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Speed & Surprise. North Viet Nam's first major surprise was the 1st Air Cav's ability to airlift its 105-mm. howitzers over trackless jungle and keep the guns supplied with shells. The division moved its guns 67 times during the campaign —and only once overland. Some 33,000 shells were fired, 6,500 alone during a single, intense 24-hour engagement. The 1st Air Cav's battalions were shifted 40 times by helicopter, and 13,257 tons of supplies were airlifted to its men before the remnants of the Communist forces scuttled to safety in Cambodia. It was a stunning defeat for Giap's forces. Thanks to the helicopter, the U.S. had found a way to overpower the guerrilla fighter with his own methods: speed and surprise.
Snow on the Volcano. Nothing in Giap's experience or theoretical manual of strategy had prepared him for the quality or magnitude of the U.S. intervention. Though Vo, his family name, means "force," and Giap, his given name, means "armor," the architect of North Viet Nam's army was born near the city of Vinh, the son of a bourgeois landowning family that had fallen into penury. By the time he was 14, he was a member of a clandestine, anti-French sect; four years later the French clapped him in jail for political agitation. It proved a fortuitous incarceration. Behind bars he met Fellow Militant Minh Thai, who became his first wife. And the French police commissure for Vinh took a liking to the brilliant, angry young Giap, got him out of prison, and sent him off to one of the best French schools in Indo-China. He won his baccalaureate, and for four years taught history at a lyceum in Hanoi.
Giap was an accomplished lecturer in French history who "could step to a blackboard and draw in the most minute detail every battle plan of Napoleon," one of his former students recalls. A passionate ascetic who could veer abruptly from violent emotion to icy control, he was early dubbed "The volcano and the snow" by his associates. "We were all intrigued," says one, "by his passion for Napoleon and the French Revolution. And we used to tease him when he railed against the French, by asking 'Are you sure you don't want to be Napoleon?' " Giap did, in his own way: he was already a member of the Communist Party.
When the party was banned in 1939, Giap fled to China. His wife stayed behind, was arrested by the French, and died in prison. Under the aegis of the Chinese Communists, the Viet Minh was founded, with Giap a 1941 charter member along with Ho Chi Minh. Ho ordered the little professor to specialize in military affairs, and the career of the Red Napoleon began. His first self-education was in guerrilla operations against the Japanese who then occupied Viet Nam. The OSS supplied Giap with American weapons to that end, but Giap was looking to the future: he cached most of them for use in the resumed struggle against the French. On Aug. 15, 1945, as the Japanese surrendered, he led his guerrillas into Hanoi and took over the city for Ho Chi Minh, and the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam was born.