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coast of Annam and in Cochinchina would also be developed.
    After Pac Bo, Giap returned to the daunting task of building up military and political forces among the Montagnard peoples, learning as he went. In his own mind, building up a way of thinking among the villagers and instilling in them a profound commitment to the cause formed the bedrock of military training. He learned, in short, how to build up “revolutionary consciousness.” He became, writes Douglas Pike,
    extremely well skilled in the art of gaining access to the enemy’s sources of supply and in knowing how to make do when such war materiel was unavailable. He learned how to move men and supplies around a battlefield far faster than anyone had a right to expect. . . . He and his cadres learned the importance of advertising the guerrilla’s cause and of creating the proper image. Finally, he learned how best to work with villagers without being betrayed by them. . . . Giap . . . knew he needed something far more sophisticated than a simple combat force, so he sought . . . [a] military mechanism that would place a premium on organization and motivation and thus harness social pressure, the strongest force in any society. 8
    Even at this early stage, when his thinking on the relationship between political mobilization work and armed forces was inchoate, Giap seems to have been convinced that the Revolution’s success would require the formation of several types of armed units, both permanent and mobile and part-time and local, and a flexible, yet responsive apparatus for coordinating their operations. It would take several years of trial and error to establish the proper relationships between guerrilla units, propaganda teams, and the traditional regular forces of an infantry army. In practice, it happened that the roles of these varied types overlapped considerably, but with remarkably little friction among commanders of the different tiers of the military forces.
    In Giap’s thinking from the early 1940s on, the relationship between military work and political work was understood to be symbiotic. Giap and his ever-growing number of young cadres and guerrilla units establishedvillage and district chapters of Quu Quocs or “mass salvation associations.” These civilian organizations were composed of various segments of society that shared a particular function, activity, or gender—for example, farmers, factory workers, women, or students who met regularly to participate in group consciousness raising sessions led by Party members, to plan community improvement projects, and to demonstrate against French legislation or repressive treatment. The associations were also recruiting organizations, encouraging the reluctant to become directly involved in such tasks as gathering intelligence, joining guerrila units, or digging trenches and tunnels in fortified villages.
    The mass salvation associations were formed in this way: Giap’s cadres began by entering a village and befriending a few young men who were already keenly interested in the resistance movement. The cadres then presented a cogent critique of colonial exploitation and explained the revolutionary Vietminh program designed to liberate the nation from French and Japanese oppression. Soon thereafter, village salvation associations were introduced, along with liberation committees consisting of sympathetic village elders and committed local sympathizers. The committees bore responsibility for administering village civil and legal affairs and improvement projects. Giap described the process of creating the overarching revolutionary administration as follows:
    A duality of power came into being in nearly all the localities where the Party had its branches. Village authorities sided with the revolution, became members of organizations for national salvation and, in whatever they did, Vietminh committees were consulted beforehand. In reality our own administration already dealt with