(3 of 4)
Even assuming that such public statements do not wholly reflect his real attitude, the intransigence seems genuine, and it rests on a compound of myth and shrewd realism. Ho and Giap, as General Westmoreland once said, "look out on the world through very small windows." They are convinced that the U.S. does not have the will and patience to wage a protracted, highly expensive war and seize upon every scrap of U.S. domestic protest to prove it. In captured enemy bunkers, G.I.s have found New York Times stories of antiwar demonstrations duplicated and translated into Vietnamese. While Hanoi probably no longer believes that it can drive out the Americans, it still believes that it can wear them down to the point of quitting.
The North Vietnamese trust no Western accounts of what is happening in the South, only the self-serving reports from their own commanders in the field that are sometimes two months in transit back up the Ho Chi Minh trail. Thus, for months Hanoi has been trumpeting its nonexistent "dry season victories," and last week reported that shelling of Saigon by the Viet Cong on National Day almost leveled the city (in fact, only 28 shells fell, mostly in open squares and courtyards). Even within South Viet Nam, the enemy often deceives himself. In the northern provinces, the troops believe that their armies are holding the Delta and pushing past Saigon. In the Delta, the guerrillas believe that the highland Viet Cong are readying a Dienbienphu for the Americans.
Their Assets
Still, for all their troubles and all their delusions, one overriding fact remains: the Communists are far from defeated. They are hurting, but their main forces are intact. By impressing an average of four battalions of fresh soldiers in the South per month, and continuing the infiltration from the North, the enemy's strength has actually increased in the South from 240,000 last December to the present level of 279,000 fighters. Most important of all, the Viet Cong's control of the villages, where four out of five Vietnamese live, has hardly been touched. If anything, say U.S. observers, the local Red cadre of headmen, police, tax collectors and schoolteachers may be stronger than ever, particularly in the rich Mekong Delta. The "other war" of revolutionary reform in South Viet Nam, to which the U.S. is so eagerly committed, has so far made negligible headway.
Even the high battlefield losses the Communists are taking must be placed in a context of nearly 20 years of continuous war and a way of life that has always been hard, dangerous and marginal. In one sense, it has conditioned them to fight on—and on a time scale in which a few more years does not very much matter. The mood is summed up in the song currently tops on Radio Hanoi:
Yankee, I swear to you
With words sharp as knives
Here in Viet Nam, it's either you or me
And I am already here So you must go!