Vietnam’s military wary of China

Press, 2 July 1983, Page 16

Vietnam’s military wary of China

By

IAN MACDOWALL,

Asian editor for

Reuters in Lang Son, Vietnam

He’s fought the French, he’s fought the Americans, and now he’s fought the Chinese. Frankly, he says, he wasn’t too impressed by any of them. The French war was small stuff, he says. “We concluded the Americans were rich but not strong; and the Chinese were many but not strong.” In his shabby green denims, his bare feet thrust into rubber sandals, Colonel Doan no has no parade ground gloss to match that of his opposite numbers from St Cyr or West Point, but his views carry weight, for he holds senior rank in the Vietnamese army, arguably the best infantry force in the world and certainly the most battle-hardened. Colonel Do, now 55, first fought in the ranks of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh guerrillas to drive the French colonial troops from Vietnam. Then he led North Vietnamese regulars across the 17th parallel to fight the South Vietnamese and the half-million Americans sent to back them in the 19605. Today he commands frontier defence forces in Lang Son province, scene of a brief but bloody war with China in 1979 and of renewed clashes in April, this year. Each side accuses the other of continuing harassment and

espionage along the mountainous border.

The desultory Chinese shelling two months ago was viewed by Western diplomats in Hanoi as a mild demonstration that Peking would not let Vietnam go unpunished for its dry-season offensive against Chinese-backed guerrilla forces in Vietnamese-occupied Kampuchea. The attack was a pinprick compared with the invasion of February, 1979, two months after Vietnamese troops overthrew what Hanoi calls the genocidal Pol Pot Government in Kampuchea. A provincial official, Phi Long, told Reuters that the Chinese used 600,000 men in all in the attack, 200,000 of them in a thrust at the provincial capital, also called Lang Son. It took them 17 days to reach it, an advance of one kilometre a day — and they withdrew almost immediately after blowing up many public buildings. Mr Long said that the Chinese had lost 19,000 dead, the Vietnamese only a few hundred. Whether or not the casualty figures were so one-sided, foreign diplomats in Hanoi at the time generally agreed that the Chinese had taken a bloody nose in an operation which had been intended to teach Vietnam a lesson over its Kampuchean invasion.

Colonel Do said that the Chinese were maintaining harassment along the province’s 253 kilometres border in a war of nerves designed to maintain tension and sap Vietnam’s economy. He went further. “They have so many troops along the border they could launch an attack at any time. They are atively preparing to launch a large-scale war.” This claim is echoed by Vietnamese officials in Hanoi, where the Chinese Embassy dismisses it as absurd. West European embassies there are generally sceptical while one East European diplomat said the Vietnamese authorities were using the Chinese bogey to foster national solidarity. The truth is probably more complex. For 2000 years the target of repeated invasions from north or west, for centuries under Chinese domination, and for the past 40 years living almost continuously in a state of war, Vietnam is obsessed by the question of security. There is a striking parallel with Israel. Both modern states were forged in the crucible of war, both see themselves as surrounded by enemies or potential enemies, both have a vulnerable narrow waist between mountains and sea, both have citizen armies of formidable toughness and fighting experience and both have a super-power patron and armourer — the United States and the Soviet Union

respectively. Ultimately each trusts only in its own army as the shield of the nation. If the Chinese do strike again in Lang Son, Colonel Do is confident that his men can beat them off. He says that in the 1979 incursion the Chinese failed to deploy their heavy weapons property and relied upon traditional human wave tactics in which they took heavy losses. The few foreign visitors who have been given a tour of the defences say the Vietnamese are heavily dug in four miles back from the frontier and could put up a fierce resistance. The casual visitor, driving up the 160-kilo-metre road from Hanoi, sees little evidence however of a defence build-up. The narrow, winding road is not being widened to carry military supplies as is the corresponding road on the Chinese side. An airfield guarded by Sam-2 missiles lies well back from the border, with no aircraft visible. Another Sam battery crowns a hilltop nearer the border. A handful of army trucks and armoured personnel carriers are parked under camouflage by the roadside near the border where small outposts are dug on the reverse slopes of the limestone hills, shielded from Chinese fire. On a sunny Sunday afternoon all is peaceful, with conscripts wandering into Lang Son market to buy

sour plums for a few coppers from their scanty pay and the road busy only with peasant traffic. “There are things you cannot see,” Colonel Do replied with a smile when asked about the few visible signs of defence preparations. Perhaps the most potent of these invisible weapons is the fact that this is still a nation in arms. Few men have not been in guerrilla or regular service at some time, few families have not lost at least one close relative in the country's wars. Civilians, dress like soldiers, soldiers look as casual as civilians. Military camps in the area, simple huts of mud and wattle, look like higgledy-piggledy peasant villages — by design or by accident — and conscripts, mostly peasants themselves, till the nearby fields to supplement their pay and improve their rations. At Chi Lang Pass, a few kilometres from the border, a large roadside sign lists 52 battles fought nearby against Chinese invaders over the centuries. “The Chinese are crafty and dangerous,” Colonel Do said. “They always say they are friendly, but inside they are trying to destroy us.” If the colonel is right, and if the Chinese do attack again, the sons of Dien Bien Phu and of the Tet offensive are likely to give them one hell of a fight.