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The Long War

Huynh Van No was sweating as he showed us the War Remnants Museum on one of the comfortable spring days in Vietnam. Over sixty and reticent, Mr. No was not a typical tour guide in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). We worried about him after we scrambled into the underground Cu Chi tunnels. “I’m OK,” he said, “I have this problem for years.”¹ As a Southerner, Huynh served as a staff sergeant in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) during the Vietnam War. After the Northern victory, the Communist government sent all the former ARVN soldiers and officers to prison or labor camps. Huynh survived seven castigating years, from 1975 to 1982, and lost his health and most everything else: his parents, three brothers, his wife, and two of his three children.² One thing good came out of the war, Huynh joked with a complacent smile: he had learned how to speak English during his three-month training in the United States as a Battalion Maintenance Officer. With workable English, he could now make $3 a day as a guide to foreign tourists to support his handicapped daughter at home.

The lengthy war claimed 3 million Vietnamese lives. For the Vietnamese veterans like Staff Sergeant No, the war lasted for thirty years, starting with the French Indochina War, 1946 to 1954; then an insurgent rebellion supported by the North against the South from 1955 to 1963; then the conflict known as the American War in 1963–1973; and finally, the civil war ending in the Communist takeover in 1975. Other ARVN veterans we met in the southern provinces had similar stories. They grew up with the war, fought in it, and then lost almost everything to it. Lt. Nguyen Yen Xuan described the war not as an event, but as his life and family history.³ This is also true for Vietnam War veterans from other parts of the world, including more than 2 million Americans. They became part of the war and it changed them in a multitude of ways. Numerous personal memoirs have been published in the United States, including many excellent oral histories.⁴

This book, as an oral history collection, tells twenty-two personal stories of American, Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, and Korean soldiers and officers. It shares the lives of international veterans, whether a U.S. Marine or a Chinese major, a Korean captain or a Russian spy, and reveals ironic similarities and differences. In their own words, they share firsthand accounts of their war experiences in Vietnam as well as their family life before and after the war. The book provides Communist stories from “the other side of the hill,” including those of a general of the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, or Viet Cong), officers of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA, or officially the People's Army of Vietnam, PAVN), Chinese soldiers of the People's Liberation Army (PLA, China's armed forces), and a Russian officer. These stories bring fresh insights from Communist veterans, examining their motivations, operations, and perceptions. Their narratives humanize and contextualize the war's events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars, and provide an international perspective for readers to have a better understanding of America's longest war.

The Bear vs. the Dragon

For the first time in English, this book provides personal accounts of Russian and Chinese Communist veterans, including three Chinese PLA officers and two Russians, a missile training instructor and a KGB spy. Western strategists and historians have long speculated about the international Communist role in Vietnam, but these stories indicate the extent of outside involvements. Between 1964 and 1974, Vietnam became a battlefield, a testing ground, and even a training site for two of the largest Communist forces in the world. The international Communist support to North Vietnam, including troops, equipment, finance, and technology, provided a decisive edge that enabled the NVA and Viet Cong to resist American forces and eventually subjugate South Vietnam. The Soviet and Chinese support prolonged the Vietnam War and made it very difficult, if not impossible, for South Vietnam and the United States to win.

After Nikita Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964 and Leonid Brezhnev's succession, the Soviet Union shifted its Vietnam policy from “staying away” to “lending a hand.” In February 1965, Soviet premier Alekei Kosygin visited Hanoi and signed an agreement with the North Vietnamese to increase Russian aid to 148,500 tons, including 55,000 tons of military aid, by year's end. North Vietnam also requested a Soviet missile combat brigade, comprised of four thousand Soviet troops, to arrive that spring.⁵ After 1965, the Soviet Union continuously increased its aid to Vietnam, particularly intensifying its military assistance. Chinese historian Li Danhui describes Moscow's primary goal as being to “infiltrate politically and win control over the strategically important Southeast Asian region, and Vietnam presented the best avenue whereby this objective might be achieved.”⁶ In 1967, Russia increased its military aid to Vietnam to over $550 million, exceeding that provided by the Chinese.⁷ From 1965 to 1972, the Soviet Union provided a total of $3 billion in aid to Vietnam, including $2 billion in military support.⁸

The Soviet Union felt compelled to use all means possible to win Vietnam over as a political ally against the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the international Communist movement. Beginning in 1958–1959, because of complicated domestic and international factors (the most important of these being whether Moscow or Beijing should be the center of the international Communist movement), the Sino-Soviet alliance, the cornerstone of the Communist international alliance system, collapsed.⁹ The great Sino-Soviet polemic debate in 1960–1962 undermined the ideological foundation of the Communist revolution. Historian Chen Jian states that, in retrospect, few events played so important a role in shaping the orientation and essence of the cold war as the Sino-Soviet split.¹⁰ Moscow lost its total control of the international Communist movement. The conflicts between the two Communist parties extended to their strategic issues in the 1960s. The 1964 transition in the Soviet leadership from Khrushchev to Brezhnev did not improve Sino-Soviet relations. China's bellicose rhetoric in the early 1960s and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution sweeping across China beginning in 1966 completely destroyed any hope that Beijing and Moscow might continuously regard each other as “comrades in arms.”¹¹ As the Sino-Soviet relationship worsened, it gradually moved from hostility to outright confrontation during a border war in the late 1960s.

China did not want to see Soviet influence increase in Southeast Asia. To keep the Soviets out and North Vietnam on its side, China was willing, at first, to provide more military assistance to North Vietnam. In 1963, China provided about $660 million in military and economic aid to Vietnam, nearly 30 percent of its total foreign aid.¹² This valuable support included enough weapons and ammunition to arm 230 infantry battalions. The massive contributions to North Vietnam enabled North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh to send more NVA troops to the South. After 1964, China increased its aid to Vietnam. From 1964 to 1973, China provided about $20 billion in aid to Vietnam, and it remained the largest supplier of war materials to North Vietnam among the Communist states until 1967, providing about 44.8 percent of the total military aid that year.¹³ Historian Shuguang Zhang determined that between 1965 and 1970, aid to North Vietnam made up 57.6 percent of China's total foreign aid.¹⁴ China's massive aid certainly helped North Vietnam survive a protracted war of attrition with the United States. Beijing did not want to see a U.S. success or North Vietnam softness when the Johnson administration escalated American involvement. China's interest was best served by backing up the North and keeping the ground war in the South.

Vietnam and Asia

Meanwhile, China began to send its troops to the Vietnam War. On April 17, 1965, the first PLA troops entered North Vietnam.¹⁵ By March 1966, China had dispatched 130,000 troops to Vietnam, including surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft artillery (AAA), railroad, combat engineering, mine-sweeping, and logistics units. Three years later, according to Gen. Zhang Aiping, former defense minister of the PRC, China had rotated in twenty-three divisions, including ninety-five regiments plus eighty-three battalions, totaling 320,000 troops.¹⁶ The Chinese forces in North Vietnam enabled Ho Chi Minh to send more NVA troops to the South to fight American ground forces and to intensify warfare in the region.¹⁷ China's military involvement may have also restrained the Johnson administration from further U.S. military escalation, which could have triggered a large-scale Chinese intervention like that in the Korean War in 1950–1953. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday point out, “It was having China as a secure rear and supply depot that made it possible for the Vietnamese to fight twenty-five years and beat first the French and then the Americans.”¹⁸

Soviet and Chinese military aid to North Vietnam between 1965 and 1973 did not improve Sino-Soviet relations, but rather created a new front and new competition as each attempted to gain leadership of the Southeast Asian Communist movements. North Vietnam knew that the Soviet Union and China were rivals in the Communist camp, competing for the leadership of the Asian Communist movement, including Vietnam. Each claimed itself a key supporter of the Vietnamese Communists’ struggle against the American invasion. Military historian Spencer C. Tucker states that therefore the Vietnamese brought both Communist nations’ troops into North Vietnam, increasing the competition between the Chinese and Soviet Communists.¹⁹ The Chinese high command ordered its AAA troops to intensify their training in order to shoot down more American airplanes than the Soviets could. Maj. Guo Haiyun recalled that the Chinese AAA troops had two enemies in North Vietnam: “the American imperialists in the sky, and the Soviet revisionists on the ground.”²⁰

The Vietnamese government and the NVA officially deny any foreign involvement in the Vietnam War. Other Communist and former Communist countries, like Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland, have maintained a similar position. The Russian government has concealed the participation of the former Soviet Union's military in the war. Soviet official records are closed to the public and scholars. Most Russian veterans do not want to talk about their experience in Vietnam, and those who are willing are difficult to reach. Because of the unavailability of sources and language barriers, there is an absence of an oral history that provides voices directly from these Communist veterans. Even though a few historians have covered Soviet and Chinese policies and involvement in the Vietnam War, no personal accounts of the Russian and Chinese veterans are available in published books in the West.²¹

Interviewing Communist Veterans

Between 2001 and 2008, I interviewed more than ninety Communist veterans in Vietnam, China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Hong Kong, and the United States. The accounts from Russian veterans came from my four interviews in Kazakhstan, three in Russia, three in Ukraine, two in America, and two in China. Five of the Russian veterans were officers, six of them soldiers, and three former KGB agents. All of them agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that their names would not be used. During the interviews of Russian veterans, the same questions were asked from a standard list concerning their training, service experience, most vivid memories, worst thing, and scariest moment in their war experiences. The standard questions also included how much they knew about the American and ARVN forces, what they thought of their combat effectiveness, and the biggest lesson they may have learned from their war experience.

Before each trip, my contact persons made arrangements with the Russian veterans who had agreed to be interviewed. I flew from Urumqi, the capital city of China's western border province Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, either to Astana, capital city of Kazakhstan; to Moscow, Russia; or to Kyiv, Ukraine, in separate trips. Most of these Russian veterans answered the questions in their own languages with a translator. Two interviews in America were in English and conducted in Maryland and Texas.²² These interviews offer an important source of information from the former Soviet Union and different viewpoints for interested readers in America. To check the accuracy of the Russian recollections, I consulted with primary and secondary sources in Moscow and Hanoi. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Communist governmental and diplomatic documents in Moscow have gradually opened up, especially since 1995, filling in some gaps in the cold war historiography.²³ We can now present some of the firsthand accounts of Russian veterans to fill part of the gap in the Vietnam War history.

Among the Communist countries, only China has acknowledged its intervention in 1965–1970. In the spring of 1979, after China lost its brief war with Vietnam and withdrew its 200,000 troops, Beijing published many details about its military aid and engagements in the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1970. The government tried to prove in the 1980s that China had been friendly, generous, exacting, and sacrificing, only to be betrayed by an odious, aggressive, and greedy Vietnam. Continuing quarrels between Beijing and Hanoi brought a considerable number of war memoirs to Chinese readers in the 1990s. Some are books, others appeared as journal and magazine articles, or as reference studies for restricted circulation only. With official permission, I conducted individual and group interviews with forty-eight Chinese veterans in nine provinces, including Guangxi and Yunnan, which border Vietnam. I also visited some of the headquarters of the engaged AAA divisions during my four research trips to China between 2001 and 2008. Since I am a native Chinese and served in the PLA in the early 1970s, the interviews went very well and contain new information on the Chinese role, previously unavailable to an English-language audience.

Since the normalization of relations between Washington and Hanoi in 1997, scholars have had opportunities to visit the battlefields and libraries in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and write on the war. Although the declassification process of the war archives in Vietnam has not yet started, a few publications became available, including stories from the generals, officials, and diplomats.²⁴ After 2002, the NVA and PLAF veterans began to talk about their personal experiences in the Vietnam War and to publish their memoirs, recollections, and war stories, adding a new perspective on the subject.²⁵ The NVA and PLAF veterans were also more willing to share their wartime memories. No matter how politically indoctrinated they might be, the Communist veterans were culturally bound to cherish the past. More importantly, they felt comfortable in talking about their experiences and allowing their recollections to be recorded, written, and published in America.²⁶

More than thirty interviews of Vietnamese Communist veterans were conducted in seven provinces both in the South and the North during my three research trips in 2002–2006. My wife helped with oral translations from Vietnamese to English if an official translator was not available. Although these stories offer direct testimony from the soldiers themselves, their personal stories often followed the official accounts that glorify the Communist victory in Vietnam. To ensure the accuracy of these personal recollections, I consulted with primary and secondary sources in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. I also noted any contradicting accounts, such as the number of casualties, whenever it occurred. Although the Vietnamese government still has a long way to go before free academic inquiry becomes a reality, the value of the NVA and Viet Cong veterans sharing their wartime experiences cannot be underestimated in our research and teaching of the Vietnam War.

The collection of the Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese stories has outlined a way of war that is different from that of the West.²⁷ For example, the Western way of war has a propensity to exclude political party control over the military, while the Communist leaders had a tendency to view the military aspect as one part of their revolutionary organization, the military as a subordinate branch of the whole party. The Soviet military brought Vietnam the Red Army tradition of the Communist Party's being in command, political propaganda, and ideological education. The long war allowed the Vietnamese Communists to make progress and successfully adopt the Soviet military system and technology. The Vietnamese Communist force transformed from an irregular peasant army to a professional modern army. The Soviet training, mobility, technology, and professionalism were a major difference between the Russian and the Chinese forces. The Chinese military brought Vietnam their asymmetric combat experience in guerrilla warfare, in which a weak Third World army could fight against a strong Western force in their country. The NVA employed some Chinese guerrilla tactics, such as engaging in mobile operations, avoiding the usually superior enemy firepower, achieving surprise whenever possible, fighting in close combat, and using ambush tactics, tunnel networks, and night attack.²⁸ Thus, the NVA could function on both conventional and unconventional levels, which the American military, in many ways, was not fully prepared to face. The advantages of the American forces were neutralized by this resourceful foe.

Vietnam Revisited

Teaching Vietnam War history has been the most challenging class in my twenty-year college teaching career in the United States. No matter if I taught it at private universities, state universities, online graduate classes for Norwich University, or the Summer Seminar in Military History at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, I always felt underprepared for the students and their questions. Our students have changed. They are the grandchildren of American veterans, to whom the war seems far away in the past; the second generation of the Southern refugees, who still attend ongoing anti-Communist Vietnamese rallies at local churches or temples; and international students who were born and grew up in Vietnam, Russia, and China. They had different questions in the class. What thematic topic can reach them all? How can I put all the veterans on the same page to compare and explain?

One day, I was surprised by the students’ reaction to my wife's visit. Tran shared her refugee story with the class. As one of the “boat people” at twenty-two, she escaped from South Vietnam and survived a pirate attack, a long sea voyage, and hardship at the refugee camps in other Southeast Asian countries. For nine months, she could not stop, traveling from one place to another. She could not die, since she had to take care of her little cousin, Sunny, a twelve-year-old boy. Sunny lost his father in the war after his mother left Saigon to go overseas. After the war, Tran's family sold everything for these kids to get out of the country on a fishing boat and look for Sunny's mother.²⁹ Her story was simple, but compelling. It was not only about the bloody battle and military technology, but also about family, survival, and hope for the future, which touched many students in the class. Responsibility, technology, and training can transform a citizen into a warrior; passion, patriotism, and belief can also turn an ordinary individual into a soldier. An examination of each veteran's background, education, and family life before and after the war provides a workable approach to understanding and comparing the international veterans. Therefore, I have chosen social history topics for my class and discussed the war events as human experience.

This book's focus moves away from the conventional combat-centered war history and instead looks into the relatively neglected subject of men and women's lives beyond the battleground. By examining topics such as their religion, marriage, education, and occupation in their home countries, the work details veteran backgrounds before the war and their civilian life after. It puts each veteran in the context of the society, culture, and politics. By introducing these young soldiers and junior officers and telling their stories, this work employs a social history methodology and provides an impetus to larger issues. It shows from the bottom up that each society has its own way to transform its civilians into soldiers, and that the people viewed and responded to similar problems differently. Oral history, of course, has its own weaknesses. The book does not intend to present a comprehensive coverage of the war, but a “limited” presentation of the voices of the international soldiers from all sides. Their stories may not be the bloodiest, but they will broaden our perspective on the war. Some of them are the noncombat stories of people who served in logistics, intelligence, medicine, and engineering, soldiers whose roles and contributions are often overlooked by historians.

The selected chapters present a life story and show the feelings and perceptions of the war by the men and women who lived it. The chapters follow the participants’ lives before, during, and after their service, to put each individual soldier in a common, broader context. To connect each man and woman with his or her social and political environment, a vignette is included as a background introduction to each personal account. Besides the Communist stories, there are fourteen stories of American, South Vietnamese, and Korean veterans.

It was difficult to select only eight American veterans from my interviews of fifty-three in fifteen states. I regret that time and space has not allowed me to include the stories of other veterans, who performed their duties in Vietnam heroically. Their stories have certainly provided a solid historical background for comparisons with the others and an analytical framework for the discussions of important issues. They also provided a large amount of wartime memorabilia, such as diaries, letters, photographs, newspapers, recommendation letters, and official documents.

The selection of South Vietnamese stories was based on interviews with ARVN veterans both in the United States and in Vietnam. Among the seventy-two South Vietnamese soldiers interviewed, sixty-one veterans and their families were in the United States. These ARVN veterans either fled the country after the war in the late 1970s or came to the United States later through humanitarian organizations and other American programs in the 1980s and 1990s. Some interviews were conducted in English, but most were done in their own native language through an interpreter, since I did not trust my Vietnamese. Certain words were changed during the translation and editing process for clarity. Between 2002 and 2006, I made three research trips to Vietnam and interviewed eleven ARVN veterans in four southern provinces. My wife helped with translations since the veterans did not feel comfortable with any official translator or other people knowing about the interview and their anti-Communist past. Reluctant and hesitant, they often avoided details about the lost war that sent them to jail for up to seven years. They did not keep many photos, records, and letters from their ARVN service. Some of them only started talking after my third visit or a dinner at a local restaurant. Some believed that the Communist government and local authorities still watched them.

The chapters are organized in both geopolitical and thematic ways. Part One begins with the narratives of six Vietnamese veterans from both sides. The second part focuses on the Russian and Chinese Communist veterans, North Vietnam's allies. Part Three examines Saigon's allies through four Americans’ stories. Then, the next part organizes the stories to show the efforts of medical personnel, including a doctor, nurse, medic, and hospital security captain. The last segment examines several different logistical support persons, including a U.S. Army lieutenant, a U.S. Air Force sergeant, a South Vietnamese official, and a Chinese colonel. The conclusion summarizes the perspectives on the war and provides a unique way of understanding Vietnam. In their own words, these former warriors put the readers in the midst of wartime life.