The Ho Chi Minh Trail
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The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War
Saigon will always be Saigon. Only airlines call it by its new name, Ho Chi Minh, and Old Uncle Ho deserves better than to have a temporary city name as his memorial. The Ho Chi Minh Trail is much more fitting. It is almost unmarked, flitting among trees and rivers and swamps. It is a memory burnt in the minds of those who live near as they lost and 40 years later continue to lose family to the unexploded spirits left so carelessly along the way.
Although great Vietnamese armies drifted South in its shadows, most of the trail was not really in Vietnam but in Laos and Cambodia. As the heart of the Vietnamese logistic system to supply the cadres and Viet Cong in the South, it snuck by the outside edge of Vietnam to hide from American bombers. It sort of worked, but it got pounded by every conceivable weapon except Nucs. Napalm, chemicals, thousand pounders, mines, and on and on. A generational tragedy but what part of that nightmare in Vietnam was not a tragedy
We were just in Cambodia's remote northeast province, Mondulkiri, on the border with Vietnam and the trip there brought back those war stories that as non combatants we could only wonder at people there. On a clear day, people claim they can still see the craters from the US bombs from one of the province's major hills that seems to have been a dump zone for unused ordinance. But it's inside the jungle that the menace lives today!
The Vietnam War and the Ho Chi Minh Trail
Its impact on Laos and Cambodia
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The Ho Chi Minh Trail
Not about familiar trails

The Ho Chi Minh Trail is not about our familiar trails. This is not a piste, the clear air in a European autumn. This is a series of suggestions of trails, or less clogged jungle, or no trails that only people who have lived in these areas for ever really know of. Sometimes, you walk through paddies or paddle through rivers. Or you traverse hills and villages. But for the Viets, they know these interconnecting links well. They accepted the hazards and terrors as the cost of their re-unification mission. We were just in My Son, My Lai and Hue and we have some sense of the dense forests and unfamiliar surroundings many young Americans have to deal with.
HCM's namesake was the underground superhighway that won the war. Everything came down from the north of Vietnam to the south. This included weapons, food, ammunitions, messages, intelligence reports and other things associated with the war. It was so effective that it brought victory to the North Vietnamese army in spite of tremendous help the South Vietnamese forces got from the United States.
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Series of footpaths
In heavy forests
Looking at the terrain of these still sparsely populated valleys of heavy forest with few clearings, the trail must have been in the same series of footpaths the local people use to go through the forests to get wood and food and find their pigs who are free range roamers. We trekked through some of the heavy forest between bamboos and vines and you can get forever get lost without local guides. I don't think the North Vietnamese were thinking of military engineering as some would call the trail now. They were transporting as they had always done whatever they had to on their backs, sometimes in hand carts, on oxen and even sleds. And these paths, though primitive were used often enough then. They were more clear then, although not from the air.
Initially, these paths were really just for North Vietnam military forces infiltration as supplies could easily be transported through the river system until the Americans patrolled these rivers (Apocalypse Now!) and so this trail became the pathway for re-supply as well as the place of R and R for the North Vietnamese forces while their enemy revelled in Pattaya or Pat Pong.
More books on the Ho Chi Minh trail
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The North Vietnamese Army was a People's Army
The Pathet Lao support
This trail really opened to become a major logistic highway when the Pathet Lao, the Laotion Communists, gave major support to the North Vietnamese army. The Pathet Lao knows the territory the trail uses through Laos.
We must also remember that the North Vietnamese Army was a people's army. Many worked in their fields and took care of their families most of the time but when needed to fight, they acted like the Americans in their 1770's independence struggle against the Brits. Put down the plough, pick up the gun! This included women and children, too. Everyone is a combatant.
At one time, the North Vietnamese, unknown to the Americans patrolling the rivers were transporting supplies by floating half filled drums which were then collected by nets at certain strategic points. Their army were the villagers so it was difficult to track those involved in the transport. Easier to find Columbian drug submarines but the same idea.
Another off and on success was the petroleum fuel pipeline assisted by small pumping stations that run from the port of Vinh in North Vietnam and then through Laos to supply the troops close to the Shau Valley in South Vietnam.
The Pathet Lao
And the Ho Chi Minh Trail
The Pathet Lao and the Ho Chi Minh Trail
What the Pathet Lao Did
- Drugs on the menu for Aussie tourists in Laos
- But everything changed in 1975 after the Laotian Civil War when the Pathet Lao ? the Laotian equivalent of Vietnam's Viet Cong ? came to power. "They rounded up all the local addicts and prostitutes and put them on two islands in the Nam Ngum ...
- The amazing life of Vang Pao
- The Hmong, while they had grudges against the Lao royal government whose powerbase was in the lowland areas of Laos, felt they had a better chance for autonomy under it than under the communist insurgency known as Pathet Lao. The Pathet Lao leadership ...
- Making Merit In Luang Prabang
- Freed of French colonial rule in 1953, Laos fell off the world map as it became mired in internal conflict and the power politics of the Cold War. In the north-east, the communist Pathet Lao movement aligned itself with Ho Chi Minh in neighbouring ...
- Hoy, 13 de febrero, en la historia
- 1973: el gobierno de Laos y el Pathet Lao firman un armisticio. 1974: en la Unión Soviética, el escritor ruso Alexander Solzhenitsin es expulsado de su país. 1975: incendio en la torre norte del World Trade Center. 1976: en España se inaugura la ...
The Hmongs
The Tribes Who Fought with the Americans
On the side of the Americans then were the Hmongs who went out of their way to get the Americans stranded in the jungles of the Ho Chi Minh trail. They took care of the wounded Americans and protected them from the Pathet Lao and the Vietnamese. The Hmongs saved many of them that afterwards, the United States government repatriated and helped them settle in the United States.
Read more about the Hmongs
And their protection of the Americans
- Fresno school named for Hmong leader Vang Pao
- The Laotian general inspired an unparalleled reverence among the ethnic Hmong he led during the Vietnam War and later helped to resettle throughout the United States. He died last year at age 81 in central California after battling pneumonia.
- The amazing life of Vang Pao
- Rosenblatt went on to become one of the main movers in the effort to relocate larger numbers of Hmong to the United States after the end of the Vietnam War?a matter by no means taken for granted at the time. Many in Washington thought the problems ...
- Still Secret After 30 Years?
- ... Union had supplied toxins made from a poisonous fungus to its Vietnamese and Laotian allies to use as a weapon against Hmong villagers who had sided with the United States during the Vietnam War and against anti-Vietnamese forces in Cambodia.
- Getting Away: Luang Prabang
- One of the darker periods in Luang Prabang's history was during the American war in Vietnam. US planes bombed Luang Prabang and virtually all of the rest of Laos, which was a Vietnamese ally. More bombs were dropped on Laos during the conflict than ...
The trail was supported by the villagers
And they just got more creative as the surveillance intensified
As the surveillance intensified, the North Vietnamese became more creative. They transported in the wee hours of the morning but also man-portered supplies in areas where surveillance was intense. Who would suspect a farmer carrying baskets of vegetables or fruits to the market? Who would suspect women or children carrying baskets of wood for fuel or cane for houses?
Our Vietnamese friend, whose seven brothers were killed in the Vietnam War, described how villages worked to make this happen: men, women and children all fired up by the same cause: to get South Vietnam back into the family. Some North Vietnamese friends were quite vocal about their complete mystification with their South Vietnamese brothers who did not want a united homeland. They have forgiveness for the Americans who they saw just as latter day French and equally bothersome, but they have difficulty giving these to their Southern countrymen.
More on the Vietnam War
A history we want to forget
The Ho Chi Minh Trail is still there
Many areas have been cleared for development

The trail is still there, remnants of a tragic war. Many areas have already been cleared for development and will soon be erased from the memory of the next generation. But if you walk along, slowly, the Ho Chi Min trail tells its tales of horror and death in the Whispers of the bamboo and the sighing of the breeze in the vines. Perhaps Ho's spirit lives more here than in the cities of the rejoined homeland.
Understand the Ho Chi Minh Trail Better
Read about the Vietnam War
Ho Chi Minh trail on Auctions
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News on the Ho Chi Minh Trail
Some developments in the trail
- The Best Defense: Reflections on Vietnam, 1964-65: Trying to get someone to ...
- But most reinforcements and materiel were coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and entering through the South Vietnam's northern provinces. I thought that the best use of American resources would be to block the Ho Chi Minh trail.
- ACTIVETRAVEL ASIA hosted Australian Motorcycle Travel group in Vietnam in Oct 2010
- ACTIVETRAVEL Indonesia (ATA) Own organised a team of Foreign Motorcyclists Taking This motorcycle destination in Ho Chi Minh Trail, Vietnam. This valuable venture ignited And even small Hanoi And yet wind up in Hoi An, Quang Nam state in Oct 20, 2010.
- Laos boosts tourist stops along Highway No. 9
- In an effort to persuade tourists to stay longer and spend more in Savannakhet provincial authorities are promoting new attractions, including the remains of a bombed out colonial-era French bank and tours of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which communist ...
- The amazing life of Vang Pao
- The famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply route from communist North Vietnam to the South, weaved its way inside and out of the territory of Laos. Interruption of the flow of supplies from Ho Chi Minh's regime in the north to their Viet Minh allies in ...
What people say of the Ho Chi Minh Trail
Interesting?
- The Best Defense: Reflections on Vietnam, 1964-65: Trying to get someone to ...
- But most reinforcements and materiel were coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and entering through the South Vietnam's northern provinces. I thought that the best use of American resources would be to block the Ho Chi Minh trail.
- ACTIVETRAVEL ASIA hosted Australian Motorcycle Travel group in Vietnam in Oct 2010
- ACTIVETRAVEL Indonesia (ATA) Own organised a team of Foreign Motorcyclists Taking This motorcycle destination in Ho Chi Minh Trail, Vietnam. This valuable venture ignited And even small Hanoi And yet wind up in Hoi An, Quang Nam state in Oct 20, 2010.
- Laos boosts tourist stops along Highway No. 9
- In an effort to persuade tourists to stay longer and spend more in Savannakhet provincial authorities are promoting new attractions, including the remains of a bombed out colonial-era French bank and tours of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which communist ...
- The amazing life of Vang Pao
- The famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply route from communist North Vietnam to the South, weaved its way inside and out of the territory of Laos. Interruption of the flow of supplies from Ho Chi Minh's regime in the north to their Viet Minh allies in ...
Lenses on the Vietnam War
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Walking the Ho Chi Minh Trail
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You are welcome to leave some comments
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Zut_Moon
Dec 2, 2011 @ 10:34 am | delete
- Very interesting lens.
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VKumar
Nov 29, 2011 @ 8:45 am | delete
- An educative and yet very enjoyable lens.
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aesta1
Dec 2, 2011 @ 8:49 am | delete
- Thank you so much.
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LaraineRose Nov 25, 2011 @ 2:07 am | delete
- I have always heard that this was a terrible war and now that I have looked at all the videos and information written here I do understand it better. I am so happy that those who survived may now be living a happier life. This lens deserves angel blessings.
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aesta1
Dec 2, 2011 @ 8:48 am | delete
- It was terrible but what war isn't?
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darciefrench
Nov 24, 2011 @ 9:37 pm | delete
- Ah, I always deeply enjoy your articles. I love how you describe locations like the Ho Chi Minh Trail with such passion and love. Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Trails always :)
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aesta1
Dec 2, 2011 @ 8:47 am | delete
- Thank you so much.
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KonaGirl
Nov 19, 2011 @ 9:18 pm | delete
- Aesta, my Cambodian friend, this was such a terrible time. It was terrible for us in the US as we lost our loved ones in a war we didn't believe in. It was a terrible time for the horrific conditions your people had to live through in your country as it was torn apart by war. In Hawaii, I saw many soldiers come in on R&R and listened to the horror stories. Many soldiers were damaged for life and cried in my arms. My own husband was damaged beyond comprehension. This is an amazing lens that you have created here. I believe it has taken great courage for you to do this. I am so glad that we have become friends through Squidoo and that you are alive and well these so many years later. I so love your sense of humor that you have manage to retain in spite of all of this. You are a brave soul, indeed. I am always so amaze with the eloquence with which you write about your country. You truly are deserving of the purple star. *Squid Angel Blessed*, my Cambodian friend, and I've added your link to My Squid Angel Wings to be featured in the "Travel & Places" neighborhood. Aloha!
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aesta1
Nov 20, 2011 @ 9:57 pm | delete
- Am happy to be considered Cambodian as we really love this country and have worked here for many years now. We worked in Vietnam, too, and our first counterpart in the Ministry of Education lost 7 brothers but they want to now forget all these and move on. Thank you for the blessing.
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traveller27 Nov 18, 2011 @ 11:21 am | delete
- Wonderful lens - blessed by a travelling angel.
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What twitterers say of the Ho chi Minh Trail
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- vakehil
- Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail (Paperback): Bury Us Upsid... http://t.co/nDWvkpPa
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- Laritafha
- Trolling for Guns on the Ho Chi Minh Trail: As the Vietnam war interdiction campaign spread to North Vietnam, La... http://t.co/QBjraTeH
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- Jenicemob
- Sparring With Charlie: When Christopher Hunt set off in search of Vietnam's notorious Ho Chi Minh Trail, he hard... http://t.co/8ZULIwBp
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- ladylight518
- OH: I have never heard the Ho Chi Minh Trail and fun in the same sentence
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- Colettexke
- Dragon NAM Ho Chi Minh Trail Viet Cong Scout "Linh" Action Figure: http://t.co/cSylrwts
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by aesta1
Hi there. I see a bit of goodness in everything. I see world events in the context of the great things that happen, not the niggly faults that hound us... more »
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