Viet Cong

The Viet Cong (VC) was an epithet and umbrella term to refer to the communist-led armed movement and united front organization in South Vietnam. In 1960, it was formally organized as the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, and conducted military operations under the name of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam (LASV). The movement fought under the direction of North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and United States governments during the Vietnam War. The organization had guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized and mobilized peasants in the territory the VC controlled. During the war, communist fighters and some anti-war activists claimed that the VC was an insurgency indigenous to the South that represented the legitimate rights of people in South Vietnam, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of North Vietnam. It was later conceded by the Vietnamese communist leadership that the movement was actually under the North Vietnamese political and military leadership, aiming to unify Vietnam under a communist rule. North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front (NLF) on December 20, 1960, at Tân Lập village in Tây Ninh Province to foment insurgency in the South. Many of the VC's core members were volunteer "regroupees", southern Viet Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accords (1954). Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the South along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The VC called for the unification of Vietnam and the overthrow of the American-backed South Vietnamese government. The VC's best-known action was the Tet Offensive, an assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese towns and cities in 1968, including an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The offensive...