Voices from the Vietnam War. Xiaobing Li
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