Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (3 page)

One day after school in Hue, a close friend passed along to Giap a copy of an outlawed pamphlet called “Colonialism on Trial.” It was written by Nguyen Ai Quoc—“Nguyen the patriot” in English—a much-traveled Vietnamese nationalist who had achieved widespread notoriety at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I. At Versailles Quoc presented an impassioned demand for self-determination in the colonized countries of Asia and Africa. Quoc had gone on to become a founding member of both the French Socialist Party and the Inter-colonial Union, an organization of radicals from France’s various colonies who sought to break the shackles placed on indigenous political expression by France. In 1923 he journeyed to the Soviet Union for formal training as a revolutionary at the Stalin School for Toilers in the East. “At that time,” wrote Giap, “for the youths of our age, Nguyen Ai Quoc had become . . . the object of our dreams. We were so eagerly searching for the truth. To read for the first time a book denouncing colonialism inspired us with so much hatred, and thrilled us.”
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Reading “Colonialism on Trial” was a pivotal event in young Giap’s life, for it was his introduction to the evils of colonialism as understood by a Communist organizer who, over the next fifteen years, would
outmaneuver numerous rivals to take up the leadership of Vietnam’s crusade for independence. The organization Nguyen Ai Quoc ultimately created to achieve that end in May 1941 was called Viet Nam Doc lap Dong minh, the League for the Independence of Vietnam. The Vietminh, as the League came to be known, was in fact a classic political front organization, meaning that it consisted of various groups and classes of people united around a single objective or platform but led by one party only. In the case of the Vietminh, that objective was clear from the outset: to end French domination and achieve national independence in the name of the people of Vietnam. Over the next thirty-five years, the front would be referred to by different names, but it was always led by the Vietnamese Communist Party, first by Ho Chi Minh, and then, after Ho’s passing in 1969, by a dozen or so of his early disciples. Prominent among them was Vo Nguyen Giap.

By the time of Ho’s death, Giap had served the Revolution as commander in chief of Communist military forces in Vietnam and minister of defense for more than thirty years. Today, Giap is widely recognized as one of the three most important strategists of the Revolution, along with Truong Chinh (“Long March” in Vietnamese) and Ho Chi Minh himself.

The principal ideas of Vietnamese revolution that Ho led had first come to him by his own account when he was in his Paris apartment in the early 1920s reading Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions.”

A critical passage of that work follows:

Above all else we must strive as far as possible to give the peasant movement a revolutionary character, to organize the peasants and the exploited in [revolutionary associations called] soviets, and thus bring about the closest possible union between the Communist proletariat of Western Europe and the revolutionary peasant movement of the east and of the colonial and subject countries.
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On reading this passage, Ho recalled in 1960, “What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled into me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need! This is the path to liberation!”
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Classical Marxism—before Lenin—had assumed that revolution and class struggle could only succeed in industrialized capitalist societies where
an oppressed working class, the proletariat, could rise up against the ruling capitalists. Ho took issue with this view. He ultimately came to argue that Communist leadership could generate strong revolutionary momentum in Vietnam only by uniting the rural peasantry with disaffected middle-class nationalists and the small proletariat in a political front movement. To preserve unity of purpose, the Communist nature of the front needed to be obscured under the cloak of an eclectic leadership council with a broad, idealistic platform eschewing Communist doctrine in favor of the goals of self-determination and democracy. Once the front had overthrown the imperialists and achieved control of the state, a disciplined and well-organized Communist Party would break with its non-Communist (and in some cases, even anti-Communist) allies, neutralizing and isolating rivals within the front, and begin to build the workers’ utopia Marx had always envisaged.

Ho had a remarkable array of personal and political assets, not the least of which was his ability to recognize the potential capabilities of his comrades. He saw from the outset that Giap was among the most driven and promising of his disciples. Ho also possessed a uniquely appealing personal magnetism. Even his adversaries marveled at his keen intelligence and avuncular modesty. “Uncle Ho’s” asceticism contrasted sharply with the arrogance and corruption that swirled around the officials of French Indochina and their Vietnamese minions. Rival Vietnamese nationalist leaders constantly quarreled over platforms and minute questions of ideology and method, while Ho displayed a rare gift for mediating conflicts within his own party, and for establishing temporary alliances with rivals to accomplish short-term Communist objectives.

As a political operator in general, Ho was something of an organizational genius. He also had an almost mystical ability to instill confidence and commitment in the Vietnamese people to a degree that is almost impossible for non-Vietnamese to imagine. Vo Nguyen Giap, like virtually all of the men who worked closely with Ho for a sustained period, revered the man as a visionary and a venerable wise man from the first time he read “Colonialism on Trial.”

Far more than any other figure on the nationalist scene in the late 1920s and 1930s, Uncle Ho possessed deep empathy for the plight of the roughly 15 million peasants who comprised 90 percent of Vietnam’s population. More importantly, he sensed their explosive revolutionary potential.
Although they lacked what Vietnam’s Communists referred to as “political consciousness,” they were an extraordinarily resilient and resourceful people. Ho had no doubt that a small group of highly trained Communist cadres could mobilize the peasantry through an intensive indoctrination program designed to create, in effect, a unified way of thinking. As Ho wrote in a 1927 article Giap would surely have read and studied,

Victory of the proletarian revolution is
impossible
in rural and semi-rural countries if the
revolutionary proletariat is not actively supported
by the mass of the peasant population. . . . In China, in India, in Latin America . . . the decisive ally of the proletariat in the revolution will be the peasant population. Only if the revolutionary wave sets in motion the rural masses under the leadership of the proletariat, will the revolution be able to triumph. Hence the exceptional importance of Party agitation in the countryside.
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Broadly speaking, Communism’s growing popularity in pre–World War II Vietnam was inextricably bound up with the corrosive and debilitating effects of French colonialism on the Vietnamese people—on their traditional ways of earning a living and structuring their society. As an American agent active in Vietnam during World War II put it, “French colonialism in Indochina [was] one of the worst possible examples of peonage [and] disregard for human rights . . . the Vietnamese had been cruelly exploited, brutally mistreated, and generally used as French chattel . . . ”
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French domination shook the Vietnamese to their very foundations, creating enormous social upheaval and tearing apart the centuries-old rhythms of village life that defined life and work in Vietnam.

France by 1885 had defeated a sustained but disorganized resistance movement led by the Confucian-mandarin elite, leading to the loss of that elite’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, the commercialization of agriculture led to a rapid concentration of landownership in the hands of French businessmen and a small number of pro-French Vietnamese, with catastrophic effects for the peasants. Hundreds of thousands of peasants lost their small lots of arable land and were forced to work for pitifully low wages. The poor were further impoverished by high taxes and extortion by local colonial functionaries, most of them Vietnamese.

Peasant farmers on the verge of starvation fled to the few cities by the thousands. Most could find only low-paying work in factories, coal mines, and rubber plantations, where they toiled long hours for a pittance, and were constantly subjected to corporal punishment. The Vietnamese proletariat was in effect enslaved by its venal colonial masters. Communism and the various front organizations it created and led seemed to offer the Vietnamese a clear and inspiring path to liberation, self-determination, and the many benefits of modern life denied them by French exploitation.

The Vietnamese Communist leaders in the 1920s and 1930s were under no illusions that a nationwide uprising was imminent. Patience and discernment on the part of the leadership were essential in building up the political consciousness of the masses and destroying the authority of the oppressors. To act before the time was right was to invite defeat and disaster. Ho and other early Communists employed the ancient Vietnamese notion of
thoi co,
which translates roughly as “opportune moment” but connotes what one leading scholar of Vietnamese revolutionary thought calls a “profound even mystical meaning about the appropriate moment for action.”
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When “the yoke of the ruling classes has become intolerable, and the village masses are in a state of revolutionary ferment and ready to fight actively against the established order,” wrote Ho, guerrilla units could be formed to harass government forces, capture weapons to expand the power of the revolutionaries, and protect a shadow government known among the revolutionaries as the political infrastructure.
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Ho’s nascent ideas about guerrilla fighting struck a chord with young Giap, for he had always been keenly interested in the history of Vietnamese resistance—a history in which the themes of protracted war and guerrilla tactics occupied an unusually prominent place.

GIAP’S EARLY YEARS

Vo Nguyen Giap was born on August 25, 1911, in An Xa, Quang Binh Province. Quang Binh itself is located in Annam, the narrow neck of Vietnam between its two great deltas, where resistance to French rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been stronger and more sustained than elsewhere. The future general’s father, Vo Quang Nghiem, was a low-ranking but highly respected mandarin in the colonial administration. In addition to his job as a town clerk responsible for preparing
and dispensing official government documents, Nghiem worked in the rice paddies as a farmer and volunteered his services as a reading tutor to An Xa’s children. Giap’s mother, Nguyen Thi Kien, loved to work in the soil, growing rice and sweet potatoes. Like her husband, Kien was passionately committed to Vietnamese independence.

Giap’s maternal grandfather had been a rebel commander in the abortive Can Vuong Uprising of 1885. Both his parents recited poems and stories they had learned as children about the resistance and rebellions that flared up with great frequency as France solidified its control over all of Indochina. “Memories of the resistance against the occupation were still very fresh [during my childhood],” Giap has written. “In the evening, in the light of the oil lamp, my mother would often tell me of the grueling trials she underwent during the Can Vuong campaign, in which my father had participated [as a very young man] . . . I can still recall my earliest childhood deeply bathed with feelings of love for our country.”
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Signs of academic brilliance emerged early. Like most of the dozen or so men who would lead the Communist Party of Vietnam, Giap was a member of a tiny minority of young Vietnamese to be educated beyond grammar school. Most of the students at the prestigious Lycée National in Hue were the sons of the French
colons,
bound for university study and careers in government, the law, or other professions, but many future Vietnamese leaders studied there, including Ho Chi Minh, Pham Van Dong, and Ngo Dinh Diem, who led the South Vietnamese government from 1955 until 1963.

Courses were taught in the French language. The curriculum was similar to that of the best schools in Paris: French literature and history, geography, particularly the geography of the entire French empire, philosophy, physics, and chemistry. Vietnamese was taught as a “second” language and literature. By all accounts Giap was one of the best students in the school. He scored the second highest of all the applicants on the entrance exam and consistently ranked first in his class academically.

It was at Hue that the budding radical first began to study contemporary world politics and military history on his own time, establishing a life-long habit of voracious reading and study. After school, he often went to visit Phan Boi Chau, who had led a resistance movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Phan called for the overthrow of French rule, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy on Japanese lines, and the construction
of Western social and educational institutions. Phan Ban Chau and his followers had little understanding of how to disseminate their platform to the peasantry or challenge France’s iron grip on the nation’s political institutions, and the movement faded into history when Phan was arrested for sedition in southern China by the French Süreté in 1925. After confining Phan to house arrest in Hue, the French, for reasons that remain unclear, nonetheless allowed him to meet regularly with admiring schoolboys like Giap who were anxious to learn about the politics of resistance.

At the Lycée National, called the Quoc Hoc in Vietnamese, Giap’s penchant for defiance of the French authorities first manifested itself. He joined in numerous protests against government repression of dissent, high taxes and rents, and corruption in the colonial administration. When a fellow student known for expressing anticolonial ideas was expelled for cheating on an examination, Giap claimed that the headmaster had manufactured the charge because he didn’t approve of the student’s political views. In 1926 he organized a “quit school” demonstration throughout Hue. Not surprisingly, he was promptly expelled from the Lycée and ordered to return to his home village.