Con Thien: The Hill of Angels

1. Before the Americans Came

The Vietnamese The Vietnamese people originated in ancient times from what is today south China. Thousands of years ago, this Mongoloid race of people was gradually pushed southward into the jungles of Indochina by the inhabitants of north China. Those early Annamites mixed with Thais and Indians along the way. They also intermarried with Indonesians. By the¤rst millennium bc, they had created a home they called “Nam Viet,” or “Land of the Southern Viet People.” The western Indochina peninsula they came to call Vietnam comprised three large areas: Tonkin (north); Annam (central); and Cochin-China, the southernmost part of Vietnam. For the ¤rst ten centuries ad, that portion of Vietnam known as Tonkin was ruled by the Chinese, but the Annamites continued to resist domination. For a thousand years, defeat after defeat did not deter them from resisting foreign assimilation. The Chinese ruled the country, but the Annamites maintained their language, customs, holidays, and religions . In the tenth century, the rebellious Annamites drove their Chinese governors out and declared their independence. Kublai Khan sent a half-million Mongols south in 1284 to conquer the Viets. The Mongols were repulsed by a fanatical Vietnamese army made up of women, children, and elderly who took up arms and joined with their ¤ghting men in a common stand that decimated the Mongol invaders. But their victory was a costly one, and a weakened Vietnam 1 Before the Americans Came was again invaded by the Chinese, who conquered the Annamites in the¤fteenth century. The Ming Dynasty governed ruthlessly, heavily taxing the populace and enslaving millions of men to clear forests and dig mines. A resistance movement arose, and within ten years they had evicted the Chinese once again. The Annamites pushed south, defeating the Chams (Hindu Empire), then drove the Khmers back into what is present-day Cambodia. By the middle of the eighteenth century, all of Cochin-China had been conquered by the Viets. In 1789, Emperor Quang Trung surprised and defeated a Chinese army at Tet, while the Manchus were sleeping off the food and wine of a day’s feasting. Still celebrated to this day, their victory was a major event in Vietnamese history. Gradually, a new menace appeared on the scene: Europeans. First came the Portuguese, then the Dutch, English, and ¤nally the French, who successfully forced out all other European competition. French colonial activity commenced in 1860, and by 1907 the entire Indochina peninsula was under its domination. On September 22, 1940, three months after the fall of France to Nazi Germany in World War II, the Vichy French government capitulated to the Imperial Japanese Army in Vietnam. Up until mid-1945, the Japanese called the shots, gradually increasing their clout and dominance over the former French colonialists. This did not go unnoticed by the Vietnamese, who saw a former European power humbled by an Asian army. Even though the French later regained full administrative control over Indochina after the Japanese surrender that ¤nally ended World War II, this perception weakened the French presence in the minds of the Viets. The seeds of Vietnamese rebellion against the French, planted earlier under ¤ve years of Japanese rule, commenced to sprout under the tutelage of Ho Chi Minh. His Communist organization, the Viet Minh, grew from a poorly equipped band of resistance ¤ghters into a modern army that vanquished their former French masters at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. A central concept of Vietnamese military doctrine was that a weaker force handled properly could defeat a stronger one. For hundreds of years, their military teachings stipulated that the stronger force had to 10 Roots of Con®ict be worn down by protracted warfare. Vietnamese forces would employ hit-and-run tactics, morale-busting booby traps and ambushes, until the timing was right for a sudden shock offensive delivered with maximum surprise and deception. The Vietnamese had always thought of themselves as giant killers, smarter and better organized than their enemy. Odds mattered little. They were used to beating the odds. They had repeatedly thrown back the Chinese, routed the “invincible” Mongol hordes, taken the remainder of their country from the Thais and Khmers, and soundly defeated the French. They never doubted that they would be victorious over the American “puppet government” in Saigon. “They were a people accustomed to war, a people who indeed de¤ned themselves by war and struggle.”1 Two Vietnams...