Vietnam War Series

The Last Phoenix by Carl Douglass, 1997, Excerpts

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was neither a trail nor a highway; it was an engineering and human marvel. The Trail was a maze of twisting tracks, foot paths, and two lane packed clay surfaced roads filtering from North Viet Nam through Laos and Cambodia and into South Viet Nam. The system was started by the Viet Minh for use against the French. In mid 1972, it was a seemingly haphazard array of 12,500 miles of road with five long parallel routes and twenty-one axes in a thirty mile corridor.

The sides of The Trail were liberally dotted with thousands of identical foxholes made to the exact specifications of French manuals and with Vietnamese originated spider holes reinforced and camouflaged with sturdy lashed bamboo. The Trail and its contribution to the NVA war effort became the principle focus of attention and activity of US regular forces.

Thirty thousand NVA engineers, security forces, transportation soldiers, and antiaircraft battery crews, and a legion of Laotian peasant workers, originally built The Trail; and 300,000 more maintained the vital net of roadways with their equally important classrooms, political indoctrination centers, and support installations. Segments of the Trail were divided with permanent garrisons of necessary personnel. The communists worked under indescribably difficult conditions to build, repair, and to camouflage the Trail that was under continual bombardment from the United States Air Force as well as the grueling forces of nature.

Not the least of their problems was dealing with the terrible rain of death they suffered requiring the replacement of tens of thousands of workers. Between 1966 and 1968 the United States, in Operation Rolling Thunder, dropped 643,000 tons of bombs along the route killing an estimated 29,000 people, only two percent of whom were soldiers. No matter what the US did, the communists could always enlist more workers; and they did so without coercion, for the most part.