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What makes kindly old "Uncle Ho" so hard-nosed? What is it that sends the men from Uncle (some 6,000 or more this year alone) southward as insurgents against an enemy that could crush Hanoi in an instant? More than anything, it is a sense of confidence in methods that have worked splendidly in the past. Ho, after all, has been riding a winning streak for 20 years. Through wile and determination, he aided in evicting the Japanese in 1945, then got the French to throw out the Chinese Nationalists in 1946, finally ejecting the French themselves in 1954. He now believes that the same techniques will work against the U.S.—not only in South Viet Nam but in all of Southeast Asia.
The Bellicose Ones. Ho's heady resolve is fed by three powerful forces.
First comes covetousness: North Viet Nam hungers for the rice of the South and the rich alluvial delta of the Mekong River. Though Ho and other Hanoi leaders speak mistily about the "reunification of the great Vietnamese people" as if it were some grand historical mission, they actually have contempt for their southerly brothers, whom they accuse of being afflicted with a "Cóte d'Azur" mentality.
Second among Ho's drives: Communist ideology. At this stage of development, the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam craves victory in a "war of national liberation." Once South Viet Nam fell, Ho could turn his attention to extending Vietnamese control over Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. As one historian observes, "The Vietnamese have contributed very little to Asian culture, and quite a bit of its violence."
Third comes Ho's fear of his Communist allies: only a reunified Viet Nam, he believes, can maintain its entity in the shadow of Red China. More than 1,000 years of Vietnamese history were spent under direct Chinese domination, and most of the rest was devoted to fighting the Chinese off. Indeed, the very name Viet Nam in Chinese means "cross over to the south."
With those forces driving him, Ho is determined to fight and win. "We held off the French for eight years," he told Historian Bernard Fall in 1962. "We can hold off the Americans for at least as long. Americans don't like long, inconclusive wars. This is going to be a long, inconclusive war."
The Three Readys. Ho's confidence is reflected by his top soldier, stocky, slab-cheeked Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, 53, the victor of Dienbienphu. "South Viet Nam is the example for national-liberation movements of our times," boasts Giap. "If it proves possible to defeat the special warfare tested in South Viet Nam by the American imperialists, this will mean that it can be defeated everywhere." There is a special kind of brute power behind Giap's rhetoric. From the 34-man platoon he formed in 1944 has mushroomed a "People's Army" of at least 450,000 regulars—tough bo doi (G.I.s) as fanatical as fighters anywhere in the world. French prisoners led out of Dienbienphu eleven years ago were told to walk on the Communist bodies littering the fields to avoid mines and barbed wire, and some of the steppingstones were still alive.