Morale of the Vietnamese

While it is true that Vietnam had dictatorships and that there were very common cases of summary executions by EVN officials, the Vietnamese had a great desire to win and have faith in their sacrifices. An example of this is the testimony given by Duong Thi Xuan Quy crossing Highway 9 at the end of the Ho Chi Minh.

My skin is peeling and I’m exhausted … I went limp and it was six o’clock when I crossed Highway 9. The road was not wide, but we had to lighten the step to avoid attention from enemy planes. Suddenly there appeared before me, a curve blurred by the summer sun, strewn with pebbles. However it seemed intact enough. So I crossed Highway 9, a path whose memory is perpetuated in the history of our heroic people.

Another example of industry without despair, is the people of North Vietnam after the bombings, had nothing to envy the famous British. A community member recounted as follows:

Since the bombing began “Operation Rolling Thunder,” the whole North, except Hanoi and Haiphong had suffered air attacks of all kinds: napalm; white phosphorus; land mines; high explosives and defoliants. Every bridge, every fork, every station, every factory had been attacked, rebuilt, camouflaged, attacked again, moved and rebuilt again.
Men from the jungle to temperate regions may find it a hostile place, a friend of his enemies, as they believed the British in Burma during the World War.

The Vietnamese were feeding on snakes, rats, lizards and when they were lucky, rice, which is why when food went missing from the forest they could survive without their morals and resisted when those stole from the base. That was something that had been experienced by the French Column Alessandri in his painful march to China when U.S. planes dropped food for them.