IN HIS OWN WORDS

General Vo Nguyen Giap leading a council of war during the planning phase of the Dien Bien Phu campaign, 1953.


The most relevant statement I could find that is actually attributable to General Giap was uttered in a 1989 interview with Morley Safer, as excerpted in The Vietnam War: An Encyclopedia of Quotations by Howard Langer (Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 318):


"We paid a high price (during the Tet offensive) but so did you [Americans) . . . not only in lives and materiel . . . Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people . . . The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory . . ."


The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion.







. . . and that's about the last word I want to dedicate to the matter - we've already given more than enough free publicity to a guy whose uniform features red stars, sickles and hammers - S.L.



Friday Bird HERE


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VO NGUYEN GIAP - DISCLAIMER

A reader commented that I should have run the post on Giap (below) through SNOPES. He claims that this is an internet urban legend, that it's not true.

While this may or may not be the case, one thing is certain; SNOPES is not a reliable source of information for the purpose of critiquing accuracy - they have a decidedly liberal slant on how they present "facts".

Let me work it - my source said he checked SNOPES beforehand, and I've heard this quote somewhere else, somewhere reputable. I will do the homework; in the meantime even if this is not a direct quote, I believe this is quite accurate; that Giap said words to this effect.


More on Giap, and the Art of War:




Sun Tzu


Historically, there have been a number of military philosophers and practitioners who spoke not only of a physical plane of war but also of the political, economic, and psychological (also known as moral) planes of war. Whereas Sun Tzu outlined five fundamentals of war, including weather and terrain, he also rated politics – or the wider context within which war is fought – as the first fundamental. Further, he included in his maxims “. . . to win a hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.”




General Vo Nguyen Giap


Providing more contemporary currency to those notions, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant North Vietnamese battlefield tactician and strategist, said:

". . . for us, there is no such thing as a single strategy. Ours is always a synthesis – simultaneously diplomatic, military and political. Which is why, quite clearly, the Tet Offensive had multiple objectives . . . And that was our biggest victory: to change the ideas of the United States. The Tet Offensive had been directed primarily at the people of South Vietnam, but . . . it affected the people of the United States more. Until Tet they thought they could win the war, but now they knew they could not. President Johnson was forced to decrease military activity and start to discuss with us around the table of how to end the war."






Today's STORMBRINGER Bird HERE


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ATTENTION VIRUS WARNING

My Dad sends me every Urban Myth thats out there . . . I finally got him trained to confirm the stuff he distributes - this is Snopes confirmed, and it's just good situational awareness, even though it's from 2008:


Feel this worth passing along. With the holidays coming up, I can see where this could be a real problem.

The newest virus circulating is the UPS/Fed Ex/USPS Delivery Failure. You will receive an e-mail from UPS, Fed Ex, or USPS along with a packet number. It will say that they were unable to deliver a package sent to you on such-and-such a date. It then asks you to print out the invoice copy attached. DON'T TRY TO PRINT THIS - IT LAUNCHES THE VIRUS! Pass this warning on to all your PC operators at work and home. This virus has caused millions of dollars in damage in the past few days. Snopes confirms that it is real.

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/ups.asp



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