Vietnamese Reminisce the 1979 War With China

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David Stout, The Last Time China Got Into a Fight With Vietnam, It Was a Disaster. Time, May 15, 2014.time.com/#100417/china-vietnam-sino-vietnamese-war-south-china-sea/

five consecutive paragraphs:

“In the winter of 1978, when Deng Xiaoping made his threat of a ‘lesson,’ more than 80,000 Chinese troops were sent across the border into Vietnam. Chinese Deputy Defense Minister Su Yu boasted of being able to take Hanoi in a week, but the untested and under-equipped People’s Liberation Army (PLA) met fierce resistance from battle hardened Vietnamese forces deployed across the frontier’s limestone karsts. The Chinese were slaughtered by local militia from positions that had been utilized for centuries against invaders from the north.

“‘More Chinese soldiers were getting killed because they were fighting like it was the old times,’ says Vietnamese veteran Nguyen Huu Hung, who witnessed the PLA’s human waves being mown down near the city of Lang Son. ‘They were in lines and just keep moving ahead … they didn’t run away.’

“It would take just six weeks for Beijing to call off its ‘self-defensive counteroffensive.’ Teaching the Vietnamese a lesson turned out to be a costly affair. Official casualty statistics have never been released by either Beijing or Hanoi; however, analysts have estimate that as many as 50,000 soldiers died during the confrontation.

“‘I heard that [China] said they wanted to teach Vietnam a lesson, but I can’t see what the lesson was,’ says Hung. ‘Our job was to fight against them. But the losses [of Vietnamese lives], to be honest, were huge.’” (brackets in Time report]

“When the Chinese began their pullout in early March, the retreating troops implemented a barbaric scorched-earth policy. Every standing structure in their path was destroyed. Any livestock they encountered were killed. Bitterness was sown.