Viet Cong 越南南方民族解放阵线

The Việt Cộng (( listen)) was the name given by Western sources to the National Liberation Front during the Vietnam War (1955-1975). The National Liberation Front was a political organization with its own army - People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF) - in South Vietnam and Cambodia, that fought the United States and South Vietnamese governments, eventually emerging on the winning side. It had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized peasants in the territory it controlled. Many soldiers were recruited in South Vietnam, but others were attached to the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), the regular North Vietnamese army. During the war, communists and anti-war spokesmen insisted the Việt Cộng was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of Hanoi. Although the terminology distinguishes northerners from the southerners, communist forces were under a single command structure set up in 1958.