Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (41 page)

In the fighting that followed in 1964, the insurgents were for the most part badly bloodied and beaten back by South Vietnamese forces and their American advisers. Thanh was discredited and Giap restored to command of the campaign. His view of much more irregular, protracted operations—conducted by Vietcong insurgents and North Vietnamese Army units, with some pitched battles fought under favorable circumstances—finally prevailed. Soon NVA units were marching southward to complement Vietcong operations, both types of units being supplied with matériel brought down via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran along a gentle southward curve from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia.

It became clear to Ho and Giap that the Americans would fight determinedly to stop them. In the wake of the Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964, when a U.S. destroyer appeared to have been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats, Congress authorized President Johnson to step up military action in Vietnam. As the historian John Prados describes the politics of this incident, it was a “heaven-sent opportunity” for Johnson to get exactly what he wanted—permission to go to war without a declaration of war.
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The small U.S. military mission in Vietnam began to grow more quickly, and by the next year major formations were deploying there. From a few thousand advisers, the “military assistance command” grew to 125,000 troops in August of 1965 and to more than half a million troops by 1968.

Giap had thought deeply about the challenge the Americans would pose, and concluded that three principal threats had to be mastered: (1) the possibility of an invasion of the North; (2) sustained aerial bombardment; and (3) the tactical mobility that U.S. forces enjoyed because of their use of helicopters. To cope with the threat of invasion, he included the North in his plan for building local militias. In the South the village-based support network would help sustain the insurgents’ offensive, but in the North they would be used to help resist an invasion. Neither Giap nor Ho realized it at the time, but American leaders were loath even to contemplate an invasion of the North, fearing (unjustifiably, in this case) that the Chinese would intervene as they had when General Douglas MacArthur drove north in Korea in 1950.

To cope with sustained air attack, Giap was already confident that his “bicycle corps” of porters on the Ho Chi Minh Trail could be harassed but not defeated by such bombardment. His forces in the field, however, would need a great deal of protection against attack aircraft. Thus he oversaw a massive program of building underground facilities, covering South Vietnam with a honeycomb of subterranean barracks, supply depots, schools, and hospitals connected by tunnels. At home in the North, he and Ho began a major effort both to disperse factories and to move them underground as well. All these measures proved effective in thwarting the aims of American airpower, from the tactical to the strategic level.

The notion of “air assault,” largely the brainchild of the American commander, General William Westmoreland, was likely the single most difficult challenge that Giap faced. In 1965 he saw the power of this mobile approach demonstrated on two key occasions. In August, at the Marine enclave at Chu Lai on the coast, Giap’s gathering forces had been struck in the rear by a Marine battalion that had moved right behind them by helicopter. This heliborne strike force was joined by another battalion coming from the sea and by garrison troops sallying out of Chu Lai. The result: nearly a thousand Vietcong confirmed killed in the fighting over three days, with a loss of fewer than fifty Marines.

The next major engagement was against the U.S. Army’s famed First Cavalry Division, now mounted in helicopters rather than on horses. In a sustained action in the central highlands, at Ia Drang in November, U.S. troopers killed more than twelve hundred enemy fighters but lost nearly three hundred of their own men. Still, these engagements seemed to bear out Westmoreland’s belief that “mobility plus firepower equals attrition.”
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In the afterglow of these victories, “Westy” was named
TIME
magazine’s man of the year for 1965.

Chastened by these losses, Giap reverted to the same pattern he had employed against the French: small-scale actions throughout the country, in both rural and urban areas. Over the next two years this became the principal pattern of attack as Giap’s forces picked their targets with great care, inflicting more and more casualties on the Americans, and beginning to erode their will to fight. Many of the American losses came from booby traps set on jungle trails, an early generation of improvised explosive devices. In the face of Giap’s shift to mostly irregular tactics, Westmoreland continued to strive, increasingly in vain, to conduct the pitched battles he preferred, overriding the Marine Corps’ preference for distributing their forces in small packets at the village level throughout South Vietnam.

The Marines’ innovative idea was to work with the Vietnamese people in “combined action platoons” to secure them from attack, much as a later generation of American soldiers worked at the small-unit level with friendly “sons of Iraq” to improve the security situation there. In both cases the locals fought hard, side by side with the Americans, in defense of their families. This approach had become a central principle of the 1960s era counterinsurgency tactics. But this notion went against the “big unit” formula for success, leading to what Defense Secretary Robert McNamara described as “considerable disagreement between Westy and the Marines.”
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There were also a number of clever army field officers who became adept at hit-and-run, ambush-style warfare and who lobbied from below for a shift to this kind of fighting. They too failed to effect change.
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The stage was thus set for Giap to repeat the success he had achieved against the French. By 1968 he felt sufficiently confident to launch a sustained series of simultaneous attacks throughout South Vietnam in February and March, the so-called Tet offensive. A thousand Americans were killed and many thousands more wounded in defending against these assaults, and friendly Vietnamese forces suffered even more heavily. But the attackers were deeply damaged too, although almost certainly they did not suffer the forty thousand killed in action that official U.S. body counts announced. In any event, President Johnson declared in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection, suggesting, as the journalist Don Oberdorfer put it, that Giap may have “suffered a battlefield setback in the war zone, but still won the political victory in the United States.”
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Indeed, Giap simply reverted to smaller-scale insurgent attacks for the next several years, waiting out the Americans. When they were gone save for a relative handful of advisers, he mounted yet another major offensive, around Easter 1972. This one was stemmed by a combination of South Vietnamese forces and American attack aircraft, but North Vietnamese elements were now in possession of several areas of the Republic of Vietnam and remained in place after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1973. Then, in the spring of 1975, when there was no hope at all of American intervention, the South was overrun in a last, swift invasion.

Giap did not command this final campaign. He had been heavily criticized for the losses suffered in the Easter Offensive, and Ho—who had died in 1969—was no longer around to shield him with his subtle political ploys. Instead he now fell prey to maneuvering that took away his field command, leaving him with such titles as minister of defense and chairman of the military committee. From this remove he observed the final campaign against the Saigon regime, which nonetheless clearly bore his stamp. North Vietnamese regular forces worked in close conjunction with guerrillas, local militias, and other cadres, and won a complete victory.

While 1975 was a year of celebration in Hanoi, it was “Year Zero” in neighboring Cambodia where the genocidal Khmer Rouge had come to power and begun the business of the “killing fields.” Although they had initially been supported by North Vietnam, their brutal excesses soon alienated Hanoi. Even so, it was not until the close of 1978 that Vietnam took military action against the Khmer Rouge, by which time more than a million innocent Cambodians had been slaughtered.

The North Vietnamese Army swiftly drove the Khmer Rouge from power in January 1979; but China, which had been friendly with the regime in Phnom Penh, bristled at the intervention. In February some three hundred thousand Chinese troops invaded at various points along the nearly five-hundred-mile-long Sino-Vietnamese border. Giap, still minister of defense, oversaw a skillful defense that featured his trademark mix of regular and irregular forces. The Chinese left with a bloody nose a month later. In this clear test of strength against the forces of Mao’s people’s war, Giap’s own brand—a blend of Mao and Napoleon—proved superior.

For the next dozen years after the war with China, Giap served in various capacities in his government, retiring early in the 1990s. He has lived on quietly ever since; he will be one hundred in 2011. His ideas about irregular warfare live on as well, in particular his skillful combination of insurgent and traditional tactics and his penchant for striking simultaneously in several places. Few military leaders of conventional or guerrilla forces have records of accomplishment that come close to Giap’s. He truly marched to the beat of a different drummer, the one that guides the master of the irregular.

BANDIT QUEEN:
PHOOLAN DEVI

Anthony Bruno

Perhaps the earliest and most persistent form of human violence is raiding: sudden surprise attacks by a few fighters intent upon theft, destruction, or killing to terrorize, or some combination of these. Raiding has long played a role in warfare—for example, the great Mongol invasion of central Europe in the thirteenth century began as an extended raid. But raiding has also been tied, possibly even more closely, to crime, mostly in the form of banditry. From ancient high seas pirates to “road agents” and a host of other bush and mountain pass brigands, bandits have been with us for ages. Yet there is a gray area, somewhere between war and crime, where the purposes of this practice are aimed at more than just pecuniary gain. This is the realm of “social banditry,” a phenomenon characterized by the pursuit of higher goals. These might include attempts to redress injustices within a society. Robin Hood tried to do this by taking from his Norman overlords and giving to the oppressed Saxons. Another form of action comes closer to insurgency, with the violence aimed at driving out an occupier, as the Jewish zealots sought to do against the Romans at the time of Christ.

There is yet one more intriguing subset of social bandits: the avengers. Where “noble robbers” and freedom fighters have always tended to calibrate their use of violence and retain some connection to ethical strictures about the use of force, avengers, feeling terribly wronged, strike back without restraint against their tormentors. As Eric Hobsbawm has suggested, the very identity of the avenger is closely tied to the ability to “prove that even the poor and weak can be terrible.”
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In some respects the rise of modern terrorism, including that conducted by al Qaeda and its affiliates, may be explained primarily in terms of the weak proving to the strong just how “terrible” they can be.

This third type of banditry, the form most distinct from crime for gain or insurgent rebellion, is the subject of this chapter, in the person of Phoolan Devi, a poor young Indian woman whose family was systematically robbed and exploited while she herself was raped repeatedly and subjected to sustained, violent abuses of other sorts. That she became an avenging
DACOIT
is no surprise.
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That she became a folk hero and was eventually elected to the Indian parliament, however, is a remarkable testament to her mastery of the irregular.

India, where her story unfolds, has a long history of banditry going back at least to the days of the Scythian raiders who came down from the steppes to the subcontinent in the sixth century C.E. The practice continued during the era of the Moghul (i.e., Mongol) rulers a thousand years later. Given the sharp class and caste differences that evolved in Indian society, bandits tended to follow the “noble robber” pattern, these
DACOITS
targeting upper-caste Brahmins in particular, and redistributing enough of their wealth among the poor so as to retain the goodwill of their low-caste fellows.

There seem to have been far fewer
DACOITS
who fell into the category of insurgents, like Mexico’s great bandits Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa—though, as John Reed once observed, Villa often crossed the line into pure criminality, for “he encountered the twentieth century with the simplicity of a savage.”
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Far from overturning the system, many
DACOITS
were at least in part coopted to help keep the social system functioning, even after the British conquest in the late eighteenth century. For example, among the larger gangs—those numbering in the several hundreds rather than the more usual few dozens of members—the nineteenth-century
DACOITS
of Badhak became for a fee the protectors of river ferries in their region. In central India the Mina ensured the safe passage of the rajah’s treasure convoys. The Ramosi protected villages in the vicinity of Bombay.
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Thus a kind of political economy of banditry emerged that was characterized more by symbiosis than parasitism.