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<h1 id="reader-title">Vietnam Will Win: Building an Army</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/"
rel="nofollow">Wilfred Burchett</a> - February 12, 2018<br>
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<p>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 <em>Granma</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <em>Hanoi
sous les Bombes,</em><a href="#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[1]</a>
in which I wrote in relation to the operational season:</p>
<p>“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 …”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Notes.</strong></p>
<p><a href="#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[1]</a> Hanoi sous les
Bombes, François Maspero, Paris, 1967</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[2]</a> General
William C. Westmorland succeeded Paul Harkins as
Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. “Military Assistance
Command” in South Vietnam in June 1964.</p>
<p><strong>NEXT: Chapter 4 – Leadership and Democracy</strong></p>
<div id="post-99665" class="post_box top post type-post
status-publish format-standard category-articles-2015"
itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
<h1 class="headline" itemprop="headline"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/12/vietnam-will-win-building-an-army/"
rel="bookmark">Vietnam Will Win: Building an Army</a></h1>
<span class="post_date" title="2018-02-12">February 12,
2018</span> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span>
<span class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/"
rel="nofollow">Wilfred Burchett</a></span> </div>
<div id="post-99640" class="post_box post-99640 post
type-post status-publish format-standard
category-articles-2015" itemscope=""
itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
<h1 class="headline" itemprop="headline"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/09/vietnam-will-win-the-making-of-a-soldier/"
rel="bookmark">Vietnam Will Win: the Making of a
Soldier</a></h1>
<span class="post_date" title="2018-02-09">February 9,
2018</span> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span>
<span class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/"
rel="nofollow">Wilfred Burchett</a></span> </div>
<div id="post-99509" class="post_box post-99509 post
type-post status-publish format-standard
category-articles-2015" itemscope=""
itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
<h1 class="headline" itemprop="headline"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/07/vietnam-will-win-the-politics-of-strategy/"
rel="bookmark">Vietnam Will Win: the Politics of
Strategy</a></h1>
<span class="post_date" title="2018-02-07">February 7,
2018</span> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span>
<span class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/"
rel="nofollow">Wilfred Burchett</a></span> </div>
<div id="post-99439" class="post_box post-99439 post
type-post status-publish format-standard
category-articles-2015" itemscope=""
itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
<h1 class="headline" itemprop="headline"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/02/vietnam-will-win-introduction/"
rel="bookmark">Vietnam Will Win: Introduction</a></h1>
<span class="post_date" title="2018-02-02">February 2,
2018</span> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span>
<span class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/"
rel="nofollow">Wilfred Burchett</a></span> </div>
<p><strong></strong></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
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