the Communist Party as its predecessor, the Vietminh, had been. All of the insurgents soon became known generically as the Vietcong (Vietnamese Communists)—a pejorative label coined in Saigon that represented one of the few propaganda victories won by South Vietnam and its American allies in this new war. Later, the people of Vietnam would look back on the years from 1954 to 1960 as a golden age. “The six years of peace,” they would call it.6 Now the interlude between wars was over and a new struggle was beginning, one that would eclipse the French Indochina War in its inhumanity.
