They Marched Into Sunlight by Maraniss David
Author:Maraniss, David [Maraniss, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2003-09-22T16:00:00+00:00
IN THE ANTI-U.S. war of resistance for national salvation, the actions of Vo Minh Triet’s regiment that October morning were by the book, right out of the combat manuals of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Plan the operation in detail. Conduct reconnaissance. Rehearse in detail. Use the three-pronged attack. Maintain complete security during movement. Conduct a sudden assault with maximum firepower. Retain a reserve element. When the enemy believes you are attacking from the west, attack from the east. When he believes you have stopped, attack again. When he believes you are advancing, stop. Plug the ears and blind the eyes of the enemy, the generals in Hanoi would say. Create surprises. Walking in the middle of the night, a man is deadly frightened if he is struck from behind. It is the same in the military field. The side which is caught by surprise will be embarrassed and be unable to capture the initiative. The side which is caught by surprise will be at a loss and be quickly annihilated.
Truth and falsehood. Falsehood and truth. To the individual Viet Cong soldier, this battle, like any battle, was a blur of chaotic moments. Nguyen Van Lam, the company commander attached to Rear Service Group 83, who grew up near the battlefield, could remember only moving from one entrenched bunker to another with his comrades that morning, shooting at Americans, listening to the helicopters and high-performance jets, trying to predict where artillery and air strikes would come in, so they could stay away from those places. He felt little threat from the Big Red Brothers on the ground.
Some American soldiers withdrew from the battle wondering how, with the trap so deadly, with the firepower so massive, the Viet Cong commanders could let even one of them get out alive. But Triet had concerns other than killing every enemy soldier. His men were tired and starving—they still had no rice—and, more important, this fight had not been planned by his superiors and was of little interest to them. For all the ingenuity and agility that Viet Cong soldiers showed on the battlefield, there was an equal and opposite rigidity in their military bureaucracy. A quick ambush was one thing, but a full-blown battle with an entire regiment engaged was quite another. Triet’s superiors were expecting him to get across the east-west corridor and meet them to prepare for the attack on Loc Ninh, a battle that had been in the planning stages for some time, part of a larger high-stakes strategy that eventually would lead to a massive attack on the cities of the South.
Triet’s reasoning, as he later explained, went like this: His regiment, in its search for rice, was already behind schedule as it moved across the corridor to its next assignment. The fact that the battle was being fought in mature jungle made it easy for him to spring the ambush but difficult to sustain a prolonged fight. The longer the battle went on, the greater the possibility that his unit would take significant casualties, especially from American artillery and air power.
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