VN: Did the 3rd Regiment, the one that was good at ambushes, attack units of the 1st Infantry Division at Minh Thanh Road in July 1966? [I pointed out the location on the map.]

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Tra: [Laughing] No, it was the 2nd Regiment. Each regiment was strong in one place, but it had to be able to fight in all ways.

VN: Was the 5th PLAF Division a hard-luck division? Our information suggests that it was.

Tra: No, but the 5th Division was not as strong as the 9th.

VN: In late 1967, as the Tet Offensive approached, what was the strategic purpose of the border battles, in particular the attack on Loc Ninh?

Tra: They were, especially at Khe Sanh, feints to draw American troops away from Saigon and populated areas.

VN: How did the knowledge that President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 prohibited American combat forces from entering Cambodia, Laos and southern North Vietnam affect your strategic and operational planning?

Tra: We always thought there was a possibility that the U.S. Army would cross the border, so there was no fixed, secure place for us. We kept moving from one place to another. There was no such place as a sanctuary for us. We used all sorts of evasive procedures to lead U.S. forces away from us.

Interviewer’s note: Shortly after noon, the interpreter told me that the general’s next appointment was at 12:15. Although we had barely begun as far as I was concerned, it was clearly time to end the interview. After thanking Mr. Dzung for translating, I told General Tra how grateful I was that he had made himself available to answer my questions. He responded that we should speak again in the future, adding that it was only through asking and answering questions that we could better understand the war and find out what actually happened. He concluded by inviting me to visit Vietnam, saying that he would arrange for me to tour battlefields and to interview participants in the battles.

As things wound down, a funny thing happened. I asked the interpreter for his business card. Lacking one, he began to write his name and address on the back of one of mine. While he was doing this I pointed to a picture of Ho Chi Minh that I had given Tra and commented that it was a nice picture. To my surprise, Tra responded in English: ‘Yes, a nice picture. A very good picture. I like.’

The translator, who, after all, had been at his intensive work for more than an hour, responded unthinkingly to the call of duty and immediately began translating Tra’s English into Vietnamese for the person Tra was speaking to — me. Realizing what he was doing, he suddenly stopped. Tra and I looked at him, looked at each other, and we all laughed.

Before leaving, I let Tra know that many of us in the West had found his Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B-2 Theater, Vol. 5: Concluding the 30-Year War useful and that we looked forward to seeing the first four volumes. I told him then that Vol. 5 had been translated into English by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and promised to send a copy, which I did in early 1991. Tra’s cryptic response was that they would be out’soon, but not very soon.’

Although one should always treat information derived from interviews with caution, I believe my conversation with Tra generated genuine insights into important historical questions. For example, while the Americans who observed the enemy campaign of late 1964 and the first half of 1965 concluded that the Communists intended to win the war then, it is clear from what Tra says that their aims were considerably less ambitious — ‘to defeat the most well-trained Saigon regime battalions and defend the liberated zones.’ Victory, they expected, would come later, after much more hard slogging. Also interesting is Tra’s claim that no difference of opinion existed between Hanoi and the B-2 Front over how to fight the war as the American intervention got underway. Both agreed to continue the main force, big-unit war preferred by the Front. The real point of contention seemed to be within the Front between the military and civilians. Tra’s comment on sanctuary, if true at least as regards North Vietnam, is interesting. It flies in the face of American conventional wisdom — namely that Washington’s known unwillingness to carry out cross-border operations allowed the Communists to thumb their noses at U.S. forces if, when withdrawing from combat, they could make it across the border into Cambodia, Laos or North Vietnam.

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