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Secrets of the Viet Cong

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I am an experienced officer of the US military who has commanded battalions, regiments, divisions and Field Forces in several wars.I have been trained for operational/strategic level command at a variety of American and foreign training facilities.
When I read Secrets of The Viet Cong I was astonished at the in-depth knowledge of warfighting and military intelligence displayed by the author. He is obviously a well trained and experienced general officer of the highest professionalism.
Secrets of the Viet Cong is not only the most innovative and well researched book that I have read on the 2nd Indochina War, it is also a comprehensive guide book for maneuver warfighting and combat intelligence. The book is loaded with surprising revelations and extrapolated data that is of great use to anyone who truly wants to understand both the North Vietnamese Army and warfighting in general.
The author's discussion of NVA intelligence, especially the machinations of the B2 and B36 units, is enlightening. Only Secrets of the Viet Cong explains: the NVA system of Nomadding used for area control, the exotic NVA Maneuvering Forces Battle System, the strange NVA ambush and power raid tactical forms, the secrets of NVA logistics, and the NVA campaigns in Cambodia, China and Laos. The book also offers a complete explanation of NVA Operational Art.
Not only is Secrets of the Viet Cong of great value to professional soldiers, it is also a book which offers clear explanations of every key aspect of modern warfare. It is a classic book on war that anyone interestted in that subject should read.

This is definitely the most thorough book that I know of on Viet Cong tactics, doctrine, weapons, etc. Especially tactics. The section on the "prepared battlefield" is especially illuminating.

I am an avid reader of historical nonfiction and I greatly enjoy a book which is carefully researched. James McCoy's book, Secrets of the Viet Cong, is among the best I have read. Its twenty-four chapters, 550 pages and over 800 footnotes mark it as the leading book on the Vietnam War.
I realize that there are a few people who subscribe to the "popular wisdom" regarding the Vietnam War. Such people depend upon table top books, newspaper accounts and the incomplete works of Pike and others for their information. Their opinions are already shaped by an ignorant prejudice.
Many current (2004) ignorant American writers, historians and bibliographers continue to claim that the Viet Cong was separate from the North Vietnamese Army and criticize those of us who reject that spurious and false differentiation (see Moise's "Vietnam Bibliography" on the internet). Mr. McCoy was one of the first to point out the true state of affairs. Second Indochinese War intelligence expert Sedgwick D. Tourison has answered those modern but ignorant "Vietnam experts" with, "...As the war had escalated markedly in 1964, an escalation which was based on earlier decisions in Hanoi, it had been realized that the Liberation Army's headquarters...could no longer provide professional command of central Vietnam which the coming conflict would demand; operational control over that area passed to the PAVN (North Vietnamese Army) high command, although on paper everything in central Vietnam still referred to the Liberation Army and COSVN...for international reasons the (North Vietnamese) Politburo and the PAVN (NVA) needed to continue the facade that the war in southern Vietnam was a local civil war not directly tied to Hanoi...but all operational control had been passed to Hanoi by 1964." Although American forces continued to refer to the 5th, 7th and 9th NVA Divisions as well as the 81st, 82nd, 83rd and 84th NVA Logistics Groups as "Viet Cong," they were actually North Vietnamese Army units.
Mr. McCoy's book, is so well researched that it far outshines the more pedestrian works available. Secrets of the Viet Cong includes ten maps, over 100 drawings and graphics as well as 170 tables and charts. The sum total of the information included in that supplementary material is equivalent to another 200 pages of information.
Secrets of the Viet Cong should be read and re-read carefully in order to understand that it is a landmark volume of historical nonfiction. I carefully read the content of Mr. McCoy's book and examined it along four categories of analysis: the author, the content, the analysis of the content as presented by the author, and extrapolated conclusion drawn from the content by the author.
James McCoy is a well know author who has written twenty-seven nonfiction books on military science and espionage alone. Most of his books are sold on the internet and have been read by many military and intelligence officers, as well as history buffs and historical researchers. His clients order Mr. McCoy's books from all over the world. He is a recognized expert whose writing reflects detailed knowledge of, and experience with, his subject matter.
The content of Secrets of the Viet Cong is not confined to the well know historical facts which are repeated so endlessly in so many books on the Vietnam War. The book is loaded with information available nowhere else or in any other books. That is why a well known military web site in England has copied content from Secrets of the Viet Cong, word for word into their data base, including many of Mr. McCoy's original drawings.
Any reading of Mr. McCoy's books is an adventure of discovery which reveals facts and processes which have heretofore been ignored. Mr. McCoy has made that material available to professionals and amateurs alike, in a readable form.
Mr. McCoy has also analyzed the meaning of the information included in the content of his book. As a learned professional soldier and pragmatic researcher, his insights knit together the historical facts at hand into patterns of behavior and process which he explains in lucid prose. No important aspect of the issue at hand is ever ignored in any of Mr. Mccoy's books.
In Secrets of the Viet Cong, Mr. McCoy explains for the first time, exactly how the North Vietnamese Army was led and how its leaders thought out and executed their seemingly complex tactics, operational art and strategy. No other author comes near Mr. McCoy in that regard.
Secrets of the Viet Cong also affords another advantage missing from most historical nonfiction which merely regurgitates facts. Mr. McCoy extrapolates the available data and ties its sinews into coherent wholes, as inter-related processes which have rational reasons for their success or failure. Such extrapolation requires an indepth understanding and command of twentieth century military history. Any review of the other available books on the North Vietnamese Army/Viet Cong and the Vietnam War, will reveal just how important such extrapolation is to history.
Any reader who wants to understand the North Vietnamese Army and why it won the Second Indochina War, should read Secrets of the Viet Cong. Any reader who wants to understand why the US armed forces lost the 2nd Indochina War, should read Mr. McCoy's book. Any reader who seeks information, analysis and hostorical extrapolation found in no other book on the Vietnam War, should read Secrets of the Viet Cong.

I have read many hundreds of books on the Second Indochina War, or Vietnam War. Most of them are mediocre works which restate the same material ad nauseum.As a history buff I am constantly searching for new information and new explanations of oft repeated "historical" facts. I found all that I looked for in Secrets of the Viet Cong by James McCoy.
Secrets of the Viet Cong includes so many revelations of heretofor overlooked historical facts that I can only praise the work as one of the best researched history books extant.
There is information in Secrets of the Viet Cong that cannot be found in any other book on the Vietnam War. For example, I was shocked to learn that the semi-covert trail signs used by North Vietnamese Army units were duplicates of trail signs used by American Indians over a century earlier. I have never before read a more detailed, precise and complete description of all aspects of North Vietnamese Army war planning and war fighting at all levels. Mr. McCoy's explanations of the North Vietnamese Army's campaigns in Cambodia, China and Laos finally enable me to understand so much that other authors had ignored.
Mr. McCoy's gift of explaning his highly researched content no doubt results from his expert knowledge of warfare and especially the Vietnam War. Few modern historians share such abilities and command of the subject matter.
Why Secrets of the Viet Cong has been unhearalded is beyond me. It is the best, the classic work, on the Vietnam War. Perhaps the book is not advertised and well known because the author refuses to follow the official historical line concerning the Vietnam War. Mr. McCoy reveals information and analyzes that information well enough to actually contradict the established historical line. Whatever the reason, we history buffs need more books like Secrets of the Viet Cong and more writing like Mr. McCoy produces.
In any discussion about the Vietnam War, I refer to Secrets of the Viet Cong as my standard reference. It should be on every history buff's desk.

I have read most of the books written about the Second Indochina War or the Vietnam War. They range from twisted self-serving liberal tirades to serious, highly researched works of historical significance. Secrets of the Viet Cong by James McCoy, falls into that latter category.
I have read all the standard fare reflecting all the standard mediocre concepts and misunderstandings. But when I read Secrets of the Vietcong I was astounded by the breadth and depth of content. The research effort put into that book is matchless. No other book on the Second Indochina War is as complete or as rewarding in its exposition of real, hard facts.
I learned things from James McCoy that I had never even thought of before. He opened my eyes to facts and scenarios that no other historian has even mentioned. He promiseed to reveal Secrets of the Viet Cong and in the process he revealed secrets of many aspects of the 2nd Indochina war.
I never realized, for example, that the trail signs utilized as covert markers by the North Vietnamese Army were duplicates of many trail signs used by American Indians over a hundred years before. No one ever before explained how the Viet communists controlled South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia. Never before had I read an account of the wars of subjugation fought by the North Vietnamese against the Cambodians, Chinese and Laotians as antecedents of the 2nd Indochina War.Certainly no other author has explained how the North Vietnamese Army planned and fought its campaigns of conquest, the detail and precision of those explanations by Mr. McCoy are astounding.He is truly an expert!
I learned more from reading Secrets of the Vietcong than I learned from the sum total of all the hundreds of other books that I have read on the Vietnam War. We history buffs need more hard-hitting books like Secrets of the Viet Cong. Where are they? I am so sick of the mundane, lock step effluvia issued by so many pseudo-historical hacks.
Those readers who have the interest it takes to read a thick volume like Secrets of the Viet Cong will surely appreciate the diverse, well documented and sensational revelations contained in the book. I cannot emphasize enough just how much NEW information can be found in that book! Mr. McCoy includes material that no other historian or author even seems aware of. Why? Obviously Mr. Mccoy is a superior researcher and a decisve expert on the Vietnam War. His incisve explanations are valuable enough to make Secret of the Viet Cong cheap at $100.00 a copy. Why hasn't the work of this man, James McCoy, been advertised and recognized for its value to history?

As a retired intelligence officer, I read James McCoy's Secrets of the Viet Cong with great interest. As I read and re-read the book, I realized that in addition to its other achievements, Secrets of the Viet Cong is a detailed intelligence report on the North Vietnamese Army and the Second and Third Indochina wars. Mr. McCoy is undoubtedly a retired intelligence case officer. His clear explanation of North Vietnamese Army (NVA)maneuver warfare is enhanced by his clever analysis of a plethora of intelligence data on the NVA. Only experienced intelligence officers like Mr. McCoy, seem to understand that, for example, the Viet Cong and the NVA were the same thing, they were both North Vietnammese Army organizations or units. Many current and ignorant American writers, historians and bibliographers continue to claim that the Viet Cong was separate from the North Vietnamese Army. They stridently criticize those of us who reject that spurious and false differentiation (see Moise's "Vietnam Bibliography" on the internet). They subscribe to the theories of such writers as Pike who regularly include NVA communist propaganda in their books, which they pass off as verifiable facts. I am in agreement with Second Indochinese War intelligence expert Sedgwick D. Tourison who has answered those modern but ignorant "Vietnam experts" with contra evidence, including: "...As the war had escalated markedly in 1964, an escalation which was based on earlier decisions in Hanoi, it had been realized that the Liberation Army's headquarters...could no longer provide professional command of central Vietnam which the coming conflict would demand; operational control over that area passed to the PAVN (North Vietnamese Army) high command, although on paper everything in central Vietnam still referred to the Liberation Army and COSVN...for international reasons the (North Vietnamese) Politburo and the PAVN (NVA) needed to continue the facade that the war in southern Vietnam was a local civil war not directly tied to Hanoi...but all operational control had been passed to Hanoi by 1964." Although American forces continued to refer to the 5th, 7th and 9th NVA Divisions as well as the 81st, 82nd, 83rd and 84th NVA Logistics Groups as "Viet Cong," they were actually North Vietnamese Army units.

A very revealing work. Gives the anatomy of North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong units, as well as their operational applications. Discloses the broader regional political objectives of the North Vietnamese communists as it relates to subjugating Laos and Cambodia, and in doing so verifies the "domino theory" that so many critics of the war were quick to label as "fabricated." "Secrets" is a good military "X's and O's" of how a "just cause" was allowed to suffer from geopolitical naivete, and the ultimate price that was paid.

This book is an important, penetrating new study of the North Vietnamese Army/ Viet Cong. While discussing the successes and failures of an army that remains a national enemy of the United States, Secrets of The Viet Cong is an honest, thoroughly readable and lively critique of the clique that still rules the United States. The author demolishes for all time the invincibility myth assigned to the North Vietnamese, one of the American people's most presumptuous international enemies, by traitorous CIA policy makers. The work is at once a history lesson, a remarkable explication of the raison d'etre and functioning of the Vietnamese communist army, and a treasure trove of thoughts for dealing with such an enemy. (Naturally the first assumption of such thoughts is that the clique ruling a nation must be acting in the best interests of the taxpayers of that nation.)
This book deserves to be thoughtfully meditated upon by all who are interested in the conduct of a victorious war. Policy makers cannot ignore the kind of intuitive, rigorous analysis this book offers without diminishing America's chances to win the next war. The man who wrote Secrets of The Viet Cong is a member of that small class of hard, talented, capable and victory oriented analysts who are no longer present in the policy making, armed services and intelligence agencies of the United States.

The book, SECRETS OF THE VIET CONG, has been very useful to me in understanding the current war against terrorism.Just as the current Muslim Jihad is actually the beginning of World War IV, if you count the Cold War as World War III, so was the international war fought by the Vietnamese communist imperialists. The same amateurism, incompetence and misunderstanding of war, reflected by Vietnam era generals as described by James McCoy, is still the norm of behavior for most American generals in 2004. The outright sabotage of the Vietnam War effort by the essentially left wing Central Intelligence Agency in Vietnam, is now happening in Iraq. Now, as before, the CIA will stoop to nothing to discredit and nullify the efforts of its major adversary, the US Army's intelligence structure. James McCoy recounts the victories of the communist enemy in Vietnam as the inevitable consequence of the incompetence and sabotage by American generals and the CIA. Mr. McCoy recognizes that the Viet Cong/NVA were not fantastic wariors, they were just pitted against an American war machine that was hobbled by the weaknesses of the men controlling the war, such as the terribly incompetent Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.The men now controlling the "war against terror," with the exception of Rumsfeldt, include in their ranks even more traitors and incompetents than were present during the Vietnam War. The role of the US media in causing the defeat of America in Vietnam, is addresssed by Mr. McCoy. Now, as then, the leftist US media is sabotaging the US war against an even more dangerous enemy. Incompetent people are ignorant of, and misunderstand, the lessons of history. Read SECRETS OF THE VIET CONG and begin to view reality clearly, not thriough the distorted prism of the monolithic and traitorous American left wing.

As a person who was in a position to directly know about what has been written in Secrets of the Viet Cong, I am here to testify that both the facts reported and the conclusions drawn in the book are impeccably accurate. The author has provided the gritty authenticity that only truth can provide. He has written his book with a narrative pace that rivals the very best thrillers. The messages of Secrets of the Viet Cong are certsainly too chilling to be ignored.I refer to the book frequently in my discussions of various aspects of the Second Indochina War. Please pay particular attention to the author's discussions of North Vietnamese Army intelligence, tactics and operational art, the Nomadding Concept, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail.