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Introduction 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 2 Voices from the Vietnam War 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...

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