(4 Oct 2013) Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant and ruthless commander who led a guerilla army to victory over first the French and then the Americans, died on Friday.
The last of the country's old-guard revolutionaries was 102.
A national hero, Giap enjoyed a legacy second only to that of his mentor, founding president and independence leader Ho Chi Minh.
Giap died in a military hospital in the capital of Hanoi, where he had spent nearly four years because of illnesses, according to a government official and a person close to him.
Both spoke on condition of anonymity before the death was announced in state-controlled media.
Giap commanded guerrillas who wore sandals made of car tires and lugged artillery piece by piece over mountains to encircle and crush the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
The unlikely victory - still studied at military schools - led to Vietnam's independence and hastened the collapse of colonialism across Indochina and beyond.
Giap then defeated the US-backed South Vietnam government in April 1975, reuniting a country that had been split into communist and non-communist states.
He regularly accepted heavy combat losses to achieve his goals.
Giap remained sharp and well-versed in current events until he was admitted to hospital.
Well into his 90s, he entertained high profile visitors, including world leaders at his colonial-style home in Hanoi.
One of them was his former nemesis, the one-time US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara who visited in 1995.
They discussed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in which two US Navy destroyers were purportedly fired upon by North Vietnamese boats, giving the US Congress justification for escalating the war.
McNamara asked Giap what happened that night.
He replied: "absolutely nothing."
Although widely revered in Vietnam, Giap was the nemesis of millions of South Vietnamese who fought alongside US troops and fled their homeland after the war, including the many staunchly anti-communist refugees who settled in the United States.
Born August 25, 1911, in central Quang Binh province, Giap became active in politics in the 1920s and worked as a journalist before joining the Indochinese Communist Party.
He was jailed briefly in 1930 for leading anti-French protests and later earned a law degree from Hanoi University.
He fled French police in 1940 and met Ho Chi Minh in southwestern China before returning to rural areas of his homeland to recruit guerrillas for the Viet Minh, a forerunner to the southern insurgency later known as the Viet Cong.
During his time abroad, his wife was arrested by the French and died in prison.
He later remarried and had five children.
In 1944, Ho Chi Minh called on Giap to organise and lead guerrilla forces against Japanese invaders in World War II.
After Japan surrendered to Allied forces the next year, the Viet Minh continued their fight for independence from France.
Giap never received any formal military training, joking that he attended the military academy "of the bush."
At Dien Bien Phu, his Viet Minh army surprised elite French forces by surrounding them.
Digging miles of trenches, the Vietnamese dragged artillery over steep mountains and slowly closed in during the bloody, 56-day battle that ended with French surrender on May 7, 1954.
It was the final act that led to French withdrawal and the Geneva Accords that partitioned Vietnam into north and south in 1956.
It paved the way for war against Saigon and its US sponsors less than a decade later.
Against US forces with sophisticated weapons and B-52 bombers, Giap's guerrillas prevailed again.

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