People's Army of Vietnam

shit,

you know, half of bloody North Vietnamese Army's been along here.

And so I told the boss, and he said, well, yeah, pull back out of that just at the moment, so...

We pulled back out.

Um, the other two squads went to different locations.

Well, what squad makes contact? Corporal Smedley and his six Marines, and they ended up initiating an ambush against 100 to 150 North Vietnamese Army soldiers, the seven of them.

And, um, it started a, basically a running gun battle throughout the night.

The North Vietnamese, this was before the Tet Offensive, so the NVA, they were running off the Ho Chi Minh Trail coming towards Da Nang, and they were bringing in 122 millimeter rocket launchers, complete systems that were coming down from China and Russia.

government, obviously because they were at war with Vietnam.

And the Khmer Rouge regime went down when the People's Army of Vietnam assaulted and occupied the country.

And they occupied it till 1990 because something that's also not really understood, I don't think, by most people, including casual students of the Cold War.

After the Sino-Soviet split, a genuine proxy war broke out between the communist juggernauts, culminating in the war between the Khmer Rouge and Hanoi, and then between Hanoi and China.

The And interestingly, Phnom Penh fell on April 17th, you know, weeks before the fall of Saigon.

And that was gratifying both to Peking and to the Khmer Rouge themselves.

U.S. officials claimed that the final assault on the Cambodian capital was spearheaded by People's Army of Vietnam units backed by combined arms.

That's not true remotely.

While it was indeed the turning point of a war that America lost eventually and that South Vietnam lost.

It was not a great victory on the battlefield for the NVA or for the Viet Cong, for the communists.

In fact, it was the most crushing single defeat they suffered over the course of the entire war.

So how could both of those things possibly be true at the same time? Let's talk about the facts.

And if you don't get blown up, you're especially the mortars, which come in close in the jungle.

around the high ground, and they're lobbing shots into this fire base, and the only thing to do is to send out a patrol and go try and get them.

Except, of course, the NVA know that's what you're going to do, so they set ambushes for the patrols.

Just a terrible situation.

Ho consolidated power as a result of the French surrender, but always kept his eyes on South Vietnam as his final goal.

In the north, Ho created the North Vietnamese Army, instituted Marxist principles of land sharing and other policies while recruiting the disenfranchised people who were tired of the corruption of the South Vietnamese government.

Those who stood against him were murdered.

Entire regions were liquidated of all people.

I mean, these days we remember the domino effect as silly paranoia, but after Korea and especially China became communist, Vietnam's movement toward communism seemed very much a threat to Japan, which the US had helped remake into a vibrant capitalist ally.

So the US got bogged down in one of its longest wars while the Soviets assisted the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong.

But then we paid them back by supporting the anti-communist mujahideen after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Of course, as we now know, nobody conquers Afghanistan, unless you are the Mongols.

Creighton Abrams, who was a brilliant combat commander, had replaced Westmoreland.

The U.S. Army had very much abandoned what had the kind of strategic hamlet orientation in favor of annihilating the People's Army of Vietnam to fairly great effect.

Effective deployment of massive firepower to neutralize the advantages the enemy had.

The widening of the war to deprive the enemy of key tactical havens.