VIET NAM: We Are Strong and Stubborn

Its huge military force is well equipped, but stretched thin

The messages from Hanoi and Peking crackled with bellicosity. On July 4 the official Viet Nam news agency reported that a protest note had been delivered to the Chinese embassy, charging that Peking's forces had fired "hundreds of mortar shells" at two towns in Hoang Lien Son province. Two days later, Radio Hanoi reported that Chinese gunners had provoked an artillery duel, "causing dozens of casualties and destroying many houses." Peking responded in kind. On July 5 a protest note was sent to Viet Nam's embassy in the Chinese capital, accusing Hanoi of "incessant armed provocations" along the 480-mile border. Chinese newspapers claimed that in the past 14 months, Vietnamese soldiers were responsible for more than 2,000 such provocations and had killed, wounded or kidnaped 240 Chinese civilians.

Despite the escalating battle of communiqués, military analysts were doubtful that China was preparing another "punishing" incursion into Viet Nam, like the one that took place 17 months ago. But Hanoi is ready. Since that invasion, the Vietnamese government has engaged in the most massive mobilization effort in the country's war-clouded history. In the space of a year, Hanoi has doubled the size of its regular army to about 60 divisions of some 1 million men. With more than 2.6 million men under arms—many of them in a highly trained, combat-ready militia—Viet Nam has the third largest military force in the world.* Pulling most of its crack divisions out of Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia, Hanoi has massed 250,000 to 300,000 troops along its frontier with China. Another invasion by Peking, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach has warned, would lead to swift and humiliating defeat for the Chinese.

French Photojournalist Jean-Claude Labbé, who took the revealing pictures on these pages, found ample evidence of the military buildup during a recent 2½-month visit to Viet Nam. In Hanoi, Labbé photographed some of the capital's elaborate defenses, including the omnipresent antiaircraft missiles, as well as Viet Nam's first women paratroopers. For the first time, Hanoi's top leaders posed for an informal group portrait, which included Minister of Defense General Van Tien Dung, who forged Viet Nam's formidable new military machine. Traveling along Viet Nam's northern frontier, Labbé photographed army and navy patrols and some of the country's elite units on permanent border alert.

Almost everywhere, Labbé found evidence of the American pullout in 1975: a huge arsenal of U.S. warplanes, helicopters, tanks, guns and other matériel captured from the disintegrating South Vietnamese army and left behind by U.S. forces. Hanoi's high command has ingeniously combined its multinational matériel. Pilots trained in Moscow fly U.S. A-37 ground-attack jets and F-5 fighter-bombers. Airborne troops drop from Soviet transport planes wearing American parachutes. Chinese-made ships, donated by Peking during the Viet Nam War, have been equipped with new Soviet guns for patrol duty near the Chinese coast.