What was life like for NVA soldiers?

What was life like for NVA soldiers?

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It sucked. You marched from the north down the Ho Chi Minh trail under shitty conditions and dodging the occasional bombing raid. If you survived the trek south, you lived in the jungle 24/7 getting into running engagements with ARVN/US forces while having to maintain a balance between fighting hard and tactically withdrawing to avoid getting drawn into a straight slugfest. Occasionally you'd get involved in an actual offensive that may or may not go well. By the 70's thing would improve with time as more American units pulled out and you'd be fighting ARVN units that were generally of inferior fighting quality. You may participate in bigger offensives like the 1972 Easter Offensive that would make a few gains but still get stopped. Provided you have made it this far you would finally be able to take part in the final offensive in '75 and roll into Saigon. Odds are most of the guys who originally went south with you are now dead or maimed horribly. You'd then survive the next 10 years of retardation as Le Duan and his fuckbuddies drive Vietnam's economy straight into the ground and the country's intelligentsia jump ship. After that things finally come around and you can now enjoy good times. Eventually you will see western chain stores and McDonalds pop up and see US ships making port of calls in Vietnam again as the new century rolls around.

I'd recommend reading NVA/VC memoirs, they're pretty good reads and give some pretty great insight. While most are obviously very happy about the final victory average life for these guys sucked pretty fucking hard, and while they deny having PTSD they just tend to repress it or don't talk about it. I'd recommend Novel with No Name (and Paradise of the Blind for the after-story of the war) by Dương Thu Hương and The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh.

Also hot damn is Vietnam still using Pith Helmits and chicom rigs?

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>be nva soldier
>fight hard to keep motherland safe from capitalist piggu
>maimed for life, lost friends, psychologically traumatized
>but it's all worth it since we beat them in the end
>except that in a few years McDonalds invades us anyway

Damn man, that's sad.
War is truly a tragedy.

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Victorious.

Bumping this so I can add more content later.

Thats Beijing western piggu

Could you recommend some good NVA memoirs?

I always think of the NVA Commander interviewed in the Kens Burns series who talks about never being able to celebrate or be happy even when he had victories because he’d only think of the men he lost to win them.
Then after the war he felt like he had failed any of his soldiers whose bodies he hadn’t been able to find.

"A Vietcong Memoir" is a good one.

> is Vietnam still using Pith Helmits and chicom rigs?
Considering Vietnam is like China's Finland, it's probably on purpose.

That is an unusually fitting comparison.

Vietnamese people don't really hate Americans. They hate China and the Chinese more. Americans were only there for a few years. The Chinese have been their enemies for hundreds of years. This is why the Vietnamese people are quick to be friendly with the US again.

>Also hot damn is Vietnam still using Pith Helmits and chicom rigs?
For the last few years they've been working with military modernization.

Hot

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Also remainder that anybody who was anybody to the communists didn’t have to go.
Related to Le Duan or any of his cronies? Go take a vacation in the Soviet Union for a few years, only the poor rice farmers are sent to the south to be burned alive by napalm.

Vietnam's history is a real fucked up one.
Ho Chi Minh worked for the CIA during WWII to fight the Japs. He then fought a war with France with remnants of the Japanese army who had defected to join the Vietnamese army, gangsters, and had a history teacher with no formal military education lead them. This ultimately led to the the western world ordering Vietnam to hand over the Japanese advisors to be executed for war crimes. Ho Chi Minh told them to fuck themselves, and damaged relations with everyone. They win the war and have elections that are rigged by the US, ultimately putting Diem in power. The infamous Vietnam war begins and they fight the US, South Vietnam, Australia, and Korea. They end up winning, and then the Khmer Rouge start harassing them. They ultimately invade Cambodia, ending one of the worst genocides in recent history only to get a Chinese invasion. They are forced to use militias and whoever they can find to fight the Chinese, and they end up pushing China out despite being severely outnumbered and outgunned. Once that's done, they are denounced by the UN for ending the Cambodian genocide, and are ordered to put the Khmer Rouge back in power. They tell the UN to go fuck themselves, and have their already crippled economy attacked even further. Once the Soviets fall, China gains power. This leads to the US, Koreans and Japanese buddying up with Vietnam because they are currently the only nation willing to fight the Chinese in an open confrontation. Now they are on the brink of war again since China is trying to claim the South China Sea while the Koreans, Japanese, and Americans sell them high tech weaponry and arms.

Kind of a stretch to say they defeated the US. We did force them to sign a peace treaty after all. Which they then broke after a bit.

>We did force them to sign a peace treaty after all

it was the other way around, user

You missed 2 bits.
1) Ho liked America and based his policy on the American Revolution originally. He wanted an american style freedom for Vietnam. Sadly, the US sided with the French and so Ho became Comrade Ho and so went the country.
2) Giap himself said they were beaten after Tet. It was the US domestics that lost the war....

>2) Giap himself said they were beaten after Tet. It was the US domestics that lost the war....

no he didnt, thats just a bullshit revisionist rumor. giap didn't even run the offensive.

Vietnamese reservists and naval security guys still use Chicoms and pith helmets. Nowadays they are modernizing the mainline guys with Israeli-made firearms, soft armor, and PASGT knockoffs.

>Ho liked America and based his policy on the American Revolution originally. He wanted an american style freedom
Not true, HCM was a commited Communist from very early on, Hell he helped to start the French Communist party. What would probably would’ve happened would be a kind of Yugoslavia situation where Vietnam would’ve remained communist but outside of the PRC and the USSR’s influence (HCM never trusted Stalin or Mao).

An NVA soldier from the 33rd battalion that I met recently spoke of walking from north vietnam all the way to the south where his battalion went up against the Australians. He spoke of being hungry and carrying little more than a couple of balls of rice in his pockets for sustenance.

They are very busy on the weekends with all the take out orders and delivery's!

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Better than being ruled by the french

Uncle Ho was mostly a left nationalist though. He wanted Vietnam to be independent from the French. Communism and Lenin appealed to him because they were anti-imperialist.

short