Vietnam’s legendary Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap dies

HANOI: General Vo Nguyen Giap, architect of Vietnam’s military victories over France and the United States, died on Friday, aged 102, family members said.
The general was one of Vietnam’s best known 20th century figures, ranked by historians among such military giants as Montgomery, Rommel and MacArthur.
The son of a peasant scholar, he was considered the mastermind of the historic defeat of the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and the communist victory over US-backed South Vietnam 21 years later.
He died Friday evening after several years in a Hanoi military hospital.
In a 2004 interview with Reuters in his spacious French villa in central Hanoi, the old warrior preached peace and said Vietnam’s independence wars were a “victory for colonized countries all over the world.” Giap recalled that on a visit to the United Nations in Geneva the previous year, he was handed a book to sign. “I wrote...and signed Vo Nguyen Giap, General of Peace.”
Born on Aug. 25, 1911, in central Vietnam, Giap was a close friend of the late revered president Ho Chi Minh and was held in high regard alongside former Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. But Giap’s critics and his nemesis, the late US General William C. Westmoreland, said he was effective partly because he was willing to sustain huge losses in pursuit of victory.