A legend passes on Vietnam appropriately announced on Saturday that a national funeral, which is the highest honour, higher even than a state funeral, would be held for the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, who died aged 102 on Friday. The independence hero’s body would lie in state at the national funeral house in Hanoi on October 12 before being buried the next day. The Central Committee of the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party has decided to declare two days of national mourning for the revolutionary icon, during which the national flag will fly at half-mast from October 11-13. The news of the General’s death on Friday evoked an outpouring of grief and tributes online. General Giap will be interred in his native Quang Binh province. He is survived by his wife and four children. Anyone old enough to remember the Vietnam war cannot have escaped the reverence and awe the General was held in by his supporters and enemies respectively. Starting life as a history teacher, Giap was soon imbued with nationalist sentiment sweeping his country and the world at the turn of the twentieth century. He soon gravitated towards Marxism, and forged one of the most remarkable partnerships in revolutionary struggle with the great Ho Chi Minh, the leader and ultimate hero of Vietnam’s long road to freedom. Giap was self-taught in military matters, but was later to prove how much more brilliant that self-education was than anything any military academy anywhere could offer. Nationalist ferment in French-ruled Indochina (comprising Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) combined with the Marxist revolutionary doctrine Ho Chi Minh imbibed in his time in Europe and later the Soviet Union. Upon his return, he and other Marxists who later attained leadership positions and fame during Vietnam’s struggle for independence secretly founded the Indochinese Communist Party in Hong Kong1930, the forerunner of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The Party decided to prepare for and launch a guerrilla struggle against French colonial rule, an Enterprise that had barely got going by the time WW II broke out in 1939. The French having been badly defeated on home soil by Hitler’s invasion in 1940, partially retreated from former colonial possessions. The ‘vacuum’ thus created allowed the Japanese to conquer most of South East Asia, including Indochina. The struggle now became transformed into guerrilla warfare against the Japanese occupiers. By the time the Axis powers were finally defeated in 1945, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh guerrilla army set up by Giap were in a position to declare the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. The French colonialists, now revived and backed by the US, attempted to reconquer Indochina. Giap’s brilliant strategy and tactics, culminating in the historic defeat of the French in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 proved the death knell of French rule. The following conference in Geneva decided the two warring sides would disengage by the Viet Minh retreating north and the French leaving through the south. A ‘temporary’ demilitarized zone was drawn midway up the country to allow this disengagement, with elections to follow countrywide by 1956 to reunify the country. However, Washington’s holy crusade against communism persuaded it to tear up the Geneva Accords and sucked it incrementally into a fresh war in Vietnam, which only ended with the ignominious defeat of the superpower on April 30, 1975, when Saigon, the South’s capital, finally fell to the advancing forces of General Giap. Thus ended one of the most extraordinary struggles for independence in world history, a feat that took no less than 45 years and provided inspiration to generations of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist fighters worldwide. There are few figures in the twentieth century to compare with the extraordinary achievements of General Giap. The defeat of two of the mightiest western powers of their time is an unprecedented and unmatched feat. Unfortunately, despite his iconic status and popularity, General Giap and his generation of revolutionaries did not fit into the new zeitgeist of the country’s increasingly pragmatic leadership which, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the socialist bloc, trimmed its sails to the exigencies of cohabiting with an overwhelmingly capitalist world in which only three countries survived as socialist countries: Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea. By 1991 (the year of the Soviet Union’s collapse), Giap had officially retired from politics, having been eased out by powerful enemies (possibly jealous of his success and popularity) from the Politburo of the Party a decade earlier. Nevertheless, only Ho Chi Minh enjoys a stature above the independence struggle hero that was General Vo Nguyen Giap in the pantheon of revolutionary heroes of Vietnam, a status nothing, not even his later life political marginalization, can ever change. Rest in peace, General, a salute to your memory.