SENIOR GENERAL VO NGUYEN GIAP REMEMBERS

Journal of Third World Studies, Fall 2003 by Currey, Cecil B

INTRODUCTION

I made my first trip to Viet Nam in 1988 and was fortunate enough to secure an interview with Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap. I had been teaching Viet Nam for some ten years before I received permission to go to that land. General Giap kindly let me interview him and later we corresponded. I told him on my second visit to Viet Nam a few months later that I planned to write his biography and he replied that he remembered me from our earlier meeting and expressed his pleasure that I planned to write about him for, he said, he wanted any book written in the West on his life to be done "with the honesty and seriousness of a good historian." I hope I fulfilled his desire.

It quickly became apparent that almost everything written in the West about Giap was riddled with errors. No one knew the name of his mother or father or the year of his birth or when he went off to school in Hue or why he was expelled or why he was sent to Lao Bao prison or how long he was an inmate there or how important journalism was to him or the name of his wife or who her family was or how many children Giap had or what happened to his eldest child or what happened to him after he fled north into China at the outbreak of World War II or how he organized the hill people into an anti-French cadre or what was the name of his first armed group or the name and occupation of his second wife-on and on and on.

There was little written on Giap in the West in any case. If one consults the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, one finds very little about Giap. Dissertations in Progress is no more rewarding. University Microfilms lists 520 studies on Vietnamese topics from 1940 to the present but only one focused to any extent on Giap. The Frenchman who fought with the Viet Minh, George Boudarel, has published a book entitled Giap!, but it has little text and is primarily a picture book. Robert J. O'Neill, an Australian, has given us two books: General Giap: Politician and Strategist and The Strategy of General Giap Since 1964, but their content is similar and they leave many questions unanswered. French speakers can peruse Gerard Le Quang, Giap: ou, la guerre du peuple and readers of Vietnamese can work through the pages of Huy Phong and Yen Anh, Nhan then huyen thoai Vo Nguyen Giap: hoa quang vay muon cho cuoc chien tuong tan. Yet most of us read neither French nor Vietnamese and the works of all these authors are now generally unavailable.

A retired British army brigadier general Peter MacDonald, published Giap: the Victor in Vietnam in 1993. It may well be the sorriest book I have ever read and I reviewed it as a work without redeeming historical, literary or biographical merit, riddled with errors, lacking understanding, and misleading in its text.

The late Douglas Pike, long a fixture at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, maintained an immense collection of documentary materials relating to Indochina, and in his writings, he occasionally focused on Giap. Time after time he supplied incorrect information about the man, which was then picked up by others and perpetuated in their writings.

That was the state of publications on Giap when my own Victory at any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam's Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap was published by Brassey's in 1997. It would have been published several years earlier save for the wrath of the estimable Douglas Pike. I had submitted the manuscript to the University of Kansas Press and the acquisitions editor was impressed, but, as is normal, sent it out for review. One of those to whom he sent it was Douglas Pike who did not like the fact that I had repeatedly corrected his writings. His reaction was to write that "this manuscript should not be published. If boiled down to article length it might have some small utility for high school students." So, of course, the University of Kansas refused to consider publishing my Giap manuscript.

Several years later it was picked up by Frank Margiotta, editor and publisher at Brassey's. It was published in hardback and paper. It was an AUSA book, and chosen by History Book Club. Published simultaneously in England, the London Times called it one of the two best books to appear there that year. It was nominated for a Pulitzer and won the President's Prize of the estimable Association of Third World Studies. It was widely and favorably reviewed. It was translated into Chinese, French, and Portuguese. I wonder if Doug Pike's reaction might possibly have been unprofessional?

My questions to Giap covered two legal sized sheets, and his answers filled twenty-three single-spaced legal sized pages. He answered my questions about his early life up to about the time of the battle of Dien Bien Phu. His wife, Dang Bich Ha, sent photographs of the general, of the both of them posing, of his children, of Giap with Ho Chi Minh. She also wrote me valuable information. Then there came a day when, in response to additional questions I posed to him, Giap refused to respond, despite his earlier willingness to do so. He inevitably had an excuse. He was "traveling," or attending "numerous ceremonies," or "celebrating historic anniversaries," or in mourning after the death of a brother. Giap finally gave only the terse explanation that he had already given me enough material and, in any case, the new questions had been "inspired by nonserious, even false and reactionary documents." The honeymoon was over. He never again responded to my efforts to contact him. Yet what he did tell me was enough to correct all previous efforts of authors who produced flawed books. His answers to my questions follow: