Vietnamese general defeated France, U.S.
Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, whowas revered as a national hero, dies at 102.
hanoi, vietnam » Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant and ruthless commander who led a ragtag army of guerrillas to victory in Vietnam over first the French and then the Americans, died Friday. The last of the country’s old-guard revolutionaries was 102.
A national hero, Giap enjoyed a legacy second only to that of his mentor, founding president and independence leader Ho Chi Minh.
Giap died in a military hospital in the capital of Hanoi, where he had spent nearly four years because of illnesses, according to a government official and a person close to him. Both spoke on condition of ano- nymity before the death was announced in statecontrolled media.
Known as the “RedNapoleon,” Giap commanded guerrillaswhowore sandals made of car tires and lugged artillery piece by piece over mountains to encircle and crush the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The unlikely victory — still studied at military schools — led toVietnam’s independence and hastened the collapse of colonialism across Indochina and beyond.
Giap then defeated the U.S.-backed SouthVietnam government in April 1975, reuniting a country that had been split into communist and noncommunist states. He regularly accepted heavy combat losses to achieve his goals.
“No other wars for na- tional liberation were as fierce or caused as many losses as thiswar,” Giap told The Associated Press in 2005 — one of his last known interviews with foreign media on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the former South Vietnamese capital.
“But we still fought because for Vietnam, nothing is more precious than independence and freedom,” he said, repeating a famous quote by Ho Chi Minh.
Although widely revered in Vietnam, Giap was the nemesis of millions of South Vietnamese who fought alongside U.S. troops and fled their homeland after thewar, including the many anti-communist refugees who settled in the U.S.
Born Aug. 25, 1911, in central Vietnam’s Quang Binh province, Giap became active in politics in the 1920s and worked as a journalist before joining the Indochinese Communist Party. He was jailed briefly in 1930 for leading anti-French protests and later earned a law degree fromHanoiUniversity.
He fled French police in 1940 and met Ho Chi Minh in southwestern China before returning to rural northernVietnam to recruit guerrillas for theViet Minh, a forerunner to the southern insurgency later known as the Viet Cong.
During his time abroad, his wifewas arrested by the French and died in prison. He later remarried and had five children.
Giap never received any formal military training, joking that he attended the military academy “of the bush.”