"I ain't got nothing against no Vietcong; no Vietcong never called me nigger," Ali famously said.
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"A Frontline Nurse for the Vietcong," an oral history by a former nurse with the National Liberation Front, also known as the Vietcong, as told to Tong Thi Xuyen.
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" But as the reporters continued to press him with questions about the war, the geography of Asia and his thoughts about killing Vietcong, he snapped, "I ain't got nothing against them Vietcong.
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"I ain't got nothing against them Vietcong," he told reporters.
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The artillery was intended to harass Vietcong; but there were no Vietcong in My Lai, not any more at least, so it merely damaged houses and dikes and forced residents to hide in bunkers.
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"I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong," he famously said.
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Kovacs is defending high ground against an equal-strength Vietcong force.
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American generals claimed this was a decisive defeat for the Vietcong.
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But North Vietnamese and Vietcong voices were amply heard, one might object.
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" He added, "We also provided rice for the Vietcong when they demanded.
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In fact, the barrier appeared to have little effect on the Vietcong.
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No other plausible leader existed who could take the fight to the Vietcong.
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"Two hundred houses were being destroyed for every Vietcong killed," one man complained.
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The Vietcong escaped that night, so we were unable to exact our revenge.
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On May 15, 1967, Don Peterson's squad was caught in a Vietcong ambush.
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Another time, a green lieutenant saw us giving plasma to a wounded Vietcong suspect.
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Lansdale visited the embassy shortly after the Vietcong attackers had been killed or captured.
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The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had the American position surrounded on three sides.
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He says he's being overrun by Vietcong, he has men down, and needs emergency evacuation.
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William Westmoreland was convinced he could kill the Vietcong faster than they could be replaced.
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Even the perimeter of the embassy in Saigon was penetrated by a Vietcong sapper squad.
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Bo takes us to a Cong Caphe, and hip coffee shop with VietCong memorabilia and decor.
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About 30 or more Vietcong, plus the same sniper team that's been harassing them all afternoon.
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And recruiters had asked my mother to join the Vietcong, but my grandmother fended them off.
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He was saying he would not serve in the Army and he would not fight those Vietcong.
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On a night in 1963, she and the chief were arrested and murdered by the local Vietcong.
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Soon we were conducting patrols outside Bearcat's jungle perimeter, searching for the Vietcong and their weapon caches.
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The target was water buffalo, which I later learned had the potential to be Vietcong military transportation.
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American "advisers" were trying to help the Army of the Republic of Vietnam ward off the Vietcong guerrillas.
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The English writer James Fenton was in Saigon, working as a journalist, when Vietcong troops arrived there in 1975.
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It was universally understood, long before the marines arrived, that in the countryside the night belonged to the Vietcong.
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Though they did not realize it yet, more than 2,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers had their position surrounded.
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I recently visited Nguyen Thi Do, a former nurse with the National Liberation Front, also known as the Vietcong.
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When he refused to be drafted into the army, he was interviewed and said, 'I have nothing against the Vietcong.
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The prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, is a Vietcong fighter but wears no uniform, only a plaid shirt and black shorts.
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On May 4, 1968, the Vietcong struck again across the South in what came to be known as Mini-Tet.
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In reality, American and South Vietnamese troops faced only skirmishes against small units, not the main forces of the Vietcong.
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On the way, Vietcong troops attacked the vehicle, and she was shot in both arms and suffered a broken foot.
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Those left in the village at that hour would supposedly be Vietcong soldiers who had blended in with the population.
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The Taliban are no Vietcong, and they are not supported by regular army units like the People's Army of Vietnam.
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MORE (R-Ariz.), who was tortured for years in a Vietcong prison, issued a lengthy statement rebuking the GOP standard-bearer.
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" As President, he said, he would seek indictments for "any college professor who talks about hoping the Vietcong win the war.
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It also was one more piece of evidence that the Vietcong were primarily South Vietnamese, not imported troops from the North.
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His plane was shot down during a combat mission; the Vietcong imprisoned and tortured McCain for five and a half years.
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And with little more than $50 among them, paying the rent may be a more pressing issue than supporting the Vietcong.
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He is the author, most recently, of "Waging Insurgent Warfare: Lessons from the Vietcong to the Islamic State" (Oxford University Press).
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From this collection, we've selected three firsthand accounts of the war — by an infantry officer, a reporter and a Vietcong nurse.
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He is the author, most recently, of "Waging Insurgent Warfare: Lessons from the Vietcong to the Islamic State" (Oxford University Press).
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The briefing for the assault on My Lai led many of Captain Medina's subordinates to believe that their mission was to kill everyone in the hamlet, to shoot the livestock, to destroy the wells and to level the buildings, because everyone living in My Lai was either a member of the Vietcong or a Vietcong sympathizer.
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The siege ended with the dislodgment of the Vietcong forces from the city's ancient citadel, which dated to the early 19th century.
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Intelligence had identified Cam Ne as a Vietcong sanctuary, though it had been abandoned by the enemy before the Americans moved in.
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They would call in air strikes whenever they could, which raised body counts but killed civilians or drove them to the Vietcong.
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This is what Lansdale believed that the Vietcong were doing, and what the Philippine rebels, who called themselves the Hukbalahap, had done.
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In actuality, ARVN did the bulk of the fighting in Hue, losing 357 in battle and killing 2,642 N.V.A. and Vietcong fighters.
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When the monk could not tell Lieutenant Calley where the Vietcong had gone, he pushed him into the ditch and shot him.
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To Americans in 1968, it conveyed that North Vietnam and the Vietcong were far stronger than they had been led to believe.
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A model and daughter of an aristocratic family, she was photographed by Jean-Pierre Rey waving the Vietcong flag during a demonstration.
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He'd said previously that the war did not comport with his faith, and that he had "no quarrel" with America's enemy, the Vietcong.
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After that, all Vietnamese became synonymous with Vietcong guerrillas for Lieutenant Calley, and soon the rest of the company adopted his harsh attitudes.
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The boxer — who had once declared, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong" — was fined $10,000 and given five years in prison.
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Concentrated small-arms fire burst out from a Vietcong unit of company size dug into bunkers that formed an L-shaped ambush position.
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A vast majority of our missions were in the area called the Iron Triangle, near Cu Chi, a Vietcong hotbed northwest of Saigon.
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They chased down the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army forces after a firefight when they would attempt to disappear back into the jungle.
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Vietnam '21972 Almost 275 years ago, Hoang Thi Lien became a full member of the People's Revolutionary Party, the political leadership of the Vietcong.
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A suicide squad of 19 Vietcong sappers breached the American Embassy grounds in Saigon — allegedly one of the most secure locations in South Vietnam.
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Richard Dudman, a journalist held over a month by the Vietcong, met Pol Pot and published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, died at 99.
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Daily life was focused on continuous small patrols of 235 to 2500 men with the mission of finding and killing or capturing Vietcong guerrillas.
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He was wounded and won a Distinguished Service Cross for defending a firebase that was partly overrun by Vietcong, the Communist insurgents in the south.
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At the Battle of Ap Bac, in January 1963, a force of 1,500 South Vietnamese, despite superior firepower, was decimated by a few hundred Vietcong.
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Eighty thousand Vietcong troops attacked 36 of 44 provincial capitals, 64 of 242 district capitals, five of six autonomous cities and numerous hamlets and villages.
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There were operations near Cambodia such as Junction City, with thousands of troops and a unique parachute jump searching for but not finding Vietcong strongholds.
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What the Vietcong and ARVN troops are fighting for and against is less important than the notion that it's not the right fight for American troops.
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Having lost a brother to a Vietcong grenade in 1971 and taken my grandmother to identify the body, my dad could relate to that mother's grief.
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Some 67,000 North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong attacked South Vietnamese cities and military facilities at the start of Tet, the celebration of the Vietnamese new year.
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Vietcong fighters used them against U.S. bases, and they were important enough to be mentioned in an extensive review of the Vietnam War ordered in 22018.
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More often than not, patrols proved only a "long walk in the hot sun," leading to the detention of a few Vietcong suspects, but no contact.
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For the rest of the day, the Vietcong and the remainder of Charlie Company fought over, around and through the battered remnants of the Second Squad.
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"The Vietcong usually sank themselves in the mud along the canal banks," a deserter told his interrogators, according to a report I found in the archives.
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After the NVA or Vietcong are pinned to trees by exploding flechettes, it's pretty hard for them to escape the area before the napalm comes in.
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Marines doused themselves with mosquito repellent so evil-smelling that experts said the North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers could identify us over long distances and avoid contact.
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But, several friends say, he believed that American prisoners of war were more likely to be tortured by the Vietcong if the United States tortured enemy captives.
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A barrier, Taylor reasoned, would weaken the People's Liberation Front, known to its enemies as the Vietcong, helping United States and South Vietnamese forces defeat the Communists.
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Twenty thousand Americans had died there, four thousand in the previous two months, following a surprise attack, known as the Tet Offensive, by North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces.
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" This was Chicago, circa 1968, while Ali was suspended for refusing to enter the military draft, uttering the famous line, "I ain't got no quarrel against them Vietcong.
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Off-air he had also pursued Trinh, a lovely Vietnamese girl, unwittingly befriended a Vietcong operative, got dangerously lost in the jungle, and threatened to subvert the whole enterprise.
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As for challenging his superiors, he did so only once, when he witnessed the carnage of a Vietcong mine and bomb attack on the Mekong Floating Restaurant in Saigon.
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As the war intensified in the late 22002s and '211s, American officials carpet bombed Laos and Cambodia and tortured and assassinated Vietcong leaders in the name of defeating Communism.
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The M-16's firepower and reputation for lethality were necessary, in Mr. McNamara's view, to counter the Kalashnikov assault rifles carried by the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong.
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The locals recruited by his team to report on Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army activities in 1966 largely relied on a barter economy rather than on currency, he said.
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While the enemy — the Vietcong and North Vietnam — operated in secrecy, American and allied troops and government civilians performed almost always under the probing eyes and lenses of newsmen.
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"I ain't got nothing against them Vietcong," Ali said in the spring of 1966, making front-page headlines, when he learned that he might be drafted for the Vietnam War.
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In the middle of the night on January 31, 1968, 10,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops swept into the historic city of Hue, a major cultural center in South Vietnam.
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You're going to Tigerland" — Fort Polk infantry advanced training in the Louisiana swamps — "and then Vietnam, and the Vietcong are going to shoot you dead your first day in country.
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Intelligence reported a major Vietcong battalion was operating there, but after several hours trudging from one rice paddy to the next, we were alerted that the enemy was spotted elsewhere.
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And he should ensure that somewhere on campus the words with which Muhammad Ali explained his conscience-driven refusal of the draft are engraved: "I ain't got nothing against them Vietcong."
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The authorities allowed us to bring only a small beer can of rice out of the hamlet because they were afraid that we would provide rice to Vietcong in the jungle.
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Charlie Company had a total of 14 wounded and one dead that day, while dead Vietcong littered the landscape, perhaps 100 in all — the fearsome cost of standing against American firepower.
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Because the offensive was so fierce, their comrades near the village of Phuoc Hiep "did not dare to visit to collect rice," Vietcong officials wrote in reports in mid-January 1967.
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The Iron Triangle was just 21967 miles northwest of Bien Hoa; a little farther west were the Ho Bo Woods and the Boi Loi Woods, other areas of high Vietcong activity.
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His weak regime needed the money to ward off the Communist insurgency of the Vietcong, a guerrilla force aided by the north's Ho Chi Minh, who had designs to reunify Vietnam.
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I remember the helicopters and the green AK-47 tracer bullets coming at us, and the body bags and the orphanage children burned alive by the Vietcong for having helped us.
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I remember the helicopters and the green AK-47 tracer bullets coming at us, and the body bags and the orphanage children burned alive by the Vietcong for having helped us.
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Nonetheless, at 8pm Saigon time, after a day spent avoiding mantraps and pursuing the ever-elusive Vietcong, GIs would try to unwind by listening to the young woman they called "Hanoi Hannah".
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Your character is at pains to point out that the Vietcong likely have their own good reasons for fighting and the United States may not have a proper place in this war.
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But, as perhaps best demonstrated by the fighting in Hue, ARVN also included stalwart leaders like Tran Ngoc Hue and, more often that not, defeated North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces in battle.
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Charles Anistranski, remembered General Koster being furious over the results of My Lai because the official body count of 128 Vietcong killed, but only three weapons recovered, reflected poorly on his leadership.
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Aside from a few quasi-mythical figures like Le Thi Hong Gam, a young Vietcong sharpshooter who allegedly downed an American helicopter, their names and lives are absent from the war's history.
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He testified that in his pre-assault briefing, he had not generally addressed the issue of what to do with civilians in the village since he assumed everyone there would be Vietcong.
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Like many Westerners of his education and generation, Fenton had hoped for a Vietcong victory, and he was impressed by the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army when they marched into the city.
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Indeed, from the late 19543s through the mid-1960s the bulk of Communist-led fighting was carried out by southern guerrillas of the National Liberation Front, known to its enemies as the Vietcong.
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Vietnam '21967 On June 2500, 2000, American forces engaged in a bloody fight for the Can Giuoc District of Long An Province, leaving 21967 Americans and 2003 Vietcong dead, and hundreds more wounded.
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So now our challenge was multiplied: We faced local Vietcong guerrillas, who posed a substantial threat to Vietnamese civilians, while remaining ready to engage in conventional infantry combat with North Vietnamese regular units.
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While working for The Times during the Vietnam War, he successfully argued for front-page display of Eddie Adams's photograph of a Saigon police chief shooting a suspected Vietcong insurgent in the head.
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Instead, the men encountered an eerie quiet and a macabre landscape of dead, wounded and weaponless women and children as a platoon of American soldiers, ostensibly hunting elusive Vietcong guerrillas, marauded among defenseless noncombatants.
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At a roadblock halfway between the border and Phnom Penh, three Vietcong fighters, brandishing assault rifles, emerged from the trees along the road and took the reporters captive, convinced that they were C.I.A. spies.
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Vietnam '67 It had been more than a week since Dang Nguyet Anh learned of a Vietcong attack in Phuoc Long Province, northeast of Saigon along the Cambodian border, where her husband was stationed.
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He believed that the Vietcong were impeding South Vietnam's advancement to the takeoff stage, and that the United States therefore needed to expend all necessary military and diplomatic means to stop the Vietcong's guerrilla infiltration.
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Until 1962 Ms. Lien and her son lived as unofficial prisoners in the strategic hamlet of Quat Xa, controlled by the South Vietnamese Army and American advisers in daytime, and by the Vietcong at night.
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In a two-channel video, "The Guerrillas of Cu Chi" (2012), we see a 1963 propaganda film set at the Cu Chi tunnels, the underground passageways outside Ho Chi Minh City used by the Vietcong.
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Mr. Colburn was the last surviving member of a three-man helicopter crew that was assigned to hover over My Lai on Saturday morning, March 21998, 20063, to identify enemy positions by drawing Vietcong fire.
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His first big breakthrough into popularity came via the radical young after he famously said "Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong" and refused to be conscripted into military service during the Vietnam war.
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Then the next day, the soldiers and Marines would plunge back into the leafy quagmire of the jungle or climb the bald hills of firebases for another deadly encounter with the Vietcong or North Vietnamese Army.
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His collection includes Vietcong black plastic sandals, United States Air Force helmets, letters and pictures, but the most precious object to him is a green cotton blanket that he used during his convalescence in the jungle.
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Ward and Burns reproduce now-famous images like Eddie Adams's picture of a Vietcong prisoner being shot in the head at close range and Nick Ut's shot of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm raid.
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" When they marched across rice paddies, he said, they carried, "along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Vietcong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good.
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As Boot notes, Lansdale was by no means the only person who believed that the way to beat the Vietcong was to play their game by embedding anti-Communist forces, trained by American advisers, in the villages.
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In early life, he had been most proud of his opposition to the Vietnam war—now, boxed in by war fever, he ran on his pride at having merc'ed a lot of Vietcong with heavy machine guns.
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Captain Medina began the cover-up by falsely claiming that the village had indeed been full of Vietcong when the assault began, but that they had all fled, so that all that remained were women and children.
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The attack, during the cease-fire for the lunar new year, known as Tet, involved close to 80,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters who had sneaked into nearly 100 hamlets, villages, cities and towns across South Vietnam.
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In this way, Mr. Chau and his C.I.A. collaborators hoped to wear down and destroy what they would later call the Vietcong infrastructure — the network of Communist cadres and agents who lived undercover among the rural population.
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Set up in a cavern-like enclosure, the videos in Guerillas of Cu Chi show how the Cu Chi Tunnels — underground passageways that the Vietcong used to combat American troops — were appropriated by different forces in history.
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Initially with the occupation by the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, many of the civilians in Hue were being terrified by [the] rounding up [of] family members who were marched off supposedly for reeducation and never came home.
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During the Tet offensive he denied even the possibility that the surprise attacks had provided a psychological shot in the arm to the Vietcong, concentrating instead on the huge casualties American and South Vietnamese forces had inflicted on them.
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So ... the fact is true that American forces chased the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong out of the city after a month of heavy fighting, so in that sense the Marines have long characterized the battle as a victory.
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A few weeks later, we learned that the area was defended not only by Vietcong, but also by large North Vietnamese Army units who, once they saw that only 12 helicopters dropped troops off, began to reinforce the village.
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Unlike women in the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese Army, the women of the W.A.F.C. did not enter combat; instead, they did administrative, intelligence, medical and social work jobs, freeing men for combat and providing support for their families.
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Today, Mr. Yen's company, Woodworth Wooden Industries, operates a factory in Cu Chi, on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, a district best known for the elaborate tunnels used by Vietcong guerrillas in their battles against American forces.
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" (The ARVN was South Vietnam's Army.) Mr. Duncan said it had been common knowledge that draft-dodging and desertion rates among South Vietnamese troops were "staggering," and that Vietcong guerrillas attacked American machine-gun positions "across open terrain with terrible losses.
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Wanting to score successes against the Vietcong, he urged Charlie Company to be very aggressive during the assault on My Lai, later acknowledging that his exhortations likely contributed to the misconception that Captain Medina's men should kill everyone in the village.
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DANGER CLOSE The "Collateral" screenwriter Stuart Beattie scripted this account of the 1966 Battle of Long Tan, when a regiment of the Australian Army was cornered by far more numerous North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces in a rubber plantation in South Vietnam.
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Ernest Medina led his infantry company in an assault on the village of Son My, along the central coast of South Vietnam, as part of a mission to find and destroy a battalion of the National Liberation Front, also known as the Vietcong.
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Vietcong operatives had found our transmissions, and a female voice kept calling us, pleading with us to come back to Saigon, saying that our families were waiting for us, that our country would take us back with open arms and big rewards.
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"My grandfather's four children, including three sons and a daughter, were Vietcong fighters," said Vo Quyet, who lived as a child in Trieu Phong, a strip of coast north of Hue and the site of bloody battles in the summer of 1972.
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So without extremely accurate artillery, you'd be killing your own people along with Vietnamese, and the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were aware of this, so part of their strategy was to stay as close to the American lines as they could.
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The escalation of the war became clear in mid-January, when my company was assigned a mission outside our normal operating area — a raid on an enemy village and safe area that was to host a meeting of more than 100 Vietcong leaders.
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Captain Medina and his men of Charlie Company, a unit in the 19673th Brigade of the Americal Division, engaged in "search and destroy operations" in March 1968 aimed at clearing the Vietcong from populated areas where they were presumed to have taken refuge.
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Eighty per cent of the population lived in the countryside, though, and it was the strategy of the Vietcong to convince them that the United States was just one more foreign invader, no different from the Japanese or the French, or from Kublai Khan.
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Bill Ray, one of the last staff photographers for the weekly Life magazine, who shot images as breathtaking as Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy and as indelible as a Navy cruiser's guns firing on the Vietcong, died on Jan.
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To understand the experiences of Vietnamese on both sides of the war, I've studied hundreds of Vietcong reports and communications, soldiers' diaries and letters, captured by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and archived at Texas Tech University.
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Foster LaHue, along with Westmoreland, refused for days to acknowledge that North Vietnamese regulars, Vietcong guerrillas and local Communist militia had seized control of the city and were inflicting severe casualties on the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops and the Americans.
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His aide, Charlie Sweet, visited a working-class section of Saigon known as District Eight and was startled by "the deep anger against all Americans" because of the heavy firepower that American forces were employing against the 200 or so Vietcong guerrillas who had infiltrated their neighborhood.
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They had to relearn tactics for assaulting heavily fortified positions ... every one of these major buildings in Southern Hue was strong-pointed and defended by large numbers of Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops, and attacking buildings by ordering your men to charge across the street proved to be suicidal.
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So there was a sort of reign of terror that was taking place even before the battle really joined ... the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong regarding anyone who was fleeing the city as an ally of the Americans and South Vietnamese, else why would they be running away?
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Q.T.N., an 21968-year-old former regiment commander and one of the few survivors of a division that was considered among the most hardened units of the Vietcong, shuddered as he recalled Cedar Falls in an interview at his home in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City.
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Sent to be Westmoreland's deputy for pacification, Komer immediately started building a new organization — Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development, or Cords — which brought together American military and civilian advisers to work with South Vietnamese in mobilizing civilians against the National Liberation Front, known to its enemies as the Vietcong.
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It wasn't exactly a shocker: He had first refused induction at the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Houston that spring, and refused to be inducted into the Army, saying he was a conscientious objector — "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong," he had told reporters.
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President Obama's speech on the war's 50th anniversary in 2012 focused on the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers; I wondered why more than 200,000 South Vietnamese and more than one million North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters who died were not mentioned, nor the countless thousands of civilians who perished.
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In addition, individual artists like Tiffany Chung and Dinh Q. Lê, both born in Vietnam during the war, have given nuanced views of a period in which, by some estimates, up to 2 million Vietnamese civilians on both sides died, and more than a million North Vietnamese soldiers and Vietcong fighters.
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In Episode 3, he noted that the South Vietnamese government had to quash a rebellion by one of its own military units in Danang for complex reasons, although the episode looked to Americans as if they were being asked to fight the Vietcong while the South Vietnamese were fighting among themselves.
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Richard Dudman, a much-traveled reporter for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who spent more than a month in captivity in Cambodia after being ambushed by Vietcong fighters and later survived an assassination attempt after meeting the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, died on Thursday in Blue Hill, Me. He was 238.
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We secured a Military Police jeep (the MPs were responsible for security in Saigon) to establish a line of communication, but a wounded soldier somewhere had grabbed a push-to-talk handset and wouldn't let go, alternately pleading for help with his injury and describing armed Vietnamese, presumably Vietcong, advancing on his position.
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Although he was a gung-ho warrior type and always believed the Vietnam War was winnable, Vann came to realize the attrition strategy was a failure, the constant bombing of the countryside was helping Vietcong recruitment, and the rampant corruption in the Saigon leadership, funded through American dollars, was devastating to the cause.
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A month later, during a visit to my stepbrother who was a helicopter pilot in the Mekong Delta, I rode along on a night mission during which a converted C-47 transport plane rained thousands of 7.62 millimeter rounds on a village and the Vietcong sent tracers back up toward my helicopter.
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When he said of Vietnam, "We're not going to have any men with any umbrellas," a pointed reference to the hapless Chamberlain, the message was clear: America would stand up to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong in a way that Chamberlain had not stood up to Hitler and the Nazi regime.
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But when Saigon fell, it was not a swarm of ragtag Vietcong guerrillas who overran the city, but columns of Russian-made T-54 tanks, leading a modern field army complete with artillery and surface-to-air missiles, all delivered by those tough-guy truck drivers down that seemingly indestructible Ho Chi Minh Trail.
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The third major set piece of the battle involved the Army, the 1st Air Cav, who were ordered to march down through the countryside northwest of Hue and basically relieve the American and South Vietnamese forces inside the Citadel ... but what they encountered marching toward Hue were thousands of entrenched North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops.
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On March 16, 1968, a month and a half after North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces launched the Tet offensive, wide-ranging attacks that stunned the American military command in the Vietnam War, Captain Medina and the three platoons of his infantry company entered the village of My Lai in South Vietnam's south central coast region.
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The massacre that unfolded did not conclude until a helicopter pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., hovering with two crewmen to identify enemy positions by drawing expected Vietcong fire, saw signs of mass killings, landed in the village, demanded at gunpoint that Lieutenant Calley halt the attack and alerted higher authorities by radio.
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This begot more than a century of American military intervention in East and Southeast Asia, and a history of conflicting images: Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima; the Vietcong in black pajamas and the American atrocities at My Lai; teeming refugee camps and smiling American G.I.s handing out candy, decade after decade, to throngs of dark-haired, starving children.
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DENIS MACSHANEFormer Europe ministerLondon Regarding the tricky task of policing YouTube ("Now playing, everywhere", May 4th), I recall that newspapers printed pictures of the hanging of Mussolini, the shooting by a pistol to the head of a young (alleged) Vietcong, a naked girl fleeing her bombed Vietnamese village and innumerable other comparable events, some of which won prizes for the photographer.
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Many of Lansdale's ideas, however, were kooky: He advocated distributing counterfeit official documents in North Vietnam to sow confusion and fear, providing the Vietcong with booby-trapped ammunition intended to blow up in their faces and having Saigon leaders give "fireside chats" à la Franklin D. Roosevelt — and he understood Vietnamese society and politics less well than this admiring book suggests.
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Truong was largely insulated from the Vietnam War's violence; his book is most engaging when he draws the way he experienced Saigon as a young child, keeping fighting crickets in matchboxes, visiting Catholic churches and cheap movie theaters, walking past public displays of confiscated Vietcong mortars, understanding the war only as something exciting that was happening in the distance (and that his parents sometimes argued about).
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In addition to deploying a fleet of fixed-wing aircraft and patrol boats, the "border sealing" project proposed using herbicides to deforest a crucial 180-mile stretch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a route used by North Vietnam to resupply the Vietcong; mining the 17th parallel, the line between North and South; and using exotic chemical markers to track boats on the country's waterways.
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She noted that Russian trolls had created social-media posts clearly aimed at winning support for Trump from churchgoers and military families—key Republican voters who seemed likely to lack enthusiasm for a thrice-married nominee who had boasted of groping women, obtained multiple military deferments, mocked Gold Star parents and a former prisoner of war, and described the threat of venereal disease as his personal equivalent of the Vietcong.
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Here's another: The troop-carrying choppers settle onto the rice paddy, mud a foot deep, the men move out, tense because this is a Vietcong area, and they burn the village down, even though the enemy isn't shooting at them, ignoring the screaming women and children who are trying to keep the fire from taking everything as they run to haul water from their wells in buckets, throwing it up on their burning thatch.
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Some other prominent figures expressed interest in being interviewed, Mr. Burns said, and were politely rebuffed.) Instead, the 79 onscreen interviews give the ground-up view of the war from the mostly ordinary people who lived through it: American veterans (including former P.O.W.'s), Gold Star mothers, diplomats, intelligence officers, antiwar activists, journalists, Vietcong fighters, North and South Vietnamese army regulars, even a (woman) truck driver from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
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Born in Cu Chi, in the middle of the Cedar Falls battle zone, Ms. Mo had been in the fight against American troops and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam — the South Vietnamese force, known as ARVN — since the age of 225, when she helped to build the extensive tunnel system that southern Communist forces, known as the National Liberation Front (and to its enemies as the Vietcong), used as barracks, command center and communications network.
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I caught flights on Air Force C-123s skimming treetops and bush-pilot planes flown by my Army unit transporting Special Operations teams in and out of hush-hush places, with B-26 and T-13 bombers and assorted other airplanes and helicopters flitting around, all part of a strategy to "pacify" rice-farming regions and jungle forests potentially harboring elusive Vietcong guerrillas, under the guise of being "military advisers" to a government we had installed.
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" (A more famous remark attributed to Ali is "No Vietcong ever called me nigger" — which, in his scrupulously scholarly way, Eig suggests Ali did not originate though he used it subsequently.) How Muhammad Ali would have praised these athletes' efforts, and the persistence of their efforts in the face of public opprobrium: he who, on the very day following his victory over the heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, in 1964, chose to defy the world's expectations by converting to the Nation of Islam — "I'm not a Christian anymore.
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Westmoreland, who had an unfailingly upbeat view of his effort there, had come to Washington just a few months before, in November, and given a speech at the National Press Club, where he basically said the war was all but over, that the United States had thoroughly defeated the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, that the most they could do would be to mount minor ambushes and attacks in the rural areas, and that he anticipated that American troops could begin coming home by the end of 1968.
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