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As he sits in his office in the buff-colored onetime French colonial-ministry building in Hanoi and contemplates his war maps, Vo Nguyen Giap today confronts a far more difficult situation. Unlike his ill-fated French predecessors, who were told to make do with the troops on hand, U.S. Commander William C. Westmoreland has been promised everything he needs to win the war—and has been getting it. Allied troops already outnumber Giap's forces in the South by over 4 to 1, and there are more to come: an estimated 100,000 more U.S. fighting men to be added to the 275,000 who are now "in-country" by the end of this year. Until the U.S. buildup began last summer, Communist and Allied casualties had been rising at roughly equal rates. Then the ratio shifted dramatically, and ever since the Communists have been losing three to four soldiers for every Allied loss. In the new war that Giap confronts, it is his own men who are being gnawed, harassed, hounded and hunted by day and night. Such sanctuaries as Zone C and Zone D near Saigon, bases in the highlands, underground village bastions on the coastal plain—all are being hit for the first time in years, keeping Giap's men off-base, off-balance and increasingly cut off from their supplies.
Who's in Charge? Nor are his men any longer swimming comfortably in the seas of population spelled out by Mao Tse-tung as the necessary environment for guerrilla warfare. Whatever dubious benefits the Viet Cong might once have brought South Vietnamese villagers, now they bring, by their presence, bombs from the omnipresent fleet of 1,000 U.S. planes wheeling through the Viet Nam skies. As a result, in many a village the Viet Cong are no longer welcome, and some 900,000 villagers have fled V.C.-controlled areas. The Reds have been forced to step up taxation, rice levies and recruitment in areas they control, reaching down even to 14-year-olds to keep up their 3,500-men-a-month draftee rate in South Viet Nam. Once there was a kind of care free banditry to Viet Congmanship; increasingly, it is a grim way of life in which a village youth will very likely get killed. Increasingly, the Viet Cong are being forced to rely on terror and assassinations to keep their own village areas in line.
For the Viet Cong of the South, there are other problems. One of the biggest is the presence of the 30,000 North Vietnamese regulars that Giap has sent down the Ho Chi Minh trail in the past year. Regional distrust and dislike between northerners and southerners in Viet Nam is centuries old, and, says one expert in Saigon, "the southern Viet Cong have long been afraid of a Red Napoleon." They now have one: half the main-force Viet Cong units not tied down to static defense are led by North Viet Nam officers, and there have been major seedings of Viet Cong into North Vietnamese regiments, most of which arrive under strength owing to disease, casualties and desertion from the long march south. More and more, Hanoi has turned the war into one primarily between the U.S. and North Viet Nam—and the Viet Cong, who were fighting for four years or more before the North Vietnamese arrived in force, resent it.