The Viet Cong Strategy Against the United States Military

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The Viet Cong had a well developed strategy which the world would see employed in the decades after the Viet Nam war in every major conflict. The Vietnamese had a long standing history of the French occupying Vietnam since the mid 1800s which helped the Vietnamese to get an understanding of guerrilla tactics which would become the key to beating the US in the 1960s.

The Vietnamese honed their skills and developed their strategies and tactics over the decades prior to the Vietnam war against the French, culminating in the French defeat to the Viet Minh’s during the siege of Din Bin Phu.

Din Bin Phu had been surrounded by the Viet Minh and it was attacked perpetually until the French finally surrendered. It was at Din Bin Phu that the Vietnamese had learned how they could take their small scale guerrilla forces and mass them up to perform a large operational group to strike at a superior force, then break the guerrilla units back into their small scale to integrate back into the population or into the regular army.

The Vietnamese perfected a few strategies which would frustrate the US for the entire war. One frustrating tactic was the ability of the Vietminh to quickly adapt and disburse when they were spotted.

The Vietminh’s agility showed that even the quick mobility of the air cavalry could be countered by being nimble and able to pickup and go quickly and silently into the night. This elusiveness had the effect of making the Viet Cong seem like the invisible enemy and it was extremely demoralizing for the US troops.

Second, swarms of soldiers would charge relentlessly at American positions during attacks. Wave after wave of soldiers that utilized the same bonsai type strategy the Japanese had in WWII, would start with a whistle and a full charge from the Vietnamese.

The sheer number of troops that they would throw into the charges had the hope of swarming the US to get as close enough to them so that they couldn’t call in their air support. This strategy was to mitigate the effect of the American air power and artillery — making it so the US would need to call down air strikes on their own position in order to get any support and if they did that then they were raining hell down on their own people.

Third, the Viet Cong blended in with the Southern Vietnamese people and the guerilla fighters pretended to be regular citizens, and often were civilians moonlighting as guerrillas. This covert strategy made it impossible to tell who the enemy was and who the civilians were and it caused a great deal of ongoing stress for the Americans as they were constantly under pressure from small arms fire and sniper fire but never really aware of where it was coming and when.

Fourth, the Vietnamese also got very good at setting brutal booby traps which would take a few soldiers out if someone recklessly kicked a can that was actually a bomb etc. One of the booby trap strategies that the Viet Cong used were to use stakes that were covered in manure as skin piercing weapons. As the trap was set off a spike would hit a target from a tree causing them a seemingly minor wound.

The spike would pierce the skin but, because there was manure on the spear tip it would inject them with manure and it would very quickly cause that American Soldier to go into shock from sepsis.

If that soldier happened to be in the Jungle when that happened then and if they were in the jungle when they got wounded chances are they wouldn’t live. Sepsis killed soldiers very quickly and it was near impossible to get out of the body once it was in there.

Aside from that the Viet Cong also made very good use of underground tunnel systems that were designed for people their size which made the tunnels extremely hard for the US soldiers to go into due to the US soldiers being on average so much larger than the Vietnamese.

The US military would have to bring in special undersized American soldiers to go through the tunnels to try to clear them out. The Vietnamese got very good at booby trapping their tunnels as well so often the Tunnel Rat would find himself in a very compromises state either because of a trip wire, or well placed poisonous bamboo snakes which were extremely deadly and would kill a GI quite fast considering their tiny size.

The tunnels system was part of a larger network of makeshift roads called the Ho Chi Minh trail. The Ho Chi Minh trail was how the North Vietnamese funneled men and supplies into South Vietnam safely. The trail started up around Hanoi and weaved through the Cambodian border which the US was not able to engage the enemy within Cambodia.

The trail made it challenge to cut off Viet Cong supply chains that were bound for the South and the flexibility of the trail made it non-permanent and hard to track where the supplies were going when suddenly a segment of the trail would stop being used in favor of another hidden segment either under ground or a few kilometers to the east. They mastered the art of logistic supply despite not having the technology that the US had.

The Viet Cong would use ambush tactics where they would only engage the US in short quick fire fights that didn’t last long but were designed as ambushes to strike a few casualties and then extricate before the air support came in to decimate them.

The Viet Cong style of fighting was very demoralizing for the US, as they had to be on guard at all times but would still take a few casualties periodically while being unable to inflict damage back to their attackers.

The US troops were perpetually peppered in small arms fire during these small skirmishes. The US had a hard time getting the VC to commit to large scale battles that did not somehow favor the VC. When they did engage in large scale conflict the US only had mixed success. They always got a larger casualty count but failed to route the Vietnamese. In either case, the demoralizing nature of the battle of attrition made it seem like an unwinnable war which soured the troops as they felt like they were sent to hell to fight a war no one understood or wanted.

The VC capitalized on that demoralized soldier mentality which created pressure to send the troops back home . In the end the VC realized that the Americans were a foreigner and that there would only be so long that the American people would tolerate the expensive foreign war which is what they decided to do, was wait them out until the people called for an end to the war.

The Viet Cong’s ‘wait them out’ strategy became perfected over the next few decades as the Middle East adopted the strategies of the Vietnamese and the Afghanistan’s drove the Soviet’s out using the same strategies. The ‘wait them out’ strategy became a cornerstone for undeveloped/undersupplied small scale militaries so that they could fight large technologically superior forces and win.