Voices from the Vietnam War. Xiaobing Li
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