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Still, he is a rewarding study, for Giap is a general with a problem, and that problem is the deployment of U.S. troops with all their mobile force and firepower in South Viet Nam. Scarcely a year ago, Giap, as he looked southward, could see victory in his grasp. Both Phase 1 (grassroots political organization) and Phase 2 (guerrilla warfare, terrorism, sabotage) in Mao's handbook of insurgency had long since been accomplished in South Viet Nam. Late in 1964, Giap apparently decided that the time had come for Phase 3—an escalation of the conflict into conventional war, attacking in large numbers for the kill. In preparation, he began to move the first North Vietnamese regular army units down the Ho Chi Minh trail to reinforce the Viet Cong soldiery.
The New War. The year 1965 was billed by the Communists as the year of victory, and it very nearly was. By May of last year the black-pajama-clad Viet Cong were roving the South with impunity. Giap's forces owned the Central Highlands. South Viet Nam's army was bloody, reeling and exhausted, its strategic reserve destroyed, and eleven of its maneuver battalions in need of complete rebuilding before they could fight again. To Giap, it seemed only a matter of time until Saigon was forced to the conference table, where he could dictate the terms: reunification and the Communist engorgement of South Viet Nam.
That time never came. In July 1965, President Johnson announced that the U.S. would come to South Viet Nam's aid in full force. Within four months, in the swiftest mobilization of large forces in history, the U.S. deployed 100,000 men into position in Viet Nam some 8,000 miles away. American officers smoothly engineered the switch from their status as advisers to a native army to that of members of an American army in the field. The original concept of the use of American troops to guard enclaves of vital government real estate and plug the holes in Vietnamese defenses, reacting only when the Vietnamese had found and fixed the enemy, was soon expanded. The Americans were out on their own, looking for kills.
Giap, for his part, was unconvinced that U.S. intervention would be able to slow his momentum. In October, he launched an assault on the Special Forces border camp of Plei Me, 30 miles south of Pleiku, intended as the opening of a concerted drive to cut Viet Nam in half from the Cambodian border to the South China Sea. His technique was a carbon copy of past successes at the camps of Due Co near Pleiku and Dong Xoai, northeast of Saigon, earlier in the year: to attack an isolated camp and then ambush the South Vietnamese force charging to the camp's rescue.
But at Plei Me, it was the newly arrived 1st Air Cavalry that came charging—and by rotors not roads. In the month-long battle that followed, Giap's soldiers at first stood their ground and fought ferociously, sending the U.S. death toll up to 240 in one week, the highest of the war. But Communist losses were far higher, owing in large part to the 1st Air Cav's helicoptered artillery, rocket-firing choppers and tactical air support. Giap's men finally broke and ran, and the 1st Air Cav relentlessly pursued them in a campaign culminating in the battle of la Drang Valley, where the slaughter of 2,262 of his men was a hideous revelation to Giap of the new kind of war and enemy that he faced.