North Viet Nam: Profile of the Infiltrators

It was in the autumn of 1965 that North Viet Nam for the first time committed the soldiers of its regular army to battle in the war in South Viet Nam. Since that bloody debut in the la Drang Valley, which cost Hanoi 2,000 men, North Vietnamese troops have marched southward in such numbers that there are now 67,000 below the DMZ—more than half the Communists' main force and doing far more than half of the enemy's fighting in South Viet Nam. Initially, the allies knew very little about their new antagonists beyond the mute evidence on the battlefields. Today a great deal is known, painstakingly pieced together from interrogations of the 1,700 NVA soldiers captured and the 250 who have defected over the past two years, and augmented by the tons of Communist documents unearthed since la Drang. With that knowledge, it is possible to compile a profile of the infiltrators.

Formidable Adversary. The typical NVA soldier sent on the long trek to the South is a young Buddhist bachelor with the equivalence of a seventh-grade education. He is likely to come from a poor farm family in the rice-growing coastal lowlands, most often the Panhandle provinces directly above the DMZ. He is 21 and a draftee—a status reflecting the manpower strains that brought on North Viet Nam's full military mobilization in mid-1966. Only two years ago, the average North Vietnamese regular in the South was a 23-year-old volunteer. Even so, the 1968 infiltrator remains well motivated, trained, armed and led. Says Lieut. General Bruce Palmer, Deputy Commander of the U.S. Army in Viet Nam: "He is a formidable adversary and as good as any soldier I've come up against."

The southbound NVA infantryman, customarily headed for an organized North Vietnamese unit but sometimes also for duty as a replacement in decimated Viet Cong ranks, is drilled night and day in the patriotic mission he has been given. "My heart is filled with joy and with an intense love for our kinsmen," one NVA wrote in his diary upon crossing the DMZ into South Viet Nam. The aim of such saturation indoctrination is to try to ensure that NVA recruits are "politically reliable."

As an additional precaution, nearly 80% of the North Vietnamese soldiers now sent South are members of the Lao Dong (Communist Party) or its labor youth affiliates—almost double the number of card-carrying troopers three years ago. Between propaganda drumbeats, the recruits practice marching with rock-filled rucksacks to ready them for the 73-lb. burden of gear and ammunition each must carry for as long as six months down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Banjo-and-songfests brighten recruit training, and each squad gets a regular issue of a deck of cards—with the stern warning that it is not to be used for gambling.