"We Are Strong and Stubborn"

By Patricia Blake

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 communiques, 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 Labbe, who took the revealing pictures on these pages, found ample evidence of the military buildup during a recent 2 1/2-month visit to Viet Nam. In Hanoi, Labbe 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, Labbe photographed army and navy patrols and some of the country's elite units on permanent border alert.

Almost everywhere, Labbe found evidence of the American pullout in 1975: a huge arsenal of U.S. warplanes, helicopters, tanks, guns and other materiel captured from the disintegrating South Vietnamese army and left behind by U.S. forces. Hanoi's high command has ingeniously combined its multinational materiel. 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.

The Vietnamese are fond of boasting about their superiority over the Chinese forces, in spite of Peking's overwhelming numerical advantage. They like to point out that China's People's Liberation Army has more than 1 million men tied down on the Sino-Soviet border, while other P.L.A. troops are needed to maintain internal security. Hanoi ridicules China's aging MiG-17 and MiG-19 fighters as "toys" that the Vietnamese can easily shoot down. Hoang Tung, editor of the Vietnamese Communist Party daily Nhan Dan (The People), told Labbe: "We have a colossal army that has received ultra-modern arms from the U.S.S.R. We are strong and stubborn. The Chinese ought to think a million times before they attack us again, because we have never been so powerful and determined as we are now."

Western analysts are not so confident. Like the P.L.A., Hanoi's forces are stretched thin, with 200,000 troops in Cambodia and 40,000 in Laos. Preoccupied with the threat from the north, the Vietnamese have replaced seasoned troops in Cambodia with raw draftees from South Viet Nam. Numerous desertions from Vietnamese army ranks in Cambodia suggest that morale is low among Southern recruits, who lack enthusiasm for Hanoi's cause.

How well would the Vietnamese fare in a full-scale war with the P.L.A.? Man for man, experts believe, the Vietnamese would perform better than the Chinese, who have not fought a major war in 27 years. Says a U.S. analyst: "The regular armed forces are generally well led, well disciplined, well equipped and highly tenacious." China's large, antiquated fleet of fighter-bombers would be no match for Viet Nam's Soviet-supplied MiG-21 interceptors. In the past 18 months Hanoi has received 150 MiG-21s from Moscow. In addition, the Vietnamese air force has acquired a number of Soviet SU-22s--modern swing-wing fighters.

The 1.5 million-man Vietnamese militia and 70,000-man regional defense forces are still using captured U.S. arms, but regular units are equipped with Soviet weapons and ammunition. Moscow's aid, which the U.S. Defense Department estimates at $3 million a day, has furnished Hanoi with a wide range of sophisticated equipment, including radar, antisubmarine systems, two frigates and some submarines. The Soviets have also supplied a variety of antiaircraft weapons, including surface-to-air missiles.

Viet Nam's party boss Le Duan and Premier Pham Van Dong visited Moscow two weeks ago for a meeting with their Soviet counterparts, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin. Le Duan said that the solidarity of the two allies had given Viet Nam "new great strength" to face its problems, many of which were caused "by collusion between U.S.-led imperialism and Chinese expansionism." Brezhnev responded by agreeing that "China and the U.S. encourage each other in almost everything when it comes to abusing the will of the peoples of Indochina."

Interests of the two Communist allies do coincide, at least for the moment. Hanoi's defenses, as well as its offensive capabilities, depend upon continuing supplies from the U.S.S.R. and the assistance of an estimated 6,000 Soviet advisers based in Viet Nam. In exchange, Soviet reconnaissance planes land at Vietnamese airports and Soviet naval ships have refueling rights at U.S.-built ports at Danang and Cam Ranh Bay. For Hanoi, Soviet assistance is the key to maintaining its present strong position in Indochina. For Moscow, the partnership keeps China off-balance and helps the Soviets gain influence in all of Southeast Asia. But fiercely independent Viet Nam is no complaisant puppet. Some Western experts believe that Hanoi did not seek prior approval from Moscow before invading Cambodia in December 1978 to unseat the Pol Pot regime. They also think that if it came to a truly hard choice--accepting further Soviet aid at the cost of forsaking their own goals--the Vietnamese would bite the bullet, as it were, and go it alone.

--By Patricia Blake. Reported by Marsh Clark/Hong Kong and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington

* After China's 4.4 million regular army and several million paramilitary troops and the Soviet Union 4 million, and before America's 2.02 million.

With reporting by Marsh Clark, Gregory H. Wierzynski

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