Grab Their Belts to Fight Them: The Viet Cong's Big-Unit War Against the U.S., 1965-1966

In 1965, despite pronounced disadvantages in firepower and mobility, the Communist Vietnamese endeavored to crush South Vietnam and expel the American military with a strategy for a quick and decisive victory predicated not on guerrilla but big-unit war. Warren Wilkins chronicles the formation, development, and participation of the Viet Cong in the opening phase of the big-unit war and shows how the failure of that strategy profoundly influenced the decision to launch the Tet Offensive. Unlike most books on the war, this one provides an authentic account from the Communist perspective, with the author drawing on memoirs, unit histories, and battlefield studies to reconstruct the formation and deployment of major military units, battles and campaigns, and the strategic debates that informed the big unit war.

Published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army