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Behind Giap's regulars stand fully half a million militiamen, trained and armed (though often with ancient fowling pieces), bolstered by the "Three Readys Movement"—1,500,000 volunteers who are supposedly "ready to fight, join the army, and go whereever needed." Last week Hanoi took further steps toward full mobilization by ordering 2,500,000 young men and women into the "Brigade of Young Volunteers to Fight U.S. Aggression for National Salvation." As bulky in numbers as it is in name, the brigade will work in fields and factories vacated by militiamen.
While North Viet Nam is thus strong in men and motivation, it is weak in the critical area of modern weaponry. Giap's air force is still minuscule, though Soviet contributions of obsolescent aircraft (MIGs and medium-range IL-28 bombers) have doubled it in the past four months to 60 planes. Now and then audacity can overcome obsolescence, as it did last March, when three MIGs took on a flight of U.S. jets twice their speed and bagged a brace. Last week the technological superiority of American planes and weapons asserted itself: missile-armed Phantoms flying combat air patrol 40 miles south of Hanoi nailed a pair of audacious MIGs, sent them flaming to the deck. The run-in proved again that Giap's airmen would face disaster if they came up in force; and Giap's navy has practically disappeared after four months of U.S. air attack.
Beneath the Chimera. For Ho, the confrontation with the U.S. over South Viet Nam is the crowning act of a long life dedicated to subversion. His personal Ho Chi Minh trail has led him through the widest range of revolutionary activity experienced by any living Red leader. En route, he shed identities like snakeskins, metamorphosing from cabin boy to pastry cook, from poet to guerrilla leader, from Parisian photo retoucher to pseudo-Buddhist monk. His name-changes alone would fill an address book (some 20 have been pinned down, ranging from Nguyen "the Victorious" to "Old Chap" Wang). But beneath the chimeric legend lies a purposeful, pragmatic Communist whose aim is the conquest of all Southeast Asia.
A Vietnamese saying has it that "a man born in Nghe An province will oppose anything." That is where Ho was born, in 1890, when France dominated Indo-China—much to the disgust of Ho's father, a scholarly colonial employee who was fired by the French for his "patriotic" activities. After schooling in Hué and Saigon, Ho (then known as Nguyen Tat Thanh) headed for Europe in 1912 as a cabin boy on a French steamer. After a brief apprenticeship at London's Carlton Hotel under the famed chef Escoffier, Ho drifted on to Paris.