Pour moi, c'est la preuve la plus vraie, la plus vivante de l'amitie, de la solidarite qui reunissent les Algeriens et les Vietnamiens, quelle que soit leur generation, et qui ne seront jamais affaiblis.Ils ont toujours entre les oreilles les noms de personne et de localite qui ont secoue le monde : Viet Nam - Dien Bien Phu - Ho Chi Minh - Vo Nguyen
Giap.
But for Krulak, la Drang represented an example of fighting the enemy's war--what North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen
Giap predicted would be "a protracted war of attrition." As Krulak noted in First to Fight (1984), by 1972, "we had managed to reduce the enemy's manpower pool by perhaps 25 percent at a cost of over 220,000 U.S.
That is why they were outwitted by General
Giap, Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani, all masters of their craft.
In our own struggle for independence, perhaps what we lacked were leaders in the mold of Vo Nyugen
Giap: tenacious, resolute, willing to sacrifice and endure hardships in the face of difficulties, not just for years but for decades.
Historical studies of communism are unlikely to devote much space to
Giap's military strategies which led to a Vietnamese victory, but they would be well advised to give full value to the link between communism and movements of national self-assertion in the twentieth century (in Cuba, Castro has ended his speeches to congresses of the Cuban communist Party with the words, 'Long live proletarian internationalism!', followed by 'Patria o muerte!', fatherland or death).
The man was General Vo Nguyen
Giap, the Vietnamese military genius who had led his country to victory, first against France's attempt to reimpose colonial rule in the aftermath of the Second World War, then against the unparalleled might of the United States when it subsequently sought to permanently divide Vietnam and install a client state in Saigon.
(There were eyewitnesses and photographs; a Vietnamese 12.7 mm machine-gun round lodged in Maddox's superstructure; and in 1984 General Vo Nguyen
Giap told former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara the attack was deliberate.) The lesson for all of us is that, in professional ethics, theories are interesting but facts matter, usually decisively.
Viet Minh sources are limited to contemporary documents captured by the French, prisoner of war interrogations, and the writings of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen
Giap. Maps, tables, figures, and photographs abound to support the text.
Hee-Chun Chung, [1] Van
Giap Nguyen, [1] Hyoung-Joon Moon, Jee-Hoon Lee, Seong-Jun Park, Ga-Eun Lee, Hye-Kwon Kim, You-Shun Noh, Chan-Hee Lee, Dane Goede, Bong Kyun Park
Near the end, a recitation of the names of different avatars of Vishnu (from the more standard Rama and Krishna to Mohini, the only female one) seamlessly extends to include appelations of Communist thinkers and leaders from around the world (Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen
Giap; Bolshevik rebels Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky, and Lev Kamenev; Romanian Communist Nicolae Ceaugescu), aligning ideas of cosmic rebirth and political revolution.
When it did General
Giap did not seek political solutions.