Getting to know Charlie.
The Viet Cong, known to our side as Victor Charlie, as with the soldiers of the regular National Liberation Front Army, followed the strategic concepts of successful revolutionary leaders such as Mao Tse tung and the military wisdom of Sun Tzu.
The basic meaning of strategy is setting the goal of a war and elaborating on the general methods of attaining that goal. In guerrilla warfare, the fighter must first accurately analyze the enemy's operations and tactics, something that is relevant to both sides. Therefore, the VC, NLF soldiers and their commanders’ carefully studied the methods of U.S. forces and the South Vietnamese forces. In fact, NLF textbooks and training documents contained a mass of pages pertaining to the analyses of US and South Viet military strategy.
The strategic fact of, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and you will be victorious in a hundred battles" so written by the greatest military theoretician of ancient China, Sun Tzu whose teachings were enthusiastically followed by the VC is as strategically relevant today as it was in ancient times. So in that vein, the Viet Cong employed various methods to collect information about us, their enemy, but in most part it came from planted agents meaning there was in probability no military unit, camp, South Vietnamese public agency, or even Government ministry without its share of Viet Cong agents. Those planted agents together with the regular soldiers and VC, political cadres, and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers worked for the goal of annihilating their enemy, just as we did towards them.
For sure, there is no bloodier kind of war than guerrilla warfare where both sides employ all available means to achieve their objectives.
The basic meaning of strategy is setting the goal of a war and elaborating on the general methods of attaining that goal. In guerrilla warfare, the fighter must first accurately analyze the enemy's operations and tactics, something that is relevant to both sides. Therefore, the VC, NLF soldiers and their commanders’ carefully studied the methods of U.S. forces and the South Vietnamese forces. In fact, NLF textbooks and training documents contained a mass of pages pertaining to the analyses of US and South Viet military strategy.
The strategic fact of, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and you will be victorious in a hundred battles" so written by the greatest military theoretician of ancient China, Sun Tzu whose teachings were enthusiastically followed by the VC is as strategically relevant today as it was in ancient times. So in that vein, the Viet Cong employed various methods to collect information about us, their enemy, but in most part it came from planted agents meaning there was in probability no military unit, camp, South Vietnamese public agency, or even Government ministry without its share of Viet Cong agents. Those planted agents together with the regular soldiers and VC, political cadres, and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers worked for the goal of annihilating their enemy, just as we did towards them.
For sure, there is no bloodier kind of war than guerrilla warfare where both sides employ all available means to achieve their objectives.
No comments have been added yet.
Author of Southlands Snuffys Series.
Life’s anecdotes and observations.
- Sergeant Walker's profile
- 15 followers
