Vo Nguyen Giap, 1911–2013

Vo Nguyen Giap sent an estimated 1 million Vietnamese soldiers to their deaths over three decades of warfare, but was far from sentimental about that extraordinary toll. “Every minute hundreds of thousands of people die all over the world,” the military general nicknamed “Red Napoleon” once said. “The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.”

Giap was born to a “scholarly rice farmer” who fed his only son “a strong dosage of patriotic ideals,” said Bloomberg.com. He joined the Communist Party of Vietnam as a teenager, and after meeting Ho Chi Minh during a trip to China, was chosen in 1941 to lead the Viet Minh, the movement’s military wing fighting French colonial control. By the end of 1945, he had built it up from a ragtag group of 34 men to an army of 5,000.

Giap spent his long military career waging war “against better-supplied, better-equipped, and better-fed enemies,” said The Washington Post. He drove French colonists out of Vietnam in 1954 by executing a brutal, sustained attack on the French army stronghold at Dien Bien Phu. Giap had his troops haul weapons and supplies by hand through dense jungle and over mountain passes, so they could lay siege to the remote fortress for 55 days. The French surrender came at the price of tens of thousands of Vietnamese deaths, but it earned Giap “the status of a national legend.”

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That same “unwavering resolve” is what won Giap the Vietnam War, said Sen. John McCain in The Wall Street Journal. Giap and Ho Chi Minh were convinced that if hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese could be convinced to die for their country, even their most powerful enemies would tire of war. And so it went: Giap engineered the 1968 Tet Offensive, a “military disaster” in which tens of thousands of Vietcong died, and despite the rivers of blood he “persisted and prevailed.” America grew weary of the dying and withdrew its forces. “It’s hard to defend the morality of the strategy. But you can’t deny its success.”

Giap was removed from command before the end of the Vietnam War, said The New York Times, and became minister of defense—the first in a series of increasingly powerless, ceremonial positions. In his later years, he became an elder statesman and “avuncular host to foreign visitors to his villa in Hanoi.” His view of the U.S. softened as he urged his people to resist the “spread of Chinese influence” and to address the challenge of lingering poverty. “Our country is like an ill person who has suffered for a long time,” he said in 1989. “The countries around us made a lot of progress. We were at war.”