That is simply not true. Please read the Boston Manifesto, starting on page 99 and you will see that the NVA were pouring into the South before 1965. It is well-documented based on North Vietnam's account of the war. I suggest you become better informed before debating the "facts" with me. I spent a year in country (in I Corps) and eight months off the coast.
"According to General Bam, the decision to unleash an armed revolt against the Saigon government was taken by a North Vietnamese communist party plenum in 1959. This was a year before the National Liberation Front was set up in South Vietnam. The aim, General Bam added, was “to reunite the country.” So much for that myth that the Vietcong was an autonomous southern force which spontaneously decided to rise against the oppression of the Diem regime And General Bam should know. As a result of the decision, he was given the job of opening up an infiltration trail in the south."
" After years of being deceived by Hanoi, after the war even the mainstream American media like the Washington Post acknowledged that the critics had in fact been wrong during the war. Consider this excerpt from a 1985 Post account of the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”: "
"According to an account published in Hanoi’s monthly Vietnam Courier in May 1984, the project to build “a special military communication line to send supplies to therevolution in the south and create conditions for its development” was launched in strict secrecy on May 19, 1959— the 69th birthday of then-president Ho Chi Minh . . . . [T]he route was used to deliver the first northern arms shipment to guerrillas south of the 17th parallel in August 1959, five years before the Tonkin Gulf Resolution paved the way for U.S. entry into the Vietnam War."
"The postwar accounts thus make it clear that, contrary to Hanoi’s persistent denials during the war, that it was infiltrating men and arms into the south, North Vietnam was doing just that, and well before the first American combat troops arrived in 1965. . . . From an estimated 10,000 North Vietnamese troops in 1964, the number of regulars sent south climbed to more than 100,000 a year by 1966." Source: William Branigin, “Ho Chi Minh Trail Led to Saigon,” Washington Post, April 23, 1985, p. A21.
"Yet another senior Communist official to confirm this fact was Colonel Bui Tin, the North Vietnamese Army officer who accepted the South Vietnamese surrender on April 30, 1975, at the Presidential Palace in Saigon and later served as editor of Nhan Dan (“The People”), the Party daily in Hanoi. When asked in 1995: “Was the National Liberation Front an independent political movement of South Vietnamese?,” he replied: “No. It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960. We always said there was only one party/
Two years ago, the University Press of Kansas published an English translation of a massive official North Vietnamese history ofthe war under the title Victory in Vietnam. In his forward to this volume, University of Pennsylvania Professor William Duiker notes that “one of the most pernicious myths about the Vietnam War— that the insurgent movement in South Vietnam was essentially an autonomous one that possessed only limited ties to the regime in the North— has been definitively dispelled."
I should be more accurate. NVA cadre were in South VN from the time of the partition. However, other than the Central Highlands, they mainly operated in the I Corps area, and left the more important Delta to the locals. After Tet, when there were no more locals, they moved regular operational ground units (higher than battalion) further south.
Weren't we talking about supplying these bastards? And why are they being wined and dined in the White House tonight?