Interviews with a Top North Vietnam Army General and Two Former Soldiers

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The following three interviews were conducted during the author’s visit to Vietnam in December 2003 and January 2004.

General Nguyen Duc Huy
Nguyen Duc Huy was born in Hung-Yen province in 1931. After joining the Viet Minh in 1948, at age 17, he went on to serve with distinction in Vietnam’s Communist army — through its various name changes — for the next 50 years. He retired in 1998. During his long service, General Huy participated in some of his nation’s most important military engagements, from Dien Bien Phu to Khe Sanh (where he commanded the NVA’s vaunted 351st Division) to the final General Offensive that concluded the war in 1975. Huy is a man of considerable fame in Vietnam, and not unused to interviews. With the aid of my interpreter, Nguyen Viet Bac, I interviewed the general in his lovely five-story home in an exclusive residential area of Hanoi. As we sat sipping tea in his living room — decorated with fine Oriental artwork and framed photographs of him with such legendary figures as General Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro — he graciously answered my questions.

Vietnam:General, what were you doing when you first joined the army in 1948 — fighting the French?

General Huy:Yes, fighting with the French people. I was only 17 then, so I was just a common soldier. You know, just in a trench shooting a rifle at the French, with them in a trench shooting rifles back at us.

VN:Did you fight at Dien Bien Phu?

Huy:Yes, and by then I was an officer.

VN:What did you do after 1954 and the Geneva Agreements that divided Vietnam into North and South?

Huy:I still was in the army and now I was going to the South. At that time I was commanding 2,000 soldiers, uniformed soldiers. There was only low-intensity combat until 1968. From 1954 to 1960 I also took various military courses. Then there was really big fighting from 1968 on. I was at Khe Sanh.

VN:At Khe Sanh you were up against U.S. Marines. Did you consider them to be good fighters?

Huy:Yes. My division was fighting mainly with the 3rd Marine Division and they were very good, experienced soldiers. You know that 3rd Marine Division has a very long history of combat. They were very good, very well trained. And that division was very large; it had about 20,000 men, and they had much more firepower than we did.

VN:Many American history books about Vietnam estimate the Communist forces at Khe Sanh at about 50,000. Is that your recollection?

Huy:No, that figure is wrong. We had nearly 100,000 at Khe Sanh when your air force arrived with more than 1,000 aircraft and also helicopters bringing in more men.

VN:The United States used Boeing B-52 bombers at Khe Sanh, and also used napalm extensively. Were any of those strikes made against your division?

Huy:Yes. Those bombs killed many of my men, more than 1,000 men in my own division. My division was the 351st Division, one of the strongest and most famous divisions in the North Vietnamese Army. We had on average about 12,000 soldiers, sometimes more, sometimes less. After those bombings we had some 1,000 fewer. It took some time to build the division up again. Both sides lost quite a lot at Khe Sanh.

VN:It has long been speculated in the United States that the Communist siege at Khe Sanh was just intended as a diversion to cause the Americans to draw more forces northward and thus weaken themselves in the South, thereby giving your own forces a better chance in the South when you launched the Tet Offensive. Is that speculation correct?

Huy:I refuse to answer that question. Many people have asked me that question before and to this day I refuse to answer.

VN:You might refuse to answer this next one, too. There has always been a question whether or not General Giap was personally present at Khe Sanh and directing operations. Some speculate that he was there for part of the battle, but once the heavy bombing started he was pressured into leaving for fear that he would become a casualty. Is that true?

Huy:Yes, all of what you have said is true. He was there, but he left — not only because we feared for his safety but also because he had urgent duties elsewhere. You know he was directing the fighting everywhere.

VN:Some military historians consider Giap a military genius, perhaps not quite on the level of Napoleon, but still a genius. Would you agree with that assessment?

Huy:Yes. He was very clever, the cleverest of generals. And he was very experienced, having fought from the time he was young until he was old.

VN:After the war, Giap told a group of Western reporters that Communist losses in the Tet Offensive were so devastating that if the Americans had kept up that level of military pressure much longer North Vietnam would have been forced to negotiate a peace on American terms. Do you agree?

Huy:If the American army had fought some more, had continued, I don’t know. Maybe. I can’t say what would have happened.

VN:What did you do with your dead?

Huy:The dead soldiers were evacuated to the rear of the division. Other men would then bury them. Letters would be sent to the soldiers’ families notifying them. Our wounded would go to a hospital, but not a hospital in a city. Sometimes our hospitals were in among the trees, but usually they were in caves.

VN:What did you do with dead Americans?

Huy:Usually American planes would circle a battlefield and keep us back until they could send in helicopters and recover the dead bodies themselves. But whenever we did find American bodies, we did bury them. We didn’t remove their dogtags. We knew what those were for, and we buried the bodies in places where they would be easily found. We buried them in shallow graves, and we grouped the graves together like steps. We knew eventually American or South Vietnamese forces would come along and find those bodies, get the tags and notify [the] families.

VN:That was considerate.

Huy:Let me tell you something else. Six years ago, your General Raymond Davis, a four-star general, brought a military delegation here to Vietnam to meet with a military delegation of ours. I was on that delegation. We did all we could to help them locate more American bodies. While General Davis was here he asked me my opinion on why America lost the war when they had so many more weapons and much better weapons than we had.

VN:That was going to be one of the next questions. How did you answer him?

Huy:I gave him three reasons. First, and most important, I told him that the North Vietnamese soldiers were fighting from their hearts for our freedom. Second, we knew the battlefield….We knew the mountains; we knew the rivers; we knew so well the terrain. And, third, we watched the Americans very closely. [Here General Huy does a little pantomime pretending he is crouching through the trees and jungle, observing the Americans with binoculars, which he pans left and right.] We tried to guess everything the Americans would do in advance. We attacked them very carefully. When we could, we would attack them from the rear. We also used our tunnels to approach them undetected. One thing General Davis told me…was that for 30 years he had been wondering how North Vietnamese tanks could so suddenly appear on a battlefield and catch the Americans by surprise. He said it seemed like magic, that they came out of nowhere. He asked me how we managed to do that. I told him that is a secret we still keep in case we ever have to use it again. Would you like me to tell you now?

VN:Yes!

Huy:No! I still refuse to answer [laughs]. But I will tell you this. We had more than one way of doing that. There was more than one trick to doing that. [This leaves one to speculate on what those tricks might have been: an especially effective camouflage system? Burying prepositioned tanks? An ingenious system of disassembling and reassembling the tanks? Heretofore undisclosed use of Soviet heavy-lift helicopters? The possibilities would seem quite limited.]

VN:Did you hate the Americans at the time of the war? And what about now?

Huy:During the war — of course! Our deaths were very, very many. Of course I hated them. But about six years ago when I met with the American military delegation I decided we could become friends. We talked together so that we could forget the past and look to the future.

VN:Have you ever heard of a plan an American think tank proposed for winning the war? Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute proposed a buildup of American troop strength in Vietnam to a total of one million. That would be enough American soldiers to link arms and stretch the entire length of South Vietnam’s land borders. They could simply prevent any more NVA from entering the country. They would be supported by tens of thousands of specially trained dogs that could detect any tunneling activity beneath the borders. While the Americans and the dogs secured the borders, the ARVN would concentrate on tracking down and destroying the VC and Communist sympathizers within South Vietnam. Does that plan sound crazy to you, or could it have worked?

Huy:I think that’s quite funny. The South Vietnamese army could never have tracked down all of our Viet Cong and Communist sympathizers within the country. There were just too many of them — men, women, the farmers. They could never have been stopped.

VN:Do you have anything else you would like to tell the readers of Vietnam Magazine?

Huy:One thing: The war is over and I look to the future. But the poisons Americans dropped on the land continue to harm many of our people — not just this generation, but the next and the next, with diseases and birth defects. You should tell this to the American government. They should be doing something to help us with this problem. I hope relations between America and Vietnam improve rapidly. It would be good for the economies and the lives of both of our peoples.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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