jopp loses the argument. in july of 1965 jopp launches an operation trying to cut south vietnam in half. he mounts an attack from the highlands region of south vietnam. this results in the famous battle of ijong. a lot of you have seen the movie "we were soldiers" we shows a stunning american north defeat. the north reassessed. they said perhaps phase three isn't the right thing to do. they back away from phase three from conventional warfare and they decide for a while jopp wins the internal debate about how to prosecute this war. as u.s. troops strength rised in 1965, the communist decide, we'll go back to protracting the war. we'll concentrate our attacks and we'll fight them some but we'll fight on the periphery, we won't go for the big battle. this only lasts a while. the north vietnamese assess here again. when they're assessing they actually do a very good job of identifying what we plan to do. they assess the united states strategy very, very well. in 1965 they predict the u.s. will build up its force

this general jopp, this is his idea. he begins building the supply root through the weak country of laos and expands into cambodia. this is very, very significant to the communist war effort in south vietnam. pivotal for all of their work once they really launch the military struggle. now the importance is critical here for supplies, logistics, manpower, so on. the north devotes a lot of effort to this. at one point they had 50,000 transport workers running it. they have 50,000 north vietnamese people that maintain it. infantry that guard it. it became what was a trail eventually became 12,500 miles of highway with 5,000 kilometers of pipeline for fuel. very significant investment. 2 million people used the trail during the course of the war. traffic on it was about 20,000 tons a month. they moved supplies on every possible thing you can imagine. the primary means of actually moving the supplies, the bulk of them come 100 pound packs on somebody's back on the trail. most of it is moved that way. by 1975 you have 25 trail