into a hardened, experienced military unit, tempered in the crucible of 
dozens of fierce battles, a second column was detached from the mother 
unit under Che Guevara to “go and do likewise” – to open another front. 
Then a third was formed under Raul Castro and so on, coordination of 
action being achieved in the beginning only by the complete identity of 
aims, methods and tactics. Once the struggle in Cuba was victorious, one 
can say a similar “growth and split” principle of development was 
applied on a hemispheric scale, when Che went off to Bolivia to head a 
new column, to open up a new front with the tragic result that was 
mourned by progressive human beings the world over.

In South Vietnam the armed struggle was also shaped by the “growth and 
split” principle, but in a very different form, because of the great 
experience acquired by the South Vietnamese people during the 
anti-French resistance war, and because of the long years of political 
struggle against the fascist regime of Diem. After the first sparks of 
spontaneous resistance in widely separated areas of the country had led 
to a decision to launch generalized armed resistance, armed groups of 
differing size and quality sprang into being virtually simultaneously 
all over the country. From these initial groups the “growth and split” 
process developed on a nationwide scale right from the beginning. There 
was not just a single unit as Giap had in 1944, but hundreds of 
platoons, although many were armed only with hoes, knives and other 
rudimentary weapons.

During one of my visits to the liberated areas in late 1964, I asked Le 
Van Muong, chief of staff of a Liberation Army regiment, to explain how 
it had been built up to its present size. “Soon after the Front issued 
its call for an armed uprising and the formation of regular, full-time 
forces,” he explained, “two platoons were formed in our district. I was 
in charge of one and Thuong Chien, the regiment political officer, was 
in charge of the other. We met and agreed to expand each of our platoons 
(around 30 men) into a company (100 men). It took quite a while to do 
this, not for lack of recruits but for lack of arms. Even when we 
started to expand, we had only about 10 firearms for each platoon. 
Sometimes a platoon member would lend his weapon to his comrade and the 
latter would come back a few hours later with two weapons, returning the 
one he had borrowed. During the first months when we made attacks, for 
every man with a weapon there was always at least one unarmed man ready 
to snatch a rifle from the enemy or from our own dead or wounded. When 
we had two under-strength companies, we fused them as a nucleus for a 
battalion. With this bigger unit, we could increase the scale of our 
attacks which in the beginning were almost exclusively to get arms. When 
we had appreciably increased our stock of weapons, we armed a third 
incomplete company and with a fourth company of reserves for whom we had 
no arms at all, we formed our first battalion.

“Later on, to form a second battalion, we took our first company away 
from the first battalion and used this as a nucleus for the second 
battalion. But growth this time was very slow, so we detached some 
cadres from the first battalion and incorporated some regional troops 
and called this the second battalion. In fact it was only at company 
strength, but as it was partly formed from regional troops, we gave it a 
fairly free hand. It started its own recruiting campaign among the young 
people of the region and fairly soon it was expanded and we really had a 
second battalion. Then we pooled the two battalions and called ourselves 
a regiment. We took ten cadres from the first and second battalions and 
incorporated the reserve companies for whom we had gradually been 
securing arms to form a third battalion, which grew much quicker than 
the lust two.

“When we first started operating as a regiment, we had plenty of 
problems. Enemy regiments, even battalions, had far greater fire power. 
Although by the time we called ourselves a regiment every man had a 
weapon, these were mainly an odd assortment of rifles and a few light 
machine guns. The NLF sent us a few heavier weapons and other supplies, 
but we were supposed to be as self-supporting as possible. We decided to 
try to add a medium-weapons support platoon to each company with medium 
machine guns and 40mm or 60mm mortars, and a heavy-weapons company to 
each battalion with heavy machine guns, 81-mm mortars and bazookas. This 
meant concentrating attention on capturing these types of weapons. Each 
company was supposed to try to get similar rifles, American carbines at 
that time, otherwise we would have problems with standardizing 
munitions. By and large, we have now achieved standardization of 
equipment and have built up our medium –  and heavy – support units. Our 
firepower up to company level is now at least equal to that of the 
Saigon troops [our discussion took place before U.S. troops were 
directly committed in South Vietnam]. Only at battalion level do they 
have the advantage of artillery and can call in air support.”

“We have the advantage that every man in our unit is a combatant,” 
interjected Thuong Chien. “The local population brings us food, right up 
to the battle lines; they evacuate our wounded and help us carry 
captured equipment back from the battlefield.”

“Without the help of the local population we would be in difficulties 
all the time,” Le Van Muong continued. “On October 10, 1964, we attacked 
an important enemy post at Go Dau [Tay Ninh Province]. We were operating 
far from our base and in what we considered a ‘weak’ area, politically 
speaking. But we knew there was a big stock of weapons there which we 
needed for our heavy-weapons support companies. At first it was 
impossible to get information about enemy dispositions. But a wonderful 
woman contacted us and asked what we wanted to know. She was the wife of 
a well-known former resistance cadre who we all knew had been killed by 
the Diemists. Within 24 hours of our meeting, she gave us exact 
information on enemy emplacements, how many effectives and their 
disposition, where the machine-gun nests and artillery positions were 
located. She brought along her two daughters and each guided one wave of 
our assault troops right to the starting point. There the question of 
tending our wounded and burying our dead – it was a big battle – was 
solved by the local population, organized by this one woman. In a night 
attack we wiped out 400 enemy troops and seized everything we needed and 
far more besides. Local people carried off our lightly wounded on 
Lambretta scooters and the more seriously wounded on stretchers. 
Practically everyone turned out to help, but the women were particularly 
active. We had to withdraw quickly after the engagement to avoid enemy 
planes early next morning. There was no time to prepare anything to eat 
that night. But people brought food for the whole unit, better food than 
we normally eat. Many of them even risked breaking out of their 
‘strategic hamlets’ to bring us something to eat and drink.”

“Normally we would have refused this,” the political officer explained, 
“but as it was a new area for us, it gave us a chance to get to know the 
people and exchange views. They would have been offended had we 
refused.. People around our own base areas know that we have strict 
rules not to accept anything from the local population. We are 
self-supporting and what we lack, the Front provides us from its reserves.

“When we are not on operations, we cultivate the land for ourselves and 
also to help the population. We are all former peasants so it comes 
naturally. During attacks around enemy posts to liberate ‘strategic 
hamlets,’ we dig trenches for ourselves but also for the population, to 
protect them against the enemy’s counteraction. When it starts, the 
troops cede their shelters to the civilians, and if the enemy begins an 
action against a village, our troops fight back. Even under fire they 
rush to the aid of the inhabitants, putting out fires and rescuing 
private belongings.”

I inspected the arms of several of the support companies and platoons. 
There were medium and heavy machine guns, mortars and bazookas, all of 
U.S. manufacture. At that time (late 1964), apart from a few old rifles 
and fight machine guns of French make, everything one saw – webbing 
belts and water canteens and even “flour bag” knapsacks – along the 
jungle trails and at the base camps was “Made in U.SA” exclusively.

“Many of our first battles we waged just to get arms,” said Le Van 
Muong, “but what we discovered, especially once we started large-unit 
operations, was that after every operation we got lots of new recruits. 
Some of them told us quite frankly that if they stayed on in the area 
there would be a reprisal raid and all the youth would be press ganged 
into the Saigon army. They preferred to join us. They considered their 
chance for survival was better with us. But the majority said they 
wanted to throw in their lot with us to defend their own homes and 
families. In many cases we took them with us for a while and then sent 
them back to organize self-defense units in their own villages. But it 
was due to popular support that we had a continuous stream of recruits 
with very high morale.

“As our regiment gathers strength, we have to develop tactics which 
correspond to our capacities and the enemy’s strength. The NLF 
leadership sent us veteran cadres, but their knowledge was based on the 
anti-French war. Things have developed since then, such as the use of 
helicopters, and we have all sorts of complicated arms that they had 
never had. The old cadres cannot cope with these problems.”

I asked about material support from the North and whether it was not 
practical to send cadres experienced in modern arms and tactics down to 
help them. “It would take almost a year to get anyone from the North 
down to this area,” replied political officer Thuong Chien. “And in fact 
it is not necessary. They have other ways of helping us. Radio Hanoi, 
for instance, recently gave a commentary by a military expert on how its 
army is preparing to counter a helicopter-borne invasion of the North, 
describing what sort of tactics would be effective. There was not a word 
about the South, of course, but this advice was very precious for us. It 
seems it was based on the experience of the Algerian FLN in countering 
French helicopter tactics which our friends in the Algerian FLN 
leadership passed on to the North with the idea that it would be useful 
for us. Of course, all our units have transistor radios and listen 
regularly to Radio Hanoi.

“Apart from helicopters, the other major U.S. innovation is the M-113 
tank. We salvaged one which had been abandoned after it hit one of our 
mines, and we studied it very carefully to find its weak points, how 
best to destroy it with the sort of weapons at our disposal and where to 
concentrate our fire. We had difficulty with our first bazooka because 
we didn’t know how to aim it. The first one we used was against an enemy 
river craft. We lashed a rifle to it so that the barrels were exactly 
parallel. We sighted with the rifle and fired the bazooka. The shell hit 
just below the water as we wanted and we sank an enemy boat with our 
very first shot. Then we understood that the bazooka sights should be 
used like ordinary rifle sights. The mortars had scales in meters but we 
had no instruments to judge the distance of enemy positions. In 
preparing our first attack we had to send scouts with balls of string, 
unrolling the string as they crawled in as straight a line as possible 
to the targets. When they came back we counted off the meters, adding 
five, 10, 20 or 50 meters according to how close the scout got to the 
target and adjusting the scales accordingly. It worked well.

“There would be enormous difficulties in moving material down from the 
North,” Thuong Chien continued, “but it would also be suicidal for us at 
this stage to have to depend on weapons and munitions from so far away 
or to have weapons for which supplies of shells and cartridges are not 
easily available. That is why we prefer captured American weapons for 
which there are ample supplies of local munitions. Our great 
difficulties were in the early stages when we literally had to wrest 
guns from the hands of the enemy.  Once we had built up sufficient 
strength to attack enemy posts and depots and ambush big convoys, 
weapons supply was no longer a real problem. When we reached the point 
at which everyone had a weapon of some sort, then we started to 
standardize, and there was a curious phase during which we grabbed 
American weapons during a battle and began using them right away, 
discarding our outmoded ones. We sometimes laughed at enemy communiqués 
saying they had ‘captured’ so many firearms from us during a battle. 
These were weapons we had ‘exchanged’ on the battlefield. Now we have 
reached the point where rifles, sidearms and light automatic weapons 
captured during a battle or an attack, are distributed to the local 
guerrillas. We have everything we need, everything we can carry, and 
this equipment is supplemented by what we make in our own workshops, 
mainly mines and hand and rifle grenades.

“We can’t expend masses of ammunition like the enemy. We have to make 
every shot count and one can say that our troops have become very expert 
in the weapons they use, especially the mortars and bazookas. The enemy 
has very great respect for the way we handle these weapons.”

In fact, when I spoke to the bazooka crews, they were able to tell me 
the result of every single shot fired by each of their weapons. Other 
soldiers spoke of the number of engagements they had taken part in, but 
the bazooka crews spoke of the result of every shell fired. At first 
they used them only at such close range that they were endangered by the 
explosion of the shells. Bit by bit they were able to increase the 
distance between themselves and the target without loss of accuracy. 
Apart from an occasional shell that failed to explode, they claimed 100% 
hits. (And this was the case at a much later period when NLF units 
started receiving the B-40 light Chinese-made, small caliber 
bazooka-type weapon, the shell of which released a temperature of 6,300 
degrees F., sufficient to melt the steel on the most heavily armored 
U.S. tanks. Accurate up to 130 yards, they are fired by NLF troops from 
about 30 to 55 yards with what they claimed was 100% efficiency. “One 
shell, one tank,” as a B-40 expert expressed it.)

I asked about instruction in using heavy machine guns and mortars, and 
such techniques as the most efficient disposition of men and weapons in 
ambushes, the use of demolition charges in battles and other 
complicated, specialized techniques.

“I can tell you that in the anti-French war we knew little about such 
matters,” said Le Van Muong. “If we captured mortars, we usually greased 
them and buried them somewhere in the hope that someone would turn up 
one day who knew how to use them. That’s why the old resistance cadres 
sent from the center are not much help in weapons technique. But we have 
solved this in different ways. When the decision to wage armed struggle 
was taken, the NLF sent some young cadres into the ranks of the enemy to 
learn weapons techniques. When they had learned all they could, they 
returned to our ranks and became instructors. A few were discovered by 
the enemy, one or two turned traitor for material reasons, but the great 
majority came back to us. A certain number of specialists deserted from 
the enemy ranks to us and begged to be sent straight into the front 
line. But we used them to train our own specialists. Gradually our 
technique improved. In one of the first battles, after we had taken an 
important post but suffered rather heavy losses ourselves, we found a 
scrawled note written on blood-stained paper and thrust in between some 
bricks. It was written by some anonymous patriot. ‘You used your heavy 
machine guns badly,’ he wrote, ‘the bullets all fell short. You should 
use trajectory fire instead of shooting like with rifles.’ We 
immediately took steps to improve the technique of our heavy machine gun 
crews. It was their lack of proficiency on that occasion which caused us 
heavy casualties. There were several instances of this sort of advice. 
On another occasion we found a note saying: ‘Comrades, you hit all the 
helicopters and could have brought them all down. But you should aim 
at…’ and he told us the weak points of various types of helicopters, 
complete with sketches. This, together with the Hanoi radio commentary, 
made us much more efficient in dealing with helicopters.”

“Another of our difficulties,” explained Thuong Chien, “is that almost 
all of our troops are illiterate and even when we have captured enemy 
weapon manuals we have only been able to make limited use of them, 
especially since they are mostly in English. But – and this is not 
limited only to weapons’ techniques but to all other branches of our 
struggle, medicine, education and so forth – we organize 
exchange-of-experience classes between specialists of different 
regiments and regions. In this way the most advanced techniques learned 
or developed in one unit or even by some individual quickly become 
generalized by word of mouth and some simple diagrams which even the 
illiterate can understand. We have found this the most effective way of 
raising technical level, but we can usually organize such interregional 
classes only in the rainy season when there is not much combat activity. 
There are classes not only for questions of general tactics and 
techniques, but also for the specialties – weapons, demolitions, 
communications, assault techniques. Our aim is to make each of our men 
expert in handling various types of weapons. We can already say that, as 
distinct from the anti-French war, even at company level our men are 
already competent to handle any type of weapon that we can capture and 
carry off the battlefield. Of course, we can’t handle artillery pieces. 
When we capture them we spike their barrels or blow them up. Our weapons 
, are limited to those that can be carried on human shoulders, or 
several pairs of shoulders for some of the heavy mortars.”

By the time I made my fourth visit to the NLF areas in the second half 
of 1966, the regiment had become a division, its battalions having been 
transformed into regiments, companies into battalions, platoons into 
companies by almost the same biological growth-and-split process by 
which the regiment itself had been formed. In most cases platoons had 
been formed around the nucleus of local self-defense guerrillas, the men 
having been replaced in the self-defense units by young women who then 
constituted an important part of the village guerrilla units.

As far as I know this was one of the first NLF divisions formed, but a 
similar process was going on all over the country from 1965 onward when 
it was decided that long-range preparations had to be made to deal with 
U.S. combat divisions. Like other regular NLF units, this division was 
largely withdrawn from combat for consolidation and training and 
“stock-piling” until the time came for the NLF counteroffensive. In the 
meantime regional troops had acquired the sort of armaments, including 
medium-weapons support units plentifully equipped with B-40’s, that they 
needed to enable them to deal with U.S. offensives in the area. This was 
in coordination with the local guerrillas whose equipment had been 
improved by early 1965 to about the standards of regional troops.

The fact that U.S. forces hardly ever met the regular NLF forces during 
the 1966-67 dry season offensives was something I drew attention to at 
the time, especially in a “Post Scriptum” dated December 1966 to my 
book, /Hanoi sous les Bombes,/[1] <#_edn1> in which I wrote in relation 
to the operational season:

“None of the three stated American strategic aims had been achieved – 
that is,  to open up communications, regain territory and return it to 
Saigon control, destroy NLF main forces. The various offensives had been 
repelled almost exclusively by local guerrilla and regional forces, 
while the NLF main force units continued their steady buildup for more 
efficient use later. I found the NLF leaders more confident than ever 
precisely because what they had been expecting for years had come about 
– the direct clash with elite U.S. combat divisions – and the NLF forces 
had come off best in every major encounter …”

The light NLF divisions formed along the lines of the regiment I have 
described are about as perfect a military instrument as could be 
conceived for Vietnam. If U.S. units are highly mobile when it comes to 
being airlifted from their bases to a battlefield, once they get on the 
ground they are incomparably less mobile than the equivalent NLF units. 
The latter move equipment that time and again has silenced the 
adversary’s artillery and wreaked havoc among his helicopters, and yet 
which can be carried on human backs and shoulders.

The lighter-equipped NLF units can run rings around U.S. units in 
mobility, bringing shattering firepower to bear on selected targets. 
Because of their intimate knowledge of terrain and their relations with 
the local population, they can maneuver around to launch surprise 
attacks against the slow-moving U.S. troops at times and places of their 
own choosing.

Although numerically an NLF division is perhaps less than half the size 
of a full U.S. division, because every man is a combatant and because 
they do not have to leave something like a third of their effectives to 
guard bases and storage areas, in actual combat and unit for unit they 
were meeting U.S. forces by the end of 1967 on something like equal 
terms in numbers and fire power, if one excepts the U.S. monopoly of 
heavy artillery and air power. But this latter advantage was often 
neutralized because of NLF close-in tactics, “grabbing the enemy by the 
belt” as they express it. Since the direct commitment of U.S. combat 
forces, new types of arms from North Vietnam and elsewhere in the 
socialist world started filtering down into NLF regular forces, 
including an ultra-rapid firing automatic rifle, the Soviet-made AK-47 
and AK-50 which the NLF troops prefer to the American M-16.

An incredible aspect of the buildup of NLF regular forces, their 
training and even their movements, is that the U.S.-Saigon Command is 
constantly being surprised by the existence of such units and their 
deployment in any given area. Despite “spy in the sky” satellites and 
infrared sensors said to be able to detect troop concentrations in the 
heat given off by human bodies; despite round-the-clock air 
reconnaissance including night photography and everything else the 
Pentagon has in the way of scientific detection equipment; and despite 
the infiltration of “special forces” teams into NLF areas, the existence 
of Liberation Army regiments was neither detected nor suspected right up 
to the moment when, after years of training, the first battle-ready 
units were set to strike at full strength. Less than 44 miles from 
Saigon, I once witnessed maneuvers of a whole regiment, carried out in 
broad daylight for several days on end. At the critical Binh Gia battle 
at the end of December 1964, I encountered another regiment in an area 
where the Americans up till a few weeks previous had never suspected the 
presence of even a guerrilla unit. It is perhaps understandable that the 
Americans were taken by surprise in the early days of their 
intervention, but this problem has continued to frustrate the U.S. 
forces. In late October 1967, General Westmoreland [2] <#_edn2> told 
some selected Saigon correspondents that the NLF had been forced back to 
small-scale guerrilla tactics and would no longer be able to launch 
attacks at greater than battalion strength, and attacks were doubtful 
even at battalion strength.

Within days of this prediction, the NLF launched an attack of at least 
regimental strength at Loc Ninh – Westmoreland claimed that a full 
division had been employed – and within a few days there was another 
attack at Dak To, nearly 240 miles to the north, which was certainly of 
divisional strength.

At the end of November 1967, after the two top-ranking U.S. colonels in 
the Dalat area were killed when they were sent to investigate a 
“Vietcong” attack on a nearby village, the whole CIA staff in Dalat was 
replaced because they had informed General Westmoreland that at most 60 
to 80 guerrillas were operating in the Dalat area. Actually, when the 
remainder of the Dalat Command tried to send a relief force to recover 
the bodies of the colonels and their two downed helicopters, they 
discovered the presence of at least an NLF regiment, enough to “eat” all 
the forces at Westmoreland’s disposal in the Dalat region, as indeed 
happened two months later when the NLF took over Dalat completely.

Of course, the best example of a surprise operation was the simultaneous 
attack on the night of January 30, 1968, against the major cities in 
which a minimum of one battalion was used against each of about 140 
objectives. Every battalion was supported by several hundred local 
inhabitants from each of the respective towns. The U.S.-Saigon Command 
was taken by such complete surprise that President Nguyen Van Thieu was 
away from Saigon celebrating the Lunar New Year with his family. Only 
routine guards were placed around the presidential palace and the U.S. 
Embassy in Saigon, and the NLF commandos succeeded in penetrating the 
command posts of almost all provincial headquarters. In an operation 
that involved at least 200,000 people, including the local inhabitants 
of the towns attacked, and extending over the whole of South Vietnam, 
complete secrecy was maintained despite the electronic devices that 
American commanders in Saigon assured journalists and visiting senators 
were so efficient that no Vietcong could even boil a pot of rice without 
being detected. This is eloquent tribute to the relations of mutual 
trust between NLF and the people, and a harsh commentary on American 
detection technique, to say the least. The U.S.-Saigon Command had to 
admit that its acoustic devices had failed even to detect the tanks that 
the Vietnamese used to overcome the “Special Forces” outpost at Lang 
Vei, protecting the big U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh.

As for Le Van Huong’s regiment, it took just six months from the merging 
of the two platoons until the third battalion was formed and the 
regiment was a going concern, a month or two less than the time taken to 
build up other regiments that I visited. From the time it started to 
operate as a regiment until it was withdrawn from operations during the 
big buildup period, this unit carried out an average of one operation a 
month, except for a period starting at the end of October 1963, when the 
whole regiment took time off from fighting to participate in a three 
month “summing-up course,” as Thuong Chien expressed it, “so that we 
could sum up our good and bad experiences, have a clearer idea of our 
task, heighten morale and acquire a firmer political outlook.”

It was indicative of the extent to which the NLF held the initiative, 
even in those days, that a whole regiment could decide to take three 
months off just at the beginning of the dry season. And this was also 
indicative of the vital importance attached to the political aspect of 
the struggle by the NLF leaders. Once the course was over, the regiment 
went back to its one-a-month operations with “heightened success because 
of a sharp uplift in morale,” to quote Chien. What is clear is that such 
units could never have been built up at such speed if the country had 
not been ripe for transforming political struggle into armed struggle.

*Notes.*

[1] <#_ednref1> Hanoi sous les Bombes, François Maspero, Paris, 1967

[2] <#_ednref2> General William C. Westmorland succeeded Paul Harkins as 
Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. “Military Assistance Command” in South 
Vietnam in June 1964.

*NEXT: Chapter 4 – Leadership and Democracy*


  Vietnam Will Win: Building an Army
  <https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/12/vietnam-will-win-building-an-army/>

February 12, 2018 by Wilfred Burchett 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/>


  Vietnam Will Win: the Making of a Soldier
  <https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/09/vietnam-will-win-the-making-of-a-soldier/>

February 9, 2018 by Wilfred Burchett 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/>


  Vietnam Will Win: the Politics of Strategy
  <https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/07/vietnam-will-win-the-politics-of-strategy/>

February 7, 2018 by Wilfred Burchett 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/>


  Vietnam Will Win: Introduction
  <https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/02/vietnam-will-win-introduction/>

February 2, 2018 by Wilfred Burchett 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/>

**

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