General Vo Nguyen Giap of the Vietnam People's Army has recently celebrated his 100th birthday. General Giap, a revolutionary journalist and military tactician, is respected throughout the world., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
October 4, 2013
Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Who Ousted U.S. From Vietnam, Is Dead
By JOSEPH R. GREGORY
New York Times
Vo Nguyen Giap, the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general whose battlefield victory at Dien Bien Phu drove France out of Vietnam and whose tenacious resistance to the United States in a long and costly war there eventually sapped America’s political will to fight, died on Friday in Hanoi. He was believed to be 102.
The death was reported by several Vietnamese news organizations, including the respected Tuoi Tre Online, which said he died in an army hospital.
General Giap was among the last survivors of a generation of Communist revolutionaries who in the postwar decades freed Vietnam of colonial rule and fought a superpower to a stalemate. In his later years, he was a living reminder of a war that was mostly old history to the Vietnamese, many of whom were born after it had ended.
But he had not faded away. He was regarded as an elder statesman in a unified Vietnam whose hard-line views had softened with the cessation of war. He supported economic overhaul and closer relations with the United States while publicly warning of the spread of Chinese influence and the environmental costs of industrialization.
A teacher and journalist with no formal military training, Vo Nguyen Giap (pronounced vo nwin ZHAP) joined a ragtag Communist insurgency in the 1940s and built it into a highly disciplined force that through 30 years of revolution and civil war ended an empire and united a nation.
He was charming and volatile, an erudite military historian and an intense nationalist who used his personal magnetism to motivate his troops and fire their devotion to their country. His admirers put him in the company of MacArthur, Rommel and other great military leaders of the 20th century.
Seth Mydans contributed reporting.
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