The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

70 THOMAS A. BASS
then in Algeria. According to Trinquier, revolutionaries prevail
not because they win their wars, but because the politicians
sell out the military at precisely the moment when it is winning
the war. If this complaint sounds familiar, it would become the
leitmotiv for many American military men who embraced this
view after their own failure in Vietnam.
In the late 1940s, Trinquier was assigned what Bernard
Fall calls “the difficult task of clearing Vietminh elements out
of the swamps and rice paddies surrounding Saigon.” Trinquier
was later put in charge of arming Vietnamese Montagnards
and other tribal groups who would be parachuted
clandestinely behind enemy lines. Supplied by the Americans,
who greatly admired this industrious soldier and his secret operation,
Major Trinquier had as many as thirty thousand men
under his command when “the regrettable Dien Bien Phu incident,”
as he calls it, put an end to the First Indochina War. The
Americans pulled the plug on Trinquier’s clandestine forces, and
many of his twenty thousand troops were ferreted out by the
Communists and killed.
During the Vietnam fighting, Trinquier developed his theory
of modern warfare. According to him, Vietnam’s revolutionary
conflict was the world’s first modern war because it
involved a battle for the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese
people. Winning the allegiance of the civilian population was a
military objective as great as winning set-piece battles. A revolutionary
force seeking to prevail in modern warfare will employ
an “interlocking system of actions—political, economic,
psychological, military—that aims at the overthrow of the established
authority in a country and its replacement by another
regime.” Given the totality of these methods, an army trying to
suppress a revolutionary force must adopt its own panoply of
modern techniques. It will operate with small, mobile teams
of commandos and clandestine forces. It will employ torture. It
will force the relocation of civilian populations into armed