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.

Rigors & Rest. The initial training of recruits in North Viet Nam seems to have declined in quality, therefore the new arrivals now get several weeks of further drilling in the South. The month of training also provides a usually much-needed rest from the rigors of the mountainous trail, where the infiltrators claim to be harassed almost equally by the attacks of U.S. jets and malarial mosquitoes. During the respite, political cadres continue hammering home their points, one of which significantly changed: the soldiers are no longer told that they are going to liberate the South, but that they must fight to prevent an invasion of the North.

For men who know they have been sent south for good until the war is over, defending the homeland presumably does more for morale than attempting what now looks obviously impossible to any NVA private with half an eye: taking over South Viet Nam. Morale is chiefly bolstered, however, by the close brotherhood afforded by the NVA's universal system of three-man cells. Each trio of soldiers eats, sleeps and fights together. Yet this tight bond, broken only by death or desertion, is a prison as well as a home, since cellmates must also watch each other and report any sign of wavering.

Raw Bean Sprouts. NVA commanders billet their men in isolated areas both for safety and to keep them away from the local South Vietnamese, including girls. The isolation is not only good military tactics but also helps prevent incidents likely to alienate the local peasants--and the local Viet Cong. But regional prejudices persist nonetheless, and the energetic NVA often disdainfully refer to their more relaxed V.C. cohorts as gia song (raw bean sprouts), while the Southerners have their own scornful sobriquet for Northerners: ran muong (spinach). The friction seldom interferes with fighting, however; in fact, some North Vietnamese even desert to the V.C. in search of a less-disciplined military life. Real desertions to the allies are infrequent, but, as in all armies, there is a kind of internal desertion or malingering: the NVA calls it "desertion to the hammock."

The NVA's ability to stand and fight in the face of superior U.S. firepower has won wide respect among the allies. It is a stamina all the more remarkable in view of the NVA's chief weaknesses: a shortage of food and a woeful lack of battlefield medicines. Serious injury in battle almost certainly means death for a North Vietnamese in a climate where even superficial wounds fester rapidly. But despite U.S. bombing on the trail and the loss of some 40,000 men in battle in 1967, the North Vietnamese army managed through massive infiltration to increase the number of its men in the South by 10,000 last year. And back home, North Vietnamese Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap still has in his army 400,000 men who have never set foot in South Viet Nam.

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