Viet Cong

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Soldiers and civilians helped the war effort by taking supplies south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail (1959)

The Viet Cong (Vietnamese: Việt cộng ()), or National Liberation Front (NLF), was a political organization and army in South Vietnam and Cambodia that fought the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War (1959–1975), and emerged 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 Viet Cong was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of Hanoi. This allowed writers to distinguish northern communists from the southern communists. However, as it turned out, northerners and southerners were always under the same command structure.