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nearly all the people’s affairs. The inhabitants came to us for marriage registrations and to settle their land disputes. Orders were given by French . . . military authorities to set up guard posts in every village as defense measures against revolutionary activities. But unfortunately for them, there existed right in the village revolutionaries for whom both militiamen and villagers had sympathy. As a result, the majority of these guard posts did not yield their authors the expected results. In many localities they were turned into our own communication links or guard posts. 9
    During the war years, the network of salvation associations came into prominence first in the Viet Bac and later, farther south in Tonkinand along the coast of central Vietnam roughly from Nha Trang in the south to Danang in the north. In the south, they functioned essentially as underground clandestine groups because the French security forces were much stronger in Cochinchina, particularly around Saigon. The people who joined the salvation associations were not, technically speaking, part of the nation’s armed forces except in the sense that in Giap’s mind, as well as in that of the other Hanoi leadership, the army and the people “were one.”
    Every mass association was organized in a pyramidal structure: village associations elected one or two of their number to serve on district association committees; district associations elected members from their group to serve in provincial association committees, all the way up to the national level of the hierarchy. Each echelon had wide latitude to respond to issues and concerns within its territorial purview, but the national association issued general directives and policies down through the echelons, that is, from regional association to provincial, to district, and so forth. So it was that all the village associations were integrated into a national structure, controlled in the end by the Vietnamese League for National Salvation—in effect a governing body of all mass salvation organizations—tightly regulated by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
    The extent of each echelon’s authority in operating within the Communist political infrastructure is unclear, and in many cases there were redundancies of authority and overlapping responsibilities. Even today, the Vietnamese have never explained clearly the chain of command or the exact distribution of responsibilities within the mass salvation associations. The redundancy ensured smooth functioning even when association leaders were killed or captured.
    But the most important point to be made about the system was that it worked, and very well. The associations were responsive to changes in local areas and provided the senior leadership with excellent information on the ground throughout the country, enabling the central authorities to adapt their indoctrinational techniques and marching orders all the way down to the villages. It was an ingenious and highly effective system of political organization. And it was exceptionally resilient. 10
    Giap established his leadership skills in this work in the year between summer 1942 and summer 1943, when Uncle Ho was placed under arrest by Zhang Fakui in China because he was suspected of being a Communistoperative. During his imprisonment, he was able to communicate with the Party leadership only intermittently.
    It was sometime during 1943 that Giap received some devastating news. He had known that his beloved wife, Quang Thai, and her Communist operative sister, had been imprisoned in the French crackdown on the Communist party in 1939–1940, but he had been unable to contact them for more than two years. He now learned that his wife had died after suffering the tortures and depravations of a French prison. His sister-in-law had been summarily executed.
    The revolutionary political and military apparatus continued to grow impressively throughout 1943 and 1944. Personal loss only